It's funny until it's not; why I've stopped finding absurd right wing conspiracy theories so hilarious

What is there to do, really, other than laugh at stuff like this? Candace Owens investigates…lol.

Candace’s grim look is the icing on the cake—putting on her best Katie Couric “this is very serious” face. It’s all so soul-crushingly dumb. And until the political culture of one of our two major political parties became completely subsumed by this absurdist cinematic universe of “alternative facts,” it also seemed relatively harmless. Indeed, I think my long-running fascination with America’s fringe and conspiratorial mishegoss—my inclination to find it hilariously compelling—derived from a sense of hubristic superiority. “Holy crap, the GOP is really going to nominate a senatorial candidate who ran an ad insisting that she wasn’t a witch! Well, that’s hilarious, and also means that the Democrat will almost certainly win this otherwise competitive race.” Boy, 2010…those were the days, huh?

One of my first forays into doing history on social media was a whimsical 2014 tumblr blog where I compiled and briefly glossed “fake founders quotes” from conservatives.

There was something absurdly funny about seeing conservative leaders, who claimed to be fervently devoted to the original intent of the founders, circulate one easily-debunked fake founder quote after another. In the era of Obama, when the GOP seemed on the verge of collapsing in the face of the demographic transformations that supposedly spelled their doom, I found it entertaining to use my two areas of scholarly expertise—the history of early America and the history of conservatism—to have some good clean fun at the expense of these empirically-challenged conservatives. How was it possible that they kept getting snookered by fake founders quotes that confirmed their priors, but which anyone familiar with primary sources from the founding era (as they claimed to be) could have immediately sussed out as fake? Didn’t these prominent political or media figures have interns who knew how to google?

It turns out, those were not the right questions to ask. The question I should have been asking is “what are the implications for American politics when a large chunk of activists, leaders, and voters in one political party stop caring in the slightest about the accuracy or even plausibility of their public statements?” It’s like the difference between walking into a fast food restaurant where there’s a big stack of chicken nuggets behind the counter, asking for chicken nuggets, having the person at the register say “oh, we’re out of nuggets,” and then winking at you and handing them over…vs. having the person behind the counter say “oh, we’re out of nuggets” and then refusing to give them to you. And then when you call over the manager they also look you in the face and say “we’re out of nuggets.” And then when you incredulously point to the nuggets behind them they have the security guard put you in a headlock while they call the police. Absurdist lies + power = authoritarian terror.

When Trump granted a 30 minute interview to Alex Jones on December 2, 2015 I remember thinking it was hilariously absurd and obviously disqualifying. Once it became clear that large numbers of Republican voters were perfectly fine with Trump and the overflowing dump truck of transparent lies and shameless fabricators that he carted around with him to every public appearance, it started to feel more ominous and less humorous. [Note how the first thing that comes up in this interview is how Trump has supposedly been “vindicated” about the story he made up about New Jersey Muslims celebrating on 9/11. It even includes a now familiar Trumpian line about how “many people have come up to me to tell me that they were in New Jersey and saw it themselves.”]

Here’s the thing about those absurd lies about Muslims…they became far less funny when Trump trotted out his bigoted Muslim ban only a few days into his administration, a ban premised upon lies about Islam. The aphorism “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” has gotten a lot of usage since 2017 and for good reason. Absurdist lies + political power = authoritarian terror on a scale much greater than my hypothetical story about a customer asking for chicken nuggets at a fast food restaurant. As historian Timothy Snyder has put it, “post-truth is pre-fascism.”

Looking back on my decades of instinctively laughing at the kooky or wildly conspiratorial things that American right wingers said with a straight face, I now see that the laughter was a coping mechanism…it’s how I pushed away the sense of fear and dread about what people who believed such hateful, cockamamie stuff about “the homosexual agenda” or “the globalist conspiracy” or “femi-Nazis” or “Antifa supersoldiers” or “Sharia Law” or “the most well-attended inauguration in history” or a “stolen election” might actually be capable of doing if organized, provoked, and protected by people in positions of power—power like, for example, the Presidential power to pardon.

