The Sunday Interview: How Blood and Soil Nationalism Went Mainstream w/Seth Cotlar

Annika Wachsmann: Welcome to the Straight White American Jesus Sunday interview. I am Annika Wachsmann, author of two books with German names. I will still say them, but you probably won't know what it is: America's Kriegers and Die Branschlifter, and host of podcasts like Feminist Shelf Control and Kreutzenflagger Crossing the Flag. And today, I'm very excited to be speaking with Seth Cotlar, who is a history professor at Willamette University, and we're going to be talking about the history of right wing extremism, blood and soil nationalism, and straight up Nazism on the American right. Seth, you are one of the most knowledgeable chroniclers, I would say, of the history of the American right today. I know that originally you started out looking at a period that was a bit earlier in American history. Maybe you can go into a bit how your path led you to this joyous topic that we're going to be talking about today. Today, we want to really dive deep into some of your research, especially your work on the GOP in your state, in Oregon, and right wing extremism on the broader American right. We'll be talking about the American right, specifically in the Pacific Northwest, but also more broadly, how ideas of blood and soil nationalism have moved around on the American right, and how they eventually have made their way into the Republican mainstream, and the shape that they take today. And I was thinking maybe the point to start would be something I've noticed in your work and also in my own research, is that there really is a through line. When we look at the narratives that permeate on the American right over the decades, there's this through line of angry victimization on the right throughout its history, sort of from McCarthy to Trump. The political project in its narrative seems to have always kind of circled around this sense of an aggrieved feeling of maybe both entitlement and victimhood, of what they see as the quote, unquote, real American. So let's start there. When we're talking about this narrative of sort of an enraged victimhood that also carries a real possibility of retribution or even violence, where have you found this in your work on the American right, and has it, and how has it morphed and changed over time? Do you see sort of common themes that just keep coming up, and what shape do they take today? Do you think?

Seth Cotlar: Yeah, that's a great question, and thanks for having me on the show. Of course, yeah. So I find the formulation that was articulated by Chip Berlet, who's a scholar of the far right, an excellent scholar, and he, in his book on right wing populism, he develops this idea of what he calls right wing producerism, a narrative about right wing producerism, and this is basically the idea that there are the real Americans—us—who are hard working, who are moral and who are beset, however, by un-American parasites who steal from us and hate us. And those parasites are people who are both below us—welfare queens, immigrants, LGBTQ folks, etc., other marginalized groups who are kind of sponges off the hard working efforts of real Americans, who are usually coded as white and straight and Christian—and then there are parasites above us who control everything. And usually what they do is they're manipulating the parasites beneath us and giving benefits to the parasites beneath us, and stealing from us in the process and getting rich. So this is the George Soros version, right? But it's college professors who are doing this. It's bureaucrats, it's government bureaucrats. It's the people who run Hollywood. It's the media elite. And the idea is that these elite parasites are trying to brainwash ordinary Americans into feeling empathy and identification with these less real Americans beneath them, and so you, the poor, just honest, beset real American, are getting it from all sides. All of the institutions of your society are out to get you and are out to benefit people who aren't like you in terms of race, in terms of sexuality, etc. And so that story, which then is animated by a bunch of conspiracy theories about how it is this is happening. And those conspiracy theories involve thinking that the folks in Hollywood and the government and education, in these regulatory agencies, are out to destroy you. It's not just that they are doing things that you don't agree with or might not like. It's that they are actively evil. So this is the narrative about Tony Fauci, who somehow, you know, went to graduate school in the 70s, playing the long game until he could wait until 2020 and 21 and murder millions of people with a vaccine, which is just absurd. But a lot of people believe it. Or one of my favorite examples of this structure of argumentation is in 1977 when Roots aired on American television. And this was the first time that slavery had been depicted in American mass media in a remotely respectful, kind of non-racist way. And there's this piece that was published, an op-ed published all over the country by a guy named Jeffrey Hart, who worked at the National Review, who also happened to [unintelligible] of Harmeet Dhillon, our current Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, and the title of his article about Roots was "Roots was a racist attack on white people." That was his reading of what Roots was, right, that this was anti-white racism. And you know, he wasn't—I mean, he was kind of a troll, but he really meant it, right? And so this required—and it's completely inaccurate in terms of his depiction of what Roots was, but it played into this sense, whereas a lot of white Americans in the 1970s, myself included, as a very young person, kind of watched this and felt edified about a part of American history that we hadn't been taught and didn't know much about. And it generated a lot of empathy for the suffering of enslaved people, and it generated a lot of identification with the white characters who seemed to be wanting to try to do the right thing in Roots, of whom there were several. And it was basically this anti-racist version of what America should be, can be, was seen as this incredible assault and threat to some white Americans. And so that narrative—it just, it's all the anti-DEI stuff now, it's all the anxiety around Black History Month. So in that sense, the this narrative, it just feels like same stuff different day. The continuity of the content of it is pretty stable. But where I think the real difference is, is in terms of where it appears and how influential it is. So that right wing producerism was a kind of illiberal right wing narrative about America that you could find if you went looking for it. You could subscribe to newsletters and other places that advanced this version of America.

Annika: So just one question. So when you say you could subscribe to newsletters, you mean back then, actual paper newsletters that you would have to seek out. So in a way, there was a version of, you know, everybody has a newsletter these days, of what Substack or other platforms are doing, but it was a lot harder to access, or you had to go to the John Birch Society bookshop, bookstore, to sign up to buy the things. Is that the difference that you're making out?

Seth: Absolutely, yes. So you could access it. So in the 1970s, for example, in the 80s, the main, the most prominent place where you could find this was in a newspaper called The Spotlight that was run by Willis Carto and the Liberty Lobby. And so this was a conspiratorial anti-Semitic paper. It was kind of coded. The anti-Semitism wasn't as explicit as the people producing it believed. But you know, and they had hundreds of thousands of subscribers. I mean, their subscriber list was probably three times the size of that of the National Review, and the people who read it thought of themselves as conservatives. They would have called themselves conservatives, but they were just being fed this non-stop diet of this narrative of right wing producerism that was basically an American version of fascism. You know, it was the sense that America was once great and now it's falling apart and to make it better again. And the way we do that is by identifying who the parasites are who are destroying the country.

