"Basically Church Type Stuff:" Old Timey Christian Americanism and the Rhizomatic History of American Fascism

Or, the crucial but sometimes fuzzy distinction between a) being a White American Christian, and b) being influenced by a violent, White Christian Supremacist variety of conspiratorial, antisemitic American Fascism known as "Christian Identity."

I find myself worrying about the threat of democracy-corroding political violence much more than I'd like to these days. As this recently published PRRI survey shows, a significant number of white conservative evangelicals have talked themselves into believing that political violence might be necessary to "save our country" from its "internal enemies." Such Christian Nationalist beliefs motivated many participants in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Such beliefs likely provided the rationale behind Vance Boelter's assassinations of Democratic office holders in Minnesota. Our current Secretary of Defense sports a "Deus Vult" tattoo, attends a Christian Nationalist church, invited Christian Nationalist theocrat Douglas Wilson to deliver a sermon at the Pentagon, and believes the lawless violence he commands abroad (and perhaps someday against the "enemy within") is sanctioned by God.

It's not a coincidence that the minority of Americans who think political violence is acceptable are also more likely to embrace absurd, racist and implicitly antisemitic conspiracy theories that purport to identify the millions of "radical left enemies" that must be destroyed if "American civilization as we've known it" is to survive. The Great Replacement Theory inspired the mass murders in Buffalo and at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, and it has now become a taken-for-granted truth by large numbers of self-described conservative Christians. A 2022 poll found that nearly 70% of Republican voters believed aspects of the Great Replacement Theory. Now that it's become a centerpiece of Trump administration messaging and saturates right wing media, I suspect that 70% number from 2022 has only gone up.

Remember August 2017 when that band of polo-shirted white nationalists chanted "Jews will not replace us" in Charlottesville, and the nation, or at least what seemed like most of it, recoiled to see the grandchildren of the Americans who defeated fascism in WWII shouting Nazi slogans in defense of a Confederate statue near the campus of Thomas Jefferson's university?

One of the most important stories of our era is the rapidity with which an implicitly genocidal, Nazi-inflected conspiracy theory about the Jewish puppet masters supposedly behind the rising tide of immigrants who are "poisoning the blood of the country" has migrated from the pages of The Daily Stormer in the early 2000s, to the tiki-torch-lit and blood-stained streets of Charlottesville in 2017, to the very center of Republican political messaging and policy making today. Like most Americans over 40, I was socialized into an America that proudly defined itself as a religiously and ethnically pluralistic land of immigrants. Thus, it's been particularly dismaying for me to witness the rising influence of this competing, Great Replacement story about a nation of Heritage, Christian Americans besieged by civilization-destroying, degenerate invaders.

I mean, I vividly recall 2017 when Steve King posted the tweet below and was upbraided by the chair of the RNC and the bulk of his Republican colleagues for it. In 2019, King's GOP house colleagues stripped him of his committee assignments for saying this sort of white nationalist stuff out loud. Today, however, white nationalist sentiments like these are publicly uttered on a daily basis by Elon Musk, Steven Miller, JD Vance, and the President....and its hard to find a single Republican in a position of power or authority who would even bat an eye about such rank and blatant racism.

Demagogic, anti-immigrant rhetoric has long been a feature of US political culture from the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to the Know Nothings in the 1850s to the Second KKK of the 1920s. Today's distinctive variant of immigrant-hating first began to establish a substantial foothold in the GOP in the 1990s with the
"America First" presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan. Pat's version of immigrant-bashing offered an only slightly watered-down version of the Klan's 1970s and 1980s-era Border Watch project. While Pat disavowed any Klan connection, former Oregon GOP chair Walter Huss saw little daylight between Duke and Buchanan, sending campaign contributions to both of them in 1992. Huss accurately perceived that Duke and Pat were basically telling the same story about a nation under siege by unassimilable, civilization-destroying foreigners whose "invasion" of America was being organized and financed by a shadowy, globalist elite that hated and wanted to displace "ordinary, hard working, real Americans" like him.

Buchanan and the blow dried, suit-and-tie wearing Duke both presented themselves as folksy, down-home protectors of what they depicted as America's "traditional, Christian" culture. Neither explicitly called for political violence in their public statements. But they knew that behind them stood an army of angry right wing populists like Huss who filled the ranks of that era's decentralized network of militia-related movements readying themselves for the moment when a well-armed populace might "be forced" to take more extreme measures to "save America" from the "radical left" menace.

As historian Kathleen Belew has argued, Timothy McVeigh was not a lone wolf, but rather an outgrowth of a resurgent and increasingly well-organized white nationalist movement that saw political violence as a legitimate means of staving off demographic and cultural change. It's not a coincidence that the Proud Boys, a far right club of street fighters who wear identical black shirts and call themselves "Western Chauvinists," reportedly open their meetings with readings from Pat Buchanan's 2001 book Death of the West. And it's notable that the recently pardoned leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, has been promoting a Mein Kampf reading group led by Ann Coulter's White Nationalist niece.

In 2009, Leonard Zeskind published an important and under-appreciated book called "Blood and Politics: The History of The White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream." This paragraph from the introduction rings hauntingly true these days (again, remember that this was written in 2009).

The idea that "white nationalism" could become the explicit, governing logic of the federal government likely seemed outlandish to most of Zeskind's Obama/McCain/Romney-era readers, and perhaps even to him. But Zeskind's understanding of US history suggested to him that this was one, very possible future that awaited the nation if the advocates of multi-racial, religiously pluralistic democracy didn't begin to take the threats to it more seriously.

Over the past year we've witnessed the roll out of an aggressively racist and Islamophobic ethnic cleansing campaign of mass deportation, the egregious sadism of which government agencies regularly glorify on social media. It's frankly terrifying that there is such a large audience for this nakedly fascistic, federal messaging, and we should retain the ability to be shocked by it. Polls show that the majority of Americans thankfully do not approve of this stuff, but the ~35% of people who comprise Trump's hardcore base, a base disproportionately comprised of white conservative Christians, seems to enjoy this performative cruelty, viewing it as an authentic expression of the "traditional American values" for which they eagerly voted.

