content: 1968: A Television Panel Discuss the Hippie Movement Something I notice when watching older television programmes, especially those in a discussion format, is how articulate and polite everyone is and how the production is very organic and natural. No dramatic set design, sound effects or obnoxious screen overlays. The discussions are real, and by today's standards hyper-literate.   Take this episode of Firing Line, #113, with William F. Buckley Jr from September 1968 for example. First half [22:42] https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=oaBnIzY3R00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaBnIzY3R00 Full Episode [50:53] https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=BYgv7ur8ipg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYgv7ur8ipg Kerouac is the key to this panel. The background I gleaned on this was that he had been under the impression that the show would be him and Buckley only, to discuss how the next generation had taken up his 'Beat' philosophy. To his horror he was paneled with an academic and a counter-culture artist. Kerouac, a serious alcoholic by this time appears on the show obviously drunk.   Despite his drunkeness, Kerouac attempts to drop redpills as Buckley, the host, who is a very dry but very intelligent man, attempts to manage the laughable statements made by Yablonsky the 'academic', who frankly looks and sounds like a cop recounting his undercover work, and Ed Sanders, the classical literature student turned rock musician who is slowly falling away from the Establishment.   Kerouac makes the claim that Communists infiltrated the Beat movement, turning the Hippies radical. He also bitingly jokes the "Vietnamese War" was a setup to boost the economy.