Down the Derp State Rabbit Hole with the Chair of the Marion County (OR) GOP

Cleon Skousen's conspiracy theories, Chinese commandos invading from Mexico, and other oldies but goodies from the right wing playbook

The Marion County (OR) GOP has a particularly active chair and so I check in on his Facebook timeline every now and then to see what county-level GOP leaders in Oregon are thinking and talking about these days. Here’s a check-in I did this summer that analyzes the sort of media this person consumes and promotes. Here’s a 3 minute video he posted earlier this year about Darwinism, eugenics, socialism, communism, and public education that provides a representative glimpse of his general approach to politics and history.

This month’s installment of the Marion County GOP newsletter features the chair’s endorsement of the "timely" 1981 book by Cleon Skousen (1913-2006), The 5000 Year Leap.

Skousen is an iconic figure on the Mormon far right whose works are greatly admired, “worshipped” one might almost say, by folks like the Bundy family and Utah Senator Mike Lee. Skousen’s apocalyptically conspiratorial writings were given a new lease on life by Glenn Beck in the Tea Party era, and are currently being promoted by far right groups like Moms for Liberty and Moms for America. Despite Skousen’s canonical status amongst a certain subset of people on the Christian Nationalist, conspiracy-inclined, and/or Mormon far right, his works have never made much of a dent in mainstream (or even just normal “conservative”) political discourse. If you spend a few minutes reading those works you will quickly get a sense of why that is.

In the 1960s, even quite conservative public figures like Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, Jr. kept Skousen at arms length. J. Bracken Lee, the right wing mayor of Salt Lake City, called Skousen “an incipient Hitler” in 1971. In October 2009 conservative commentator Rod Dreher—who is now a very far right, Soros-obsessed, pro-Tucker Carlson and pro-Viktor Orban anti-globalist—wrote this op-ed mocking Glenn Beck for endorsing the “ooga-booga world” conjured in Skousen’s writings. Dreher warned his fellow conservatives that following the lead of an “unhinged buffoon” like Glenn Beck or Cleon Skousen would be the death knell for the GOP. That was just one of many things Dreher got wrong in this column.

A search for “Cleon Skousen” in the pages of William F. Buckley’s National Review, the most important outlet for American conservative thought from the 1950s until the Trump era, turns up exactly one hit since 1975, and that was a paid advertisement for one of Skousen’s books.¹ For contrast, in those same years (1975 to the present) the National Review mentioned “Milton Friedman” 643 times, “Kevin Phillips” 214 times, “Joseph Sobran” 679 times, and “Pat Buchanan” 655 times. In the world of “respectable,” National Review-style conservatism (which was hardly averse to accommodating quite far right figures), Cleon Skousen was considered a nonentity, an anti-intellectual embarrassment to conservatism who was best ignored.

The Skousen renaissance of the past 15 years is just one of innumerable examples one could give of how the guardrails on the conservative movement have plunged into the sea, never to be seen again. But while Skousen had been persona non grata in the world of the sorts of conservatives who read the National Review, he has long been a persistent and well-known figure in other self-identified “conservative” political networks that floated a few clicks off the right shoulder of the National Review crew. It’s that ultra-right variant of “conservatism” ca. 1955-2010 that formed the seedbed for the Trumpian Republican party of today, a party in which the Skousen-admiring chair of the current Marion County GOP feels so at home.

And now comes the portion of the newsletter where I reveal the shocking news that one great admirer of Cleon Skousen’s from the 1950s into the early 2000s was none other than [drum roll please] Walter Huss, the white Christian supremacist who became chair of the OR GOP in 1978. When Huss needed a lawyer to represent him at a city council hearing in 1961, Cleon’s brother Leroy flew to Oregon to do the job. Huss frequently mentioned Cleon’s writings in materials he produced. To take just one example, below is a leaflet Huss produced in 1971 where he cites Skousen as the inspiration and justification for his plan for a grassroots, far right takeover of the OR GOP that would “THROW THE RASCALS OUT.” This was the very strategy that eventually resulted in Huss’s shocking victory in the 1978 state election for GOP chair.

I talk at greater length about Huss’s plans for a Skousen-inspired, right wing insurgency inside the Republican Party in this earlier edition of Rightlandia.