Annika: And eliminating them. Sounds familiar, right? Very, very vaguely familiar.

Seth: Yeah, this was in The Spotlight, but it was on the AM radio dial, hundreds of stations around the country. So I guess that's where I would say, you know, it was there, it was available, but it was always perceived as quite marginal. So the figures who were advocating this version of America wouldn't show up, say in the pages of the National Review. The National Review would not talk about these particular figures. Or if they did, they would talk about them as being outside the sort of bounds of responsible conservatism. So that's that.

Annika: So would you say that at this moment in history, there's this real, this emerging political project of the likes of William F. Buckley and the National Review, who really tried to make American conservatism into a cleaner, more respectable, less openly anti-Semitic and racist endeavor that was still racist, that still used racist messaging, that still had anti-Semitism in it, but that produced it in a less obvious way, or in a way where someone could claim plausible deniability as the national conversation about race and civil rights was slowly changing. So at that time, although I think there has been some really great historical work that shows that the German—the German conversation is obsessed at the moment politically with the notion of what's called the firewall between conservatism and the radical right or right wing extremism, and there's lots of debate over whether that ever really existed, whether it's wishful thinking, or whether it's more of a porous garden gate that swings both ways sometimes. And I think that's really fascinating, especially when we look at how opposition to the Civil Rights Movement shows up at that time, both on the part of the American right that would be seen as, or what people like William Buckley would have labeled the kooks—like those are not the real conservatives—but we might still have some friendly correspondence with one or two of them, or even employ them at the National Review, or have them write some articles until they make bad headlines. Because, you know, David Welch showed this in his book very well, until they basically make bad headlines for us by appearing at a white nationalist conference. And then we kind of have to go. But what would you say, in what way was the opposition to the civil rights movement one of the factors that really led to the formation and organization of the forces of the modern American right and American conservatism that we know today? And how did people like Buckley navigate relationships to the more extreme, openly extremely racist and anti-Semitic parts of their movement?

Seth: Yeah, I think if there was a line, the way to conceptualize what that line was had to do with what future people envisioned, right? So I think for William F. Buckley and the folks in that orbit of the National Review—not everyone, but most—imagined a future in which America was a multiracial democracy. There was this sense of, like, look, there are white people in America. There are black people in America. It's a multiracial country. You're never going to create a white ethnostate, even if you wanted to. And so therefore, their critique of the civil rights movement—and they were very critical of many aspects of the civil rights movement—but it was usually along the lines of tactics, right? It was the idea that, like, well, or that there are some elements in the civil rights movement that were, say, black nationalist or were communist, as they would see. And so they would say that we disagree with that part of it, the economic vision, or we disagree with the kind of racial consciousness. But they would say that, but we don't disagree with the idea that we can all share this country together and live and everybody should have the right to vote, and those basic kind of small-l liberal values. But the problem is that the line between people whose concerns about the civil rights movement were about tactics or about certain elements in the movement, versus people who were just opposed to the entire idea of sharing America as a country with black people—that was a fuzzy line, and there were folks in the coalition who were in both those places. And so that, to me, is one of the things that has really, you know, kind of broken open in the last, say, 10 years, right, where someone like David Duke can look at a Republican presidential candidate and say, "Like, that's my guy. He agrees with me." And people like Nick Fuentes and other white nationalists can just openly embrace their identities as Republicans, whereas in the 1960s and 70s, the Republican Party was a coalition that did include some white nationalists, but for the most part was comprised of folks who were on the other side of that line, right, who did buy into post-World War Two consensus. And so both the mainstream media and the GOP as institutions kind of maintained a rough kind of firewall, right, where someone showing up with a swastika or someone throwing up a Heil Hitler salute—that was obviously like, okay, you're across some line.

Annika: You're saying that's not someone who, I don't know, someone like a Republican president at the time would have had dinner with at the private club that they owned in Florida, right?

Seth: Probably, yeah, definitely not that, right? As a pretty major—and this frequently happened, you know, that there were these exposés about—subject to come back to the Liberty Lobby and Willis Carto, who was a neo-Nazi, and he did have connections to several sitting senators and congressmen, people like Orrin Hatch, or people like Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms. So he was on friendly terms. This neo-Nazi was on friendly terms with some of these more conservative kind of Republicans. But for example, 1983, Ronald Reagan nominated someone for a post in HHS who was the lead counsel for the Liberty Lobby. And when that came out, all of the senators were like, "Yeah, no way. We're not going to approve this guy. Like, you can't. We're not going to be associated with the Liberty Lobby." And so there were still those kind of instincts inside the Republican Party and inside the media who would report on this and who knew about this, and the public seemed to care. Like that. It didn't—there wasn't significant pushback like, "Well, wait a minute, why are you canceling the poor, innocent Liberty Lobby?" It was more like, "Oh yeah, those people are terrible. They like Hitler, we're not gonna appoint those people." So those guardrails in the media and in the party have vanished at this point, and so that's part of where we're at.

Annika: Now, I realize this is a very general question, but what do you think are the contributing factors that led to those guardrails, however shabby they might have been, completely disintegrating? Because, you know, we're talking now after the year of leaked Nazi group chats in the Republican Party, and while some Republicans, some younger—we're talking usually about mid-30s to mid-40s people here when JD Vance talks about these young kids in those group chats—but some of them lost their jobs. But all in all, the outrage within the party seemed—there was some outrage, but there was also some—some people stayed silent on the matter, and I found that very notable. What do you think contributed to those guardrails disappearing? Was it simply erosion over time? Or do you think are there points that you can really make out that led to this?

