A window into the media diet of today's grassroots Oregon Republican Party

On this Rightlandia substack I mostly write about Walter Huss, the man behind the grassroots far right insurgency that slowly took over the historically moderate Oregon Republican Party from the 1960s into the early 2000s. Reconstructing that history matters, in part, because it helps us understand the origins of the political culture of today’s GOP in Oregon and nationwide. While I devote most of my time to researching the history of the American right and the GOP, I occasionally check in on the current iteration of the OR GOP. What follows is a quick snapshot of the alternate media ecosystem it inhabits.

Walter Huss’s archive has taught me a lot about his distinctive media diet, which consisted of just about anything that was at least two clicks to the right of National Review (the foundational magazine of modern American conservatism, and a magazine Huss appeared to have had exactly zero interest in or familiarity with). He read neo-Nazi newsletters from Western Front in Southern California, he devoured The Spotlight published by the “populists” at the Liberty Lobby who were actually closeted neo-Nazis, he read Gerald LK Smith’s The Cross and the Flag, he read dozens of other Christian Nationalist and Christian Identity newsletters, he read literature put out by radically anti-government and anti-tax Posse Comitatus and Sovereign Citizen groups, he read David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People newsletter, he read the John Birch Society’s Review of the News, and he also read The Oregonian.

As we see in this newsletter, sent out last month by the current chair of the Marion County GOP, the media diet he recommends for his fellow Republicans in many ways feels like a 2023 version of Walter Huss’s, only minus anything as scandalously left-wing as The Oregonian. The featured highlight this month was the podcast from the far right outlet, The Federalist. This is the closest thing to mainstream media this person recommended, and if you’re familiar with the Federalist, you’ll know that’s saying something.

When you click on the “Media Resources” tab in that newsletter for additional recommendations, this is what you see.

It’s understandable why someone with a media diet like this thinks the world is about to end and that the Democrats are both Nazis and Communists who are on the verge of burning your church down, confiscating all of your guns, forcing you to get an abortion, and then putting you in a gulag staffed by sadistic drag queens who will force feed you the blood of sex trafficked children.

You’re probably familiar with (Glenn Beck’s) The Blaze, the (Dan) Bongino Report, (Ben Shapiro’s) Daily Wire, and (Tucker Carlson founded) Daily Caller—all Limbaugh-descended rage farms that live a few steps to the right of the conspicuously not-mentioned Fox News. The Survival Mom is a site run by the nation’s leading Christian Prepper. New Discourses is run by failed mathematician turned amateur philosopher and cultural critic James Lindsay who travels the TPUSA speaker circuit ranting about the authoritarian menace of Cultural Marxism in a way that is best described as “an uninformed person’s idea of what an informed person sounds like.” Lindsay has also dabbled, as most Cultural Marxism obsessives do, with antisemitism.

NW Observer and Oregon Catalyst are local conservative websites that publish partisan pieces written by Republican activists. Revolver news is the mysteriously funded, pro-Putin brainchild of Darren Beattie, one of Tucker Carlson’s favorite intellectuals who was fired from the Trump White House for attending a white nationalist conference and then was immediately hired as a speechwriter by Matt Gaetz. So yeah, you get the idea.

Zerohedge and PJ Media are far right/libertarian conspiracy sites known for publishing inaccurate and even straight up fabricated stories that serve their predetermined ideological ends. Just the News is run by John Solomon, an old school anti-Clinton conspiracy monger from the 90s who has now shifted his business model to be a pro-Trump conspiracy monger.

I encourage you to browse those sites for 20 minutes or so and then imagine how such a media diet might shape your perception of the reality you theoretically share with the other humans alive in 2023.

But wait, there are more recommendations!

The River Roundtable is hosted by the pastor of one of Salem’s Christian Nationalist churches. They were the original hosts for Mike Flynn’s “Reawaken America” tour when it came to Salem in 2022, but it was then moved to a larger venue.

