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Paul Matzko Profile picture
Paul Matzko
@PMatzko
Historian. Author of "The Radio Right" (Oxford, 2020). Research Fellow at the Cato Institute.
7 subscribers
Nov 15, 2023 • 20 tweets • 5 min read
A truly vile essay that, while ostensibly about @drantbradley's tweets, actually demonstrates Douglas Wilson's profound historical ignorance.

dougwils.com/books-and-cult… There is much that I could criticize, but let's focus on the core claim.

Lynch mobs were not an example of "untethered empathy." The feelings of white woman were merely offered as an excuse, a thin ex post facto justification, for the use of violence to enforce white supremacy.
Aug 7, 2023 • 27 tweets • 5 min read
Here's how Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis accidentally exposed a trio of white supremacists: Pedro Gonzalez, Nate Hochman, and Richard Hanania. A 🧵.

(You can read the whole post by clicking the link in my bio.) Three months, three scandals.

Pedro Gonzalez in June: anti-semitic & white nationalist text messages.

Nate Hochman in July: created DeSantis campaign video w/ fascist imagery.

Richard Hanania in August: alt-account w/ with eugenicist, racist, and misogynistic posts.
Jul 21, 2023 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
I've reviewed @realchrisrufo's new book for @reason. While one can read it as a cautionary tale about the extremes to which radical left activism can go -- both in the 60s and today -- Rufo ultimately imitates what he opposes. A 🧵. Each section of the book has the same arc of rise & declension & rise again for an 60s radical intellectual: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, & Derrick Bell. Rufo wants his readers to make a direct connection b/t current left-wing movements and 60s radicalism.
Jun 24, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
It's incredible that we could all watch the Wagner coup live on Google Maps. A 🧵. As I readied for bed in the UK last night, I read about Wagner PMC's Yevgeny Prigozhin criticizing the justifications for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

I didn't think too much of it until reports on Twitter said that Wagner troops were crossing the border back into Russia.
Jun 22, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The classic text on the subject is “The Churching of America,” which emphasizes the fundamental connection between establishmentarianism & low adherence vs disestablishmentarianism & high adherence. https://t.co/Hr7zF23Xjeamazon.com/Churching-Amer…
It’s another reminder that the neo-Christian nationalists—whether of the high church (Wolfe) or low church variety (Joe Rigney)—are generally historical illiterates who rely on just-so stories.
Apr 19, 2023 • 33 tweets • 7 min read
A student fashion show inspired by Paradise Lost brought down the mandolin-strumming president of a college that once billed itself as “the World’s Most Unusual University.” 🧵 I'm both a historian of 20th c America and a graduate of Bob Jones University, so I'm gonna unpack that truly bizarre sentence for you.
Feb 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Ooof, this lede is giving religious illiteracy. Image This would be a bit like an article describing a Catholic attacker as an adherent to the religion of "transubstantiation." 😂
Feb 15, 2023 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
Funny to see a corner of the fundamentalist Protestant world I grew up in make the NYT. Let's see if I can provide a little context.

nytimes.com/2023/02/14/art… I attended undergrad at Bob Jones University, which was then locked in a rivalry over the future of fundamentalism w/ Pensacola Christian College. It was ostensibly a divide over something called King James Only-ism, but the competition for fundie students was the prime driver.
Nov 21, 2022 • 28 tweets • 8 min read
There are two primary strains of right-wing Christian Nationalism in America at the moment. 🧵

1) the most extensive, called Seven Mountains theology, bubbled up from independent charismatic entrepreneurs like Lance Wallnau. They rely on a novel interpretation of obscure biblical passages in Isaiah & Revelation that call for reclaiming 7 mountains of Christian social control, from government through education. If they succeed, then God will bless America. If they fail, then apocalypse now.
Nov 18, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
His next sentence is revealing:

"And, indeed, older exegetes regularly aligned the great OT kings—Josiah, Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, etc.—with the great emperors of Rome—Constantine, Theodosius, Justinian, etc.—to demonstrate this continuity."

It shows how little history he knows. I'll do him one better. You can got to a little museum in Paris and find 28 decapitated heads of statues of kings of Israel that had ornamented Notre Dame Cathedral.

joyofmuseums.com/museums/europe…
Apr 7, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Immigration restrictionism is bad, story time.