Seth: So I think there are two different stories, one for the media and then one for the parties, right? So for the media, just the technological changes of the last 15 years of social media, the demise of local journalism. And so where people are getting their information now is so much more along partisan lines, and with even more explicitly sort of partisan outlets, so that there—and there really is no way to gatekeep. You know, if you were the editor of your local newspaper and someone wanted to publish something in your newspaper and they were a Nazi, you could just say, "No, I'm not going to publish that in my newspaper." Now, a person can just post it on X or post it wherever. And so the democratization of media has created the space for all kinds of stuff to show up and then go viral. So I think that's a big part of it. It's just not possible, even if the media wanted to, right, to do that kind of gatekeeping. And then in terms of the parties, I mean, this is a story that political scientists have well documented, is the way that American parties have become weaker over time, and the way that our sense of partisanship has gotten stronger, and that's part of our dilemma, is that people are ever more partisan than ever, but the parties themselves really don't have much power to gatekeep. And this goes back to the 70s and the way the primary system changed and so on. So that now the people who play a huge role in county level, state level Republican party organizations are really committed activist partisans who usually consume this very partisan, partial media, and so their view of the world is very much shaped by this, and it has just created this mechanism through which it's almost—there's no incentive for the parties to police their edges. And this is especially the case for the Republican Party, because the primary electorate is so much smaller and is usually comprised of people who are the people who are most invested in partisan politics. It just creates this dynamic where the Republican Party especially just keeps nominating ever more kind of like people further to the right. And there are still efforts. So I can speak about the Oregon example, just because—

Annika: Oh yes, please.

Seth: —the history I know. You know, Phil Knight, who is the richest man in Oregon, who runs Nike, has a real investment in the Oregon Republican Party winning more because—and for him, I don't think it's about culture war stuff. I think for him, it's just about taxes, and he's just an old, old school pro-business Republican, right? Now, the problem is, is that it's almost impossible to win a primary as an old fashioned pro-business Reagan kind of Republican. In Oregon, you have to give voters all the culture war red meat about DEI and how the 2020 election was stolen, and kind of all that stuff. And so Phil Knight is trying to back a Republican candidate for governor who is the closest thing Oregon has to kind of old school, moderate Republican. And I don't know—it's going to be interesting to see. There's actually now two people of that stripe in the race, it's Christine Drazan and Chris Dudley, who's a former basketball player for the Portland Trailblazers. But then there's a raft of other folks who are in the kind of MAGA Trumpy mold. And we'll see what happens. I mean, and the problem that the party has gotten itself into is that the people who are most popular with the base are the people who are least likely to win in a general election. The people who have the best chance of winning in a general election, who are more moderate, it's much harder for them to win in a primary.

Annika: Because I gotta say, like before we started talking, I just, you know, scrolled through the Facebook posts of the Oregon GOP. And it really, even, you know, on a scale of the modern GOP, it really is the nutbaggiest, radical conspiracy stuff you can imagine. And if I understand you correctly, what you're saying in your research is that this blend that we can see on the Facebook pages, and I'm also guessing the Facebook groups of the Oregon GOP, sort of blend of white Christian nationalism mixed with a very distinct whiff of blood and soil and conspiracism, that this blend is not new, that this has been sort of sizzling for a very long time.

Seth: Well, and it has, and it's also really a departure for the Oregon Republican Party. So one of the things that is most notable—so if you went back to the 1960s and 70s and 80s, and you compared Oregon Republicans, elected Republicans in Oregon to Republicans from other states, it would be far more moderate, if not liberal. So the most famous Oregon Republican is a guy named Mark Hatfield, who was our governor and then the senator for 30 years, who opposed the Vietnam War, who was an outspoken advocate of civil rights, who wrote several op-ed pieces decrying the influence of the far right in the 1980s and saying this is terrible if we let these people take over our party. And Mark—if there's anyone who's missed a Republican in Oregon history, Mark Hatfield. Our other senator at the time was Bob Packwood, who was pro-choice and was also moderate on a lot of issues. Oregon's Republican governor in the 1970s was a guy named Tom McCall who called himself a liberal Republican, and he was the guy that created the urban growth boundaries that we have that try to create more tightly settled cities, not sprawl. He was the guy that started the bottle bill that was intended to encourage recycling. So, you know, right? So the type of Republican that just absolutely does not exist anymore. But these guys weren't weird in Oregon. They were the quintessential what it meant to be a Republican in Oregon. So it was very much a party that was associated with a far more moderate version of Republicanism. So in 1980, when Reagan gets coronated in Detroit at the GOP primary, the Oregon delegation—there were all these articles in the newspaper where people were like, "Who are these people?" Like, basically all the old school Oregon Republicans were like, "I'm not going to that. I don't like this Reagan guy." So the people who were into Reagan in Oregon were kind of outsiders in the party at the time. And so part of—in my research, what I've been trying to do is figure out, like, how did—but by the time you get to the 90s, those old moderates feel like complete outsiders to the party, and they've been sort of vitalized. Some of them are still hanging in there, hanging on. But by the time you get into the 90s, the Oregon Republican Party has really shifted pretty far to the Reaganite, if not further, right. And that's why, you know, the guy that I'm writing about, I think was pretty instrumental in kind of building that kind of political culture. Walter Huss is the name. And so he basically just led this insurgency, this kind of grassroots far right insurgency. He was a really good organizer. He organized people in counties. Oregon has 36 counties. Our politics is dominated by Portland because it's the most populous city by far. You can't really win if you don't win in Portland, and it's a pretty liberal city and has been historically. But it's a huge state, and every county has a say in organizing the party and so on. And so Walter Huss was just very adept at going into these rural communities or these small towns, meeting in churches and American Legions with folks who felt very alienated from kind of 1960s, 70s America, from Portland that was more receptive to civil rights, that was more receptive to gay rights. And he really tapped into those, that sense of victimization and alienation on the part of white, middle and working class Oregonians. And through that, was able to kind of take over and really shift the culture of the Oregon Republican Party in a way. And this wasn't like some gradual thing. Like the people who were the moderates, they felt like they had just been like some corporate raiders had just taken over their party and stolen it from them. Like they really felt like a kind of alien invasion of people who were just radically different than they were. And so that's the story that I'm sort of trying to tell. So it's both like a break from the history of the Oregon Republican Party. But it also took like 30, 40 years for this to work itself out.

