Inside the Infamous NYC Riot That Got Six Cops Indicted

stock footage of the Tomkins Square Riot in New York City, 1988

 

Spend a night in 'hell': The last days of the Hotel Cadillac

short documentary film about

the Hotel Cadillac  in Rochester, New York

(2019)

 

The 1962 University of Mississippi Riots That Changed The World

The 1962 riots at the University of Mississippi campus marked a turning point for racial equality in the region. For a state that featured the confederate emblem on their state flag well into the 21st century, progress came slowly. Nevertheless, the enrollment of James H. Meredith due to clerical oversight set off a chain of events that rocked Ole Miss to its core. A showdown between President Kennedy and Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, highlighted by a fiery call to arms before a football game, ended with two dead and hundreds injured.

Read the full article on Groovy History

 

Understanding Tommy Wiseau's Net Worth: How and Where Did He Get His Money?

Many of us can easily reel off some of the best movies that Hollywood has ever produced, but things get murky and harder to pinpoint when it comes to the other end of the divide. However, one movie that is universally acclaimed as one of the worst movies ever made is The Room and the director behind it is none other than than the mysterious Tommy Wiseau who has a net worth of $500,000.

Read the full article on Just Richest

 

Two Men Wrongfully Convicted of Killing Malcolm X Are Exonerated After 55 Years

Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam, who each served more than 20 years of a life sentence, had always maintained their innocence

Read the full article on Smithsonian Magazine

 

Mommy Dead and Dearest

documentary film about Gypsy Rose Blanchard and 

the murder of her mother Dee Dee

directed by Erin Lee Carr

(2017)

 

Barry Goldwater's Presidential Campaign of 1964: The Politics Of the Lowest Common Denominator

     Barry Goldwater was not a man of his times. Nor was he a man of later times, earlier times, or our present times. He was a man of no times, maybe even a man of all times. To say that he lost the American presidential election of 1964 by the biggest landslide in history because he couldn’t connect with the voters is an understatement. In more recent times, and despite this crushing defeat, political pundits have hailed Goldwater’s campaign as the beginning of the late 20^th century American Conservative movement. But a careful examination of Goldwater’s values proves that back in the 1960’s, and all throughout his life, he did not share many of the core beliefs that characterize what we call today the conservative right wing. There simply must be something besides beliefs that has brought political historians to that conclusion.

Barry Goldwater was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1909 to the son of an immigrant Polish Jew. His father owned an upscale department store called Goldwater’s and married a wealthy woman named Hattie. In order to further assimilate to American culture, the family, including Barry Jr. and his two brothers, were raised as Episcopalians. Barry, however, had little regard for religion and spent his life considering himself a secularist more than anything. In high school, Barry Goldwater was a mediocre student with a steady C average. He excelled in sports, though, and after graduation he went on to college but dropped out due to lack of interest in academic subjects. Not only did he go on to be the first and only presidential candidate to be of Jewish ancestry, he was also the only one to have never attained a college degree. His lack of intellectual prowess did not hold him back in life, though; during World War II he enlisted in the air force and got decorated as a war hero after the allied victory.

Goldwater’s political career began in 1949 when he got elected as a member to the City Counsel as part of a nonpartisan team dedicated to the eradication of gambling and prostitution in Phoenix. As a Republican, he also helped to rebuild the moribund local party apparatus. Later, he successfully ran for senator of Arizona. His election came as a surprise since his home state was a Democratic stronghold at the time. Barry Goldwater was deeply committed to desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement; he helped to set up the first NAACP chapter in Arizona and showed strong support for the Urban League.

During the 1950s, he also gave support to Joseph McCarthy and his witch hunt against Communists in American society. Goldwater’s fervid anti-Communist stance would be a hallmark of his belief system throughout his life. The fact that this stance contradicted his support for the socialist-leaning Urban League did not appear to cause any moral conflicts in his mind. Goldwater’s outspoken dislike of the New Deal Coalition established by Franklin D. Roosevelt also gained him notoriety in the Senate, especially because he criticized President Eisenhower’s economic policy as being a cheap knock-off of the New Deal. Goldwater also attacked what he called the liberal wing of the Republican party, thereby making enemies of future presidential candidates like Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller who he deemed to be too far to the left to be truly American. Despite his distaste for the liberal brand of politics, he was a close personal friend of John F. Kennedy. When Goldwater told Kennedy that was planning on running against him in the 1964 presidential election, the two agreed to avoid any negative campaigning, running as two friendly rivals since they both disliked the idea of turning the American voters against one another along partisan lines.

