Do Successful Movements Have Better Music (and Prettier Women)?

“The Hills We Die On” for #FreedomMusicFriday

Yesterday morning,

Andrej Uličný

hipped me to a song that you simply must hear. After hearing just a few bars, I knew two things.

• First, that we had to do #FreedomMusicFriday today, and this had to be the song.

• Second, that our “side”—the side of freedom and peace under natural law—is really starting to develop a genuine protest-music tradition!

I will get to that. But first, a related diversion…

Many years ago, author and humorist P.J. O’Rourke posited the “Babe Theory of Political Movements.” I can no longer find the full text (which I read about two decades ago now), but I did find this excerpt:

Best of all, there were hardly any beautiful women at the [Housing Now!] rally. I saw a journalist friend of mine in the Mall, and he and I pursued this line of inquiry as assiduously as our happy private lives allow. Practically every female at the march was a bowser. “We’re not being sexist here,” my friend insisted. “It’s not that looks matter per se. It’s just that beautiful women are always on the cutting edge of social trends. Remember how many beautiful women were in the anti-war movement twenty years ago? In the yoga classes fifteen years ago? At the discos ten years ago? On Wall Street five years ago? Where the beautiful women are is where the country is headed,” said my friend. “And this,” he looked around him, “isn’t it.”

O’Rourke was being his typical cheeky self—and naturally his “theory” elicited no small amount of outrage from feminists and their many simps.

But was he onto something? As I noted back in ‘23,

There are also data on biological markers. People on the right tend to have higher sexual dimorphism (more manly men and feminine women) than people on the left—to the point where even people on the left tend to find people on the right more physically attractive. People on the right report greater levels of life satisfaction and even tend to smile more.

Science has gone some short distance in demonstrating what you know intuitively, and through anecdotal observation: these days, there are a greater number of unattractive women (and soyboys wearing capris) on the political left. Yes, since leftists tend to skew younger, there will also be many who still enjoy the attractiveness that comes with youth. But it is clear that the center of gravity of attractiveness has been shifting away from the left for a while now. The 60s and 70s are long gone.

The point is that centers of gravity do shift. Movements change.

The ideology of left, for example, used to be a pro-worker phenomenon. Yes, it was always run by a vanguard of middle-class, university-educated elites and bored rich snobs (see Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, Chapter 11, for a hilarious description of just how far that goes back). But the left were once very much pro-worker, or at least they pretended to be. Now, they have given up all pretense of giving a crap about workers.

In fact, they hate and resent the working class today. Increasingly, the working class is now allied with the right.

Similarly, the left has largely given up any pretense of being antiwar or pro-free-speech. The locus of those too is increasingly on the right. (Of course, the right here means all modern inheritors of classical liberalism: conservatives, libertarians, and anarchists).

The same goes for many issues of bodily autonomy. “My body, my choice” only applies on the left when it comes to terminating infants in the womb; they are now perfectly happy to coerce you into taking experimental vaccines or forcibly prevent you from trying alternative therapies.

People on the left, at one point, also would have claimed to be opposed to the idea of concentration camps and digital yellow stars. Not so much anymore.

I could go on, but this’ll do for our purposes here. The point is simple: the center of gravity has shifted.

So I am now going to take a page out of O’Rourke’s book and propose a “Protest-Music Theory of Political Movements.” Something like,

The quality and quantity of movement’s protest music is an indicator of that movement’s success, proliferation, durability, and impact.

(“Protest music” here is just a term of art for music with themes that reflect a movement’s political, social, or cultural outlook.)

O’Rourke and his friend were saying that you will know a movement has arrived when a noticeably large number of attractive women join in. I am saying that you will know a movement has arrived when it has a lot of kick-ass protest music.

A 36,000-foot view of the last century demonstrates that the classical-liberal right is now in a period of rapid change…

If you imagine a spectrum that measures individual freedom (in inverse proportion to amount of government), then today’s right is moving rightward, toward more classically libertarian positions on drugs, war, social issues, and size of government. It is a fraught and inconsistent process, but it is underway.

Now that leftism is culturally and socially dominant (with some deeper globalist cabal sitting atop the pyramid), they have become the establishment. The classical-liberal right has become almost entirely an oppositional phenomenon. This is a continuation of a historical process…

The American Founders were radicals in their day, vis-à-vis Crown and Parliament. Their ideological descendants (mostly) became conservatives—attempting to conserve the political and social gains of the American Revolution. Now, everything has shifted. The times once again call on classical liberals to be radicals.

And let’s face it—radicals tend to make better music.

“The Hills We Die On” by Brendan Daniel is definitely good music. Not just good as protest music goes, but straight up good music.

That is what you want. You want the music to be moving, catchy, or singable. You want the lyrics to tell the tale, but not in a contrived way. Daniel nails it with “The Hills We Die On.”

This is folk, just as a lot of the protest music of the 60s started out as folk. It’s an excellent genre for such music. Others can learn the chords on guitar. People can sing it around a campfire. Good folk songs can become standards. (Of course there can be good political music in plenty of other genres too, as we have been discussing here over the last year.)

A video of a live version of the song is below. It’s really nice. Even if you’re not particularly a fan of folk music, you should still recognize that it’s the real deal.

The lyrics speak for themselves, as you will hear and see. (And given our topic in the most recent Distributed Nation installment on Wednesday, you can imagine how my ears perked up at mention of the moon and planting flags!)

I hope Brendan Daniel will not mind me reprinting the lyrics in full here.

Song below. (And a hat tip to

Etienne de la Boetie2

for showcasing this great song and artist.)

The classical-liberal right’s body of protest music is still small, but it is growing. And this is a good sign of that growth. Enjoy.

We didn't land on the moon in 1969, they lied about it
But I know that hill and I know they'll kill and die on it
Plant their flag on it

Tell me who killed who and for what reasons for what views
Disguises
But I know that hill and I know they'll kill and die on it
They can fight on it

These are the hills
These are the hills we'll die on
It's where we plant our flag
And what we will not change our minds on
These are the hills we'll die on

And everyone's along for the ride under the guise of science
And I know that hill and I know they'll kill and die on it
Test and try on it

We didn't need to be deceived about solutions to disease and violence
But I know that hill and I know they'll kill and die on it
They can fight on it

These are the hills
These are the hills we'll die on
It's where we plant our flag
And what we will not change our minds on
These are the hills that we will kill and die on

And if everyone is wrong and so the curtain has been drawn then who's behind it?
And I know that hill and I know they'll kill and die on it
They rely on us

These are the hills
These are the hills we'll die on
It's where we plant our flag
And what we will not change our minds on
These are the hills that we will kill and die on

We didn't land on the moon in 1969, they lied about it
But I know that hill and I know they'll kill and die on it