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September 1, 2026
ABE GREENWALD: A Counterculture Without a Culture.
The left-wing counterculture of the 1960s was violent and reckless, and we’re still trying to contain its residual damage. There was no reason to believe that a right-wing version would be any more restrained. The inexorable aim of a counterculture is provocation, which is also a common hallmark of young minds and anyone who loses himself in a collective frenzy.
Nonetheless, many things pointed in this direction. The left had taken over as the country’s insufferable scolds and prudes. It was the right (including many youths) that took the lead in challenging establishment narratives around Covid. High-school-age kids were not only locked down and isolated for no reason. They were harangued by the woke establishment for being racist and privileged. And the boys were lectured on the toxicity of their sex. At the same time, young right-wing influencers were growing their audiences, and there was a newly defined class of young men, the involuntarily celibate (incels), to be hoovered up.
These incel gamers moldering away in their parents’ basements “turned on” their screens and “dropped out” of society every bit as much as the acid-eating hippies had a half-century earlier. And they “tuned in” to an endless array of angry, populist right-wing streamers from their own generation.
As long as America remains a free country, its youth will look to transgress. And all told, it was now the right that offered the most welcoming avenue for transgression. Right-wing influencers used and promoted language proscribed by the left. The right counselled against trusting adults, revered institutions, and their account of how the world works.
Earlier: The Making of the Counter Culture.
Beginning, of course, with the moon landing, expect retrospectives devoted to the Manson murders, Woodstock, the Chicago 7 trial, and even Altamont, representing both the apogee and perigee of Aquarian salad days. But the 50-year milestone with arguably the most enduring impact is likely to pass unacknowledged: publication that fall of Theodore Roszak’s landmark book The Making of a Counter Culture.
In an accident of timing that is every author’s dream, Doubleday released it soon after that standard bearer of mainstream culture, the New York Times, said that Woodstock “had little more sanity than the impulses that drove the lemmings to march to their deaths in the sea.” And also asked, “What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?”
Roszak fortuitously had the answer: a counter culture. His book received serious attention from reviewers, was a topic for talk-show hosts such as Dick Cavett, found itself on university syllabi, and became a National Book Award finalist. It was a publishing sensation.
And yet, I suspect you’ve never read it. And almost certainly never even heard of it.
Why? There’s a good reason. Uniquely in history, it wasn’t the book’s content that left a permanent footprint. It was the title. Seriously. Those two words, “counter culture,” which we now write as counterculture, were Roszak’s original coinage. And yet their instantly idiomatic quality made it seem as though they’d always existed side by side. Plus, they sounded sublime in a way that “hippies” no longer did.
Which explains why, in an era when going viral meant you were contagious, the self-flattering neologism was adopted overnight by millions of boomers, from Berkeley to Cambridge and all points north and south, to describe their brave stand against the “Establishment.”
There is a poetic irony to the boomers. They were the first generation to watch itself grow up on TV. They were the primary target audience of most popular entertainments during their youth. In adulthood, they quickly seized control of mass media, journalism, Hollywood, and academia. And yet, to this day, boomers harbor a vestigial sense of belonging to a “counterculture” rather than being the dominant culture.
And have been for almost a century now, if one combines FDR’s era “old left” along with the “new left” that usurped it in the 1960s, and then made the next decade such a frenzy:
Though he writes from the perspective of a conservative (actually, given [David] Frum’s Canadian origins, one might more precisely call him a Tory, albeit a very “dry” one) and his work is an analysis of a decade in which liberalism ran rampant, Frum does not revisit the 1970s to bury them. Far from it. He makes the bold claim that the painful lessons America learned in the 1970s helped teach us how to find renewed purpose and vigor in the two decades that followed:
America won the cold war, pioneered the computer revolution, squelched inflation, and suppressed crime, yes, but only because it first underwent a decade and a half of suffering and humiliation. Those years were daunting and frightening because habits and institutions that had worked brilliantly for half a century suddenly sputtered. . . . Then [Americans] recouped. They rethought. They reinvented. They rediscovered in their own past the governing principles of their future. Out of the failure and trauma of the 1970s they emerged stronger, richer and—if it is not overdramatic to say so—greater than ever.
The most obvious change wrought by the 1970s was the libertinism that rose in conjunction with the liberation of sex from the shackles of law and tradition. After a precis of the court decisions that effectively ended two centuries of the legislation of sexual morality, Frum sums up: “Every era tacitly places one liberty ahead of all others; one that must always prevail when values conflict. For late 18th-century Americans, that liberty was freedom of religion. For late 19th-century Americans, it was the right to own and dispose of property. For late 20th-century Americans, it is sexual freedom.” One of the many unintended consequences was the devastation done to marriage: As the 1970s progressed, Frum writes, “a once-universal institution was dwindling into a middle-class idiosyncrasy, like bottled water or cotton shirts.”
And then #metoo and the left’s concurrent freakout of Brett Kavanaugh happened, transforming them into “The New Prudes.”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
Suspicions Of Ayatollah's Death Rise After His Name Appears On California Voter Rolls https://t.co/Rpq9LWU7ac
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) September 1, 2026
CATALYST MOMENT:
I don’t think these women understand how the Lindsay Clancy case is impacting the way men see women… pic.twitter.com/fXQIVjVbFj
— Nick Freitas (@NickJFreitas) September 1, 2026
HE’S ONE OF THOSE GUYS WHO JUST CAN’T STAY OUT OF TROUBLE: George Santos Permanently Banned From Kalshi for Insider Trading. “George Santos has become the first person permanently banned from prediction market Kalshi after the company found evidence the former New York congressman engaged in insider trading tied to his own attendance at President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. Kalshi also fined Santos $71,356, according to the company.”
