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Sam Haselby Profile picture
Sam Haselby
@samhaselby
Historian, wrote Origins of American Religious Nationalism; Eagle Scout, Wisconsinite
Oct 12, 2025 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The Confederacy couldn't get its richest citizens to pay taxes or its state governors to obey its President and Britain turned to India and Egypt for cotton during the American Civil War. The counterfactual about the juggernaut of the imperial Confederacy is not based on reality. In 1860, you couldn't take a railroad from Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, to New Orleans. Southern planters were the richest ruling class in the Western world at the time, but the South was not developing economically. Eighty-two percent of Southerns in 1860 were...
Aug 5, 2025 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
MAGA comes to fruition from the corruption, incompetence, mayhem, and slaughter of the Iraq War, mass dispossession of the Global Financial Crisis, and the elite lawlessness on display in both crises. The historians I mentioned, as well as Heather Richardson and several.. ...others glomming onto this totally fake narrative, spent years in legacy media pushing this "revanchist" take on MAGA, telling rich liberals they are re-battling the Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement and peopling their analysis with fan fiction appearances from Frederick..
Jul 28, 2025 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
The mainstream American historians totally botched MAGA. David Blight, Sean Wilentz, Mike Kazin, spent several years in some Walter Mitty fantasy pretending they were battling the Confederacy. Kathleen Belew spent 8 years on MSNBC talking about a few thousand Nazis in Idaho. Overall, the historians exhibited total herd mentality, following elite legacy media figures into a position that turned out to be totally wrong. A couple emblematic pieces: here's Tim Snyder with a long and influential 2021 piece in NYT about how MAGA represents "white...
Jul 28, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Here's a short media literacy🧵for scholars and other people who haven't worked in the field (especially TV) to help you understand what historians they are doing on TV news. They are not chosen for scholarly reasons. Even in print media, the difference between being an editor.. ...at a scholarly journal and a magazine is in the former you are representing the interests of the discipline in the latter you are representing the interests of readers. TV news is a more peculiar market: small, super competitive, highly lucrative. It's this way because its...
Jul 21, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Jim is expressing one of the oldest chestnuts of American exceptionalism: 'Europe has bad ethnic nationalisms but the US has salubrious civic ideals or patriotism.' It's not true. First, Jefferson and Andrew Jackson and then many New England intellectuals could not have... ...been any clearer in expressing white nationalism. Jefferson wrote about how putative physical differences of people of African descent made them incapable of the duties citizenship. That's white nationalism. Andrew Jackson was as explicit in his addresses to Congress on...
Jul 5, 2024 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
By request, a short 🧵on why among hundreds of learned and capable historians of America, Chris Hayes would turn to Thomas Zimmer, who has never published any scholarship in English, and Kevin Kruse, who got caught plagiarizing. This may help media people who think this...
Image
Image ...is solid history or historians who are wondering about the principle of selection at work. First, doing TV is hard. It is very different from how historians learn in scholarly communities to think and talk. You have to speak quickly, make your point economically in active...
Nov 29, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Rachel Maddow is paid $30 million a year is because she is skilled and effective at her job. Her job is helping convince American liberals that foreign tyrants or totally marginal losers like Idaho Nazis are a huge, dangerous threat. This is propaganda for the 1% and... ..if historians at the schools for the 1% want to join this project, that is what, thinking historically, we'd expect of their social role. The rest of us should however not believe that "engaging with the public" or "broad publics" are kinds of magic...
Aug 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
In the end, all the utilitarian arguments for saving or preserving the study of languages and philosophy and history and literature in colleges are concessions to neoliberal premises and fail. People simply have to find studying them fun and important in deep ways. No one wants to hear lectures on the potential market value of studying history or Persian poetry. It's mostly bullshit anyway. One thing that is not going to be good though is these things disappearing from West Virginia University while getting ever richer at the Stanfords.
Jun 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
A coterie of liberal elites remains committed to maintaining that poor and working class voters are not moved by material interests but motivated by atavistic resentments and primordial cultural patterns. They make this argument mostly through...
democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-… ...awkward rhetorical assertions: "Delivering for people on economic issues is an important goal in itself, but it is not an antivenom for the snakebite of authoritarianism." Snakebites. Antivenom. How do they explain risiing mortality rates? Well it is poor white peoples'...
May 18, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Fox News is the fake problem most beloved by our neoliberal elites. Fox has lost 1/3 of its audience since 2020 (now down to 2 million viewers, fewer people than Queens or Houston) and will be replaced by the even worse Newsmax or Breitbart or something else. Media-brain addled neoliberals who don't want to change anything real have convinced each other Fox controls the world. But Fox didn't want McCain in '08, Romney in '12, or Trump in '16. They couldn't even get the Republican presidential candidate they want.
May 15, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The paradox pioneered by our elite neoliberal institutions: standpoint diversity, viewpoint orthodoxy. People are blaming the consultants but (I admit I am biased because I know, like, and respect several people who do this professionally) their view is they are hired to provide cover for what institutions already want to do. Image
Apr 4, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
If you want to understand why "racial capitalism" is being theorized at Harvard and Stanford and the schools for the 1%: 60% of their undergrads go into finance, consulting, or tech. They want to look anywhere except to class and economic inequality to explain our political ills. People who think racial capitalism is a radical or left wing theory might ask why the NYT, Disney, Hulu, the Carlyle Group are publicizing it (in form of 1619 Project), and why pharma, finance, and Silicon Valley are giving Kendi millions of $ to promote it.
Feb 16, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Prestige legacy media often more interested in what Fox says about events than the events themselves. Liberal media depends on Fox. They report not only on things which appear on Fox News but things that Fox employees allegedly said in private and in this way contribute to everyone becoming dumber: