Upcoming event (date TBD) for paid subscribers: Join me, Thomas Zimmer, and hopefully a few other historians for a conversation about Ron DeSantis's 2011 book "Dreams from Our Founding Fathers."
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Recommended Reading: Leah Sottile's Recent Article about the Students in my History of the Far Right Class
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
Slow Knowledge in the Age of Hot Takes: Some Thoughts on Historians as Pundits
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
"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
PragerU's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad History
The outfit that's making historical content for Trump's White House and America's youth has a history of doing history that has a fairly loose relationship with the truth