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Jeet Heer Profile picture
@HeerJeet
Sep 25, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
1. Remember the Mueller cult? That seems kind of funny now.
2. Saturday Night Live did a regular series of skits featuring Trump (Alec Baldwin) cowering in fear under the stern glaze of Mueller (Robert Di Niro in his gruff tough guy mode). As we now know, it was the opposite: Mueller cowered before Trump.
3. Writing in @newrepublic in 2017, I noted that both liberals & conservatives are addicted to the myth of the heroic prosecutor: the selfless federal lawman who can save us from the messiness of politics & political corruption.
4. Historically, the myth of the heroic federal prosector & lawman goes back to the propaganda campaign that J. Edgar Hoover concocted in the 1930s to sell the FBI: amid the real corruption of big city mayors & cops, the G-Man was faithful to the law.
5. But political crimes are as much about politics as about law-breaking: they require a political redress as well as a legal one. What we haven't seen, amid all Trump's corruption, is much political response to Trump's massive corruption (Elizabeth Warren is the exception)
6. More on how heroic prosecutors are not the salvation from political corruption and what needs to be done to rein in future corrupt presidents: thenation.com/article/politi…

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More from @HeerJeet

Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jan 11
1. The idea of USA annexing Canada, Greenland & the Panama Canal might seem like a typical Trump brain fart, but it has deep roots in the far right. MAGA Manifest destiny owes much to Pat Buchanan, Peter Brimelow & the strange figure of Lee Craig Schoonmaker (a gay rights pioneer turned hate-monger)
2. Trump's America First foreign policy isn't a quirk of his weird personality (altho his thuggish/trollish expression of it is). "America First" is real tradition going back to McKinley, Hoover, Lindbergh & Taft. Miscalled "isolationism" is policy of European disengagement & hemispheric dominance
3. Pre-Trump the immediate manifestation of America First foreign policy was the circle around Pat Buchanan in 1980s/1990s called paleo-conservatives. As against dominant neo-cons faction which at end of Cold War wanted to extend USA global reach, paleo-cons wanted focus on hemispheric dominance.
Read 9 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Dec 15, 2023
1. "What a minute," yo might ask, "Isn't Milei a self-proclaimed libertarian, even an anarcho-capitalist who who wants to abolish the state? How can he be using police power to repress free speech & protests?" Well, the history of anarcho-capitalism has the answers.
2. The term anarcho-capitalism was coined by Murray Rothbard, this elfin looking guy, tweaking an earlier formulation by his friend Karl Hess (a Goldwater speechwriter turned anti-war activist). Rothbard was a pioneer in coopting language of anarchy for authoritarianism Image
3. Rothbard was politically all over the map, at various points allying himself with Robert Taft, Joseph McCarthy, Ayn Rand, William F. Buckley, New Left historical revisionists like William Appleman Williams, the Maoist Peace & Freedom Party, the Koch bros, Pat Buchanan
Read 8 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Nov 2, 2023
1. Fun fact: New Criticism was an outgrowth of a group called The Fugitives or Southern Agrarians. Their governing ideology was a celebration of hierarchical & traditional societies like the pre-Civil War south & pre-industrial Europe. Guess what they thought of Blacks & Jews?
2. This is a complicated story but the New Critics were Southern white reactionaries who idealized pre-industrial life & Christian hegemony, whitewashed slavery, and embraced formalism in criticism as a way of exalting an idealized order untouched by historical change.
3. It's kind of hard to place the New Critics in terms of contemporary politics because they were both anti-socialist and anti-capitalist, seeing industrialization as a falling off. And their critiques of capitalism & industrialization have real force & value.
Read 11 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Aug 6, 2023
I've literally been reading racists right-wingers (notably Samuel Francis and Pat Buchanan) since Yglesias was in kindergarten. It's a big part of the work I do. Yet I somehow manage to avoid praising them as interesting parts of the discourse even as analyze their work. Image
The key thing here is that Yglesias thinks of the revanchist & racist right as part of his universe of discourse, people who are wrong on some stuff but worth engaging with. By contrast, for him left & left-liberals beyond the pale.


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"He's clearly quite racist! But...." There's always a but. Image
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jul 27, 2023
1. Oppenheimer, Barbie and the contradictions of German-Jewish whiteness: Notes for an essay. (Jack Kirby will make a cameo here).
2. What's the real thread unifying the Barbenheimer phenomenon besides the coincidence of an opening date. I'd say both films are about the fraught experience of the children of immigrants in putatively melting pot society.
3. J. Robert Oppenheimer: of German-Jewish descent, huge success in his field, brought low by national security establishment. Ruth Handler, creator of Barbie, of Polish-Jewish descent, huge success in her field, brought low by IRS.
Read 6 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jul 18, 2023
1. While researching Young Americans for Freedom I came across what is, I think I can say this confidently, the worst music every sung by humans: the ersatz folk songs belted out by young rightwingers in 1960s in a desperate attempt to copy the folk revival.
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2. This music is evidence of the strong anxiety created by the rise of the counterculture & New Left, which the right felt had to matched by an counter-attack. Janet Greene, for example, was often touted as the right's answer to Joan Baez.
3. This story has it all: White Christian Nationalism, neo-Nazis, domestic terrorism, the GOP, and a ventriloquist dummy. Hard to imagine any terrorism worse than the music though.
Read 8 tweets

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