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1. So I have some thoughts on Ezra Pound, White Citizen Councils & pro-segregationist violence, the Southern Strategy, Hugh Kenner, National Review, Regnery Books, the militia movement, Alex Jones, & the unwritten history of the American right.
2. Ezra Pound was a vortex. He drew in many forces, literary and political. His support for Mussolini from 1920s until 1945 is well known. Less commonly known is he was a pivotal creator of violent American far right in 1940s & 1950s.
3. From 1945 to 1958 Pound was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the criminally insane as a result of his wartime broadcasts in fascist Italy, arguably in support of Mussolini's regime.
4. At St. Elizabeths, Pound had many visitors. Some were literary friends & admirers (TS Eliot, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, H.L. Menken) but there was also a cohort of political admirers, who would go on to be the seedbed of far right, sometimes including terrorists.
5. Pound's far-right fans included John Kaspers, Dave Horton & Eustace Mullins. Pound was especially close to Kaspers, contributing to Kasper's pro-segregationist publications.
6. In 1950s, Pound played a key role in reformulating an older "Jeffersonian" states rights tradition in an anti-liberal direction, which some of his followers took further as a licence for racist and anti-government violence.
7. Pound's disciple Kasper, in particular, was a violent agitator, responding to the desegregation push by fomenting riots & also working with KKK types who dynamited schools and synagogues.
8. Horton was an inspiration for the ranchers in Southwest who fought the “Sagebrush Wars” of 1980s over federal land. Mullins' theories of Federal Reserve (sparked by Pound) are a staple of conspiracy theorists.
9. Here is Mullins on the Alex Jones show, where he talks about influence Pound on his politics: "I got my education in a nuthouse."
10. But it wasn't just the violent far right that took inspiration from Pound, but also also the more respectable emerging conservative movement found in National Review and Regnery Books, both of which published Pound.
11. What Pound's conservative admirers (led preeminently by the great literary critic Hugh Kenner, a National Review editor in 1960s) appreciated in Pound was his creation of a usable non-liberal past: Kung, Jefferson, Adams, etc.
12. Pound's alliance Kaspers was a crude, vicious version of a trend that had more rarefied intellectual counterparts in exultation of Southern culture found in National Review, Modern Age etc. (Weaver, Southern Agarians, even The New Criticism).
13. You go hunting where the ducks are. If you're anti-liberal in the 1940s/1950s, the ducks are white Southerners. Hence the Southern Strategy, with its intellectual counterpart in various southern intellectual movements (both conservative & far right)
14. Kenner, along with his then mentor Marshall McLuhan, met Pound at St. Elizabeths in 1948. Academically, Kenner & McLuhan were allied with the New Critics, who used formalism in the service of conservative & often pro-traditional South politics
15. Unlike the New Critics, though, Kenner didn't think a poet's social vision was irrelevant. However, he did believe that it could be separated from the particular politics the poet had. In other words, Pound's condemnation of usury doesn't have to be fascist.
16. In an important 1967 essay, later reprinted & praised by William F. Buckley, Kenner argues that the politics of Pound & the other fascist modernists could be bracketed off from their politics. 
17. Kenner: “With Hitler, Mussolini and General O’Duffy at last out of the way, with the magnetic fields their names commanded now for all time collapsed, one can see what were the real subjects of concern [for writers like Pound]" But is fascism really "out of the way"?
18. Kenner was a brilliant critic & Pound's best advocate, but I think the new scholarship (by Alec Marsh & others) casts doubt on a central claim. Pound's fascism was not just a matter of defeated European movement but also a still living American one.
19. In Italy today, there is a neofascist group called CasaPound. The members call themselves ragazzi di Ezra: Ezra’s boys (not related to Vox). None of this is dead & over.
20. If I were truly on the ball, I could've worked in Robert Anton Wilson (Pounder lover, Kenner correspondent & author of the Illumantus books). @notjessewalker explains the relevance here:
21. If I were also on the case, I would have brought in James Jesus Angleton (Pound admirer, CIA counter-intelligence expert, the man who dropped the ball on Oswald, torturer of many Soviet defectors).
22. Anyways, if you want to read more about the cultural politics of the Pound era, here's an essay I did on Hugh Kenner & Guy Davenport. It's one of the best things I've written: newrepublic.com/article/153244…