Walter Huss's plan to take back America for God, one precinct at a time, Part 1 of 2

Alhough Skousen’s writings were rarely mentioned in mainstream publications until the Tea Party era, they circulated widely for years in Christian home schooling curricula and in the ecosystem of conspiratorial periodicals that far right activists like Walter Huss consumed. One example of that sort of publication is the Oregon Observer from the late 1990s that was published by Edward Snook, who is still in the right wing news business. When Huss decided to run for Governor in 1998 as an independent he took out a full page ad in the April 1998 edition of the Oregon Observer. [Spoiler alert: Huss, who was 80 years old at the time, was NOT elected governor of Oregon in 1998.]

Below is one of Skousen’s most memed pieces (excerpted from his 1958 book The Naked Communist) as it appeared a few pages earlier in that same, April 1998 edition of the Oregon Observer.

Though Skousen claimed to have been "an assistant to J. Edgar Hoover,” he was a fairly low level clerk and then a rank-and-file agent in Southern California during his 15 years with the FBI. There is no evidence that Hoover ever regarded Skousen as a close and trusted associate. In other words, Skousen was a far right fabulist who egregiously stretched the truth in order to inspire more trust and devotion from a group of credulous and paranoid reactionaries…I know, shocking.

Fast forward to December 23, 2020 (2 weeks before J6) when Donald Trump tweeted out an Epoch Times video entitled “The Plot to Steal America” that used Skousen’s 1958 list of “45 commie goals” as “evidence” that Biden and the deep state had stolen the election from Trump in order to further the ongoing Communist conspiracy to destroy America. The pieces of the Communist puzzle were coming together at last, and just as Skousen had predicted it 62 years earlier! Now that’s what I’d call “playing the long game.” [For more on the story behind this video and the mysterious jewelry salesman/conspiracy theorist Seth Holehouse who is the talking head in it, see this piece by investigative journalist Will Sommer.]

Other pieces that appeared in the Oregon Observer in 1998 give a flavor of the sort of Oregonian who would have been exposed to Skousen at that time. For example, here’s an ad placed by a Christian Identity (i.e. white Christian nationalist and antisemitic) singer named Carl Klang.

These 25 year old lyrics by Klang read like a normal segment one might watch on Newsmax or CBN these days--lying media, stolen elections, bioweapons, microchips in your brains, the deep state, snarky comments about the liberals who claim to love democracy, and Jesus coming back to blow the lid off the whole evil filthy rotten conspiracy! [And as we learn at the end of the song, it’s the people who killed Jesus who are behind today’s evil rotten conspiracy, you know, (((them))). This is the same imagined conspiracy that Walter Huss thought he was battling against his entire life.]

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The Christian conspiracy stylings of Carl Klang are just one way in which the Oregon Observer from 1998 resonates with the contemporary political culture of the Republican Party. Climate change, for example, is a hoax…

…and the corporate media is controlled by the Orwellian PC mind police who are not to be trusted…

…and there is a globalist conspiracy to destroy American sovereignty and enslave good Christian Patriots like yourself.

The inclusion of this piece by Don Bell (taken from his 1972 newsletter) is noteworthy. Bell was an old school segregationist and antisemite who’d been publishing “Don Bell Reports” since 1954. He was part of a small community of fascist activists in Palm Beach that included Nazi seditionist George Deatherage. Bell was the sort of activist who would periodically offer to sell copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to his subscribers. A fairly ubiquitous presence on the far right (Huss’s archive contains scores of copies of his publications), Bell mostly flew under the radar of mainstream media. Below is a rare mainstream media mention of Bell from a 1963 reporter at the Stillwater [OK] News Press who stumbled upon Bell’s writings while trying to find the source of a sudden flood of conspiratorial complaints about the new city manager form of municipal governance. [Dedicated readers of Rightlandia will recognize Hargis and Hindman as also being influential figures in Walter Huss’s conspiratorial imaginary.]

So much for our quick tour of the wacky world of the Oregon Observer ca. 1998—a world where Cleon Skousen, Carl Klang, Don Bell, Walter Huss, climate change deniers, gun rights extremists, and a host of other “fringe” far right figures shared space together. In 1998 few people outside the relatively small circles of far right activists in Oregon would have even known the Observer existed. If you'd told Oregon's last Republican Senator, Gordon Smith, that the Observer was far more representative of where his party was headed than his buttoned down press releases, he probably would have scoffed and called you a biased liberal alarmist. But here we are…it’s December of 2023 and the chair of one of the more active and influential county GOP organizations in the state is recommending Cleon Skousen’s 5000 Year Leap as his book of the month.

