Are the Hippies and Yippies of today part of a conservative revolutionary movement?

By Steve Otto

I remember one party I had, in the 1980’s, where I told people to dress as their least favorite dictator. I dressed up like Ronald Reagan. He always wore a suit, so I wore a suit. My friends came to the party and asked, “Why are you dressed up like that?” Then I answered, “Roland Reagan dresses up like this.”

The point here is that a suit and tie used to be what most conservatives wore. Some of them wore a baseball cap, even if it had something different from baseball. A few wore clothes that indicated they like car races, like the Daytona.

During the 1970s when I came of age, hippies were usually to the left, some liberals, some Marxists and some anarchists. They wore unconventional clothing. That included sandals, blue jeans, tie die shirts, long hair, beards and at times they wore face paint, just as Jerry Rubin did on the cover of his book, “Do It.”

He had long hair, a beard, a head band and at times he dressed like a guerrilla hippie. He was a member of the Yippies in his early years. But later he became a conservative and he changed his clothes into—a suit.

So there we saw it—hippie clothes, left-wing, suits, right-wing or conservative. Now we look at conservatives today and we see a different pattern.

Readers can click on the pix to make it bigger.

Jacob Anthony Chansley, AKA Jake Angeli, and also known as the "QAnon Shaman" was a part of the January 6, storming of the US Capitol. In the picture above he is standing next to a man who has long hair and a beard. Chansley has an outfit that resembles something a 1960s Yippie would wear. He has a hat made of animal skins and horns. He has face paint on, and he calls himself a “Shaman.” All this points to the clothing of a 1960s or 1970s hippie, anarchist or some kind of left-wing person. But he is far to the right—a conservative. And it used to be hippies that would follow non-Christian type beliefs, such as Shamanism. He is not the only conservative who dresses more like the old 1960s radicals. And the event he took part in, resembles the actions of a 1960s radical. An example of that was the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in Berkeley.

According to Calisphere:

 

“The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a college campus phenomenon inspired first by the struggle for civil rights and later fueled by opposition to the Vietnam War. The Free Speech Movement began in 1964, when students at the University of California, Berkeley protested a ban on on-campus political activities. The protest was led by several students, who also demanded their right to free speech and academic freedom. The FSM sparked an unprecedented wave of student activism and involvement.”

The students took over Sproul Plaza and occupied the balconies of Sproul Hall, a campus administration building, holding FSM banners and an American flag.

If there is one thing similar to such actions today, it is that Government officials do not take well to such people taking the law into their own hands. The FBI kept secret files on FSM leaders. Voters elected Ronald Reagan to "clean up the mess in Berkeley."

There were other protests taking place, in the ‘60s, around that time and according to Wikipedia, there was a backlash against these actions and a wide variety of protests, concerned citizens, and activists were lumped together.

And…

 

“Earlier protests against the House Committee on Un-American Activities meeting in San Francisco in 1960 had included an iconic scene as protesters were literally washed down the steps inside the Rotunda of San Francisco City Hall with fire hoses.”

 

Today authorities are trying to arrest every person who took part in the actions of January 6.

So what does all of this mean? Is this just a fashion trend? Or is it more significant? I don’t have all the answers. It seems as if the hippies of today are conservatives. The action on the Capital, this January, is almost revolutionary. It is hard for me to imagine what Donald Trump was actually thinking. Did he really believe he could overturn the election results and put himself back in office for the next four years? Only he knows the answer. In a way, I have to admire Trump’s ability to draw in working class people among his supporters and he even won the support of what seems a lot like modern day Yippies—revolutionaries NOW of the far right.

Of course I oppose everything Trump tried to do to this country. He and I are complete opposites. However he was able to draw in a large section of the proletariat and lumpen proletariat to a completely anti-worker bourgeois platform. For conservatives that ain’t easy—or at least it shouldn’t be.

I always considered Ronald Reagan the nation’s best con man. He lowered the working people’s wages, took away a lot of their rights and they loved him for it. Trump is a con man in the same league. He also conned the working class, and even now with being out of office, I strongly suspect he will keep at it.

 

Pix by Cincinnati Inquirer, City Beat, NavyTimes.