Annika: I'm really interested. How did you find Huss? Because he's quite obscure, or he had been before I think you started publicizing your research about him. So listeners, if you follow Seth on Bluesky, for example, every week you will find usually multiple very, very interesting and very disturbing archival threads where he shares some of his research. Like Walter Huss doesn't seem to have been that well known, I would say, even in Oregon or Oregonian political history. So can you tell us, where did you stumble upon him? And maybe just to situate him for our listeners, where are we at the moment in history? What is the world that Walter Huss sort of becomes really this power player in Oregonian politics?

Seth: His basic story—he's born in 1918 and he moves to Portland in 1960. He's an Oregonian his whole life, but he moves back to Portland in 1960 and sets up an anti-communist kind of school. And then he's an activist in Oregon from 1960 until the early 2000s. He dies in 2006. And this entire time, he's traveling across the state trying to organize folks, and his main effort is to try to take over the Oregon Republican Party for his brand of kind of white Christian nationalism. And I'm pretty sure I've located him as a Silver Shirt in Portland at the age of 20 in 1938.

Annika: Kidding?

Seth: No. So he also went to a Bible college in Los Angeles at the heyday of like Christian Identity stuff at that Bible college, and when Gerald L.K. Smith was very prominent.

Annika: So just for our listeners, Christian Identity is the brand of Jesus wants a race war.

Seth: Yes, it's the theology that informed the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho. It's basically neo-Nazi, but not the swastikas. It's the idea that the chosen people of God are not Jews, but instead white people. White Christians are the chosen people of God, and Jews are, according to this, not the real Jews. The real Jews from the Bible are white Christian people, and so people who call themselves Jews today are fake Jews. And Jews and people of color are all kind of descendants of Satan, basically. So we live in a world where it's a battle between good and evil, between satanic, demonic forces who are everyone who's not a white Christian like us. So that's Christian Identity, which derives from British Israelism, which is a much older kind of tradition that was not necessarily as virulently anti-Semitic. But this is basically the idea that communism is an international Jewish conspiracy, which is working in league with the civil rights movement, working in league with people of color to destroy white Christian civilization in America, is the basic—so that's the most kind of potent Christian Identity version. And Walter Huss was very much—his worldview was very much informed by that. So that makes him very much a weirdo in the context of, like, World War Two, American political—he's a Holocaust denier. He reads all of Willis Carto's stuff from The Spotlight. Two of his mentees in the 1960s become neo-Nazis. They put on jackboots and start like marching around Portland like Nazis and holding up anti-Semitic signs and so on. Yeah, so that's who he was. And he was really regarded by most of his contemporaries as a weirdo because he was like a kook. Everyone thought that this guy was kind of strange. And so hence, very few people took him seriously.

Annika: So his associations were well known. People knew, or could at least suspect, he's really palling around with Nazis or Nazi adjacent stuff, or he sure talks a lot about a secret cabal who rules the world. How obvious was he in his sort of public presentation? Can we trace that?

Seth: Yeah, so he was savvy enough to know what he could say in public. I mean, because his goal was to take over the Oregon Republican Party, and he knew that if he's out there praising Hitler, or, you know, saying that, you know, he's sunk. So he very much positioned himself as just a Christian patriot who loves America, good, traditional America. So during the Goldwater campaign, for example, he was huge into Goldwater.

Annika: Big surprise.

Seth: He actually basically ran the Goldwater campaign in Portland on an ad hoc, informal basis. One of my favorites about his life is that in 1964, Goldwater came to Portland, came to Oregon for a campaign stop. He knew he wasn't going to win the state, but he came once, and Walter Huss organized this huge welcome for him, like hundreds of people holding up signs. And he just did this on his own. And Goldwater came off the plane, and Walter Huss went up and introduced himself. And meanwhile, the chair of the Oregon Republican Party is like, "Wait, who are you? Like, what are you doing here? Like, I'm the chair of the Oregon Republican Party. Like, why are you here?" And Walter Huss is like, "Well, why are you here? What have you been doing to help Barry Goldwater?" And so he just kind of muscled his way, you know, into this place of sort of claiming to be the real voice of Oregon Republicanism in the 1960s and 70s. Yeah, so anyway, but part of—he's been completely memory holed, and it's understandable why the Oregon Republican Party wouldn't want to own him. So he was successful. He did—in 1978, he was elected chair of the Oregon Republican Party, and he served in that position for about nine or 10 months before he was kind of ushered out because he was so incompetent and strange. But when he won the election to be the chair of the party in 1978, this happened at the state convention where, you know, we're talking about a total of maybe 100 people who are voting, and he won by like five votes, right? So this wasn't a statewide election. He never—he ran in multiple statewide elections and never won more than 20 or 30% of the vote. He was a perennial loser, right? So this was his one—this was his great moment of glory. There were 51 people at the 1978 convention, and he'd been trying for 10 years. Every two years, he would show up at the state convention and try to win as chair. And then in 1978, he pulled it off. And so this made the Washington Post at the time. It was such a sort of startling thing. They didn't call him a neo-Nazi. And I don't think many people knew fully. The FBI apparently had been following him for many years, and the FBI did suspect him of being associated with the Nazi Party. Really. They've just—they destroyed his FBI file, so I do not know on what basis they basically made that. Fortunately. But they also thought that he was involved with the Posse Comitatus movement, which was accurate. And so the Posse Comitatus movement is kind of the descendant of the Christian Identity phenomenon, right, and has a very similar ideology. And these are kind of right wing domestic terrorists who believe the Constitution doesn't apply, that the Constitution's been suspended. So many of Walter Huss's political compatriots and friends in Portland were the leaders of the Posse Comitatus movement in the 1970s and 80s. So the FBI was not wrong in that. That said, Walter Huss did have a very handy dandy letter on the letterhead of the Posse Comitatus group saying that he was not a member. So there you go. His friend of 25 years said that he wasn't. But certainly. So this guy, Walter Huss, is kind of like a running joke in some ways in Oregon. Like the Republicans want to think of him as a kook. Like most of them—people who aren't Republicans find him to be a really strange, weird kind of anachronistic figure. And so that's why I think he just kind of got like marginalized in people's memories. Like, oh, he had his moment, and he did this weird stuff, and then he went away. So when I stumbled upon him, it was because I was about to teach a course on the history of the far right in the US for the first time. This was in 2020. And I went looking for a local figure that we might study in the class. For part of it, I always like to include stuff from Oregon history or the area. And so I was looking at a database for stuff related to Oregon or Portland. And I found this guy, Walter Huss, and saw his materials, and I thought, oh, that's kind of interesting. And I asked colleagues of mine, who are historians of conservatism or historians of Oregon, if they'd ever heard of him. No one had ever heard of him. There was nothing written about him. Like literally nothing. There was—there's now a Wikipedia page, but that didn't exist at the time. So like two sentences had been written about this guy that I could find. And one of the things that I identified in these primary sources that I found was that he published a newspaper in Portland in the 1960s. And a November 1965 edition of it had been owned by a man named Joseph Dilys in Chicago, and it had a stamp on it. It had Joseph Dilys's name and address in Chicago, and it had a stamp that said, "Communism is Jewish." And I said, "Okay, all right, that's interesting. I know what that means. I know. Like, let's dig in. Who's Joseph Dilys?" And so I did some digging around. And turns out he was the most infamous neo-Nazi in Chicago in the 1960s.