Barry Goldwater was conservative in the sense that he valued individual freedom over the collective good. He didn’t like big government or welfare and he certainly didn’t like Communism. Such ideas are run-of-the-mill conservative strawman tropes. But Goldwater was unable to see how these beliefs smashed into a wall of obvious contradictions in light of his other beliefs. For example, the Civil Rights Movement was very much about support for the common good over the rights of the individual. Enforcing desegregation laws also requires big government interference in the lives of individuals; without a mandate at the federal level, it would be impossible to enforce integration. His ideas on crime and foreign policy also deconstruct themselves with minimal effort under examination. Goldwater claimed a strong police force with sweeping powers was necessary but this idea of a police state contradicts the idea of big government intervention. It also fails to account for how the police force and the FBI were instrumentalized by the government to oppress the African-American people he claimed to support.

Foreign policy was not one of his strong points either since he claimed to be in favor of minimal foreign intervention in conflicts overseas while being hawkish, pro-war, and supportive of military expansion. Goldwater failed to recognize that overseas wars might not effect individual freedoms on American soil but they do effect the individual freedoms of people living in foreign countries, especially when the US government interferes with elections, overthrows governments they don’t like, and installs dictators to act as puppets for the American empire. Holding the double standard that individual freedom is good for us while oppressing nations leads to a cockeyed morality and a distorted view of the world. Were Goldwater’s beliefs an intellectual sleight of mind trick meant to distract us from reality? No. Barry Goldwater, the college dropout, was a classic example of the American anti-intellectual, so deficient in critical thinking skills that he could not see his own contradictions parading themselves across his line of vision. Otherwise, though, he was a very nice man with a pleasant personality. For certain types of Americans, that is more important.

Such was the kind of baggage Goldwater would bring into the presidential election cycle of 1964. Just as the Republican Party candidates were gearing up for the primaries, a couple major events took place. One was that President John F. Kennedy, the expected candidate for the Democratic Party was assassinated in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. The other was that Lyndon B. Johnson, the new sitting President, ratified the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Before the assassination, American paranoia about nuclear war and Communist infiltration was already high. The Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis had recently happened while the Berlin Wall was under construction. Government discussions involved plans for building fallout shelters in case of a nuclear attack. But the assassination of Kennedy took public discomfort to a whole new level as paranoid conspiracy theories began to circulate. Despite this dark shadow cast by the Red Menace, the Civil Rights Movement was the issue of the day. Jim Crow laws had been taken off the books, Freedom Riders had been beaten nearly to death by barbaric Southerners in Alabama, Malcolm X had been assassinated, and Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a non-violent movement towards racial integration, the likes of which no nation on Earth had ever seen before. As a Senator, Barry Goldwater had voted to ratify the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the 24^th Amendment to the Constitution, but in 1964, he voted against Johnson’s new Civil Rights Act. It wasn’t that Goldwater was against Civil Rights. His past involvement in the cause was nothing short of commendable. He just took issue with the bill giving the federal government more power than he thought it deserved. He was, after all, an advocate of states’ rights over federal rule. This emphasis on states’ rights sounded too much like neo-confederate ideology for the times he was living in. States’ Rights was the battle cry of the Confederacy before the Civil War began, unfortunately for the tin-eared Goldwater. These poorly thought out positions would come back to bite him later in the campaign when African-Americans showed in droves to support Johnson.

During the Republican Party presidential primaries, Nelson Rockefeller of New York started off with a strong lead. His popularity declined sharply when he announced his engagement to a woman younger than him by eighteen years. The prudent conservative base rejected him even more when it was revealed that she had recently gotten divorced and was soon in labor, giving birth to a child obviously conceived out of wedlock. Rockefeller’s momentum died out and he sank by twenty points in the polls. In the initial primary vote, Henry Cabot Lodge emerged as the front runner even though he was not officially on the ballot; he was, in fact, a write in candidate.

