This semester I taught a course on the History of the Far Right in the US. We were lucky to have one of the Pacific Northwest's sharpest contemporary chroniclers and interpreters of the far right, Leah Sottile, spend a day with us. The piece by Leah, "The
Last Tuesday afternoon my notifications exploded with hundreds of sudden new friend requests from strangers on Facebook, new followers on Bluesky, and new subscribers to my (now abandoned) Substack and this (currently ongoing) Ghost newsletter. At first I thought "oh shit, some MAGA influencer with a huge following just
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
The outfit that's making historical content for Trump's White House and America's youth has a history of doing history that has a fairly loose relationship with the truth
A window into Walter's world in its twilight years, and some thoughts about why people like me and that bookseller (and maybe you too?) find right wing kooks like Huss so morbidly compelling
What if they really were/are out to get you as they transform the country into an authoritarian hellscape?
What if those people who are different from you aren't part of some nefarious "Communist" conspiracy, but are just people in a free country who are [heaven forefend!] different from you?
On American Fascism's parasitic relationship to "The Party of Lincoln"
On the Oregon Republican response to the attempt on Donald Trump's life
When in the course of tremendous human events like nobody has ever seen before...
The "liberal, anti-fascist consensus" of the post-WWII era was always tenuous, but the "rough beast" of Trumpism has turned one of our two major parties directly against it like never before.
If the Project 2025 folks get their way, we will all soon live in the sort of dystopian, disorienting information ecosystem the MAGA many already inhabit
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In 1987 Oregon Republicans upbraided a former party leader (Walter Huss) for acting like a shameless, racist troll. Those were the days, eh?
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Some thoughts on the recently released PBS documentary about William F. Buckley
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NPR recently released an excellent podcast series on the politics of the 1970s called Landslide. If you haven’t listened to it yet, I highly recommend it. At the very least, it’ll almost certainly revolutionize the way you think about Gerald Ford. [How about that for the hard sell?
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Few people in Viroqua, Wisconsin WANTED Gerald LK Smith, the head of the America First Party, to speak, but when they ALLOWED it, they fanned the flickering embers of the American Fascist Tradition
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What is there to do, really, other than laugh at stuff like this? Candace Owens investigates…lol. Candace’s grim look is the icing on the cake—putting on her best Katie Couric “this is very serious” face. It’s all so soul-crushingly dumb. And until the political culture of
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The political world view of Walter Huss (1918-2006) was formed by the pro-Hitler, fascist organizations that flourished in late 1930s Portland...here's why that matters.
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Sometimes history does more than just rhyme
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A story about that time in 1962 when a group of former Silver Shirts and present white nationalists and Christian supremacists came close to taking over the Multnomah County Republican Party.
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On the fuzzy line between hard and soft Christian Nationalism
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And some news and announcements
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On Walter Huss's lifelong hatred of MLK, the many "totally not racist" Oregonians who enabled it, and the small group of antifascist activists and researchers who told the truth about it
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A state GOP chairman who was possibly a Nazi? Seems bad.