The draw for watching this for me was William F. Buckley. And the rest of the crew here are visibly neurotic. It's hilarious for me that these are the great minds of the 1960's counterculture/hippie movement. Kerouac in particular can barely put a sentence together.
From what is most visible of the movement, the prime forces of the hippie movement were first the beatniks of the 1950's, kind of an existentialist writers and poets movement that rose out of the arts, combined with the civil rights movement for Black America. I think the hippie movement fully formed in 1965 with the Vietnam war and protest against the war (and more importantly for many, a motivation to not be sent to Vietnam). The core of the hippie movement was student protest movements at universities nationwwide, led by the college professors who indoctrinated them.
And that is the key to seeing the real and less visible driving force behind the hippie movement: cultural marxism. Led by a core of university professors, whose motivation was to indoctrinate a new generation in the virtues of socialism and the evils of capitalism, to indoctrinate an anti-American/anti-capitalist Marxist ideology. This began with a group of Marxist professors in Germany known as the Frankfurt School, who fled from Nazi Germany to the U,.S. in the late 1930's and began teaching in U.S. universities, and over two decades built a counter-cultural movement that emerged as the 1960's revolution.
The movement died when President Nixon negotiated the end of the Vietnam war, thus ending the draft (Dec 1972). Interesting how quickly the protests died after that. Manifesting it was for most involved about not getting drafted, rather than greater altruistic motives.
But amazingly, as shown in the clip above, some of the movement's most visible thinkers could barely articulate a lucid purpose for the movement. Perhaps they were dupes of the cultural marxists as well.