But Barry Goldwater continued to campaign with his message being that the Democrats and the Republicans had too many similarities. He denounced the liberal wing of the Republican party as a group of East Coast, overly-educated elites who were out of touch with the common people. He wanted to take the party further to the right and went so far as to say the entire Eastern seaboard should be cut off and separated from the rest of America. Needless to say, calling for an entire section of the country to be forced into secession, the part of the country with the highest population density and the biggest number of voters, was not a wise election strategy. Goldwater did, however, emerge as the front runner.

At the 1964 Republican National Convention, shouting matches broke out between the liberal and conservative wings of the GOP and Nelson Rockefeller got booed while making a speech. The liberals roundly denounced Goldwater but he pulled ahead in the ballots and became the clear nominee, choosing William E. Miller of New York, one of those East Coast elites, as his vice-presidential running mate.

As the election cycle of 1964 started, Lyndon B. Johnson, running with Hubert Humphries for vice-president, was riding a wave of popularity. In part this resulted from serving a term in office as vice-president under the wildly popular John F. Kennedy whose stature grew to even more enormous proportions after the assassination. Another factor of his support resulted from his recent ratification of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, although this created another problem for Johnson: he lost major amounts of sympathy from the electorate of the Deep South, previously considered a Democratic stronghold because of Roosevelt’s New Deal which lifted large portions of that population out of poverty. Another setback for Johnson was his escalation of the Vietnam War which was starting to look questionable in the eyes of a small but vocal part of the young American community. On the other hand, Johnson campaigned on the implementation of his pet projects called The Great Society and The War on Poverty which proved to be visionary in scope and were supported by an overwhelming segment of America. Democrats always do their best when they aim high.

On the contrary, Barry Goldwater had little to run on. In an age of nuclear terror, he promised to dramatically escalate the arms race, believing that an increase in the size of America’s arsenal would guarantee victory if a war were to break out. He proposed funding for the development of nuclear grade tactical weapons, like military assault rifles and hand grenades, to be carried by ordinary soldiers on the battlefield. He proposed doing away with the military bureaucracy that prevented commanding officers from issuing such weapons to foot soldiers on the ground He also proposed using executive orders to bypass Congress, enabling the President to declare war unilaterally. This small government ideologue advocated for a form of legislative overreach without realizing that Congressional approval serves the purpose of preventing any branch of government from becoming too powerful. Goldwater the Conservative argued against a conservative system of checks and balances that is necessary to prevent executive tyranny. He also proposed launching nuclear attacks against North Vietnam and the Kremlin in Moscow. At a time when people were preoccupied with preventing nuclear war, Goldwater was saying he wanted to start one.

Such thinking made Goldwater an easy target for attacks from Lyndon Johnson who accused him of being a right-wing extremist, getting most of his support from kooks and political cults like the conspiracy theory-mongering John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan. Support for Goldwater from the latter organization was especially curious considering Goldwater was an ethnic Jew and an advocate of desegregation but his misguided opposition to Johnson’s Civil Rights Act, and the hatred they had for the incumbent president, made them strongly support Goldwater nonetheless. Another one of Johnson’s attacks was even more harsh. He produced a television campaign ad that has come to be known as Daisy Girl. The commercial was shown only once before it got pulled off the airwaves by the networks. It showed a young girl picking petals off a daisy while counting to ten. Then a man off screen counted down from ten to one; this was followed by a nuclear explosion with two mushroom clouds. Lyndon Johnson’s voice-over explains that we need to create a world based on love where all people are safe to live. The final segment has a deep-voiced man saying “Vote for Lyndon Johnson on November 3, the stakes are too high.” The clear implication was that a Goldwater presidency would result in a nuclear holocaust.

