Charlie Watts on the 1960s

When people talk about the '60s I never think that was me there.  It was me and I was in it, but I was never enamoured with all that.  It's supposed to be sex and drugs and rock and roll and I'm not really like that.  I've never really seen the Rolling Stones as anything.

~ Charlie Watts, drummer, The Rolling Stones

June 2, 1941 - August 24, 2021

Kevin Duffy on the 1960s roots of cultural Marxism

The current radical shift left has its roots in the social activism of the 1960s.  Marxism was intellectually dead after a series of failed experiments with nothing but poverty and stacks of dead bodies to show for it.  The Left needed a new marketing campaign.  Influenced by people like Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse, socialists gave up on violent overthrow of the existing order (which wouldn’t work in America anyway) to focus on changing the culture and pitting groups against each other (oppressors vs. victims).  This was to be a long, slow process, like boiling a frog.

~ Kevin Duffy, The Coffee Can Portfolio, August 11, 2020

Samuel Mitcham on when "all about slavery" became the official narrative of the Civil War

From the 1870s to the late 1950s, there was an unofficial truce between the North and South.  Each side recognized and saluted the courage of the other; it was conceded that the North fought to preserve the Union and because Old Glory had been fired on, and the Southerner fought for liberty and to defend his home; the two great heroes of the war were Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee; and the South admitted that slavery was wrong but never conceded that it was cruel.

Around 1960, the Democratic Party—led by Lyndon B. Johnson—advanced the modern incarnation of identity politics.  It worked very well for them.  In the election of 1956, 75% of African-Americans voted Republican.  By 1964, more than 90% of them voted Democrat, and they have been doing so until 2020.  As part of their effort to control and manipulate the black vote, the Leftists and their myrmidons advanced the myth that the Civil War was all about slavery.  It wasn’t.  It was, in my opinion, about money, more than anything else.

~ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., "Why the Civil War Wasn't About Slavery," LewRockwell.com, July 15, 2020