"Dear Patriot"

Seven years ago I playfully responded to a poll from the Trump campaign, and now I am the recipient of dozens of fundraising emails a day. I haven’t unsubscribed because these emails offer an informative window into what Trump’s marketing people *think* will play well with his small donors. This edition of Rightlandia is about one seemingly pablum term, “patriot,” that has become more ubiquitous recently in the Trump emails. Here’s a sample of that usage that I received today.

Needless to say, Trump’s use of the word “patriot” here departs from the more familiar meaning of the term—love of one’s country and one’s fellow citizens. In MAGA-parlance, the true “patriot” demonstrates their love of country by hating >50% of their fellow Americans. Trump’s rhetoric seeks to mobilize HIS cadre of patriots for “the final battle to save America” not from some external threat, but from the 81 million Americans who voted for that notorious hater of America, Joe Biden. It’s hardly an original insight to point out the angry and Manichean nature of Trump’s rhetoric, but I think the historically-specific way in which the pablum term “patriot” rings in the ears of far right Americans is less well known. What “comrade” is to a certain type of American leftist, “patriot” is to a certain type of American rightist.

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Indeed, Trump is hardly the first American to deploy the term “patriot” in such an urgent, menacing, and divisive manner. It’s worth noting that in the 1980s and 1990s such Trumpian usage of the term “patriot” would have identified one as a participant in a far right subculture far more associated with conspiracy-obsessed paramilitary organizations than with Republican office holders. While Bill Buckley would have certainly called himself a patriot, he rarely addressed his readers with the salutation of “Dear Fellow Patriots!” It is the historical memory of that substantial, “right of National Review” segment of the “conservative” coalition that Trump speaks to and for with his distinctive and familiar (to them) usage of the term “patriot.”

You’ll be unsurprised to learn that Walter Huss frequently described himself and his supporters as “Patriots.” He was also the recipient of many appeals from far right extremist organizations that called for immediate, often violent action on the part of “patriots” like him to save the nation from a variety of dire, internal threats—depending on the day and the organization that threat could take the form of Black people, Jews, immigrants, LGBTQ folks, feminists, the ACLU, abortion doctors, or just run of the mill liberals. What follows are some representative and annotated examples from Huss’s archive of the sort of organizations from the 1980s and 90s that addressed letters to him with that “Dear Patriot” salutation.

David Duke, both in his individual capacity and through his organization the National Association for the Advancement of White People, was fond of the “Dear Patriot” salutation. It’s not hard to discern who did and did not count as the sort of citizen he was addressing as “patriot.”

The Christian Bar Association was a sovereign citizen organization in Oregon that encouraged members not to pay federal income taxes and to think of themselves as not subject to laws that (by their lights) were unconstitutional. Art Hollowell, an associate of Huss’s, was the head of one such organization. Hollowell eventually served time in prison for tax fraud after living as a fugitive for many years.

The Christian Defense League and the National Alliance were both rabidly antisemitic white power organizations. Note that the National Alliance letter is signed by William Pierce, the author of The Turner Diaries, a text that was an inspiration to Timothy McVeigh, the self-understood “patriot” who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in the name of, you know, patriotism. The term “revisionist” in the CDL letter is a reference to people who took a more favorable view of Germany’s role in WWII and were generally doubtful that the Holocaust really happened.

Prayer for America was an offshoot of John Harrell’s Christian Patriot Defense League in Louisville, IL, which was an antisemitic Christian nationalist militia organization. The Committee of the Ten Million was Robert DePugh’s Missouri-based far right paramilitary organization.

“Dear Patriot, America is being invaded and we have lost control of our border.” So begins this familiar-sounding letter from an anti-immigration organization in 1981.

One of Huss’s friends sent him a copy of Operation Vampire Killer in 1993. This text was to be given to local police officers so that they could be prepared to side with the “real” American patriots in the coming armed battle against a US government that was supposedly about to welcome the imposition of a UN-led, communistic “New World Order.”

There are many more examples of the “Dear Patriot” salutation in Huss’s papers, but you get the idea. After spending the past two years in Huss’s archive being barraged by the word “patriot” in the literature of some of the most hateful, conspiracy-addled, and violent organizations from the 1980s and 90s, I can perhaps be forgiven for having a visceral response to Trump’s recent, incessant usage of it. I kid you not, he’s used the word in 35 separate emails I’ve received from him in just this past week

Donald Trump and the illiberal far right do not own the word “patriot.” The >50% of Americans who are marked out as “enemies of the people” by his usage of that term need not relinquish its meaning to him. When those in the center or on the left identify someone like John Lewis as a great “patriot,” what they mean is that he successfully advocated for principles like universal voting rights that embody the most democratic and inclusive features of the nation’s political tradition. Lauding John Lewis’s “patriotism” implies that one opposes and is prepared to non-violently fight against bigotry and inequality, but not that one hates and is arming in preparation for a battle against any particular community of Americans.

When we pay attention to the very different historical echoes that Trump’s use of the term “Patriot” invokes for his audience, it reveals the deeply-rooted nature of the exclusionary and anti-democratic political energies the MAGA phenomenon taps into, channels into the institutional fabric of the GOP, and amplifies in our broader culture. What was once a cri de coeur term deployed by a small and desperate minority of far right white Christian Americans who lamented that they had little influence in either party, has now become a ubiquitous rallying cry for the presumptive GOP POTUS nominee in 2024. In the MAGA mindset, nothing says “He’s a true patriot” like instigating a violent attack on the US Capitol in an illegal attempt to retain power by negating the voice of the American electorate. The author of The Turner Diaries couldn’t have agreed more with such a definition of what it means to be “a true American patriot.” We might call it the “I love you so much and that’s why I have to kill you” variety of patriotism.

Update [added 8 hours after I wrote this]: Yesterday Trump announced that his first campaign rally will be held in Waco, Tx. This was the event that inspired Timothy McVeigh to engage in his “patriotic” bombing in Oklahoma City.

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