Revenge Of The Sixties?

People’s Park, a 2.8 acre parcel to the east of Telegraph Avenue at the University of California, was ground zero for the radical political activism in the late 1960s. Mario Savio and a band of other students led the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus when they defied the establishment’s development plans and declared the site a community park.

Confrontation and its aftermath: demolition bulldozers; arrests; “Bloody Thursday”; the Free Speech Movement; and the rise of governor “clean up the mess at Berkeley” Ronald Reagan. Depending on who you ask, the site was either a cesspool of filth, drugs, and crime or the beacon of enlightenment. But no matter as the area was eventually fenced in by a 17-foot high wall of shipping containers to await construction of student housing pending resolution of legal issues. A six-inch hole in the ground filled with soil and a surrounding granite ring memorialized the space by certifying the soil and the air space above it to be beyond the jurisdiction of any entity. Thus endeth this social convulsion of the 60’s.

Or maybe not. About the same time and on the other coast, a political framework was being devised to bring about significant systemic change by means of the radical idea of creating crises. The work of two sociologist (socialist) professors at Columbia – Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Pivens – was initially published in 1966 centered on the idea to overload the public welfare systems to the point of collapse, leading to political crisis. While the initial goal was to usher in the idea of broad-based universal income, the so-called Cloward-Piven strategy became a blueprint for progressive reform by leveraging the collective power of marginalized groups as a catalyst for socio economic restructuring (Cloward Pivens, The Nation).

Do your own due diligence but the strategy did not appear out of thin air. A former KGB agent, Yuri Bezmenov, gave a stunning interview in 1985 in which he outlined the formula used by the international communist movement designed to bring down the West (Bezmenov Interview). The cited “ideological subversion” strategy was meant to change the perception of reality of every American through, first, the demoralization stage, taking 15 to 20 years, the time required to educate one generation by the work of the “useful idiots” of the media, educators, and political organizers. That period would be followed by the “destabilization” stage, lasting two to five years, targeting the essentials of the economy, foreign relations, and defense. Then comes the “crisis” stage and the post-crisis “normalization” stage on the way to a totalitarian transformation. Make no mistake, he said before he died of a “massive heart attack” in 1993, having defected to Canada, the United States is living in a state of undeclared total war against this foundational assault.

Go ahead and roll your eyes but apply some data points. How else to explain the previous otherwise-inexplicable open borders, soft-on-crime posture, and irresponsible monetary policy. A personal anecdote related to the above demoralization stage arose from the role decades ago as a member of the founding board to negotiate the terms of the agreement for the Peak To Peak charter school. It became clear the interest on the part of BVSD for robust academics in a public school was perfunctory at best, with the charter’s passing only after state intervention.

Students these days may learn the first part of Churchill’s dictum (“The inherent indictment of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings.”) while failing to learn the second (“The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of the miseries”). Enter Zohran Mamdani, the begotten son of the socialist movement.

Might this charismatic politician represent the ultimate revenge of the Sixties?

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