Annika: There we go.

Seth: When Tom Metzger and the White Aryan Resistance guys had their star turn on Oprah in the 80s, Joseph Dilys was their hero. So I was like, "Okay, that's interesting and perhaps noteworthy and seems relevant, right?" And so then I discovered that Walter Huss had left 57 boxes of his papers to the University of Oregon, where there was this huge archive that no one had ever looked at.

Annika: Every historian's dream.

Seth: Exactly. And so I was like, "That's great." And that's about an hour and 15 minute drive from where I live. But it was during COVID, and they were closed, so I could not go for another year. But I did note on the finding aid in box two, there were two folders. It's only cataloged by folder level within box, and there were two folders labeled "Jews." And I thought, "Okay, that could be bad." But you know, giving him the benefit of the doubt, he's a trained minister. He might have a theological interest in Judaism, perhaps. And so for eight months I was not able to go look. And so I was like, "What's in the Jews folder?"

Annika: Gotta say, as the trained German historian, that's the moment where I start to sweat.

Seth: Yes. Well, it turns out that is the appropriate anticipatory—so those, of course, were the first folders that I requested when I went down there. So it was—yes, it was in there, and they were the greatest hits of 20th century neo-Nazi anti-Semitism in his Jews folder. So that just like then opened up, because there are thousands of newspaper articles written about him, and that's where I started my research, because that's what I could access. And, you know, there were little glimmers that he was like pretty conservative, or like maybe bigoted, like that. Like there were some indications that maybe he was kind of an odd guy, a little outside the mainstream. But nothing that just made it as clear and obvious. And in part, I think it's because of just the code of the time that you wouldn't call someone a racist or an anti-Semite unless you had really good evidence for it publicly. And also, he was very good at sort of code switching, you know, and just like a traditional Pat Robertson type of conservative.

Annika: Knew what words to hit to blend in, yeah.

Seth: But another thing that's in his archive, though, are some recorded telephone calls. So he was a super paranoid guy, so he recorded a lot of his telephone calls because he—very Nixon of him.

Annika: Yeah, no.

Seth: Very Nixonesque. And well, because he assumed that the Jews were all spying on him, trying to railroad him and so on. So he wanted to have a record, sure. Fortunately, what the record is that he left behind of these phone calls is him complaining about the Jews with other people on the phone. So, but anyway, but in his mind, he didn't think—he didn't think of himself as an anti-Semite. He thought of himself as an anti-communist. And so his criticisms of Jews were legitimate, he thought, because the Jews were behind the communist conspiracy to destroy America, and they were just out to get him because he so accurately perceived what they were doing. And so that's how he—so he didn't think of himself as a baddie. Like he wasn't—it wasn't like, you know, George Lincoln Rockwell, I think, thought of himself as a kind of vaguely sinister, dangerous figure. Walter Huss really thought like he was the good guy in all of this. Like he was trying to save America.

Annika: He was saving America. Yeah, yeah. I was wondering because you just mentioned the all-time hits of neo-Nazi anti-Semitism, and because we're also trying to see, what are the through lines, because you did mention, you know, Walter Huss then disappears from the political stage after he's being ousted. But I watched a clip recently, and I immediately had to think of your research and the materials you found amongst Huss's possessions, because, you know, a lot has happened in the last couple of months on the American right and in MAGA land, and Brad and Dan have covered a lot of this in detail, especially the growing rift between the sort of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes faction and the Trump faction. And so we see some people like Marjorie Taylor Greene try to sort of rebrand as America First instead of MAGA, maybe with the calculation that Trump's time in politics is limited, while others, like Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, seem to kind of have one foot in each faction. Now, a couple of months ago at this time, when Kevin Roberts defended that Tucker Carlson interview with Nick Fuentes, there was internal backlash at Heritage. He had to publicly backtrack, et cetera, et cetera. But what I want to do at this point is kind of zoom in onto the aftermath of this fight that really kind of boils down to, I think, what form of anti-Semitism is acceptable in the MAGA coalition, in the Republican Party to display publicly. And in part, that fight, that rift is between what the relationship between the US and Israel should look like. That is one part of the conversation. But I would say in this instance, because we're talking about people like Fuentes and, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene, lady of Jewish space lasers, she is a vessel for pretty rank and very open anti-Semitism. And that kind of boiled up at AmericaFest, the Turning Point USA mega event, when Ben Shapiro, who's a right wing Jewish commentator, attacked Candace Owens for spreading conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk's death. That's a short recap for anyone who's missed out on this. And then Candace Owens recorded a reply to Ben Shapiro. And what really struck me, and that was the moment why I thought of you, not of you, but of your research. You know what I mean? Was the reaction of Candace Owens. Can you give us a short recap of what happened and why it was so notable to you?

Seth: To which—what was the book that she held up? I'm trying to imagine.

