Antisemitism and the Genealogy of American anti-leftism
Or; what I mean when I say that antisemitism was not just an unfortunate character flaw that Walter Huss had, but was the organizing principle of his entire world view
I first learned about Oregon conservative activist Walter Huss (1918-2006) in 2021 when I found an approximately 100-page collection of his early 1960s pamphlets and newspapers in a digital database. All I knew about him at the time was that he was a Portland-based, conservative anti-Communist activist who in 1978 became the chair of the Oregon Republican Party. What I saw in those digitized materials looked like standard, John Bircher right wing content in which anyone to the left of Barry Goldwater was suspected of being either a Communist or a Communist sympathizer. But one detail stood out to me, and it seemed to point to something even more radical and sinister.
A copy of Walter Huss’s Portland Newspaper from June 24, 1965 that was digitized as part of the Hall-Hoag Collection at Brown University.
The copy of Huss’s 1965 newspaper that appeared in this digital database had been owned by a man named Joseph Dilys who was the very normal type of person who owned a stamp that said “Communism is Jewish.” “Hmmm, seems bad,” I thought. Little did I know.
With summer approaching I was eager to do some digging into the 57 boxes of Walter Huss’s papers that were held at the University of Oregon. I had a hunch that maybe this “Communism is Jewish” stamp was just the tip of the iceberg. Huss’s papers had only been minimally processed and cataloged so I didn’t have much to go on before traveling to Eugene to look at them, but I did notice that Huss had two folders labeled “Jews.” Again, seemed bad, but I didn’t want to rush to judgment. He was an ordained minister, so maybe he just had a scholarly interest in other religions? I couldn’t wait to take a look at those “Jews” folders to see what was in there.
Now, you may recall that there was a global pandemic raging in 2021. Because of this, the University of Oregon (like many institutions) had closed their reading rooms to off-campus visitors. So my curiosity about Huss’s “Jews” folders would go unsatisfied until mid-August when I was finally able to visit the archive in person. In the intervening three months, while I waited for the UO reading room to open, I read every newspaper article I could find about Huss (of which there were several hundreds). He was often identified as a “far right” figure who expressed some “bigotry,” but nowhere was he publicly described as an antisemite, let alone as the sort of extremist who would be a knowing associate of a neo-Nazi like Joseph Dilys. So in the name of interpretive restraint, I proceeded with my research on Huss with the assumption that he was most likely a normie Christian conservative whose newspaper had happened to have gotten picked up by an unsavory character to his right.
What I found when I was finally able to examine Huss’s “Jews” folder was about as bad as I could have imagined. It was basically the “greatest hits” of 20th century fascist and neo-Nazi antisemitism, much of it annotated in Huss’s handwriting. The oldest materials were from the 1940s, the newest from the 1990s. He’d been collecting and avidly reading antisemitic, Holocaust denying, and neo-Nazi literature his entire life. Those “Jews” folders were a real labor of love…or I guess I should say “a real labor of hate.”
Here’s the key point about Huss’s antisemitism: it wasn’t just some character flaw that he suffered from, it was the organizing principle of his politics. It was his most cherished conspiracy theory that explained everything he thought was wrong in the world—it explained why “Negroes” (the only term he ever used to refer to Black Americans) were so “uppity” lately, it explained why “the gays” were allowed to so aggressively promote their “agenda,” it explained why Huss and other Christian Patriots like him were treated so unfairly by the media, it explained why egghead professors supposedly got away with teaching students to hate Christianity and America, it explained why “they” were planning to confiscate your guns, it explained why the UN was part of a New World Order conspiracy to dissolve national sovereignty and institute worldwide communism, and it explained why Hollywood made so many “liberal” films that depicted Black people, gays, and Jews sympathetically while being critical of the good Christian defenders of Western Civilization who righteously fought back against the “special pleading” of these “anti-American interest groups.”
Huss, like many of his fellow American conservatives past and present, understood his and the nation’s existential enemy to be every American associated with “the left.” To him, every person to his left was either a Communist or an enabler of Communism. Now recall Dilys’s “Communism is Jewish” stamp. The “Communist conspiracy” of “radical leftists” that so many Americans on the right defined themselves in opposition to, was, in the mind of Walter Huss and many others, indistinguishable from “the Jewish conspiracy.” This may sound mind-numbingly ignorant (and it is), but it’s also important to remember that Huss deeply believed it to be true and he had folders filled with literature that “proved” it. His antisemitism wasn’t just unreflective bigotry or a gulf of ignorance, it was an intricately elaborated and substantiated world view that rested upon a mountain of lying books filled with false information and easily-disprovable ideas. He was not some fringe loner, rather he was part of a fairly substantial political subculture of people on the right edge of the Republican Party who regarded themselves as sufficiently enlightened (or “red-pilled” they’d say today) so that they could see the real “truths” that the (((elites))) in DC, Hollywood, and the media were hiding from you.
Here’s just one representative sample from Huss’s “Jews” folder to give you a sense of how this conspiratorial world view served to supposedly explain everything. As you read this flier (published in 1990 by a press that specialized in white nationalism and Holocaust denial) you’ll probably recognize some contemporary Fox News or MAGA talking points. Sure, the sharper edges have been sanded off today, but the basic structure of the white Christian victimization conspiracy theory is pretty much the same. [Note, the flier starts on the far right panel of the first image, continues on to the 4 panels in the second image, and then finishes with the 3 panels on the left side of the first image. The blue highlights were put there by Huss.]
“Leftists/Jews are the real racists because they encourage everyone to hate white people.”
“Leftists/Jews in schools and the media are engaged in Marxist psychological warfare that teaches white people to hate ourselves, hate the beautiful free country we built, and hate our glorious religious and cultural traditions.”
“The leftists/Jews who control the media are hiding information from you about rampant Black criminality and leftist immorality because they want to focus the public’s critical attention on white Christians.”
Those familiar talking points we encounter in that far right extremist publication from 1990 would have been very familiar to Walter Huss, they comprised the water he swam in. Now consider this report (published this week) about how an influential network of well-funded and well-connected conservative activists imagines how “the left” works today in the 21st century.
You may notice how this 2023 story involves a culturally-alien billionaire secretly (and effectively) plotting to brainwash an entire nation of innocent children with the help of culturally-alien intellectuals, and culturally-alien people in "Hollywood" and "the media." So yes, they don’t mention “the joos” once, but the actors in and logic of this absurd conspiracy theory are virtually identical to the actors in and logic of Huss’s “Communism is Jewish” understanding of the world.
This sort of conspiratorial antisemitism is so deeply grooved into the political culture of the right that it doesn’t need to invoke “the joos” to feel like it has explanatory power. The people who find it compelling do so not because they are antisemites necessarily, but because they’ve become accustomed to understanding cultural changes they’re uncomfortable with as obviously part of a shadowy, intentional conspiracy on the part of a network of “globalist elites” to impose their “radical leftist” values on us, the good innocent Christian Patriots who comprise “the real Americans.”
Immersing myself in Walter Huss’s papers has made me attuned to how these sorts of implicitly antisemitic conspiracy theories informed the “Christian Patriot” political culture that Huss helped nurture inside the Oregon Republican Party from the 1960s up into the 21st century. There were scores of people with whom Huss could converse honestly about how “the joos” were the source of all of the nation’s problems, but he was smart enough to know that he needed to dial back such talk when speaking to a more public audience. But underneath the conservative movement’s paranoid (and inaccurate) vision of an all-powerful left that was advancing a unified Marxist playbook through their control of the media, the universities, Hollywood, and DC; was the same old, antisemitic story that has informed every fascist movement in US history.