173: Hardhat Cinema (with Sami Gold)

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Sami Gold, an undergraduate political science student at George Washington University and contributor to Liberal Currents joins me from New York City to discuss some key texts of reactionary right-wing cinema from the post-Civil Rights era and the beginning of America’s involvement in Vietnam and the election of Richard Nixon, what we could call counter-counter revolutionary cinema or Silent Majority cinema.

We begin with a discussion of the John Birch Society, a formerly influential wing of the Republican Party whose ideas we can see being indulged now in Donald Trump’s control of the GOP, including the JBS’s controversial propaganda film Anarchy U.S.A., which argues that the Civil Rights movement is a secret Communist plot to fuel a “Negro-Soviet” takeover of the United States.

John Wayne was once a member of the John Birch Society and we discuss his passion project of the late sixties, the controversial pro-Vietnam War film The Green Berets which he co-directed, one of the only studio films about the war made during the war, released in the summer of 1968 in a climate of antiwar protests, assassinations and the rise of Richard Nixon.

And we also discuss the 1970 political satire Joe, starring Peter Boyle as a blue collar, racist, anti-hippie right-winger who strikes up a friendship with a conservative member of the executive class who in a moment of rage murders the drug-dealing boyfriend of his junkie hippie daughter, and how their search for her in New York leads to further carnage, with remarkable echoes to modern politics because these two men represent the two main voter blocks that support Trump today.

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Sami's article "Chris Rufo and the Great Liberal Threat" for Liberal Currents, Feb 27, 2024

"Barry Goldwater vs. The Swinging ’60s: The ‘Choice’ Film” by Daniel McCarthy, for the American Conservative, May 20, 2013

The suppressed 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign commercial Choice

The John Birch Society propaganda film Anarchy U.S.A. (G. Edward Griffin, 1966), courtesy of the National Film Preservation Foundation

Trailer for The Green Berets (John Wayne and Ray Kellogg, 1968)

UK trailer for Joe (John G. Avildsen, 1970)