Annika: She held up an English translation of Der Talmud Jude, The Talmudic Jew, written by August Rohling, written in 1878. It's the kind of example of a very specific German Catholic brand of very rank anti-Semitism. The Nazis referenced Rohling's lies later on. And it basically claims that in the Talmud, Jews are being taught to lie, kill, pillage, quote unquote, "unbelievers" to advance their evil cause. That's basically what's in the book. And Candace Owens, with a cross in the background, holds up an English translation. I tried to find the edition that she had. It went into my collection of cursed screenshots that I harbor, and I could only find it in what I can only call a neo-Nazi press that seems to be operating online only. That's the only place where I could find it. So that's kind of the stuff she's marinating in.

Seth: Yeah. And there's, you know, this whole really well elaborated world of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that go back to that book. But you know, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are the most famous and influential in American political culture. And so there's the—this is where, you know, right wing conspiracy theories are always kind of built upon a substrate of anti-Semitism, right? And even if the anti-Semitism isn't explicit and fully surfaced, you know, the George Soros conspiracy theories are the greatest example of the ways that it becomes, "Oh, I didn't know George Soros was Jewish. I just meant that he's rich, right? And he gives all this money, and he has so much control over the media and over Hollywood and over the government and over higher education, and he is so invested in helping these weird degenerate groups like LGBTQ people and people of color and so on." And it's the same story about, you know, the communist Jews of the 1950s and 60s funding the civil rights movement and then funding the gay rights movement and so on. It's just an updated version of it. But I think for a lot of the people who buy into those conspiracy theories and find them compelling, they don't necessarily have opinions about individual Jews, right, or have a really well developed—they just, you know, they're worried about international bankers, and they heard something about the Rothschild family back in the day, and you know, the creation of the Federal Reserve. Weren't they involved with it too? And so it's this kind of ether of half-understood stories that are about a conspiracy of people who are in some way strange or other, or not fully American and not fully Christian, who mean harm to the country and are trying to sort of extract wealth from it and to change it, really permanently change its culture and values. And so that version of that anti-Semitic story is the same story that Walter Huss believed, that Joe McCarthy sort of was telling in the 1950s, Elizabeth Dilling was telling in the 1930s and 40s. And so the resurgence of it, you know, it's kind of tapping into this almost kind of subconscious, kind of deep well of American conspiracism that the John Birch Society helped foster and so on. And so it's almost like there are buttons out there to be pushed. They know they can push these buttons, and if they do, certain people will respond to them, and they're kind of like, well, like they've been beta tested. Like they've been tested in the shop, and they work. If you tell these stories, they will work. And there used to be some degree of self-restraint, I think, amongst folks on the right. It's like, "Yeah, yeah. I know if I like talk about Haitians in Springfield eating pets, and if I do the blood libel story about an ethnic minority, I know that'll probably work, and people will respond to it, but like, that's kind of Nazi stuff. I shouldn't do that. Like, that's just not appropriate in a democracy." All of that sense of self-restraint is gone. And so what we have are just these very predictable, well-worn kind of structures, rhetorical structures and narrative structures. And those are operating alongside what's currently happening geopolitically in Israel with Gaza. And what that issue does is it creates a kind of like on-ramp, especially for younger people who don't have a lot of historical background or political background, and they feel an immediate sense of kind of outrage about what they see happening in Gaza. They are critical of the State of Israel and what it's doing. And then there are all these people waiting with these neo-Nazi kind of stories about how, "Oh no, this isn't about the current people in charge of the State of Israel. This is about Jews in general." And then it becomes this kind of key that, to them, unlocks all kinds of things about American culture. Why are schools speaking positively about trans people? They didn't do that 15 years ago. Why is that? I wonder. The same people that killed Charlie Kirk—why are they doing this? And so the COVID conspiracy theories, all of this stuff just feeds into it. And because social media just like incentivizes and algorithmically powers these kind of stories, and then because the leadership class of the Republican Party has absolutely no restraint and no compunction about telling these stories and amplifying them, and because the owner of the world's biggest social media platform, Elon Musk, actually seems to believe this stuff, or maybe doesn't even believe it, but he's just recirculating it. It just creates this perfect condition for these really, you know, historically toxic kind of dangerous political narratives to find their way into just mainstream discourse, such that, you know, young people are listening to Nick Fuentes. A lot of them will say like, "Oh, well, I don't agree with everything he says." You know, they find him funny, or they find ways to not like fully buy in, but they're still kind of like taking in all of it, and it all just feels to them like normal discourse.

Annika: There was a second moment at the Turning Point AmericaFest. I think, if I remember correctly, you wrote a thread about this. It was the combination of sort of the Candace Owens reply video, and that the USS Liberty was a topic that came up more than once, if I remember correctly. Can you maybe just shortly explain to our listeners why that sent off alarm bells in your head?

Seth: Yeah, yeah. So the USS Liberty is a real event that happened in the 1960s when an American ship was torpedoed by the Israeli army. And I think the general understanding is that this was like an accident, and was a mistake and was a bad thing that happened. I think 60-some American sailors died in this event. So it's a real thing that really did happen. And there are lots of different ways to then metabolize what this means. So for most folks, the way this has gotten metabolized is like, "Oh, well, that was a really terrible international incident in which American sailors lost their lives, and that's a real shame, and we should honor, you know, the service of those servicemen." Like this terrible thing. However, this event in the world of the far right takes on far greater meaning because this, of course, is part of the story of Jewish perfidy, right, and of the horrific atrocities that the Jewish people have inflicted upon white Christian Americans. And it becomes one piece of a much broader conspiratorial story about how the Jews are our enemy and need to be vanquished and destroyed. And so it's kind of one of these events. I'm trying to think of a kind of parallel. Like there's history, which is what happened, and then there's memory, what we remember, right? And to most Americans, they do not remember the USS Liberty. It's not—it's an event. People can look it up. They can go to Wikipedia, and maybe they would know about it. And if you are related to someone who was affected by it, then you would know about it. But if you don't have any personal connection to that event, it's generally not something that most Americans would know about. But if you are a neo-Nazi, you absolutely know about that event, and you have read multiple books about it, and you can recite chapter and verse about it, and it's like a huge topic of conversation and debate. And so when at TPUSA, suddenly they're debating about the USS Liberty event, I was like, "Okay, it's not a good sign." Because in general, most Americans are like, "Well, this isn't really—I mean, okay, fine, we can talk about it, but why are we going to spend a lot of time talking about it at a political convention that is about 2026 and the future of American politics?" The USS Liberty is not an event that's all that relevant arguably. To a certain type of person on the right, the USS Liberty is a very significant event, and it's kind of part of a way that people are socialized into the far right. It becomes a story. It becomes something that you have to read about and become educated about. And, I mean, another really complicating factor here is that there are survivors of the USS Liberty, and there's an official organization that's connected to it, and that organization has been basically kind of taken over by sort of pretty far right people who are using it. Yeah, so they're using their own experience—some of these, and they don't speak for all the survivors. It's been a huge controversy within the community of people who do descend from that. But it's basically become this opportunistic thing that a group of kind of far right activists have now started using because they perceive that like on the TPUSA influencer right wing world, there's a real interest in kind of talking about it and bringing this story back into public conversation, discussion in a way that serves the needs, right, of a very particular brand of anti-Semitic American politics.

