The Descent Of Dissent: Why The Chicago 7 Would Be Appalled

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a new film documenting the explosive trial of the political radicals who incited (or not) the bloody riots in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Party convention that nominated Hubert Humphrey to succeed president Lyndon Johnson. The focus of their rage was the drafting of young men to fight in the Viet Nam war.

A product of liberal writer/ director Aaron Sorkin, it has a stellar cast re-enacting the trial of eight men charged with conspiracy and crossing state lines with the intention of inciting riots at the Convention. While there are re-creations of the riots themselves, Sorkin concentrates on the political pressure and courtroom tactics from the new Nixon administration and cantankerous federal judge Julius  Hoffman (played by an oily Frank Langella). 

There is little doubt whom Sorkin is rooting for. as we watch the agitprop pairing of Abie Hoffman (no relation to the judge) and Jerry Rubin plus the sulphurous rage of Black Panther Bobby Seale (Seale was not involved in the riots but added to the case for the political punch of a black revolutionary among the defendants.) The prosecutors are grey, grim figures while the defenders are like the zany cast of M*A*S*H. 

There are lengthy debates amongst the fractious defendants over the proper use of violence and coercion in political action. If there’s one thing they do agree upon it is the right of free speech and dissent in America. The group— and their lawyer William Kunstler (played by brilliant British actor Mark Rylance) are tortured heroes pushed to the extremes by Tricky Dick’s war machine. When they call for blood or punch back it is forgiven as understandable in the face of tyranny.

Though Sorkin vilifies Republican president Nixon, the Chicago 7— plus Seale— are, ironically, protesting the Democratic Party’s pursuit of the Viet Nam War and its Dixiecrat base that invented Jim Crow. That is the same Democratic Party that now venerates the Chicago rioters as part of its iconography, its sainted past as progressives.

  It’s clear from Sorkin’s film he, too, believes the Left is still the natural home of civil liberties, free speech and the First Amendment. (A point also hammered home in Miloš Forman’s 1996 movie, The People v. Larry Flynt, in which free-speech advocates of the Left successfully defend the porn publisher against televangelist Jerry Falwell). 

But the Democratic Party of 2021 has morphed from brave to slave, dedicated to intellectual conformity, not contrary opinions. Gone are the civil libertarians like Kunstler. In their place are AOC and her brigades of SJWs purveying hate-speech laws and attacking deniers of the “true climate religion”. First amendment rights have been replaced by cancel-culture indictments. 

In just one of many examples, these purported protegés of the Chicago 7 go after people like Mr. Pillow salesman Mike Lindell for having supported Donald Trump in the election. 

Where Sorkin and Miloš Forman see corporate America as a blight on free speech, the New Left now ruthlessly employs Big Tech, Wall Street and the media against its idealogical enemies— including some of its former allies. Just ask third-generation feminist Naomi Wolfe who appeared on Tucker Carlson this week to decry the death of civl liberties by government zealots— including Biden’s Democrats. No doubt it will make her a non-person on the Left

What is telling is how third-generation feminists suddenly realize that they are no longer safe within the shell of Kunstler’s Democratic Party. Wolfe & Co. are now demoted to secondary status behind the transgender, racial and socialist bent of the party. They see the abolition of gender as their destruction and are petrified. Now they’re on FOX-TV protesting as an invasion of civil liberties the stifling of free speech they employed to promote Roe v Wade. The irony is rich.

It’s an irony lost on the pious members of the Left’s culture industry— like Sorkin— who still function in Canada and the U.S. as if they’re on the cutting edge against the “disinformation”  and “bad speech” of the racist right. Just five minutes into his late-night show,  Stephen Colbert’s smug collective will demonstrate the insularity of thought now suffocating free speech.

Or distorting free speech, as we see at the Mexican/ American border. In the four years of Trump liberals decried the president putting separated kids into “cages” or “concentration camps”. Till Covid arrived it was their go-to attack dog. But now with Trump gone, children are again being put into cages. But these are called “holding facilities” and the Media Party has moved on to other issues.

As a final thought, The Trial of the Chicago Seven makes clear what guilt-soaked liberals themselves will never admit about their history. For all the rhetoric about oppressed blacks, noble Vietnamese and geopolitics, the true inspiration for the 1960s cultural and political foment was the drafting of middle and upper-middle class white men to fight the war. 

“Hell no, we won’t go” was the cry of an entitled generation. The first exercise of Boomer consciousness was to not replicate their parents, the WW II generation. So some of the hippies and SDS protesters went to jail for draft evasion, some moved to Canada and some, like the Chicago rioters, got a truncheon to the head for their troubles. But they didn’t go to ‘Nam.

Brought up on on Doctor Spock, not General Patton, they believed they were made for better things than dying in a rice paddy in southeast Asia. In the end they won the culture war, had the draft removed and moved into positions in the political left’s vast bureaucracy. (The Swamp, pace Donald Trump.)  When the draft ended, most America’s liberals were happy to let south east Asia sink without a trace into a murderous orgy of killing by Pol Pot and the North Vietnamese (see: The Killing Fields). Their work was done.

Don’t expect Aaron Sorkin to be doing a film on the Left’s abandonment of Free Speech anytime soon. 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx