Woodstock: From Liberty to Lockdown

“Said, I’m going down to Yasgur’s Farm, Gonna join in a rock and roll band, Got to get back to the land and set my soul free…”

The year was 1969. A music festival would set up shop on a rural farm in Bethel, New York. The event would become legendary in stature. But it would also become a signpost of a dramatic change that was about to occur in the American culture, and the displacement of a worldview that had been the foundation of our society for centuries.

The festival would ultimately draw a crowd of more than 400,000 people. The music would play for three days amid births, deaths, and some undesirable elements of nature. Miraculously, peace would hold and love would prevail, despite the numbers that gathered.

The lyrics cited above and below are from a tune written by Joni Mitchell and recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The song generated a solid hit for both the songwriter and the group. Predictably, an anthem was born for part of a generation that would fall in love with leftist ideology.

These would be the folks who would grow up thinking that they were thoroughly “progressive-minded.” They would have families of their own, but they would raise their children much differently than parents of past generations had, both in manner and substance.

They would also take over the reins of power in all of the institutions that make up the pillars of a once-envied society—educational, political, medical, legal, and religious.

“And maybe it’s the time of year, Yes and maybe it’s the time of man, And I don’t know who I am, But life is for learning…”

A gigantic experiment was taking place without much of society’s knowledge or willingness. The counterculture of the 1960s was rebellious in nature, longing to be supposedly unshackled from traditional modes of authority, while still seeking an ideal new interpretation of “The American Dream.”

Something went terribly wrong, though.

It seems as if it would take an eternity to try and figure out what has actually occurred over these past decades as the result of an aggressive segment bulldozing an unassuming one. Time is a luxury we can ill afford, so for now the puzzle pieces will have to remain scattered.

An article dealing with Woodstock recently triggered a number of media outlets. The article about the iconic rock festival, titled “Woodstock occurred in the middle of a pandemic,” was published by the American Institute for Economic Research and written by Jeffrey Tucker.

As the article’s title indicates, the gist is that a very well attended, seminal rock festival took place smack in the middle of the 1968-69 Hong Kong flu pandemic.

According to the CDC, the Hong Kong flu was estimated to have caused 1 million deaths globally and 100,000 in the United States. Symptoms included coughing, fever, and shortness of breath. Most of the victims of the illness were over 65 years of age and had additional underlying medical conditions.

The government monitored the outbreak. People washed their hands and sought medical attention if they were ill. There were no masks, no lockdowns, no stay-at-home orders, and no prisoners released from jail. The press for the most part ignored the whole thing.

As for social distancing, Tucker wrote that the entire notion of using social distancing and public lockdowns is a relatively new one. The first time it came up was in a 2006 study by scientist Robert J. Glass, who got the idea from his teenage daughter’s science project. Two doctors who were working in the Bush administration suggested that government-enforced social distancing should be used in the next pandemic.

Tucker’s Woodstock article was not received well by the dominant media, likely because its content is at odds with the narrative that is being spun by a majority of the elite.

Reuters news service, which had initially classified Tucker’s article as True, apparently felt the need to fact-check itself. The news service downgraded its rating to Partially True and then downgraded its designation a third time to Misleading.

Reuters claimed that the pandemic came in two waves, and Woodstock took place in between the two waves, so therefore the rock festival did not take place “during” the pandemic.

Interestingly, Woodstock’s organizer Michael Lang was aware of the danger of the pandemic. He was quoted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in August of 1969, specifically stating that a medical team was brought into the festival in the event an outbreak occurred. This came to light thanks to economic and political historian Phil Magness’s Twitter account.

Magness also revealed that the Altamont Speedway festival, or as it was known at the time, the “Woodstock of the West,” was held in December 1969, almost exactly when the second wave of the Hong Kong flu outbreak was peaking.

It is literally shocking that leftists of today who espouse the philosophical worldview of the 1960s are the same individuals who are now utilizing authoritarian tactics to strip away freedoms and stifle expression.

Ironically, they have become everything they never wanted to be.

“We are stardust, we are golden, We are caught in the devil’s bargain, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden…”