One key dimension of this unapologetically violent world view is the way it passes itself off as innocent, passive, and victimized. The person running the Department of Labor's fascistic social media campaign, for example, is fond of nostalgic imagery that hearkens back to the white populist aesthetic of the 1930s and the Currier and Ives treacle from the late 19th century.

This same reactionary, nostalgia was on display at TPUSA's all-white, alternate Super Bowl half-time show last month when Lee Brice performed his song "Country Nowadays" with the hook line "It ain't easy being country in this country nowadays."

The lyrics read like a Mad Magazine satire of a MAGA country song...but I swear, these are the real lyrics.

The premise of the song is that this regular guy just wants to be left alone, but unfortunately he has been forced to accept this invitation from a trollishly Islamophobic and anti-LGBTQ organization that bussed hundreds of people to January 6. Some unnamed, nefarious entities forced poor Lee Brice to leave his fishing hole and stand before the bright lights performing a song about how mad he is that other people are sending the country up in flames while blaming tranquil, humble, gun-toting, privacy-seeking millionaire celebrities like him for it.

Why has he been forced into doing this? Because the NFL chose some un-American Puerto Rican (Puerto Ricans are, of course, US citizens) who sings in Spanish (a language spoken by ~60 million Americans) to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show. I hate it when other people create incendiary cultural events like this, and then blame aw-shucks "country" guys like me when the "real Americans" who listen to my music get all riled up.

In the rest of this piece I explore how this distinctive variant of American Christian culture has historically provided a shield of innocence behind which a Schmittian, anti-democratic culture of justified political violence has hidden and readied itself for action. What follows is a non-systematic tour through some key moments in the history of the US right in Oregon where we can see this conspiracy-saturated mixture of down home, "Christian Patriot" innocence and righteous vengeful violence coursing through and erupting out from under the surface of American "conservative" political culture.

In the spring of 2022, Mike Flynn's Reawaken America tour celebrating the January 6, 2021 insurrection and promoting Donald Trump’s seemingly outlandish aspirations to become President again came to the Salem area. When someone inquired on Nextdoor about rumored disruptions at the event, the Republican chair of the Salem-Keizer school board responded with a revealing, awkwardly-phrased explanation.

According to Christian Nationalist school board chair Marty Heyen, the thousands of red-hat-wearing MAGA fans who paid about $250 to attend the Reawaken America tour (headlined by Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Eric Trump) were just your boring old neighbors doing innocuous "church type stuff." The only problem she noted involved a handful of Antifa troublemakers supposedly harassing these godly, peaceable, pro-insurrectionists. [BTW, Heyen's claim about punctured tires is almost certainly false. I’ve seen no evidence that this happened, let alone that it was perpetrated by the handful of people who peacefully protested the event.]

Heyen’s minimizing phrase, “basically church type stuff,” has rung in my ears over the past 3 years. The Reawaken America tour was pure extremist politics, revolving entirely around baseless Covid conspiracy theories, the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump, and the apocalyptic, Christian Nationalist idea that America as we've known it would soon perish if God's MAGA agents on earth didn't do something drastic to save it from the demonic wrath of...a devout Catholic and moderate Democrat named Joe Biden for whom 81 million Americans voted. [You can watch day 1 of the event here, and day 2 here if you want to confirm my description of it. For the US History nerds in the audience, I particularly recommend Overstock dot com's CEO Patrick Byrne's history lecture at the 7 hour mark of day 2 where he explains to his almost entirely white audience how the real racists and fascists in US history have always been Democrats, like Andrew Jackson, someone for whom Donald Trump has expressed great admiration, for what it's worth.]

The Reawaken America tour was headlined by Eric Trump (not a pastor), Roger Stone (a proud political "ratfucker" with a tattoo of Nixon on his back, who is definitely not a pastor) and Mike Flynn, (also not a pastor). Stone was a key organizer of the "Stop the Steal" group that orchestrated the events of January 6. Flynn had famously urged Trump to declare martial law after the 2020 election so that he could illegally stay in power. Flynn also took the Fifth when asked whether he believed in the peaceful transfer of power. I guess it's a thin line between humbly rendering unto Caesar on one hand, and actively promoting an American version of Christian Nationalist Caesarism on the other.

It's worth noting that Marty Heyen's husband Jeff, who was the chair of the Marion County GOP at the time, self-identified as a member of the 3% militia. The three percenters are a paramilitary group that has been linked to several acts of political violence, though to be clear, I've seen no indication that Heyen himself has ever or would ever condone such actions.

Another featured speaker on that “church type stuff” Reawaken America tour in 2022 was Scott McKay, a contemporary disseminator of the antisemitic “khazarian mafia” messaging that has been a feature of American fascist political culture since the 1940s. [Regular readers of Rightlandia will remember that in the 1980s Walter Huss blamed all of his financial and legal problems on "the Jewish Communist mafia" that he thought controlled Oregon.] This bizarre and fringe-y Khazar stuff is absolutely NOT the sort of thing any decent person should consider normal “church type stuff." Below is a summary of the sort of conspiratorial, blood libel, antisemitic foolishness McKay espouses.

I doubt if McKay would call himself a Nazi, but I feel pretty comfortable calling his belief system pretty darn Nazi-ish. To my mind, if we’re looking for examples of what “the banality of evil, American style” looks like, then treating dehumanizing, genocidal ideas like these with roots in Nazi-era antisemitic conspiracy theories as if they're just a ho-hum variety of “church type stuff” comes pretty close.

I haven't yet watched the full 16 hours of the footage to confirm if Scott McKay (pictured below with the President’s son at another Reawaken America Tour event) spoke in Salem as advertised. If he did, it would have been behind the podium (pictured below with Mike Flynn) that belongs to Salem’s River Church, a local sponsor/host of the event. The pastor of that faith-healing, prosperity-gospel, anti-LGBTQ, Covid-denialist River Church recently hosted a weekly radio show on KSLM with one of his parishioners who was, at the time, the chair of the Marion County GOP (Jeff Heyen's successor in that role).

