Thread by @destroyideas

I spent one year of primary education in a public school: kindergarten. My parents were/are far right wing culture warriors, coming through the JPUSA movement in the ‘70s and into the Calvary Chapel movement in the ‘80s as they got cozy with power during the Reagan administration

The homeschool movement was fringe right wing, intending to bring up a whole generation of people groomed in the culture war, prepared to overturn the liberal institutions.

The fringe right wing of American politics was/is the mainstream of white evangelicalism. My father operated mainstream Christian radio stations - I would know.

The homeschool movement was integrated with the boycott of mainstream culture, so we didn’t listen to “secular music,” watch “secular movies” (unless they were pre-culture war, so I grew up with black and white movies - in the ‘90s), and the TV was for Atari and Rescue 911 only.

Mainstream Christian culture was highly separate from the mainstream, and they developed their own film industry, TV programs, radio stations with radio dramas, news, current issue programming, magazines, music, etc

It’s hard to talk about this without mentioning CCM - Contemporary Christian Music. Oh boy.

At the center of this cultural movement was Focus on the Family, who had an entire media empire to rival (at the time) Tyler Perry’s studios.

In the back of every issue of the FotF teen boys magazine “Breakaway” (a play on terms because ours a sports thing but also breaking away from mainstream culture) was a guide for certain alternatives to music.

A table like “if you’re into System of a Down, you should listen to P.O.D.”

The homeschool movement was an activist movement. My mother still displays a newspaper clipping of a story with a picture of my family (my in a cradle) at an anti-abortion rally.

The homeschool movement was an activist movement, I attended several “Christian worldview” seminars and camps (the longest was Summit Ministries, affiliated with FotF, was two weeks) meant to develop leaders for the conservative movement.

John Birch Society was a leader in this movement. One camp I went to was named for Robert W. Welch, their founder.

The Home School Legal Defense Association/Fund was also very big in this movement. Supported by FotF, they had a regular radio segment broadcast on mainstream Christian radio.

Issues in Education was another big player, they had a newsletter and radio program. (I recently rediscovered them and they’re definitely in the Trump Cult, sounding just like Qanon.)

It went deeper still, because the homeschool co-ops were deeply full of the farthest right wing propaganda and conspiracy theories.

In the ‘90s you didn’t post YouTube videos on Facebook to share with your friends, you passed VHS tapes through networks and held parties to watch them.

Among these videos were the Clinton Chronicles, funded by Larry Nichols and distributed by Jerry Falwell.

Other videos were focused on Ruby Ridge, one I remember was a Waco conspiracy theory video that set out to prove FBI whistleblowers were murdered by ATF agents inside the compound.

The most troubling were Oklahoma City Bombing conspiracy videos and workbooks trying to prove the CIA did the bombing as a false flag in order to persecuted Christians.

The survivalist movement was big in the ‘90s in this movement. Stockpiling water, food, weapons, iodine pills.

I’m still in close enough proximity to some of the other homeschool children in our co-ops, and most of them are extreme fringe - tax protestors, militia, patriots.

I wrote this thread because the entire homeschool movement had an extreme purpose, and a lot of people came through that and have had to learn to live outside it. And it wasn’t a majority of evangelicalism, but was firmly in the center of it.

I wrote on here in 2017 that Trump’s victory was a victory for the ideology of Timothy McVeigh, because I saw the direct line from the two. None of this was surprising to me.

I too was pretty extreme in right wing thought, and I feel I was saved by it when I was introduced to nonviolent Christian theology. It fit with the anarchist views, but was nonviolent.

So it was really wild for me to see an @AP journalist write that this movement didn’t have links to radicalization. I hope @kkruesi reads through this thread and researches these organization I’ve named and can follow up that reporting with this perspective.

I’m grateful for @C_Stroop who really gets my experience and does a wonderful job explaining it in her articles and advocacy.

You know this thread is important to me because I mostly avoided typos.

Support artists and local venues. #SaveOurStages isitbandcampfriday.com

Post script: Rubio, Cruz are the elders of this vein, they have been stripping the respectable parts off recently. I think it’s the Thune, Hawley and Cotton group that are the immediate outcropping of it though.

What did I say about Hawley and McVeigh?

https://twitter.com/nberlat/status/1353367024395718656