More negative publicity came Goldwater’s way when Fact magazine published an article about the Republican contender’s mental health. It explain in detail how the make-up of his psyche was too fragile for him to handle the office of the presidency. It ended with a petition signed by more than 1000 psychiatrists who claimed that Barry Goldwater was psychologically unfit for political office. Goldwater’s performance during debates, interviews, and Q and A sessions did not lend him any credibility. His speaking was evasive, characterized by empty sloganeering and circular logic that made him appear as if he didn’t know what he was talking about. His belief that the government was secretly hiding UFOs further cemented his image as a flaky nutcase. Lyndon Johnson, while not especially attractive, was an eloquent and highly-skilled speaker who could talk circles around Goldwater without much effort.

Worse than all this was the fact that Barry Goldwater could never extend his popularity beyond his own miniscule base of conservative Republicans. Liberal and moderate Republicans all flocked to the Democratic side in support of Johnson. Goldwater’s narrow messaging never connected with anybody in the opposing political party and it certainly drove independents farther to the left.

Goldwater did attract the attention of a politician whose star was rising and would prove to be more influential in the future. Ronald Reagan at that time was a barely known actor, making corny unwatchable B-movies like Bedtime for Bonzo in which he fed a chimpanzee. His wife too was a complete airhead named Nancy whose biggest role was in a science-fiction film called Donovan’s Brain. Somehow it slid by the censors during the McCarthy era when leftist themes were less tolerated. Ironically the film was about a corrupt, power-hungry businessman who gets brought back to life. While the film is not explicitly pro-Communist, it certainly does have an anti-capitalist message to it. Reagan’s greatest political asset at that time was that he was the President of the Actor’s Guild, another irony since Goldwater was against labor unions. He saw his opportunity to transition from Hollywood to Sacramento to Washington, D.C. and jumped on Goldwater’s tiny, shrinking bandwagon. The future President made one campaign speech praising Goldwater’s shallow ideology. Two years later, Ronald Reagan would get elected governor of California and then go on to be elected President in 1980, defeating Jimmy Carter.

Come election day, Lyndon Johnson slaughtered Barry Goldwater in the polls. He broke voting records on two counts. With 486 electoral votes to Goldwater’s 52, Johnson took the highest number of electoral college votes in history, a record only to be surpassed by Ronald Reagan in 1980. Johnson also received 61% of the popular vote, a number that has never been surpassed by any candidate yet. President Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater with the biggest landslide victory in the history of American elections. The only states taken by Barry Goldwater in the electoral college were his home state of Arizona, which he barely won, and the Deep South states of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina. These Dixiecrat states went red largely in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. Once again, the Confederacy was on the wrong side of history. It probably won’t be the last time either.

The election of 1964 represented a major turning point in American politics. Not only did it launch the governmental career of Ronald Reagan but it also turned the once Democratic South towards the conservative Republican Party. It also marked a shift in the voting preferences of African-American people who were traditionally supporters of Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans and have been predominantly supporters of the more inclusive Democratic Party ever since.

Although Barry Goldwater lost miserably, political scientists see his campaign as the start of the modern Conservative movement in America. In some ways he is an odd choice for such a dubious honor. The conservative public intellectual William F. Buckley Jr., after the bloodletting campaign of 1964 ended, commented that Goldwater made Conservatives look like a bunch of simpletons. In any case, he unwittingly hit on a painful truth. Most likely it was not what Barry Goldwater believed in or said that made him the forefather of Reagan-era right-wing politics, it was his approach that did it. Goldwater, the college dropout and anti-intellectual, once said that the American people were not complicated and appreciated simplicity more than anything. Goldwater, the clean-cut, pleasant sounding man fit this role perfectly. He communicated his message with ease, without parsing over and fine details or potential flaws. He appealed to those who work hard and think little, the low-information voters. He dragged political debate down to the lowest common denominator, a tactic that Fox News, with their bullying and infantile temper tantrums, have been running with for the last twenty years.