Another current parishioner at the church that sponsored Salem's iteration of the Reawaken America Tour was, back in the 2000s and early 2010s, one of the area's most well-known neo-Nazis. He now claims to have changed his ways and I have no reason to disbelieve him, but it's notable that last month he posted about his wish to see a Turner Diary/"Day of the Rope" sort of scenario play out at this year's Super Bowl halftime.

What do we make of a culture of god-fearing, "Back the Blue" Christian patriots who stand together reverently singing "God Bless the USA" by Lee Greenwood...while also celebrating the camo-wearing, walkie-talkie toting, "Hang Mike Pence" chanting, Turner Diaries emulating, convicted (but now pardoned) seditious conspirators who tried to violently disrupt the peaceful transfer of power by storming the US Capitol, smearing feces on the walls of the building, and injuring hundreds of police officers in the process? What do we make of self-understood "Christian patriots" who worship the "Prince of Peace" while arming themselves to the teeth in preparation for holy war against "the (((globalist))), Soros-funded enemy within," an enemy who could also just be described as tens of millions of their neighbors who vote, pray, and/or love differently from them?

This merger of folksy, Christ-loving traditionalist piety and apocalyptically violent political ideation fixated on eliminating perceived enemies on the left is not new. Its genealogy traces back to the Christian anti-communism of the Cold War era that shaped Walter Huss's self-conception as a brave, truth-telling warrior battling against the supposedly anti-white and anti-Christian enemies who he thought controlled America and were on the verge of imposing a one-world government run by and for degenerate non-white people and non-Christians. Not to put too fine a point on it, but when Huss spoke of such enemies, he just meant "Jews."

It's the seemingly contradictory culture of nostalgic, kitschy, and treacly Christian Americana on one hand, and bitterly resentful, militarized Nazi-tinged macho menace on the other that I'm trying to unpack and analyze here. We might think of it as America's distinctive brand of vernacular fascism.

In March 2023 I decided to cold call a 77 year old former associate of Walter Huss's named Edmund Crump. From 1964 until 1966, when he left Oregon for good at the age of 20, Crump had been the leader of the National Party of America, a brown-shirted, jackbooted gang of about a dozen young antisemites and white supremacists who staged dozens of aggressive and intentionally obnoxious direct actions throughout Portland. For a short time Crump also worked with the National States Rights Party, a fascist organization responsible for several church and synagogue bombings as well as assassinations of civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 60s. The NSRP appealed to white Americans who thought their local Klan or White Citizens Councils took too timid of an approach in their defense of America's "Christian Civilization."

In his junior or senior year of high school in SE Portland, Crump decided to dip his toes into the city's political waters by attending political meetings at Walter Huss's Freedom Center at 23rd and Belmont. He'd been reading George Lincoln Rockwell's materials and thought he'd go check out the primary right wing, anti-communist group in Portland. By January of 1964 Crump was attending pro-George Wallace protests with Huss where they formed a small group of Wallace supporters who spat racial epithets at the much larger group of anti-racists there protesting against the notoriously segregationist governor of Alabama who'd come to the state to speak.

Since beginning my research on Huss I hadn't been able to find any of his sympathetic associates who were willing to talk to me about him, so one day I figured, why not, let's cold call Crump and see if he'll share some of his memories of Walter Huss.

When Edmund Crump picked up the phone on that day in March 2023 he was on a windy beach with his grandchildren. As far as I can tell, he'd left the world of far right extremist politics in 1966 and then transitioned into what appeared to be a normal, 40+ year career in corporate America. He said he hadn't been in touch with Walter Huss or thought about him for almost 60 years. When he got a call out of the blue from some Oregon professor asking about Walter Huss he hesitated for a couple beats, tentatively said "yes, I knew Huss," and then offered some fairly terse, but not unfriendly, responses to my initial questions.

When I asked what kind of person Huss was, Crump described him as "a very decent, likable guy" with "very good intentions." Crump mostly remembered Huss as "a minister who gave kind of preachy speeches who had a following that was pretty religiously oriented." When I asked about Huss's political philosophy, Crump said "He was a religious conservative at the forefront of the political evangelical movement." Crump became interested in Huss because of the outspoken anti-communist pastor's reputation for "swimming upstream" in the context of the politics of Portland at the time. For the first five minutes of our conversation this 1960s "Silver Shirt," a protege of Portland's aging community of 1930s Silver Shirts like Walter Huss, wanted me to know that Huss's political activities in the 1960s were just basically normal, conservative, "church type stuff."

I quickly sensed that Crump wasn't going to volunteer much more than this, so I gently moved the conversation into edgier territory and asked if he'd ever heard Huss say anything antisemitic or talk about "the Jewish conspiracy." Crump said no, he'd never heard Huss say anything like that. At this stage of the conversation I sensed that Crump was withholding information from me. He'd probably begun to suspect that I was one of the few people in the world who knew about his political activities back in the mid-1960s. My "best case scenario" hope when I made this call was that Crump might regret his actions as a young man and would be willing to tell his story in an effort to repair the harm he'd caused. Unfortunately, that is not how that call played out.

Below is a picture of Crump (on the left, facing away) at an April 1965 pro-Vietnam War demonstration on the campus of Portland State University standing in front of a banner saying "Communism is Judaism."

And below is an edition of Huss's June 1965 newspaper that was being sold on the streets of Chicago by a neo-Nazi named Joseph Dilys, who had annotated Huss's newspaper with a stamp saying "Communism is Jewish." I think it's unlikely that Crump had no idea Huss was the sort of antisemite who spent decades carefully curating two thick folders labeled "Jews" that were stuffed with the "greatest hits" of 20th century, fascistic antisemitism. Being opposed to communism was a pretty uncontroversial position in 1965, but embracing the conspiratorial claim that "Communism is Jewish" crossed a very bright line between being a "conservative anti-Communist" and being a Nazi-curious fascist.

