, 6 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
This is a membership card for the Portland branch of the America First Committee. As open fascist organizations from the 30s were marginalized and closed, many of those people just folded into the slightly more moderate America First movement. 1/
This same dynamic has played out a number of times on the far-right. Radical organizations get shuttered, and then a more mainstream institution is formed that echoes their sentiments without the same open affiliations. 2/
This was true of the White Citizens Councils, the Barry Goldwater Campaign, the John Birch Society, Pat Buchanan in 1992, David Duke's various runs, and a whole host of libertarian and "patriot" organizations. 3/
What America First did was use a civic nationalist populism, the language of "anti-interventionism," and try to code some of its racialism and anti-Semitism to take the same ideas propped up by the Silver Shirts, the German-American Bund, and the KKK into the mainstream.
That dynamic and rhetoric was copied almost directly into the Trump campaign, and that surge of far-right support in 2016, which really centralized a disparate white nationalist movement, got its play book from the America First Committee.
We quite literally are seeing the America if the America First Committee had defined the administration, only in the 21st century with incredible technology, social media, and an increasingly powerful military industrial complex.
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