The historian and political sociologist Richard Hofstadter may have been the first to draw a connection between Barry Goldwater and the kind of people he inspired. In his landmark book of essays called The Paranoid Style in American Politics, he connected Goldwater to a certain class of conservative Americans. These are white, middle class people with low levels of education. They are suspicious of government while being loudmouthed about their patriotism and loyalty to their country. They know little about policy or economics, dislike foreign intervention but strongly support any war America wages. They believe in individual freedom but despise anyone, be they freaks, hippies, pacifists, homosexuals, or punks, who expresses their individual liberty in ways that are different from their own. Prone to conspiracy theories, they often think the establishment has fallen from grace, being infiltrated by foreign agents like Communists, Jews, Catholics, the Illuminati, Freemasons, immigrants, and the United Nations. Millenarian in their thinking, they believe society is on the verge of collapse at all times. These thought patterns are common among the Calvinist and Evangelical Christian belief systems, with deep roots in the Puritan sect that arrived in America so many years ago. These are the people who Ronald Reagan rallied in the 1980s and have since degenerated into a mean-spirited form of hatred, narrow-mindedness, and nationalism inspired by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, culminating in the dystopian rise of reactionary ignoramuses like Sarah Palin and the quasi-fascism of Donald Trump. These are the people who became post-Goldwater Conservatives.

Such a legacy may not be entirely fair to Barry Goldwater. If he were alive today, he would be horrified by what the Republican Party has become. During the 1970s he took a break from politics and re-emerged once again as a Senator. While he expressed some admiration for Reagan, he was not entirely happy with what Conservatism was. He was critical of Reagan’s interventions in Central America and condemned the sale of arms to Iran in order to illegally fund a right-wing dictatorship in Nicaragua in what came to be known as the Iran-Contra Affair. Being an advocate of marijuana legalization, he dislike the disastrous War on Drugs. He also disliked the Religious Right, believing them to be a pseudo-totalitarian form of surrogate big government. Goldwater said that Jerry Falwell deserved to be kicked in the balls and complained that Pat Robertson was little more than a charlatan, a petty conman, and a grifter. He was a staunch advocate of environmental protection and believed heavy taxation on big industries would force them to reduce carbon admissions on their own at the source of production. He advocated for gay and lesbian rights along while being a supporter of gay marriage. He was pro-choice, believing a ban on abortion constituted government interference in a woman’s right to control over her own body. These are an incredibly liberal set of beliefs coming from a guy who is thought of as the godfather of the Conservative movement. In fact, Goldwater was once known to have said that most liberals are actually fine people with outstanding moral standards. All these contradictions go right over the heads of low-information Conservatives with their love of simplicity, lack of curiosity, and anti-intellectualism that prevents them from seeing the obvious.

If Barry Goldwater can represent anything definite in our times, he can act as a symbol of futility, the dysfunctionality of pigeonholing people into categories of belief. As a right wing Conservative, his ideology does not hold up well under scrutiny. As a Liberal, he doesn’t do any better. Realistically, today he would be a blend of Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders, more likely an Independent than a Republican or Democrat. If he hadn’t died, he might exemplify the virtue of maintaining a voice independent of the hostile tribal partisanship that is crippling American politics. But then again, maybe not. His method of polite delivery and shallow reasoning might make him sufficiently non-committal to any party but being in such a central position might only result in his being shot at from all sides at once.

 

Ancient Greek and Roman Libraries

lecture by Edith Hall of Gresham College

 

FW de Klerk: South Africa's former president dies at 85

FW de Klerk, the former president of South Africa and the last white person to lead the country, has died at the age of 85.

Read the full article on BBC

 

Princess Emiluma, The Story Of Srebrenica, & Bob The Blob

bizarre children's stories found on an unlabeled VHS tape

by Nanny Lynn

(1997)

 

Finding Goatse: The Mystery Man Behind the Most Disturbing Internet Meme in History

Sometime in the late 20th century a naked man bent over, spread his ass and took a picture. Eventually that picture, known as Goatse, became one of the most venerable memes in internet history. Who is this man, and how did his ass take over the internet?

Read the full article on Gawker

 

Freedom Ride

short documentary film about the Freedom Riders

sponsored by CORE (Congress of Racial Equality)

(1961)

 

QAnon supporters gather in downtown Dallas expecting JFK Jr. to reappear

Some believe the reappearance of John F. Kennedy’s son, who died in a plane crash in 1999, will bring about the reinstatement of Donald Trump as president.

Read the full article on The Dallas Morning News