Annika: Yeah, God. Yeah, really rough.

Seth: It's just a bad sign. Like with someone talking about Talmudic Jews, or someone mentions the USS Liberty—like, this is the sort of thing where it's like, if you see that in someone's timeline, it's probably a bad sign.

Annika: It's a really bad sign usually. Yeah, speaking of bad signs, as we're nearing the end of our conversation, I wanted to touch on one last topic. In recent months, I would say we've seen an emergence of talk on the right, the debate, or the attempt to end birthright citizenship, as the context of why this is happening, about what is being called on the right, the quote-unquote "heritage American," basically the idea that there are tiers to being a real American, or tiers that citizenship is somehow tiered. In order to be a real American, it's not enough to be a citizen, to be an American citizen. And I wanted to dive into that shortly before we end the episode. In your research, where have you seen this idea pop up? What are the historical roots of this idea? And who on the right do you see talking about this at the moment?

Seth: Yeah, so this is really like blood and soil stuff, right? And to me, it's really redolent of the second Klan from the 1920s, right, from that era of immigration restrictionism, and this idea, you know, 100% Americanism. And it's this idea that white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans are the heritage real Americans. And in the 1920s, Catholics were perceived as foreigners, Jews were perceived as foreigners, Italians, Polish people, et cetera. And so that was the context of the early 20th century. What's new now is that a lot of people talking about heritage Americanism are themselves the descendants of the immigrants who were pilloried as un-American in the 1920s. Stephen Miller is a perfect example of this, right? So Stephen Miller talks about heritage Americans. His great-grandparents were Jewish immigrants who were regarded as, you know, dangers, threats to America. And so part of what's changed in terms of the context is what we might call like the role of white ethnicity in American culture. So in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, there was this real kind of resurgence and an interest in Polishness, being Polish American, Italian. They're all those movies about the mob or, you know, kind of families, these ethnic, white, ethnic families. And this was part of this whole "America is a land of immigrants" story that we told ourselves in the age of Reagan. And this was happening in the context of the reopening of immigration in 1965. Between 1924 and 1965, there were very few immigrants to America in those years, especially from non-white countries. And then in 1965, immigration's opened up again. And so the demographic changes that have happened since 1965 happened in the context of—at first they're happening in the context of most white Americans identifying as immigrants, as the children and grandchildren of immigrants, right? But what's shifted now is that those same people are seeing themselves as heritage Americans, over and against more recent immigrants. And so that shift, it feels very unstable. It feels very heretical to those of us who are old enough to have been raised in the era when "America, the land of immigrants" was just taken for granted as a story. But I think what it shows is that even behind that nation of immigrants narrative from the 60s, 70s and 80s, there was an implicit kind of anti-Blackness and an implicit whiteness to it, right? That what made someone an ethnic American was that you were Polish or Italian or Irish. And so the implicit anti-Blackness behind that, I think, has become more apparent. And so what that heritage Americanism means is just whiteness, right? It's this particular configuration of whiteness that is genealogically descended from the Klan in the 20s. But, you know, the Klan in the 20s, there were plenty of white people who they hated, who were people who today we think of as white, right? Catholics or—

Annika: Yeah.

Seth: And so that part has sort of dropped away, and it's just become a kind of vague sense of whiteness that there's this category—

Annika: I find it very interesting that JD Vance seems to, in an attempt to secure sort of his position as, I don't know, the crown prince of MAGA, or whatever he would like to call himself, that he tries to style himself as the new face of this very, to me, very specifically blood and soil coded nationalism in the US. Like I was at NatCon in 2024. I think there was a week or two before his nomination, that he was going to run as VP, was announced. And I remember very distinctly he tried out a paragraph that he would then later include in his acceptance speech at the GOP convention, and it was this very odd bit about how he wanted his children to be buried in a cemetery in Kentucky where his forefathers bled and died. And I sat—I remember sitting there thinking that makes the little hairs on the back of my neck kind of stand up again. As a German historian, that makes my ears prick up. And the fact that JD Vance is Catholic, and as a Catholic sort of advancing this narrative, I find fascinating from a work standpoint, and kind of terrifying from a human standpoint. But it's kind of interesting to see.

Seth: Yeah, well, as the white nationalists in his coalition will point out in response to him, he has a son named Vivek, which is not a heritage American name by their standards. By my standards, that's a perfectly American name. But by the standards that JD Vance seems to be signaling to or agreeing with, there are people who would regard that type of name as not a legitimately, as not a 100% American name. It's his own child, and so that's where the just the obvious incoherence and contradictoriness of it—I'm not quite, you know, it feels like an easy dunk to say, like, "Haha, JD Vance," you're like, or "Haha, JD Vance, you know, your son is named Vivek" because, I think, to his mind, and this has always been the case, that like this is the way whiteness works. You can always generally include some people in it. This is where American Jews were given an honorary whiteness pass, right, at some point. But that pass is always at risk of being revoked, as long as we're living within a regime that is invested in an exclusionary version of what Americanness means, and associating Americanness with a type of whiteness. And so this is where, like, all the talk of like Western civilization or our culture, becomes a way that people who aren't, you know, typically white or aren't exactly Christian in exactly the same way can feel like they can be a part of it. So Ben Shapiro can talk about the Judeo-Christian Western civilization and feel like all the people in his coalition see him and agree with him, and we're all on the same team here, right? But a lot of those folks using that same language of Western civilization see Jews like Ben Shapiro as their existential enemy, not as part of it. And so that instability there in that coalition, it's going to be interesting to see where this goes and how it all plays out. And I really hope—I mean, that felt very dark, like for Ben Shapiro. It was brave of him to go there and to say what he said. And, you know, he didn't capitulate. He spoke very forcefully and clearly. But it seemed to me like he lost the day. In general, he did, yeah. I don't know what that means for him down the road in terms of his place on the right, but it doesn't seem to be heading anywhere good for him or sort of other American Jews.