About 5 minutes into the conversation, having not had much luck getting Crump to loosen up and start telling me longer stories about his mentor Walter Huss, I made a rookie mistake and showed too much of my hand. I asked Crump if he remembered a friend of Huss's named Dale Benjamin. Crump paused for several awkward seconds, and then said unconvincingly that no, he didn't recognize that name at all. I could tell that a switch had flipped. From that point forward Crump's answers became more terse and cagey. He began asking questions about who I was, and he wanted to make it clear that this chapter of his life had ended long ago and he had little interest in revisiting it.

I asked Crump about Dale Benjamin because I knew that Crump and his group of young far right activists had been mentored by Benjamin, a convicted pedophile, a KKK organizer from the 1920s (in 1924 he was notorious for driving a car emblazoned with the phrase "Keep Kalvin Koolidge" on the side), a Silver Shirt from the 1930s, and the Oregon head of the National States Rights Party who had extensive ties to a wide array of neo-Nazis and domestic terrorists. In 1963 Benjamin had reserved a room at the main public library in downtown Portland so that his budding white nationalist protege Edmund Crump (age 17) could give his first public speech on "the race issue."

And in 1965, when the head of the National States Rights Party J.B. Stoner came to Portland, the write up in the party's newspaper, The Thunderbolt, mentioned two Portlanders by name, Edmund Crump and Dale Benjamin.

I also knew that immediately after JFK was assassinated, when there were suspicions that it might have been part of some broader right wing plot to destabilize the country, the FBI office in Portland immediately checked on locals who they thought might be "likely suspects" to be involved in such a conspiracy to start a race war. Three of the first people they checked in on were Dale Benjamin, Edmund Crump, and Walter Huss.

So while I have not found any evidence that Walter Huss, Dale Benjamin, or Edmund Crump ever engaged in acts of political violence, they were all associated pretty closely with many people who did. And given how relatively little attention the FBI payed to the far right compared to the left in the 1960s, I feel pretty comfortable saying that the feds probably had good reasons to have these three on the top of their list of Portlanders who might be planning to commit racialized political violence. So while Benjamin and Huss both identified as Christian ministers, it would be quite the understatement for anyone, let alone Edmund Crump, to characterize their activities as what most people would consider normal, innocuous "church type stuff."

This underlying, ominous truth is probably why the National States Rights Party and Walter Huss went to great lengths to present themselves to the public as "Christian Patriots" who were exercising their First Amendment rights to engage in unremarkable and even positively admirable, traditional American politics.

In the fall of 1963, Edmund Crump was attending events at Walter Huss's "churchy" Freedom Center and germinating the idea for his more edgy "conservative" organization, the "National Party."

That same fall of 1963, Walter Huss took two weeks to shepherd one of his marquee, anti-communist speakers to locales across Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. That featured speaker was Kenneth Goff, and the events were marketed as "Patriotic" rallies featuring talks by Huss and his fellow, Christian anti-communist.

Goff was not just your average Christian anti-communist, however. He ran a paramilitary training camp for Klansmen, Minutemen, and neo-Nazis in Colorado. Just a few months before going on tour with Walter Huss in 1963 he'd spoken at a National States Rights Party event in Alabama alongside Oren Potito, a preacher who revered Adolf Hitler for his supposed efforts during WWII to save Christian Germans from the global Jewish communist conspiracy. Potito was himself a Klansman, and also an important figure in the world of Christian Identity--the same violently white nationalist and antisemitic quasi-theological tradition that informed the thinking of Walter Huss, Wesley Swift, Kenneth Goff, and Alexander Schiffner (the guy whose "Jesus Saves" church in Spokane was pictured at the opening of this post)...but more on that soon.

The key point here is that none of Goff's violent, fascist associations were a part of his public persona. This darker side of Goff and Huss's political vision was largely invisible to the several hundreds, probably thousands, of self-described "Christian Patriot conservatives" across the Pacific Northwest in the fall of 1963 who came out to hear Walter Huss and Kenneth Goff speak about the Communist menace that was on the verge of destroying America. That menace, as they saw it, took the form of secular public school curricula, The Beatles, labor unions, the civil rights movement, Hollywood producers, the liberal media, the United Nations, innocent kids duped by communists into collecting money at Halloween to support UNICEF, college professors, liberal activists who all seemed to have suspiciously Jewish-sounding names, and mainline "so-called Christian churches" that tolerated all of this dangerous, anti-American nonsense.

The concerned citizens who attended these 1963 events had no way of knowing that an FBI informant had overheard Goff plotting to murder the leader of Wichita's NAACP a few months earlier. They almost certainly had no idea that Goff had traveled to Oregon from his "Soldiers of the Cross" camp in Colorado where he'd just finished training scores of young neo-Nazis and Klansmen in bomb-making, hand-to-hand-combat, marksmanship, and other methods for most efficiently murdering "the internal enemy." They likely had no idea Goff had recently attended meetings and given speeches with Hitler fans like Oren Potito, Wesley Swift, Pedro del Valle, and John Crommelin, all Douglas MacArthur and Joe McCarthy-admiring former military men who were diligently planning a coup to overthrow the "Jewish/communist controlled" JFK administration. The attendees at Goff and Huss's series of 1970 meetings across the Pacific Northwest likely had no idea that the FBI considered Goff to be a "borderline psychopath" or that he regularly received inquiries like the one below, from a 24-year old Nazi who was thrilled to receive a free scholarship to attend Goff's Soldiers of the Cross camp the previous summer.

As far as most of the thousands of people in Goff and Huss's audiences of self-understood Christian conservatives in 1960s Oregon were concerned, they were simply there to hear some patriotic, anti-communist, regular old "church type stuff."