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At the beginning of this newsletter I promised stories about Chinese commandos preparing to invade from Mexico…so it’s about time I deliver. The Marion County GOP chair who recommended Skousen’s book has a podcast on Rumble that is quite a ride. If you go to minute 38 you can hear him talk about how he expects himself and all other GOP officials to be rounded up by the FBI just for the crime of being Republicans. He makes this claim on the basis of a story about one local Republican official in Los Angeles who entered the Capitol on January 6 and has recently been arrested on misdemeanor charges related to that action. FWIW, that person’s lawyer is Larry Klayman, a notorious far right figure who has his own SPLC page (!) and believes that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing. He’s also quite an Islamophobe who maintains that Obama was a secret Muslim. So yeah, there are perhaps a few reasons to be skeptical about the self-reporting coming from that Los Angeles Republican who was recently arrested and then released on bond. Apologies, but I can’t resist sharing the section of Klayman’s Wikipedia page featuring his impressive resume…that last sentence is quite the kicker. Depending upon one’s perspective of course, it either means Klayman is an ineffective lawyer, or it means the deep state is so powerful that even someone as brilliant as Klayman hasn’t been able to slay it yet.

Now for the Chinese invaders at the Mexican border. At 46:30 in the Marion County chair’s podcast he expresses great concern out about a proposed plan for undocumented people to earn citizenship by serving in the military. The chair finds this terrifying because he thinks such un-American soldiers will obviously be used by the Democrat controlled government to oppress conservative US citizens like himself. Then he starts talking about the large numbers of military aged Chinese men who are seeking asylum in America and who, he implies, will find their way as undocumented people into the military and then play a role in that impending Democrat/Chinese Communist takeover of the country.

This is, of course, ludicrous. As all of the reports that are not in far right media outlets make abundantly clear (like this recent NYTimes article), those Chinese migrants are FLEEING Communist China because they hate it. They’re not secret agents sent by China to serve as a Fifth Column in America. They are exactly the sort of risk-taking, freedom-seeking individuals that you’d think your average Republican would admire. Indeed, one of the Marion County Chair’s close political associates is Solomon Yue, Oregon’s GOP National Committeeman who fled China as a young man and is a staunch anti-Communist and very conservative backer of Donald Trump’s. One could easily look at these young men fleeing China and seeking asylum in America as future Solomon Yue’s. But why engage with the reality of what’s happening when you can feed a racist, fear mongering story about “hordes of young Chinese men flooding over the border” that’s currently ubiquitous on right wing media?

Believe it or not, nightmarish claims about Chinese communists swarming into the country from Mexico to overthrow the country are a common and recurrent theme in US right wing culture. In 1963, for example, a moderate Republican Senator from California named Thomas Kuchel denounced that era’s right wing “fright peddlers” who scared American citizens with publications that trafficked in all sorts of wacky conspiracy theories, including one that claimed thousands of Chinese commandos were stationed in Mexico and preparing to launch an invasion across the border. Kuchel had received hundreds of letters from angry constituents concerned that the government wasn’t doing enough to prepare for that immanent Chinese invasion via Mexico.

Kenneth Goff (who joined Walter Huss on a speaking tour across Oregon a few months after publishing this piece) offered a rebuttal to Kuchel in a white Christian supremacist publication called The White Sentinel. Goff had seen the “Red Chinese” massing in Mexico with his very own eyes! [Note: given that this was not happening, it seems pretty clear that Goff was lying about this. And given that Goff was the guy whose lie was the centerpiece of the “communists are putting fluoride in our water to sap us of our manly essence” canard, his willingness to lie about an immanent Chinese invasion of the US via Mexico should not be surprising either.]

Another one of those “fright peddlers” who imagined that Chinese communists were undermining the US from just across the southern border was Walter Huss. This story appeared in the March 1965 edition of his newspaper The Eagle.

That same month (March 1965) a neo-Nazi periodical named National Christian News, which was edited by an associate of Huss’s friend Dale Benjamin, also imagined a scenario in which hordes of “red Chinese” would invade the US from their base in Mexico.

Just so you don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that National Christian News was a neo-Nazi publication, here’s the full page that featured the story about Chinese Communists coming up from Mexico.

The point is not that anyone who thinks Chinese communists are using Mexico as a staging ground for a coming revolution is a Nazi…the point is that getting a community of people to believe absurdities (like that “the Jews created communism”) is one way ultra-right activists prepare people to commit atrocities (like eliminating Jews) in the name of those absurdities (like the idea that eliminating Jews will eliminate Communism). To bring that into the present, one might say that getting people to believe absurdities about how a dead Venezuelan president used voting machine technology to steal the election from Donald Trump, then led people to atrociously storm the US Capitol and violently attack police officers while chanting “hang Mike Pence” in the name of “preserving law and order” and “saving America.” This is ultimately why I think it’s worth paying attention to the strange, conspiracy-addled world that many (if not most) leading Republican activists inhabit. Ideas are not actions, but actions are informed and inspired by ideas.

