Legend has it, probably apocryphal, that George Washington’s Continental Army band played “The World Turned Upside Down” during the surrender ceremony of the British army after the Battle of Yorktown. A tune that was written to mock the Puritan parliament’s suppression of traditional Christmas festivities in the 1640s ended up expressing a historical truism: Give it enough time and things flip. For instance, the markers that defined the Left now are true of the Right and vice versa. It is profoundly true in this brief interlude called the Trump era.
Trump has abetted the rise of a sixties peacenik faction of the Right. The logic and thoughts of the Soixante-Huitards – radical Left, anti-War protesters who massed in Europe and America during 1968, the “peaceniks” – have resurfaced on today’s Right. The most recent example of the phenomena appeared a month ago on Joe Rogan’s podcast in a debate between Douglas Murray and Dave Smith. Watch it below, all nearly 3 hours of it.
If I closed my eyes, I could swear that I was hearing Tom Hayden or Abbie Hoffman or Rudi Dutschke (of “the long march through the institutions” fame) in the person of Dave Smith, the self-described libertarian and Donald Trump enthusiast. It’s de-ja-vu all over again, in an alternative universe.
The confusion between generations that the situation engenders was aptly fictionalized in Rob Long’s tale of an imaginary surveillance transcript of two Harvard undergrads discussing their latest plans for an anti-Trump protest.
In it, they unwittingly sound like Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan leaving their conservative fathers dumbfounded by their lefty sons’ embrace of free trade and Friedman in their outcry against Trump and MAGA. Here’s Long’s depiction:
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Harvard University Undergraduate Surveillance ICE UNIT 7
BEGIN EXTRACT 09:33:02 04.04.25
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: So I was thinking, for the anti-Trump rally, we come at them with something powerful and progressive, like “From the River to the Sea, World Trade Should Be Free,” you know, something like that.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: That’s amazing. And I have some posters with, like, that guy’s face on it, who’s that guy again?
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Milton Friedman?
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Yeah!
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Awesome. We need a bunch of those.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: This is going to be an amazing demonstration. We’ve got the free trade stuff, and the Friedman guy stuff, we just need some other stuff . . .
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Someone in the steering committee meeting suggested, like, an RFK Jr. slam? Like, Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Big Pharma’s the Way to Go.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Not loving it.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: We can workshop some more. But I think we need to make a statement supporting our allies at Novartis and Bristol Myers Squibb.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Totally.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Any other allies we should support? Should we have a team carrying signs in solidarity with Walmart? They’re on the front lines of this trade stuff.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Good instinct. Let’s keep it diverse. Let the teams know we don’t want to be just anti-Trump. That just gets us negative coverage. We need to keep it on the key progressive issues, like free trade and military intervention.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Right. We made that clear in the planning meeting.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Yeah. Us too. Let’s keep it issue-based. That’s what’s going to have impact.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Right. But some of these issues? It’s like, I’m a senior and I could swear that my freshman year in my Intro Poli Sci class we were against free trade, because it was just a tool of the global patriarchal elite.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Yeah, I was in that class, too. Plus, were you in World Health Systems in Crisis? I’m pretty sure everything RFK Jr. is saying now was in our textbook. In fact, I know it was because I used some of his stuff about seed oils in my final paper.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: And in my freshman year Survey of Modern Geopolitical Strategy we were told that when two countries have a border dispute we’re not supposed to intervene.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Yeah. Does that mean I should tell the Ukraine team to pick another issue?
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: No, no. No. I mean, no, right? It’s just weird how everything changed. And it seems like some of the stuff we’re now in favor of is . . .
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Stuff my dad was saying a few years ago?
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Right! Exactly! My dad was always telling me that tariffs are taxes and taxes are bad.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Oh, that’s a good one! I’ll tell them to make up some posters with that one!
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: Yeah. Yeah. It’s just that . . . it feels very strange to be agreeing with my Republican father. About politics and economics and stuff.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Agree with him? But he’s a Republican! He’s a Trumper!
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: No, actually he’s not. He’s not anything, I don’t think. Anymore. It’s kind of sad, actually. He just sits in the den with a lost expression on his face. When I showed him my Free Trade Now! tattoo he asked if it hurt and when I said no he asked where I got it.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: Hey, look. Yes, things are a little upside down right now, but you said it yourself! We’re at Harvard! We’re not supposed to think about this stuff, we’re supposed to lead!
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 1: You’re right. You’re right.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE 2: And you’re lucky your dad’s a banker. Mine is a college professor. All of this Gaza stuff hit him really hard. He didn’t know which side he was supposed to be on. We had to have him institutionalized.
END EXTRACT
** Rob Long, “The Long View”, National Review, June 2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/06/document-extract-surveillance-transcript/
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Again, the Dave Smith and Douglas Murray debate on the Joe Rogan Experience is linked below. Enjoy.
RGraf