Is it a Rabbit Hole? Or...

This morning I stumbled upon this letter from 1960 and got sent tumbling down a research rabbit hole that I’ll share with you here. I want to temporarily put a hold on my usage of the term “rabbit hole,” however, because it implies something hidden, buried, and far removed from the surface where most of the action happens. Instead, I think this letter is so rhetorically familiar to us today because it speaks in a language that has simply been the buzzing background noise of white conservative political culture from the 1950s into the present. That apocalyptic buzzing often emanates from the highly-amped-up, very farthest right, fascist or fascist-adjacent, reaches of the US political spectrum.

"The year XXX could bring the point of no return for the United States. Everything depends upon this next election. Either the Nation moves toward a return to American ideals and true Constitutional government or sinks deeper into the quicksand of Socialism." Is it 1960, or 2023?

Leo Reardon, the guy who signed that 1960 letter on behalf of the Manion Forum, is a perfect example of how the emotional punch of the right’s apocalyptic, anti-communist rhetoric often comes from the farthest right reaches of the US political spectrum. In the 1930s, Reardon had been an assistant to Father Coughlin and even took a trip to Nazi Germany to meet with leaders there on Coughlin's behalf. These screenshots are from Donald Warren's book on Coughlin.

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Reardon's boss, Clarence Manion, was the former Dean of the Notre Dame Law School and was one of the leading far right figures behind the "Draft Goldwater" movement in the late 50s and early 60s that sought to push the GOP radically rightward. His radio show was broadcast across the nation. His was no tiny voice emanating out of some deep rabbit hole; it could be heard on a regular basis virtually everywhere in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

It’s also worth noting that the idea to publish "Conscience of a Conservative" (1960), one of the ur-texts of the American conservative tradition, was hatched by none other than Manion’s (and Coughlin’s) right hand man, Leo Reardon. This is the title page of the first edition, issued by Reardon's Kentucky publishing company. Again, no one would ever say that Conscience of a Conservative, one of the most influential books of the early 1960s, ghost written by Bill Buckley’s good friend and co-author L. Brent Bozell, was somehow a rabbit hole.

Most people in 1960 (a mere 15 years after the end of WWII) would have been squeamish about working with a guy who was Coughlin's emissary to Nazi Germany, but not Manion. "No enemies to the right" was his basic approach to organizing.

Manion was one of those people who regarded just about everything the federal government was doing in the Cold War era (except for prepping to militarily defeat Communism) as "creeping socialism."

Clarence Manion fell into relative obscurity after Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 but the family had a second act in 1986 when Reagan nominated Manion's son (who largely shared his father's far right politics) to a federal judgeship, though he was not particularly qualified. Ultimately, Manion made it through the nomination process and he still sits on the bench. Manion was approved 50-49 by the Senate, with VP GHWB casting the deciding vote. One of Manion's strongest supporters in that confirmation battle was none other than future VP Dan Quayle, a law school classmate of Manion's.

So the Manion family’s politics eventually found their way onto the federal bench, thanks to an assist from Reagan, GHWB, and Dan Quayle. We might think of those politics as fairly niche and nerdy, the preserve of right wing law students like Manion and his law school dean father. But those ideas didn’t just appear in obscure legal journals or opinions issued from the bench, they could be heard on a regular basis on AM radio stations around the country.

But this is where we return to Leo Reardon/fascist-adjacent territory. Sunday night listeners to WLAC in Nashville could hear Manion’s show and that of Reverend Buddy Tucker right next to each other from 1962 to 1967. Buddy Tucker was a rabidly antisemitic white nationalist who was a leading disciple of Gerald LK Smith’s, and runs the website that keeps Smith’s memory alive on the internet today.

Tucker was a self-avowed "Christian Nationalist," which in the 1960s and 70s meant one thought the nation was in the grips of a Jewish/Communist conspiracy that sought to destroy the supremacy of white Christians in the US. He was not shy about this. This was the view from the pews in Tucker’s church in the 1960s and 70s.

I want to reiterate that this white Christian nationalist antisemite had a radio show that was broadcast every Sunday night for years on Nashville's CBS affiliate. All the same, he considered himself to be a persecuted victim of "the controlled media."

Buddy Tucker was (and still is) a truly "deplorable" human. He's lived his entire life convinced that Christian Patriots like him are on the brink of being destroyed by a "globalist conspiracy."

This vibrant world of AM radio “conservatism” in which the distinction between Clarence Manion’s variety of anti-communism (shorn of the most extremely racist and antisemitic edges) and Rev. Dewey Tucker’s would have probably been lost on most ordinary listeners. Tucker was just one of many fascists or neo-Nazis who had radio shows that were broadcast on the same stations that carried more “normal” conservative content.

While this world of far right bloviating about the immanent Socialistic destruction of America was considered as fringe and irrelevant by most in the mainstream political and media world, the constant buzzing of this sort of stuff profoundly shaped the way millions of ordinary, self-described “white conservatives” understood the world.

To close, here’s a photo of Buddy Tucker in 2020. Still fighting the good fight against those damn radical left Marxists.

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