Did Huss broker a meeting in 1963 between young Crump and the like-minded Goff during his time in Oregon? We'll probably never know. Did Huss know about the full fascistic extent of Goff's violent political project? It seems highly likely given their long and friendly association with each other, but at this point I can't say for certain. What seems clear is that, in their public appearances, Huss and Goff were playing a fairly savvy good cop/bad cop routine. According to David Belden, an Albany High School student who heard Huss and Goff speak twice in 1963, Huss played the cool, calm, grandfatherly preacher to Goff's hellfire scaremongering. Goff's Huss-sponsored speeches at dozens of school auditoriums and churches throughout the state of Oregon in 1963, 1969, and 1970 garnered a good amount of press coverage, and almost all of it treated these events like they were just normal sort of "conservative" gatherings of concerned citizens. Just "church type stuff," or "conservative type stuff."

In hindsight, and based on what we now know about people like Huss and Goff, this normalizing coverage largely overlooking the violently white supremacist and antisemitic energies that powered their politics seems grievously lacking. But at the time, the primary framework most outsiders to Goff and Huss's world would have used to make sense of their activities was a cultural one, not a political one. These guys looked like harmless, slightly kooky, good old fashioned, donation-bucket-passing, holy roller preachers, the sorts of vestigial old timers you could hear any time you'd tune in to your local AM radio station for "Gospel Programs" like Walter Huss's Freedom Center show which was broadcast across Oregon five days a week.

In the summer of 1963, as the nation metabolized televised footage of Bull Connor’s firehoses tearing into the flesh of teenaged civil rights activists in Birmingham, JFK’s announcement of what would become the epochal Civil Rights Act, Betty Friedan's new book The Feminine Mystique, and MLK’s March on Washington at which he delivered his “I have a dream” speech; white religious conservatives in Oregon like Walter Huss were tuning in to the very different sounds of “old time” gospel programming represented in the lily white line up above. In this “church type stuff” aural universe, things like the civil rights movement, rock and roll, the United Nations, "women's libbers," and experimental TV shows like The Twilight Zone all seemed like bizarre, alien life ways being imposed on an unwilling nation. It felt like the corrosive forces of atheistic, cosmopolitan Communism were on the verge of destroying the beloved but besieged, down home rural culture of “real America” that KLIQ beamed into the homes and workplaces of thousands of Oregonians. We might say that KLIQ's programming especially appealed to white Christian Oregonians who felt like it was getting harder and harder to be "country" in this country nowadays.

And they weren't entirely wrong. The majority of the nation's radios were tuned that summer of 1963 to stations that played contemporary hits like Fingertips by “Little Stevie Wonder,” One Fine Day by The Chiffons, Surfin’ USA by the Beach Boys, and two covers of songs written by cutting edge artists known only to a handful of hipsters—Peter, Paul, and Mary’s version of Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind and Del Shannon’s adaptation of From Me to You, the first single written by some shaggy haired up and comers from Liverpool. Had most Americans, especially those with more formal education and/or money, tuned in to the old timey programming on KLIQ, they probably would have found it quaint and archaic, like a time capsule from the Scopes Trial era of the 1920s as depicted in the 1960 hit film Inherit the Wind.

If you asked most Americans today what their nation’s distinctive culture of fascism looked, sounded, and felt like from the 1930s up to the present, that radio line up from 1963 is likely NOT what would come to mind. Most Americans since WWII have assumed that “fascism” is something that only happened in "other countries" like Germany or Italy. They associate it with death camps or masses of identically clad soldiers goose stepping down wide European boulevards or Mussolini ranting on a balcony with a puffed out chest, not with holy roller radio preachers and the tinny sounds of white gospel music pouring out of transistor radio speakers. If pressed to come up with people or images they associate with AMERICAN fascism, most people would either give you a blank look ("we never had that here") or, if they’re of a more historical bent, they’d name odious, ranting, fringe haters like George Lincoln Rockwell, William Luther Pierce, David Duke, Richard Butler, Richard Spencer, or the khaki-panted Charlottesville tiki-torch rally goers.

But what if I told you that the public lectures and radio programs hosted by Walter Huss and the seemingly innocuous picture below—a church run by another one of the people on that 1963 radio line-up—represented one important (though certainly not the only) cultural seedbed of Cold War-era American fascism?

Bethel Temple in Spokane, WA ca. 1973. The church was located at the corner of Sharp and Lincoln. The building is currently occupied by the True Hope Church which, as far as I know, has no connection to Foursquare minister Alexander Schiffner who built the 400 seat church in 1944.

To be clear, the vast majority of American churches in the Cold War era were NOT facilitators of the culture of fascism. But this 400-seat Spokane church was not just your average church. And the other programs on that KLIQ lineup from 1963 were not just your average radio shows.

That normal-enough looking building pictured above housed a congregation led by pastor Alexander Schiffner from the mid-1940s until the mid-1970s. Schiffner was a product of the same Los Angeles bible college Walter Huss attended in the late 1940s, and Schiffner was an ordained Foursquare minister just like Huss. But what set Schniffer and Huss apart from most of their fellow Foursquare ministers was that they were believers in and articulators of a virulently racist and antisemitic, Christian Nationalist theology known as Christian Identity. Kenneth Goff was also a Christian Identity adherent, as were many of his associates like Oren Potito and Wesley Swift. Goff's "Soldiers of the Cross" paramilitary camp in Colorado was where Dan Gayman (b. 1937) and Thomas Robb (b. 1946) both got their starts as white nationalist leaders of the Christian Identity movement.

The basic tenets of Christian Identity belief are a) White people are the true chosen people of God, b) the people who call themselves "Jews" today are fake Jews and do not actually descend from the Jews depicted in the Bible (this is the Khazar mishegoss that Eric Trump's friend Scott McKay traffics in), c) non-white people are "mud people" who are inferior to whites in spiritual, intellectual, and moral terms, and d) the white Christians to whom America should rightfully belong are under siege by a secret cabal of Communist Jews who have successfully gained control of the nation's media, entertainment, financial, educational, religious, and political institutions. This "globalist cabal" uses its multi-pronged, subterranean influence to brainwash white Christians into embracing religious pluralism, cultural liberalism, and racial equality (what today might be called "the woke mind virus") so that they'll acquiesce to the Jews' evil plan to destroy "traditional Americanism" and replace it with a racially mongrelized, sexually degenerate, and atheistic society presided over by a communist one world government.

