Thread by @SethCotlar

Here’s an illustration of this. Watch this short clip from a 1984 Donahue show. Note how familiar many of the guest’s talking points would sound to anyone familiar with MAGA political culture. I’ll tell you who this is in the next tweet.

https://twitter.com/jesserodriguez/status/1607381444497637376

This is the genocidal neo-Nazi Christian Nationalist Donahue is interviewing. splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…

If you want to watch the entire interview (which is a pretty fascinating primary source) you can find it by googling. The only place I've found it is in a dark corner of the web teaming with neo-Nazi content, so I'm not going to link to it.

Wickstrom was on Donahue because the Posse Comitatus was in the news due to the effort to apprehend "tax protester" Gordon Kahl who was on the lam after killing some law enforcement officers. Here's a contemporary documentary that whitewashes Kahl.

Gordon Kahl was a rabidly anti-Semitic Christian Nationalist HIS ENTIRE LIFE. He read Henry Ford's "The International Jew" in the 1930s and listened to Father Coughlin. His world view was an Americanized version of Nazism. But the media depicted him as an angry farmer.

I've had to learn a lot about Kahl and these Posse Comitatus fascists because the person I'm researching, the chair of the OR GOP in 1978, was very sympathetic to Kahl's plight and had multiple ties to neo-Nazis and Posse Comitatus types.

https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1555379193231249408?s=20&t=65bG4zDIuR3RSCJDBRl17g

Walter Huss's story (and the story of the anti-vax, anti-government, Christian Nationalist, and Qanon saturated OR GOP of today) is a perfect illustration of the point made in the WaPo article linked in the original post.

In the late 70s and early 80s most establishment Republicans regarded Huss and his many supporters as "kooks." Today, virtually none of those establishment Republicans from that era vote Republican anymore, let alone have any influence over the party.

My experience of getting to know Huss and the world view of the people around him has been profoundly disorienting because of how incredibly *contemporary* much of his rhetoric feels...despite how dated and marginal it appeared in the 1960s and 70s.

https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1401236262242066433?s=20&t=65bG4zDIuR3RSCJDBRl17g

In the early 80s people like Huss, Wickstrom, & Kahl were part of a vast network of far right extremists tied together by scores of small newsletters and AM radio shows scattered across the nation. Many hoped the GOP could become a vehicle for their ideas.

https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1599635046872539136?s=20&t=65bG4zDIuR3RSCJDBRl17g

In the late 80s and early 90s, David Duke played a key role in forging a tie between explicit white nationalism and the political culture of the GOP. You'll be unsurprised to learn that Walter Huss was a HUGE fan of Duke's.

https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1545161059232690176?s=20&t=65bG4zDIuR3RSCJDBRl17g

This 1989 solicitation from Duke's NAAWP (yes, it stands for exactly the trolling thing you think it does) would sound pretty "normal" coming out of Tucker's mouth these days. This picture is from the papers of Walter Huss, chair of the OR GOP in 1978.

As I note in my pinned tweet, I'm mostly staying off of this site (other than to ring the alarm bell) because Elon appears to be using it as a propaganda machine to normalize right wing extremism (under the dopey banner of fighting the "woke mind virus.")

https://twitter.com/EladNehorai/status/1607291331512242177?s=20&t=65bG4zDIuR3RSCJDBRl17g

There is nothing "cute" or "puckish" or "playful" about the far right propagandists Elon interacts w/ amicably & whose voices he's amplified on this platform in the name of "free speech" & combating the imaginary, civilization destroying "woke mind virus."

https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1589481876808675328?s=20&t=65bG4zDIuR3RSCJDBRl17g

unroll @threadreaderapp

For example, if you search for uses on Twitter of the phrase "woke mind virus" before January 1, 2020 you will find exactly three. twitter.com/search?q=%22wo…

2020 was the year that phrase first got purchase in the discourse. This is what I mean when I say that Elon is engaged in a right wing propagandistic project to make this dopey three word phrase the topic of our national and global conversation. twitter.com/search?q=%22wo…

Instead of talking about real things like climate change or economic inequality or democracy or health care access or [insert actual thing that impacts real humans' lives] Elon wants us talking about an imaginary conspiracy theory that explains why people like him are victims.

Which is similar to how a bunch of rural white men in the 1980s like Wickstrom, who had inherited large plots of land that their ancestors had either been given for free by the federal government or had violently stolen from Native Americans, were "the real victims" of their era.