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Seth Cotlar Profile picture
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Feb 23 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
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.
5 days before the Jan 6 insurrection, then President Trump tweeted out a batshit video by an Epoch Times writer that used text straight from Skousen's "Naked Communist" to explain why America was on the verge of a Commie takeover.
That Jan 1 tweet no longer exists because Trump's Twitter account was revoked. But here's a story about they Epoch Times guy who made the video. money.yahoo.com/newest-trump-b…
The US has long had a significant number of people (almost entirely white) who have been socialized into a deeply illiberal, far right political culture that they think of as the epitome of American Patriotism. Trump/Bannon didn't invent that political culture, they activated it.
In the mid-1960s there was an enormous ecosystem of far right publications and radio shows that reached millions of self-described "American conservatives and patriots." The National Review was a tiny blip compared to them.
As @DavidAstinWalsh, @johnshuntington, @eh_miller, and others have argued, it's not accurate to think of the "reasonable conservatives" at the National Review as principled opponents of these far right conservatives. It's best to think of them as allies with occasional qualms.
It was a long, complicated process through which the farther right elements of "conservatism" came to dominate the political culture of the GOP over the past 60 years. But blaming it on Trump is historically inaccurate.

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More from @SethCotlar

Seth Cotlar Profile picture
Feb 25
Ditto to all of this.
To see supposed progressives echoing Putin's dopey "the Ukranians are Nazis" talking point was equally affecting, tho in a different sort of way.
These are the people who got out of Elizabethgrad, Ukraine (now called Kropyvnytskyi) in the 1890s.
Read 4 tweets
Seth Cotlar Profile picture
Feb 25
A group of conservative Oregonians called for a convoy of trucks to show up at the state capitol to enact a repeat of what happened in Ottawa. I stopped by to check it out. There were more pizzas than people. There were more people in Proud Boy regalia than there were trucks. ImageImageImageImage
The sponsor was an offshoot of Timber Unity, the "grassroots" group that had organized a much larger and louder truck convoy in June 2019 that was part of the effort to squash a cap and trade bill. It was notable that the Proud Boy flag was displayed right next to the stage. ImageImageImage
It basically felt like a very low energy and low attendance Trump rally. Tho this rendition of Trump’s theme song was pretty competent.
Read 10 tweets
Seth Cotlar Profile picture
Feb 23
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.
Read 4 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

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