HOLDING THE LINE:
In-state tuition at state universities in Florida is $6300 — the same as it was when I became governor in 2019. pic.twitter.com/OW21BWNrXY
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) September 1, 2026
TRACK YOUR PET: Furbo Mini 360° Pet Camera. #CommissionEarned
OUT ON A LIMB: Leftists Will Never Self-Reflect, And They Will Never Apologize For The Horrors They Inflict.
They’ll conveniently forget any of it ever happened, and they’ll aggressively gaslight Americans into believing that it never happened, too. Through their control over institutions like the media and academia, they can memory-hole practically whatever they want, just as they’ve already done with scandals like Russiagate and with the worst excesses of the Covid era.
Finally, they’ll convince themselves that rather than a string of necessary evils required to defeat the reviled conservative oppressors, their atrocities were a positive good — finally liberating America and ushering in an age of left-wing utopia.
The citizens of the former Soviet Union didn’t “wake up” to all the horrors of their regime. They still deny the Holodomor, the abortion rate remains extremely high, and the government has offered little in the way of an acknowledgment or apology for the brutal gulag system. The Soviet Union didn’t fall because the Soviet citizenry woke up one day and suddenly regretted all the terrible things that had been committed in the name of the communist regime. They finally turned against the Soviet system once its intrusiveness and incompetence became too inconvenient in daily life, but there was no grand self-reflection. You can look at every communist, socialist, or “democratic socialist” regime of the last century, and you’ll see this exact same pattern.
Like the Soviets, some (emphasis on some) of the leftists of today will only begin to turn against leftism (if at all) once it starts to negatively affect them personally, but they’ll never grapple with the historic horrors wrought by their movement. Because the horror is the point.
See also: British historian Eric Hobsbawm, an unapologetic Stalinist to the bitter end at age 95 in 2012. “Hobsbawm himself made this quite clear in a now famous and much quoted interview with Michael Ignatieff that conducted in 1994. What you are saying, Ignatieff asked, is ‘that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?’ Hobsbawm immediately gave a one-word answer that says it all: ‘Yes.’ No wonder Roger Kimball refers to him as a ‘repellent figure.’”
IT’S JUST THE ALIEN REACTOR BURIED UNDER PYRAMID MOUNTAIN: Scientists discover a massive heat anomaly deep inside Mars. “Gravity measurements suggest that the interior beneath Mars’s southern hemisphere is about 200 to 400 degrees Celsius warmer than the north and may be partially molten. The finding offers a new window into the Red Planet’s geologic history, including periods when Mars may have had environments capable of supporting life.”
COMPLAINING ABOUT MEMES IS HOW YOU GET MORE MEMES:
JUST IN: Mark Carney declares Canada will only resume trade talks with the U.S. when Americans “stop doing memes”
— Polymarket (@Polymarket) September 1, 2026
KEIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW: Keir Starmer Just Quit Parliament, Too.
EDITORS… EDITING? CAN THEY DO THAT?
"Editor in Chief performs journalism . .. leftists outraged"
— nero (@n3ro) September 1, 2026
READER FAVORITE: Snailax Full Body Massage Mat with Heat. #CommisisonEarned
PRIVACY: DeSantis bans Flock cameras on state roads in Florida.
The move came less than a week after Mr. DeSantis echoed the concerns of Florida residents who complained the cameras, powered by artificial intelligence, go too far in monitoring the public and are being used in some cases for nefarious reasons by rogue police officers and others.
“I’m all about law enforcement having the tools to be able to hold criminals accountable,” Mr. DeSantis said last week during a press conference at Florida International University. “But I don’t want to have this become a surveillance state.”
Mr. DeSantis called for a legislative overhaul of the law governing the use of the cameras, which number in the thousands in Florida.
“I think these cameras, these license plate readers, I think it’s out of control,” he said.
Just yesterday: Responding to Their Customers, Gun Stores Take Down Their Flock Cameras.
GET RESULTS FAST:
As I predicted, @washingtonpost has finally edited its despicable and inaccurate report on me @CynicalPublius & @RobManess to correct the embarrassing misspellings of my name by @DanLamothe.
Now, they should correct the false implication that we were paid to spread propaganda… pic.twitter.com/yow7Py0lJB
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) September 1, 2026
Kurt might have to wait a bit longer for this: “Now, they should correct the false implication that we were paid to spread propaganda for the Pentagon and apologize to us.”
Full background here.
OMG! WHATS UP POST-IRAN FOR TDSERS? It hasn’t happened just yet, but Trump’s Anaconda strategy against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard regime seems to be steadily tightening toward victory. Those mischievous expositors at Issues & Insights worry what will happen to millions of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) sufferers when Orange Man Bad puts the final touch on the victory.
TALARICO IN 2020: Capitalism Is White Supremacy and Texas Oil Is Kinda Racist.
Just wait until campaign ads feature Talarico’s thoughts on capitalism and the state’s oil industry. That will be coming too, along with Talarico’s radical positions on abortion, and perhaps even Talarico’s foolish and uninformed remarks on the Karmelo Anthony case, which blew up last week in a hearing that forced a lot of Anthony’s previous crimes and bizarre behavior into the open. Talarico won’t have anywhere to hide, and while there may be some concerns about Paxton’s baggage, he’s won three statewide elections … and that’s three more than Talarico, or any other Texas Democrat in the past 32 years.
Eschew all modalities of cocksuredness, y’all.
“HUMILIATING” PRESUPPOSES A SENSE OF SHAME: Wolf Blitzer’s Trump Mail-In Voting Lie Blows Up in His Face With Humiliating Correction.