The ideology of Christian Identity has roots that stretch back to 19th century British Israelism, but the key American progenitors of it were west coast fascists William Potter Gale, Wesley Swift, and Richard Butler. These men developed the basic outlines of Christian Identity ideology from the 1940s into the 1960s. The tape recordings of Wesley Swift's Cold War era sermons, over 300 of which are available at various places on the internet, have long played a key role in inculcating people into the world of Christian Identity. Gale, Swift, and Butler were steeped in the "Christian Nationalist" and "America First" political culture of late 1940s Southern California, the most influential proponent of which was Gerald LK Smith. For what it's worth, the person who has done the most to keep the flame of Gerald LK Smith's version of Christian Identity alive on the internet today is Tennessee's Dewey Tucker, pictured below in 2020.

Below is a letter in which the aforementioned Kenneth Goff brags to his mentor/patron Gerald LK Smith in 1945 about how he's persuaded the head of the Foursquare Church in LA to arrange "a conference for me with some of his preachers and youth leaders...[W]hen I return to LA he [will] have me address his bible school of six hundred students." These were the people who would become Walter Huss's classmates and mentors just one year later when he enrolled at LIFE Bible College after serving in WWII.

It's important to note that the historical relationship between the Foursquare Church and Christian Identity is much more complicated and nuanced than I have time to convey here. Suffice it to say that the church officially denounced Christian Identity teachings several times in the 1940s and 1950s, but given the decentralized nature of the Foursquare denomination, the leadership was never fully successful in rooting it out entirely. Both Alexander Schiffner and Kenneth Goff, for example, spoke from the pulpit at the Foursquare Church in Portland. That church's longtime, well-respected (and as far as I know, not Christian Identity-affiliated) leader was Harold Jeffries. When Huss decided to get baptized in 1941, he had Jeffries do the honors. This was right around the time a 23 year-old Huss was likely involved with fascist organizations in Portland like the Silver Shirts.

If you’ve heard of Christian Identity before, it’s probably because you’ve seen it mentioned as the sinister, guiding philosophy of Richard Butler’s neo-Nazi, Aryan Nations compound in Northern Idaho. While self-understood "Christian Identity" churches are relatively few in number these days, there were hundreds of them scattered across the country in the 1980s and 90s, and their membership rolls significantly overlapped with the personnel of the "patriot militia" movements of that era.

Christian Identity was the organizing ideology behind the Posse Comitatus movement, an antisemitic and white Christian nationalist domestic terrorist organization active in rural America from the 1970s into the 1990s that is genealogically connected to the Sovereign Citizen and Constitutional Sheriff movements of more recent years. Oregon was arguably the birthplace of the Posse Comitatus movement, and Huss was a long-time associate of several of the movement's founders and leaders. In 1985 a friend informed Huss that the FBI suspected him of being a member of both the Nazi Party and the Posse Comitatus, so in order to clear his name he had his friends, Posse Comitatus leaders LaVerne Hollenbeck and Syl Ehr, write up this handy dandy letter, on official letterhead, stating that Huss and his wife were definitely NOT members of the organization. Very convincing.

The document below provides a useful visual depiction of Huss's connection to the world of Christian Identity. These are notes Huss took on a 1987 phone conversation he had with a Posse Comitatus member and long-time associate, Rev. Edward Haman. (In this earlier Rightlandia post I talked about the early 1970s multi-level marketing scam that Huss and Haman participated in together selling the $29.95 "Pacer Magnum" that supposedly improved your gas mileage but which did no such thing.)

During Huss and Haman's conversation, they mentioned many of the key figures in the national Christian Identity movement--Wesley Swift, Gerald LK Smith, William Potter Gale, Jack Mohr, Vance Comer, Richard Butler, Everett Thoren, and John Harrell. Huss's papers are filled with materials written by such Christian Identity activists.

As you can tell from the language of this 1988 letter below from Haman to Huss where he name checks Goff, William Potter Gale, Richard Butler, and others in the Posse Comitatus/Christian Identity universe, this is some seriously weird shit.

Needless to say, if Huss's Republican contemporaries in the 1970s had fully understood the wild things he believed and the violent company he kept, there's little chance he could have successfully accomplished his goal of getting elected chair of the Oregon Republican party. In his capacity as OR GOP chair in 1979 Huss traveled to Washington DC where he met with several members of Congress, participated in all of the usual RNC meetings with the other state chairs, and scored a 30 minute interview on Pat Robertson's 700 Club. In 1976 and 1980 Huss was an enthusiastic Reagan delegate to the Republican National Convention. If his fellow Republicans knew he was spending his free time hanging out with a guy who ran a training camp for neo-Nazis and Klansmen in Colorado, reading Holocaust denial literature that exposed the "Rothschilds as father of Shickelgruber," and cultivating young jackbooted antisemites who proudly carried forward the tradition of the 1930s Silver Shirts run by "America's Hitler," William Dudley Pelley...well, that probably would have blown Huss's cover as a grandfatherly Reagan conservative just doing "church type stuff" and trying to get more kind-souled Christians involved in the Republican party.

Let's return to Spokane's Alexander Schiffner and that 1963 gospel radio line up he appeared on. "Christian Identity" ideas lay at the core of the message that Schiffner conveyed to his all-white congregation for 40+ years and it informed his radio show that was broadcast on over 40 stations around the country. As this 1946 ad in the Spokane Chronicle indicates, it’s not like Schiffner was hiding the ball. “The Anglo-Saxon-Scandanavian-Celtic peoples are the descendants of Jacob and constitute the House of Israel.”

From what I’ve been able to discern, it appears that Schiffner managed to have a 40+ year career as a well-known, old-timey Pentecostal minister in Spokane without ever being held accountable for the fact that he was preaching the American gospel of Christian Nationalist fascism that encouraged his audience to think of non-whites and "Communistic Jews" as an existential threat to their country, their race, and their faith. Schiffner’s radio program “Prophetic Herald” could be heard on about 40 radio stations around the country from the 1940s into the 1970s and I’ve seen no evidence that anyone publicly raised concerns about it. Like almost all of the fascists I've researched, when Schiffner died his obituary made it seem as if he was just doing "basically church type stuff" like any minister would, unless you picked up on the political implications of what it meant to "propagate Anglo-saxondom as the lost tribes of Israel."