The River Church also has been involved with events like the one below that featured prominent Proud Boys (Dan Tooze) and members of the 3% militia. Mike Nearman is the Republican legislator who let right wing protesters into the closed OR state capitol building in December 2020 and was expelled from the House for that action. Jo Rae Perkins is the Qanon advocate who has been the OR GOP candidate for US Senate the last two election cycles. Rob Taylor is a radio host from Southern Oregon whose show makes the stylings of national AM radio figures like Dennis Prager, Mark Levin, Charlie Kirk, or Seb Gorka seem tame in comparison.

Now let’s talk about the Constitution IQ project. This organization promotes a Christian Nationalist/Constitutional Sheriff/Sovereign Citizen sort of gloss on the Constitution, as reflected in the list of resources they have on their website.

Founders Online is excellent, but other than that, this is not a list of sources that any historian of the founding era would call “substantive” or “reliable.” Here we see James Lindsay’s New Discourses again along with David Barton’s old school Christian Nationalist organization, WallBuilders. PragerU, Heritage, TPUSA and Hillsdale you’re probably familiar with. The Tuttle Twins is a set of far right “history” books for children marketed to conservative homeschooling parents who want to indoctrinate, er, I mean, educate their children.

One name on this list you might not know is KrisAnne Hall. She’s been invited to speak by groups like the John Birch Society and the neo-Confederate League of the South, and she has a long-standing affinity with the Bundy clan. The OR GOP, and especially the Marion County GOP, is a HUGE fan of hers. She’s spoken at Salem’s River Church multiple times as well. The screenshot below is from 21 February 2021.

---

Lest this little window into the fringe media diet of a contemporary Republican activist make you feel like we’re in a historically unprecedented moment, check out this list of the most widely read “conservative” media outlets of the mid 1960’s. You’ll notice how the National Review (the least far right of all of the outlets mentioned here and probably the only one you’ll recognize unless you have a freakish interest in right wing politics like I do) comes out looking like a fairly minor player in this world.

By my count, every week (or in some cases, month) over 457,000 pieces of openly white nationalist and/or antisemitic periodical literature went through the US mails in 1966. I got to that number by adding up the circulation for the Liberty Letter, The Defender, The Councilor, The Cross and the Flag, The Citizen, Common Sense, and American Mercury. That is, periodicals that were TO THE RIGHT of the John Birch Society's "American Opinion." If we add up all of the not-explicitly-racist-or-antisemitic far right publications that trafficked in empirically-challenged conspiracy theories, we can add an additional 433,000 to that weekly/monthly circulation total for 1966. I did not count National Review in that total.

So while the National Review was reaching about 97,000 households in 1966, periodicals to the right of NR were reaching almost 900,000 households. And this doesn't even factor in the many hundreds of AM radio stations that aired weekly programs by those far right outlets. This was the media universe that Walter Huss inhabited and which he contributed to with his own newspaper called The Eagle and his own AM radio show that was broadcast on seven AM stations across Oregon in the early 1960s.

So while the current media landscape is quite different from that of the mid-1960s in a variety of ways, it’s incorrect to assume that all Americans back in the 1960s inhabited a shared reality in which they got their news from local newspapers and Walter Cronkite. The self-described “conservatives” on the farther right edge of the political spectrum were served by a wide array of pretty kooky periodicals that largely flew under the radar of the mainstream press and mainstream politicians, and depicted themselves as truthful antidotes to the lies the liberal media was trying to brainwash you with.

One of the major shifts that’s happened since the 1960s is that the far right media ecosystem has come to play an increasingly significant role in setting the policy and messaging agenda for the GOP. When Walter Huss recommended his fellow Republicans read far right outlets like The Spotlight or Human Events in the 1970s, his fellow Republicans like Mark Hatfield or Tom McCall would have found this to be a ludicrous idea, largely because they thought such outlets would hive readers off into a bizarro alternate universe that would render them unable to speak effectively to and/or recruit people who didn’t already inhabit that bizarro universe. The days of such Republicans are long over by now, and show no sign of returning.