Talking about the 1960s worked for conservatives in the 1970s and 1980s, but when you started to have many voters who weren't born until after the Sixties, such talk lost its appeal with voters. Even voters who do remember the Fifties and Sixties weren't energized.
Plus, the population has changed. People's experiences and expectations are different. They can't fit into the pattern of the 1940s or 1950s because they grew up with more and wanted more.
Things change. It's hard to find people around now touting the pure 1960s message of sexual liberation. People are more suspicious of such claims. To that extent the 60s are long over.
But that doesn't mean you can shoehorn people back into earlier patterns of thought. For better or worse, people are watching Game of Thrones, not Gunsmoke, and their lives are shaped by what they watch.
If you want to make sex trafficking an issue, deal with what it is and what it specifically involves and why and how it's going on. Don't roll out yesterday's campaign talk and try to fit it into themes that don't resonate today.
But that's a straw dog that the title of this article suggests, that is not supported by the actual transcript they quote, which comes from a poor, distantly-recorded audio recording of a meeting Mr. Hawley attended with a number of conservative pastors (and, obviously, a mole, looking for anything that can be twisted out of context).
The word "60s" / sixties doesn't appear in the transcript. He mentioned "sexual revolution" but not "sixties," and the S. R. is far, far more than the culturally toxic fumes we first started getting dumped on us in the late 60s. Here's the transcript once again:
"We have a human trafficking crisis in our state and in this city and in our country because people are willing to purchase women, young women, and treat them like commodities. There is a market for it. Why is there? Because our culture has completely lost its way. The sexual revolution has led to exploitation of women on a scale that we would never have imagined, never have imagined,...." "We must ... deliver a message to our culture that the false gospel of ‘anything goes’ ends in this road of slavery. It ends in the slavery and the exploitation of the most vulnerable among us. It ends in the slavery and exploitation of young women."
The Sexual Revolution only began in the 60s, but has been gaining steam ever since, and is a veritable juggernaut today. There is NO comparision between the state of the culture today, versus, say, 3 years or 5 years or 10 years after the S. R started.
Moreover, he also blamed sexual trafficking on the "anything goes" mentality we have today, and on a "culture [that] has completely lost its way". I can see such remarks might be considered "controversial" by lefties. But by conservatives?!
Regardless of whether you remember the 60s, please tell me you at least have witnessed over your lifetime a steady slide into a cultural cesspool, even if you didn't witness the start of that descent?
Given the context of the venue in which he spoke, he wasn't "running on a platform of 60's bashing". By no stretch of the imagination.
Of course, the Left and the gopE and RINOs will naturally try to spin this as such.
I certainly hope the average Freeper - especially those from my Dad's home state (he's 95 this year, and still talks about being born in "the German ghetto" in St Louie) - don't buy into this lie and further perpetuate it.
There is absolutely nothing in Hawley's words that should cause a single Freeper to do a facepalm. Nothing.