Schiffner’s obituary, Spokesman Review, 19 December 1979.

Schiffner’s brand of Christian Nationalist fascism was just one of many different flavors of fascism facilitating fluff that flourished on the Cold War AM dial. Let’s take a second to unpack this aforementioned 1963 line up from Portland's KLIQ which, on the surface, looks innocent enough.

In the noon slot at the bottom you’ll notice Schiffner’s show, Prophetic Herald. At 7:30AM is the Freedom Center show, run by Walter Huss, a former Silver Shirt and the antisemitic/White Nationalist star of Rightlandia. Huss was preceded at 7:15 by Life Line, just one of many Christian Nationalist propaganda outlets financed by a far right conspiracy monger who was also America's richest man, Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt. Hunt proudly spoke publicly about his, shall we say, eccentric daily wellness practice of crawling like a baby (he called it "creeping") on the floor of his suburban Texas home, a replica of Mount Vernon.

Hunt's Lifeline was preceded by Max Wyatt, a faith healing “Latter Rain” preacher who, like Schiffner, was a Christian Identity-influenced minister. Preceding Wyatt was CW Burpo, a Huss-esque far right anti-communist preacher who I wrote about in this earlier edition of Rightlandia. Carl McIntire, the 9:30 show, was the A-list dean of far right anti-communist preachers whose daily show aired on over 500 stations across the country and conveyed the same basic message as B-listers like Burpo and Huss. McIntire, Huss, and Burpo all depicted the civil rights movement, the “moral movement” of that era, as a Communist attack on white Christian patriots, an obvious arm of the "one world government" plot to destroy "traditional America" and Christianity.

W.B. Record, featured at 10:30, was a Christian Nationalist preacher of the Gerald LK Smith variety, the sort of pastor who wrote essays explaining how racial “discrimination is biblical” and that anyone who tells you racism is bad is probably working in leagues with the “talmudic communist” conspiracy. 8:45’s Christian Jew show was a precursor to the Jews for Jesus movement that took off in the 1970s. This show’s message to the Christian listeners of KLIQ was that “good Jews” were the ones who acknowledged the “truth” of Christianity and converted, while the “bad Jews” were the ones who refused to admit that Christianity was the one true faith and would soon deservedly perish in hellfire. This was the same message preached by 10:00’s “Bethel Mission” show featuring “Pastor Rosenberg,” a converted Jew who led an organization devoted to resolving what he called “the Jewish Question” by converting all of the world’s Jews to the true faith of Christianity.

Finally, it wouldn’t be an old-timey, stick it to the “lying experts who hate you and are out to get you,” radio line up without a precociously MAHA-esque figure like Carlton Fredericks at 11:15, a heavy smoking quack nutrition “expert."

If you won't take it from me that this 1963 KLIQ radio line up gives off some fascistic vibes, then will you take the word of an influential antisemitic conspiracy theorist from the Cold War era named Myron Fagan? Fagan was the sort of person who would record a 2.5 hour lecture in 1967 about the Illuminati, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with the goal of exposing the "UN, one world dictatorship" that was about to swallow up American sovereignty.

Fagan, the director of the Gerald LK Smith-affiliated, McCarthyite organization "Cinema Educational Guild," created a list of what he considered to be the "great radio" shows of the early 1960s. You'll note that several people on this list--McIntire, Burpo, Life Line, Schiffner, Huss, and Record appeared on KLIQ's 1963 lineup. People like Dean [Clarence] Manion or Paul Harvey had standing as generally "respectable," if quite far right conservatives, while others like Richard Cotten were just straight up neo-Nazis who called themselves "conservatives."

In 1966, journalist Jack Anderson published this map of right wing propaganda media outlets in the US that broadcast shows like the ones identified above by fascist Myron Fagan as "Great Radio."

Like the vast majority of Americans, I had never heard of the Christian Identity movement until just a few years ago. There's good reason for that, because there were likely never more than 50,000 Christian Identity adherents at the height of its influence in the 1980s and 90s when this 8-page, state-by-state directory was published.

But as that 1966 map and that 1963 KLIQ line up showed, the conspiratorial, apocalyptic, emotionally inciting, and implicitly (if not explicitly) antisemitic world view behind Christian Identity could be heard pouring out of radio speakers all across the country on a daily basis in the Cold War era. The basic story line those radio programs developed resembles that of today's Great Replacement Theory, a theory that has genealogical roots that stretch back to the neo-Nazi Klan rhetoric of the 1970s.

For example, consider the messaging about immigrants in this 1990s publication put out by Klan leader Thomas Robb. Robb met his wife at Ken Goff's Soldiers of the Cross paramilitary camp in 1964, just a few months after Goff had spent 2 weeks sitting in the passenger seat of Walter Huss's car, probably listening to gospel programs on KLIQ as they drove across the Pacific Northwest from one gathering of concerned "Christian Patriots" to another. This is what I mean when I say that this seemingly innocuous line up of "gospel" programs in 1963 was interconnected with America's distinct brand of vernacular fascism.

The lack of public knowledge about and awareness of "Christian Identity" as an influential, subterranean feature of the US right's political culture became apparent during a social media firestorm that erupted last fall when the world's richest man and one of the GOP's largest donors, Elon Musk, expressed outrage upon learning that the ADL's website contained a 2017 article accurately describing and criticizing "Christian Identity." "The ADL hates Christians," Musk raged, sounding a lot like a Christian Identity adherent. [It can not be overstated how negatively obsessed Christian Identity folk have always been with the ADL. It's understandable since the ADL was one of only a handful of organizations from the 1950s into the 1990s that was doing the work to document and expose Christian Identity leaders and organizations.]

