In 1951 the National Association of Manufacturers commissioned a comic book about the dangers of inflation. The art work was by Dan Barry, of Flash Gordon fame.
You can read the entire thing here. I was inspired to search for these online because they were mentioned in Edward Miller's biography of Robert Welch which I'm currently reading. Welch may have had something to do with commissioning this comic. lcamtuf.coredump.cx/communism/Your…
Charles Schulz (yes, that Charles Schulz) was the artist who produced this very understated anti-communist comic in 1947. lcamtuf.coredump.cx/communism/Is%2…
Believe it or not, this is the first panel of that anti-communist comic. Someone using a flag as a weapon on the steps of the US Capitol? That'll never happen!
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The rightward lurch of the GOP since 2015 has led many to ask "when did it start?" and "how did it happen?" I've been researching the Oregon chapter of that story, and it's clear that 1970 was a key turning point, and that it was a bottom up more than a top down story.
People on the far right mobilized at the county level across the state and almost succeeded in taking over the party in 1970. That would have been shocking since the Oregon GOP Senators Hatfield & Packwood were known for their moderation, if not outright liberalism at the time.
Walter Huss and his fellow "ultraconservatives" continued organizing at the local level and in 1978 finally succeeded in taking over the state GOP. Huss was removed from his chair position after a few disastrous months, but it had a lasting impact.
If you’d told me in 1989 when I was a student in Gordon Wood’s Am Rev class that in thirty years he’d be giving friendly interviews to Trotskyites and publishing in a far right review affiliated with a lawyer who advocated overturning the 2020 election for Donald Trump…well.
Gordon Wood, who was so sensitive about his professional reputation that he was angry that the 1619 Project didn't consult with him, is now affiliating himself with an institution that gave a fellowship to a Pizzagate guy.
To be honest, however, if you'd told me that it was Gordon Wood's interpretation of the history of racism and slavery in the US that would particularly endear him to the class-reductionist left and the anti-anti-racist right, then I would have less surprised by that.
Things one tweets when one has no understanding, like absolutely none, like a howling black hole of the opposite of understanding, of what historians do; and also a raging volcano's worth of misplaced confidence about your ability to make pronouncements about what historians do.
Tell me you've never had an actual conversation with a historian about what they do or read the most basic methodological texts used in introductory theory and methods course without actually telling me that.
The anti-intellectual "public intellectual" is, IMO, not a great look.
I'm starting to think that the people who built their identity around the imperative to "stand athwart history yelling stop" rendered themselves uniquely ill-equipped to deal with the sorts of adjustments necessary to deal with a pandemic of historically-unprecedented scale.
I mean, you can yell "stop" at the coronavirus all you like, but it really doesn't care.
You can yell "stop" at climate change all you like, but it really doesn't care.
🧵Watching the footage from Ottawa reminded me that a few hundred trucks convoyed into Salem, OR and snarled traffic for about 10 hours on June 27, 2019. It was part of a mostly-astroturfed movement that scuttled a carbon bill that, by all accounts, was about to pass.
The group that organized the rally was called "Timber Unity" & it had 1st come into existence on June 6, 2019 (3 weeks before the protest) as a Facebook group. From what I can tell, the 37K members (as of late June 2019) were real live Oregonians who didn't like the Carbon Bill.
That said, the seed money for the group was provided on 6/21 by Andrew Miller, a longtime conservative donor in Oregon who is the heir to a multi-generational timber fortune. He owns Stimson Lumber Company. Screenshot from Oregon Sec of State website.