The Alex Jones loving, septuagenarian Publix heiress who wired several hundred thousand dollars from her lair in Tuscany to fund the Jan 6 coup reminded me of an earlier far right heiress with Italian ties, Countess Guardabassi. esquire.com/news-politics/…
Countess Guardabassi (born Rosalind Wood, heir to a New England textile fortune who married an Italian fascist aristocrat) was a super-rich Palm Beach racist who funded neo-Nazi and other right wing groups from the 1950s into the 1970s
In 1971 she hosted neo-Nazi Revilo Oliver at her Palm Beach mansion. Oliver was working with the National Youth Alliance at the time, the group that spawned the guy who wrote the Turner Diaries.
This is the Countess's home in Palm Beach, 4 miles north of Mar-a-Lago. Clearly she suffered from much economic anxiety.
The Heritage Foundation has a fellowship named after her son, an avid Reagan supporter who seemed to have been a real peach. sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-19…
The obit of Fred Guardabassi, who funded the fellowship, is quite the journey. He was a guest at Mussolini’s son’s birthday party, met Hitler, AND introduced Swiss cheese and fondue to America in the 1960s. Quite a resume.
Here’s his full obit. legacy.com/us/obituaries/…
In 1968 Countess Guardabassi identified a tough talking, right wing outsider who she thought could shake up the political establishment, so she donated over $10,000 to his fledgling campaign. His name was George Wallace.
In 1969 Guardabassi was revealed to be a major donor to the nation’s most notorious antisemitic, white Christian nationalist preacher, Gerald LK Smith.
In the 1960s the Countess would gather up right wing materials like Smith’s publications and send them to her friend, John M. Kemper, who was the headmaster at Phillips Academy. One of the students during Kemper's time there in the 1960s was George W. Bush.
Not surprisingly, her obit in the NYTimes makes no mention of her neo-Nazi proclivities. nytimes.com/1971/07/22/arc…
The Countess’s grandson is in real estate in South Florida. He has a public FB page and his politics are, unsurprising, shall we say.
If you want a flavor of what Revilo Oliver would have said in that Palm Beach mansion, here’s a film he made for the neo-Nazi National Youth Alliance around 1970. archive.org/details/havewe…

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More from @SethCotlar

11 Dec
In 1939, when Chuck Grassley and Diane Feinstein were six years old, 10% of Americans (13 million people if the Roper poll was accurate) thought Jews should be deported. 53% said they should face "some restrictions." Only 39% said they should be treated the same as any American.
I mentioned those two senators just for perspective. This was in living memory. This was the generation that raised the boomers, and were the grandparents of Gen X.
Antisemitism is just one manifestation of a broader thread of illiberalism that courses through US history and politics. Don’t be fooled into thinking bigotry (of this and other forms) is some irrelevant vestige of a dead past.
Read 4 tweets
11 Dec
There were pictures of David Duke in a Nazi uniform and a KKK uniform publicly circulating in 1991 and yet the majority of white Louisianans voted for him for Governor...just in case you were wondering what past sins US voters have been willing to overlook.
It would be interesting to know how many of those Duke voters who were fine with his past in 1991, were completely unwilling to forgive Obama in 2008 for once going to an event at the home of Bill Ayres.
Duke got 56% of the vote of whites with family incomes under $15,000, 63% of those making from $15,000 to $29,999, 60% of those making from $30,000 to 49,999, 49% of those making from $50,000 to $74,999, and 34% percent of those with incomes $75,000 and over.
Read 5 tweets
10 Dec
I watched the NYTimes 40 minute video reconstructing the events of January 6 with students and one of their main takeaways was how close things got to being much much worse. They audibly gasped when Pence and the nuclear codes were quickly hustled out of the chamber.
Another take away was the cognitive dissonance of watching self-described “patriots” marauding through the hallowed halls of the US Capitol like drunk college students trashing the student center after a lost football game.
They’d all watched January 6 in real time and had found it disturbing. But seeing the bloodthirsty rage of the crowd up close like you do in that video really brought home the seriousness of purpose that drove these folks.
Read 4 tweets
9 Dec
What was happening in the WH in December 2020 and January 2021 was like Watergate on steroids...and yet it seems highly likely that none of the high level people involved will be held accountable for it because their Republican colleagues will protect them at all costs.
They were seriously talking about declaring a fake "National Security Emergency" to justify the nullification of a free and fair election. Just take a second to imagine what Lindsay Graham would have said about this if Obama had done it.
Read 4 tweets
9 Dec
The use of symbolic language in this Merle Haggard/Leona Williams duet is wonderfully subtle.

You've got the bull of the wood
You've got the beaver from Missouri
And we oughta get together you and me
In case it’s not clear, that was sarcasm.
1978 was weirder than I realized as someone who was in 4th grade at the time.
Read 4 tweets
8 Dec
When David Brooks was 3 years old, Jackie Robinson, a longtime Republican, expressed regret that the GOP, by nominating staunch conservative Barry Goldwater, had embraced a racist variety of "conservatism" explicitly intended to attract votes from bigoted white people.
If you won't take Jackie Robinson's word for it, will you take Robert Novak's word?
Jackie Robinson compared his experience of attending the 1964 GOP convention (again, the very year the conservative movement gained its key foothold in the party) to being a Jew in Hitler's Germany.
Read 4 tweets

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