This 1972 Video Explains How The Left Won The Culture

In the movie “You’ve Got Mail,” Tom Hanks says, “’The Godfather’ is the sum of all wisdom.” He’s wrong: William F. Buckley Jr. is. Words and phrases from his books, columns, and television shows continue to shed light years after they have expired, like a north star guiding conservatives home. Buried in an interview with an obscure Sixties radical during a forgotten, 49-year-old episode of Buckley’s PBS TV series, “Firing Line,” is the precise blueprint the Left used to transform the culture, radicalize three generations of Americans, and move the U.S. closer to the precipice of adopting socialism. The left-wing activist also revealed  jarring but fundamental realities about the Left: “It’s anti-rational” and has a “greater tolerance of liquidating a class” of people by mass execution.

The episode — which was titled “Hate America” and which featured Buckley and fellow conservative intellectual Arnold Beichman speaking with a socialist agitator named Dotson Rader (who went on to be an entertainment reporter for Parade magazine) — was recorded on October 3, 1972. Weeks later, the nation’s “silent majority” would power President Richard Nixon to a historic, 49-state landside over the avatar of the New Left, George McGovern. The Left appeared to have suffered a definitive rebuke.

When a triumphant Buckley pressed Rader to name one thing the revolutionary movement had accomplished, he appeared stunned by his guest’s response. Rader essentially gave a precursor to Andrew Breitbart’s dictum that “politics is downstream of culture.”

What the Left got right

“Part of our belief is that the first thing that you change, [the] first thing that occurs before political change is cultural change. You have to change the conscience of people,” said Rader. On that front, “we’ve made a great deal of achievement. The country has moved left, culturally left.” Countercultural revolutionaries had shifted “the country as a whole in terms of questions on abortion, on pornography, on greater freedom for the arts,” and other social issues.

To succeed in replacing America’s constitutional system of limited government with a socialist government, “I personally believe you’ve got to change people’s sexual attitudes, people’s attitude towards the church, people’s attitude towards education, towards business,” Rader continued.

He then revealed how the Left would change those values: by promoting practices that vitiated America’s Judeo-Christian moral heritage, like drug use, abortion, and “sexual promiscuity.” Any one of these, he said, could serve as a “device” for the Left to chip away at America’s foundation.