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Feb 23 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
That Blake Masters video making the rounds in which he name checks the heroes of suburban American 13-year old Boy Scouts ca. 1964 (Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Norman Rockwell, Chuck Berry) reminded me of this moment in Reagan’s farewell address.
Today’s MAGA-candidates who “love America” while stoking vicious hatred of over half of their fellow Americans learned well from their “conservative” predecessors. They do it now with a grimace instead of Ron’s warm smile, but the message is similar.
I enjoyed Masters’s Mark Twain shout out as well, as if President “we’re gonna build a wall and Mexico will pay for it” isn’t a con man right out of Twain’s oeuvre.
Blake Masters has some strong 1961 Bircher vibes. His positive Chuck Berry reference is probably the only thing that these 1961 angry, America-loving guys would reject.

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More from @SethCotlar

Seth Cotlar Profile picture
Feb 23
Happy to see Cleon Skousen getting the negative attention he so deserves.
In 1998, very few Americans knew who Skousen was. Those that did, were likely to be reading material like this Oregon rag, that also contained advertisements for white supremacist CDs.
The person who we probably most have to "thank" for bringing Skousen back into our national discourse is Glenn Beck, who resuscitated that far right conspiracy crank during his Tea Party days.
Read 9 tweets
Seth Cotlar Profile picture
Feb 22
An enslaved woman named Ona Judge escaped from GW's Philadelphia household in 1793 and he used his position as President to try to recapture her. He never succeeded, and Judge lived in New Hampshire for the remainder of her life.
This is a great book about Ona Judge. School kids in Florida would learn a lot from reading it, but I suspect a teacher who assigned it might lose their job. google.com/books/edition/…
Anyway, GW did many other things in his life, including requiring the soldiers in his Continental Army to be inoculated against smallpox. But the claim that he made "everyone's" life better only works if one presumes the lives of the people he enslaved don't matter.
Read 5 tweets
Seth Cotlar Profile picture
Feb 21
Trump’s “pro-free speech” social media platform will be a perfect object lesson in how “free speech absolutism” is an incoherent idea. The developers are literally training the “free speech” app to spot banned content.
Here’s the Parler iteration of this object lesson from 2020.
A story from 2018 about the Reddit iteration of the story. newyorker.com/magazine/2018/…
Read 4 tweets
Seth Cotlar Profile picture
Feb 18
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.
Read 10 tweets
Seth Cotlar Profile picture
Feb 18
Has there ever been a television news host who had more consistent and influential access to a sitting President than “fair and balanced” Hannity?
Screenshot from this story. washingtonpost.com/politics/inter…
Flashback to this 2018 reporting. I motion that we refer to Hannity’s show as MAGA-PRAVDA from this point forward. nymag.com/intelligencer/…
Read 4 tweets
Seth Cotlar Profile picture
Feb 17
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.
Read 4 tweets

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