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Why does this all matter? After all, who cares if some guy tells his Facebook followers to read an old book by Cleon Skousen and rants on Rumble about Chinese Communists staging a stealth takeover of the US via Mexico?

The chair of the Marion County Republican party is 100% entitled to his opinions about Cleon Skousen and Chinese asylum seekers and anything else under the sun. If he was just some random individual then I would have never taken the time to write about him. But he’s not some random individual, he’s an influential and representative leader in one of the nation’s two major political parties, and thus his ideas and actions significantly impact the politics of my town (Salem) and my state (Oregon). When someone in such a position egregiously misapprehends and then misrepresents what is happening with Chinese asylum seekers at the border, to take just that one example, then this influences how Republican elected officials and voters will think and act in regard to that issue. I’m old fashioned enough to think that the best policy decisions are made when we are attentive to the empirical facts on the ground and consider a wide range of perspectives that are based on that evidence. Bringing groundless conspiracy theories into our public deliberations contributes nothing toward the likelihood of us making a good decision, and instead makes such a positive outcome far less likely. I believe that we all benefit from good, empirically-grounded decisions regardless of our partisan affiliations, another old fashioned idea I’m not yet willing to give up.

A final thread I want to tug here has to do with the timelessness of this conspiratorial world view. As a history professor, I obviously have absolutely no problem with someone recommending that people read a 40+ year old book. I mean, that’s basically what I do for a living is read old shit from the past. But the idea that Skousen’s book, written before Ronald Reagan took office, is politically “timely” in 2023 strikes me as odd. Skousen’s book, which was considered kooky by the majority of his contemporaries in 1981 and was widely ignored, was written at a time that differs so dramatically from our own that it’s hard to see how it’s lessons can be applied today, unless of course one assumes that it contains timeless truths that we’d all assent to if only we took the time to read it. Similarly, the idea that Don Bell’s 1972 warnings about a global managed society were applicable to the readers of the Oregon Observer in 1998 makes little sense, especially since Bell’s confident predictions had, um, clearly not come true for the past 26 years. Likewise, the idea that Cleon Skousen’s 1958 list of “communist goals” could explain Oregon politics for readers of the Observer in 1998 was almost as nonsensical as the Epoch Times’ claim that they explained the 2020 election. In 1958 Skousen had looked around and asked “what are the things that conservative people like me who might buy my book are mad about?” He listed them out and then falsely claimed that those 45 things just so happened to be the exact plans the Communists had made back in the 1940s when Skousen worked for the FBI and supposedly had special insight into the Communist plot! It’s laughable how transparent it all is, but that sure didn’t stop that list of 45 commie goals from going viral in far right circles many separate times over the decades.

In the 1960s and 70s the leadership class of the Republican Party and the gatekeepers in the mainstream media were able to sideline books like Skousen’s and stories about an immanent Chinese Communist invasion out of Mexico. This was not censorship or an abrogation of free speech, I’d argue. Rather, this was the institutions of a modern democracy functioning as they should have, to try to foster a robust public debate about matters of shared concern that was as empirically-grounded and logically coherent as possible. We now live in an age when a shameless liar like Donald Trump can become the leader of one of our two national parties, and when a majority of the rank and file members of that party believe falsehoods about basic matters like who won the 2020 election or what happened on January 6, 2021. This is not the first time large numbers of people believe things that are not true and it won’t be the last. What concerns me is the synergy between the community of people who all believe one set of absurdities, and the leader of a major political party who wants to ride their energies and votes into power.

The 60+ year history of this conspiratorial and empirically-challenged political culture I’ve offered here, this tour down the Derp State rabbit hole, shows that Donald Trump was and is more of a crystallizing symptom, than he is a cause, of the contemporary Republican party’s dysfunction. But the perpetuation of that dysfunction is not inevitable. It is a product of the choices made day in and day out by people in positions of authority and influence in that party.

1. The organization that placed that ad in the 1980s was Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communist Crusade. That organization still exists and is being run by David Noebel, an influential figure in Michele Bachmann’s life who is probably most famous for his 1965 book that demonstrated how The Beatles were part of a communist plot to hypnotize and brainwash the world’s children.