Annika: Yeah, well, Seth, thank you for going down this very dark path with me and sharing all of these insights. Thank you listeners for listening to the Sunday interview at Straight White American Jesus. I'm Annika Wachsmann, author of America's Kriegers and Die Branschlifter. You can find me at Ardent Historian on Bluesky. That's easier to spell than my actual last name, fewer consonants. You can check our website for the content schedule and make sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date with everything on SWAJ and Axis Mundi Media. And before we finish up, Seth, can you tell us where listeners can connect with you and your work? Where can they find you?

Seth: Sure? So I'm on Bluesky. I post there, and then I have a blog that is Rightlandia, that is on Ghost. So if you just Google Rightlandia—that is my too clever by half title for this project—and I periodically will post some longer pieces there, where I'll include archival bits and so on from my research.

Annika: All right, I'm going to ask Seth one more question about DHS pandering to white nationalists in their recruitment posts. Subscribers stick around, and if you are not a subscriber, today is the best time to sign up. See the show notes for how to get access. So the last question of the day, I know that you've been looking at DHS recruitment posts as most of us, I'm guessing, in our line of work, and, you know, posts from the Department of Labor have also been notable, let's say, because they've all been using from the subtle to the pretty overt white supremacist codes and white nationalist references. I was wondering, is there, if you look back on the first year of Trump 2.0, is there one or two that stood out particularly to you, and who do you think they're pandering to with this? Who's the core audience?

Seth: Yeah. So there was the one that—I can't remember the exact—it's a reference to a song that is very popular in neo-Nazi circles. And I think, "Oh, we'll have a home again." Yes. And that's the kind of thing where it's like, you know, it's kind of, if you know, you know, kind of wink where it's very clear who they're winking to. I think that's also very much intended to trigger then people like us, who will then talk about this in public, and then they can be like, "Haha." And so it's not like they were doing it thinking they weren't going to get caught. They were doing it, and part of it was to wink to the actual neo-Nazis. I don't know whether the people posting it actually are themselves—I mean, they obviously know about this.

Annika: I mean, I don't think you just stumble upon Pine Tree Riot by chance. That is an acapella group that I think Hannah Gais from the Southern Poverty Law Center posted is actively affiliated with Patriot Front. That's open Nazi stuff. So much that I think a DHS spokesperson denied that DHS had posted the song under the post, which is a lie, not surprisingly. But yeah, that is very open Nazi stuff.

Seth: It is. But like, as we were saying earlier, like we're living in an environment where, like, it's okay. Nobody cares. Like it doesn't matter. Like you just do it, and it's not like you're gonna get fired. There are not gonna be any consequences for it. And so we're also living in an era of incredibly irony-poisoned, you know, online kind of "LOL, nothing matters" kind of politics where you can simultaneously post a Nazi thing and also be like, "Oh, but, you know"—or you can—there was this great story in New York Magazine about TPUSA at the University of Mississippi. You saw this? But one of the details that comes out in there is that the head of TPUSA at the University of Mississippi is listening to Nick Fuentes like hours every week. And according to her, she's like, "Oh, I don't agree with everything, you know. I just think it's funny. I think he's funny." So this is a situation where, you know, the head of TPUSA is listening to a guy who says he loves Hitler, who has said the Holocaust didn't really happen, who, you know, is in favor of deporting black people from America—all the horrific things we all know. And, you know. So this woman can simultaneously think of herself as just like a good, wholesome Christian conservative, and be listening to this guy who says the most like horrific fascistic things. And who knows how much of it she believes or doesn't believe. I take her word on it that she probably doesn't agree with all of it, but she doesn't have enough of a sense of decency to be like, "That is horrific fascist crap. I don't want to have that in my ear, you know. I don't want to have that in my room." I imagine if she had a Jewish roommate, she probably wouldn't be listening to Nick Fuentes out loud. Hopefully. So this is where you know, and I'm sure our listeners are familiar with Jean-Paul Sartre's point about fascists and their attitude, or the anti-Semites and their attitude towards truth, right? They don't care. I mean, they could be kidding. They could be serious. It doesn't matter. It's all about power, right? And so in that sense, I think what these social media accounts for DHS or Department of Labor are doing is they're just enjoying posting this really transgressive white nationalist stuff that they know is, you know, breaking the norms of what America is supposed to depict itself to itself. They also know that a significant number of like people on the right in America will get it and will agree with it and understand it and love it. They also know that they can't just wholly own it publicly, because they also know that a significant number of people who will look at this will receive it as just like good wholesome Americana, right? They'll see the photos of 19th century small towns in New England with churches and people going to church for Christmas in the winter. Isn't that—it's like Currier and Ives, right. It has this kind of nostalgic feel to it that today kind of codes as Nazi within particular circles, but they also know that it doesn't code that way in many circles. And that's also part of the project of this stuff, is to hold together this coalition of really avowed white nationalists and people who just, you know, have been soaked and saturated in America's historical culture of white supremacy, but also are the sorts of people who would eagerly go to a Candace Owens event and want to get their picture with her to prove how much they don't hate black people, or the extent to which they really want people to know that they really admire Enrique Tarrio because he's not white. And so it's that version of a kind of conservative culture in which people simultaneously are activated and respond positively to kind of white supremacist messaging, but also very authentically want to think of themselves as people who are not white supremacists.

Annika: Seth, thank you so much for coming on the pod. We really appreciate it. Guys, check out his work and tune in to the next episode.