I used to work as a bank teller on Girard Ave in Philly. One day, a man parked his lifted F-150 truck in the lot and came into the bank with an off-the-books employee from Latin America who spoke only broken English. The employer withdrew $200 in cash, turned and handed $100 to his worker, who then protested that he had been promised $200 for completing the job.

The employer sneered and told him, "Be thankful I gave you anything. If you say one more word, I'll get you deported."
Apr 6, 2022 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Think it's weird that a conspiracy-peddling pillow salesman tried to overthrow American democracy after the '20 election?

Well, the MyPillow guy doesn't hold a candle to the inventor of the Sugar Daddy, Robert Welch, & his fantastical conspiracy theories.
lareviewofbooks.org/article/sugar-… Check out my review of @eh_miller's book in @LAReviewofBooks for more, but I'll highlight a few of his more significant contributions here.

First, Miller puts another nail in the coffin of the "ostracization thesis" of the origins of modern conservatism.
Apr 5, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Land warfare won't be the same post-Ukraine. The ability to destroy vehicles with drones--like the subject of this remixed Ukrainian hit song--and cheap shoulder fired missiles has turned tanks into steel coffins on treads.

Yet an old guard in the US military (and congresspeople with tank factories in their districts) want to maintain a large tank fleet in perpetuity. 🤦

politico.com/news/2022/04/0…
Mar 12, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
When I was in grad school, our history department didn't replace the last military historian despite consistent student demand for her courses.

Many programs have done so over the last couple decades and are now learning the hard way that it was a mistake. We had a Civil War institute filled with excellent scholars of trauma, memory, medicine, and so on. But the inside joke was that our program studied everything about the Civil War...except the War!
Feb 25, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The Ukrainian War of Russian Aggression will be the first western war to be mass documented by a smartphone equipped population. I can see the US Military Academy dissertation already, "Putin's Phone Failure: 2014 Crimea vs 2022 Ukraine."

It could make a difference as Russia/Ukraine wage a rhetorical war for global sympathy and in rallying Ukrainian resistance vs losing Russian home front morale.
Feb 24, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The pastor of our Evangelical Presbyterian Church removed the American flag from the stage which sparked:

1) An elder (and large tither) left the church &

2) The mainline host church that owned the sanctuary complained.

3) Our congregation had to dissolve within the year. We had a congregational meeting. I pointed out that the presence of an American flag in the sanctuary was not common practice in most American churches until the wave of jingoism during WW1.
Dec 10, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Much of progressive politics today is just trying to fix problems created by past generations of progressives. Healthcare. Progressives in Congress in the 1940s/50s sowed the seeds of our current healthcare affordability crisis via the bad idea of pushing people to get their health insurance through an employer middleman.
Nov 11, 2021 • 17 tweets • 6 min read
Fears of overpopulation have been fashionable since the 1970s. Too many people consuming too much stuff and producing too much waste.

But it's UNDER-population, not overpopulation, that should worry us most right now. If you've ever visited a crumbling rustbelt city you've seen how grim it can be in a town that's depopulating. Closing schools, boarded businesses, abandoned homes, economic stagnation.
Nov 10, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Another congressional "science harder" bill. 🙄 The simple ways of doing it are too easy to beat, ie drunks passing an engine startup breathalyzer via a non-drunk friend or kid. (Indeed, it might make accidents *more* deadly by encouraging dependent +1s.)
Nov 9, 2021 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
I wouldn't want to get a beer with half of the folks involved w/ the University of Austin pitch, let alone pay to listen to them talk.

But their whole "y'all are suppressing the truth so I'm gonna start my own school" energy is how many US universities got their start. It's why Princeton began as the "Log College" with New Side Presbyterians who thought Harvard and Yale were churning out a bunch o' liberal Old Sider PINOs (Presbyterians in Name Only), dontchya know!
Oct 31, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I'll second this. 9 years in two history grad programs and never learned about CRT. Which makes sense because it was a law school construct.

The way around this is for anti-CRT reactionaries to inflate CRT to include every form of race as an analytical category, which is silly. The credulous citation of selective quotes compiled by bad faith political operatives (Rufo, et al) is a rhetorical echo of anti-communist activism in the mid-20th century.