Musk's characteristically incendiary and brain-crushingly ignorant post took on special meaning coming on the heels of Charlie Kirk's assassination, a moment when the right was aggressively pushing the idea that Kirk was targeted by "the left" because he was Christian. That murder super-charged the long-standing MAGA talking point that American Christians were an increasingly persecuted and endangered group who needed to "fight back" and crush their enemies who supposedly hated and sought to destroy them for being Christian. Remember the eulogy offered by Holocaust-skeptic and Nick Fuentes-platformer Tucker Carlson, in which he compared Kirk to Jesus, a man who was murdered by some "hummus eaters" because they couldn't handle the truths that brave man was telling about them?

The claim that "the Jews killed Jesus" is to contemporary Christian Nationalism what "Communism is Jewish" was to conservative anti-Communism in the Cold War era. It marks a fairly bright line between those who believe in religious pluralism, and those who are prepping for a violent, purgative, national holy war akin to that longed for by earlier generations of Christian Identity, America First "conservatives" like Gerald LK Smith, Kenneth Goff, and Walter Huss.

How do you take a white nationalist worldview like Christian Identity that's so dark, paranoid, and menacing; and reframe it as something warm, wholesome, and homey? This is what that 1963 radio lineup did. And that, I'd argue, is similar to what TPUSA's alternative halftime show did.

I wouldn't go so far as to call TPUSA a "Christian Identity" organization, but it's notable that the person who introduced TPUSA's alternative halftime show (and who frequently co-hosted Charlie Kirk's podcast) tweeted this in 2024.

In case it's not entirely clear, Posobiec is equating the white backlash to the Civil Rights Act with Nazism's rise in response to the "stab in the back" at Versailles...and he's affirming this as a good thing, or at least an understandable thing. At an October 2025 White House roundtable on Antifa, Posobiec talked about how Antifa first emerged in the Weimar Period...again, implying that Antifa's opponents in the Weimar Period were the good guys. And while Richard Spencer is perhaps not the most reliable informant, it's worth noting that in 2019 he outed Jack Posobiec as a fan of Harold Covington's novels.

Because you are likely a normal sort of person who wouldn't know who Wesley Swift or William Potter Gale or Kenneth Goff or Alexander Schniffer or Gerald LK Smith are, you've probably also never heard of Harold Covington either. Covington was a very weird, fringe, and ineffectual figure in the already weird, fringe, and (at least so far) ineffectual world of American neo-Nazism. He's most associated with the idea of turning the Pacific Northwest into a white ethnostate. He's also known for writing truly shitty novels that are read and admired only by the most brain-addled white nationalists imaginable, like, it would appear, Jack Posobiec.

It's long past time to end this winding tour of the rhizomatic history of vernacular American fascism, but there's one thing I want to clearly state lest anyone misinterpret what I'm saying. Many, if not most, of the people who participated in the Cold War culture of old-timey, gospel Americanism did NOT knowingly belong to or eagerly support any organized fascist movements. Just because someone listened to white gospel music or attended a charismatic church or enjoyed reactionary country music, that's hardly sufficient to label them as an active participant in a fascist movement. The same goes for many (if not most) of the people who enjoy Lee Brice's music or consume TPUSA's content. The same goes for the people who attend River Church and happen to be worshipping next to a person who used to be a leader of Salem's Nazi Party.

The key point is that people steeped in this reactionary and conspiracy-obsessed culture are often targeted for recruitment by violent, white Christian nationalist fascists like Walter Huss and Kenneth Goff. Moreover, that culture incubated, normalized, and amplified a host of aggressively illiberal sensibilities around race, gender, religion, and sexuality that provided a fertile seedbed in which America's distinctive, rhizomatic, conspiracy-obsessed political culture of grievance-based fascism could grow. It takes a lot of work to get a large cohort of citizens to cross over the line between "normal," electoral politics and political violence. From the end of WWII to the present, the culture of vernacular American fascism has sought to produce more and more self-described Christian conservatives willing to either step over that line themselves, or look favorably upon those who have.

That said, it's crucial to remember that the relationship between culture and politics is incredibly fuzzy and indirect. For example, Bill Beeny, the White Christian Nationalist who spoke at Ken Goff's funeral and tried to make a quick buck off of Goff's estate....

....who also recorded a 1968 album with the lessons he learned at Goff's Soldiers of the Cross neo-Nazi/Klan training camp....

...spent the last 20+ years of his life running a kitschy and innocuous museum in Missouri dedicated to the proposition that Elvis was still alive.

How should we think about the relationship between the genocidal conspiracy theory about the tragic demise and hopeful rebirth of "old time America" that Bill Beeny devoted his life to while working with Ken Goff in the 1960s and 1970s on one hand, and the far more innocuous conspiracy theory about Elvis and the tragic demise and hopeful rebirth of "old time America" to which Beeny devoted the last 25+ years of his life?

It would be absurd to equate the goings on at the Soldiers of the Cross camp in the 1960s to the goings on at the Elvis is Alive museum...and yet this was the same person involved who seems to have had the same political outlook his entire life, appealing to the same general demographic of nostalgic and resentful white Christian Americans who desperately longed for the return of those old days when America was great.

It is perhaps a source of some comfort to know that despite the violent and hateful things Walter Huss, Edmund Crump, Ken Goff, Bill Beeny, and Alexander Schiffner said over the course of their lives, those words were never translated into large scale acts of political violence. With the benefit of hindsight, they seem like fairly pathetic and relatively harmless figures, people whose memory could just as easily elicit some chuckles along with some wide-eyed head shakes.

But it is perhaps a source of some concern that the genocidal and fascistic conspiracy theories with which these "kooks" filled the radio airwaves, church halls, and school auditoriums of the Cold War era so closely resemble the messages currently pouring out of this administration's official government accounts and algorithmically driving the conversation on platforms like Facebook and Elon Musk's X.

The future is always unknown and will be shaped by the actions we take in the constantly unfolding present. Here's hoping the history I've told here might help us more clearly see our current moment and how we got here...while helping to light a path into a more democratic and peaceful future.