Walter Huss's 1987 plan for the "silent majority" to "save America" from impending ruin.

Walter Huss was an organizer his entire life. From the 1950s when he first got involved in political activism into the 2000s when he died, he believed that the nation was beset by a Jewish/Communist conspiracy that controlled the media, education, entertainment, the government at all levels, and the courts. The real Americans, the “silent majority” of patriotic white straight Christian Americans like him, were a dominated, victimized community that played David to the Jewish/Communist Conspiracy’s Goliath. [It’s probably worth pointing out for those unfamiliar with the demographics of Oregon, that the population was 97% white in 1970, 92% white in 1990, and about 85% white in 2006 when Walter Huss died. Jews have never comprised more than 2% of the state’s population, but we punch above our weight in Huss’s imagination, I suppose.]

Beginning in the late 1960s Walter Huss began working up a plan by which the poor, put upon “silent majority” of people like him could “save America” and “restore the nation’s greatness.” In its earlier iterations it was called “the key people” plan, but what I’ll share with you here was the more mature, 1987 iteration of it—a combination multi-level marketing plan and grassroots conservative political organization called “Help America.”

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The problem as Huss perceived it was one of information and “disinformation.” He believed that “the real Americans” would see things his way, the correct way, if only they had the right sort of information that would enable them to see through the lies with which the “Jewish controlled media” had brainwashed them. He was fascinated by and invested heavily in modern communications technology like mobile phones and faxes (and later, in the 90s, the internet). This technology, he thought, could level the playing field and enable the silent majority to find each other, dispersed as they were across the nation and without access to the mainstream outlets that he thought were controlled by the enemy.

All they needed was to find 4.7 million right minded people like himself (and presumably you, dear reader) to reach 12 households each and the nation could be saved from its impending ruin via AIDS, Communist encirclement (remember, this is 1987), the genocide that was abortion, and the national debt that was about to send the nation spiraling into insolvency any minute now.

For a very low price, you could join Help America and become one of the 4.7 million points of light who would spread truthful information (provided monthly by Walter Huss) that would enable you and your neighbors to be like a new generation of Founding Fathers bringing about a rebirth of American freedom. “The people” like you have been shut out of media and politics for too long, and now there is a grassroots plan that will enable the real Americans to take back the country from “those people” who have stolen it from “us.” But wait…there’s more!

You can EARN MONEY while helping to protect “freedom and free enterprise.” All you need to do is send Walter Huss $30/year (or $40 for the special leadership training course) and then sign up others for $30/year and you keep half of every annual membership. You can start raking in the dough right now, while saving the country at the same time! [FWIW, this model whereby you keep part of the membership dues of every new member you sign up was exactly the same growth model used by the KKK in the 1920s.]

It’s noteworthy that Huss’s bio does not identify which “major party” he chaired. I don’t think this is because he sought to attract both Democrats and Republicans to his cause, it’s because the people he wanted to recruit were, like him, feeling increasingly alienated from a Reaganite Republican Party that they’d hoped would be the conduit for their radical right politics but which, to their disappointment, had seemed to have been captured by the same old establishment that had thwarted past truth tellers Huss admired like Robert Taft, General MacArthur, Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, and so on.

The American Revolutionary era iconography here is notable because it was precisely this 1980s moment when a new iteration of the “Christian Nation” discourse had blossomed thanks to David Barton and others. Much like the folks on January 6 who carried “Appeal to Heaven” flags and shouted “1776” as they invaded the Capitol to “restore America’s greatness,” Huss understood his visceral hatred of the existing government that his fellow citizens had elected, to be the highest form of “patriotism.”

1987 was an especially challenging year for Huss, and this provides some important context for understanding what he’s doing here. A few years earlier he’d been busted by the FDA and Customs for illegally importing Brazilian bark tea that he falsely claimed cured cancer. So he was on the hook for about a $30,000 fine related to that hardship that he chalked up to persecution at the hands of the Jewish Mafia that supposedly controlled Oregon. Meanwhile, the person who held the mortgage on his property was threatening to foreclose because he hadn’t been keeping up on mortgage payments for the past several years.

Huss had gotten so desperate that he tried raising money by sending out the “golden circle” chain letter that had been all the rage back in the late 1970s and then was exposed as a scam. Note how Huss tried to convince his friends and acquaintances to participate in 1987 by making it look as if Jimmy Swaggart was involved. [The address on that envelope is Huss’s home and, needless to say, Jimmy Swaggart did not live with him.]

His entire life Huss chased one “get rich quick” scheme after another…some concocted by others who ripped him off, some concocted by him and designed to monetize the trust that people had in him as an ordained Foursquare minister and former chair of the Oregon Republican Party. Huss saw Help America as a perfect way to blend his interest and expertise in politics with his faith in the MLM, “free enterprise” model of wealth acquisition. He wanted to do well by doing good. Ultimately, he did neither, but it sure didn’t stop him from trying over and over and over again.

Coda: While we’re on the subject of the “silent majority” saving America from the “globalist cabal,” here’s a fundraising email I received from Donald Trump yesterday.

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