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Jeet Heer Profile picture
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23 Jun, 6 tweets, 2 min read
1. This is in fact the typical coalition of right-wing mobilization: elite defense of status quo allying with vulgar anger: the snobs & the slobs. In 1920 Lothrop Stoddard writing tomes while other rougher Klansmen did the lynchings: led to 1924 immigration act among others.
2. One sees the snobs & slobs alliance in McCarthyism, with roughneck Tailgunner Joe providing the popular touch while Wilmoore Kendall & William F. Buckley (and even, sadly Sidney Hook) providing a high-brow rational for red baiting.
3. As I mentioned the other day, anti-CRT movement has this component, with both a very explicitly racialist base stirring up shit & a very organized think tank/dark money infrastructure pushing it into respectable form of GOP bills.
4. As I mentioned before, the 1974 text book wars in West Virginia, where fundamentalist parents dynamited a school building to oppose comparative religion text, is real model. Heritage Foundation send lawyers to defend accused bombers & mobilize parents into New Right.
5. The anti-CRT has to be understood politically: its a strategy for the out-of-national-power right to consolidate base & recruit new people. School controversies are great for right because they can cultivate local hotheads & turn them into political functionaries.
6. I did a podcast with @rickperlstein, the great Homeric chronicler of the American Right, tracing the origins of the anti-CRT agitation back to the schools wars of the distant past but also the New Right playbook of 1970s. It's a great conversation! jeetheer.substack.com/p/podcast-rick…

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More from @HeerJeet

Jeet Heer Profile picture
24 Jun
1. The threat of the insurrectionist right remains real. Yet this clip, on a network Trump has appeared on, shows the limits of a counter-terrorism approach. This isn't a hidden network; it's an out-in-the-open political movement advocating violence.
2. As in 1850s, the threat of insurrection is coming from within the system, from people who have positions of power, wealth & status in the existing order. That makes it a threat of a different order & kind than, say, 9/11 or even the Oklahoma bombing.
3. As far as I can tell, the existing counter-terrorism models all posit threats from outside the system, from extremists on the fringe rather than extremists who have their own TV network, a former president egging them on, etc.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
22 Jun
1. In 1974 violence broke out Kanawha County, West Virginia over comparative religion textbooks. Fundamentalist parents dynamited a school building among other acts of violence. Then the Heritage Foundation stepped in & offered legal defense for the alleged dynamiters.
2. The Kanawha County textbook wars of 1974 are a direct precursor to the anti-CRT struggles today. While political battles over schooling are immemorial, the specific model of 1974 (agitated parents, right-wing think tanks proving organizing) started in 1974.
3. Heritage Foundation has taken the lead in organizing anti-CRT for the same reason they intervened in text book wars of 1974: school battles are a good way to recruit grassroots into movement conservatism.
Read 5 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
21 Jun
1. This twitter thread from yesterday is already a classic, one of the all time greats. It also raises an interesting question: how do conservatives reconcile their exaltation of ancient Greece & Rome (where same-sex practices were accepted) with their homophobia?
2. One way to reconcile celebrations of ancients with homophobia is to recontextualize ancient relationships in way Peg does. Harmodius and Aristogeiton weren't gay, they were just close male friends, liked to do some camping & wrestling, oil each other up, nothing to see here.
3. Another form of recontextualizing is pseudo-history. I remember an evangelical Christian telling me once that all the gay stuff started only in the late, decadent period decline, that when Rome was a young Republic they were all as straight as a rod.
Read 12 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
20 Jun
1. William Randolph Hearst is of course remembered as a pioneering press baron, a patron of the arts, the prototype of Charles Foster Kane, a failed politician etc. But his role in this history of the American right, has, I think been forgotten.
2. Hearst was the Rupert Murdoch of his time, but had a broader reach than Murdoch now has because it transcended narrow party differences and went beyond politics to culture (with his vast press empire having a hand in everything from cartoons to movies)
3. The interesting thing about Hearst is that he was a pioneer of both left & right populism, first using anti-systems politics to attack wealthy elites & then turning it against the New Deal. This was both a cultural & a political agenda.
Read 5 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
18 Jun
Essential point!
Because of elite overproduction we have too many over-educated pundits trying to prove they know what CRT is and have a developed critique of it, when all these anti-CRT bills (or anti-"CRT") are not about CRT at all but messaging bills (the message being "ooga-booga").
If someone is saying "A bunch of Jews created CRT to stir up race war in America & kill white people" you don't respond by saying, "Well, I have a much more modulated criticism of Adorno & Horkheimer's's Dialectic of Enlightenment." You say "that's an anti-Semitic myth."
Read 5 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
17 Jun
1. The anti-CRT thing is an obvious astroturf culture war propaganda operation (with the fingerprints of GOP dark money all over it). The fact that it's also designed to stifle speech deserves more attention.
2. I haven't done a full inventory but as far as I can tell, the only two signatories of the notorious Harper's letter to speak out against these anti-CRT bills are me & @thomaschattwill. And yet the bills clearly have a chilling effect on teaching USA history honestly.
3. The anti-CRT stuff is worrisome because it follows a pattern familiar in USA history of pushing schools to indoctrinate patriotic history -- going back to progressive era backlash against Beard & forward to McCarthyism. This stuff has been historically poisonous.
Read 4 tweets

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