To bring this back to Walter Huss, I remember literally LOL-ing in the archive in 2021 when I came across this 1986 legal brief written up by his self-licensed lawyer Lyle Hartford VanDyke, Jr, a protege’s of Huss’s who was a Pearl Harbor truther who’d gotten busted for printing $3 million of his own money after losing his job as an Elvis-impersonating piano player at a SE Portland Mexican restaurant. I mean, holy cow, what is there to say about a statement like this other than “LOL, WTF?”

Well, one thing we could say about that statement is that Walter Huss, the chair of the OR GOP in 1978 who died in 2006 and whose former residence at 23rd and Belmont in Portland I find myself driving by with some regularity, believed his entire life that Jews like me were his existential enemy who, if push came to shove, needed to be exterminated. There’s nothing remotely funny about that. It’s frankly terrifying. Humor has long been how Jews have dealt with such terror, so I’m not sorry for having enjoyed several laughs at Walter expense, but I also have come to think such laughter has been a way I’ve avoided staring the terror squarely in the face. The laughter, in other words, was comprised of one part old-school Jewish gallows humor, but also one part the misplaced hubris of someone socialized as “white” in the US who’d never taken to heart the possibility that that privileged status might some day be revoked.

It’s easier to consider conspiracy theorists like Walter Huss or Alex Jones laugh-worthy when they don’t have much power….and THAT is the key thing that’s changed in the Trump era. After all, the current secretary of the OR GOP and the GOP’s US Senate nominee in 2020 and 2022 is a 9/11 truther who believes the Covid vaccine killed more people than Covid. She also believes Twitter conspired with the deep state and the Chinese Communist Party to steal the 2020 election from Trump. She has also tweeted at the Obamas with a QAnon hashtag telling them that they should “get out of my country” and are soon bound for Gitmo.

She is also an admirer of New Apostolic Reformation leader Dutch Sheets who believes it is the job of Christian Nationalists to take dominion over all aspects of American society in order to save the country from impending Communist rule.

900,000 of my fellow Oregonians have voted twice for Joe Rae Perkins, an authoritarian conspiracy monger, to serve in the US Senate. Because I live in Oregon I can find that kinda funny because she has little chance of ever winning and wielding political power…but because I live in America, I find it terrifying because there are few Republican media figures, activists, or politicians anywhere (even in Oregon) who would dare disagree with her for fear of getting booted from the party.

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The Fascist Origins of a Viral Fake Founders Quote; or, have I ever told you the story about Ben Franklin, William Dudley Pelley, Walter Huss, Osama bin Laden, and the Jews?

One of the first practitioners of the viral fake founder quote was the founder of the Silver Shirts, William Dudley Pelley, the guy who called himself “America’s Hitler.” In 1934 he wrote up a document entitled “the Franklin prophecy” in which we hear Ben Franklin at the Constitutional Convention supposedly warning his fellow delegates about the existential threat that Jews pose to the new republic. Even though this had been thoroughly debunked multiple times by 1935, that didn’t prevent Dudley’s fake Franklin quote from going viral on the US far right in the 1930s and ever since, serving as “proof” that genocidal antisemitism was congruent with the original intent of founders like Franklin.¹ Here, for example, is the “Franklin prophecy” as it appeared on a flyer from the National Socialist White People’s Party in the early 1980s

At a November 1937 meeting of a Portland fascist group called the American Defenders—a meeting Walter Huss may have attended—a visiting speaker from Los Angeles read the newly invented “Franklin prophecy” to the audience.

Do you remember when Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America” went semi-viral on Tik Tok recently? Well, one of the lines in that letter references the “Franklin prophecy” that had found its way from the 1930s era American fascist right, to Nazi propaganda, to the subculture of American fascism in the Cold War era, and then eventually into the subculture of late 20th century Islamic extremism and then Tik Tok.

Walter Huss received his own personal copy of the “Franklin Prophecy” in the mail in November of 1978 when it was sent to the headquarters of the Oregon Republican Party. The sender was a Southern California fascist organization called Western Front with which Huss had a longstanding familiarity. Their materials are sprinkled throughout Huss’s archive. Western Front’s leader Walter White, Jr. was a close and long-time associate of Christian Nationalist Crusade leader Gerald LK Smith, another American fascist whose magazine, The Cross and the Flag, Huss subscribed to for years.

The date of this document and its location in Huss’s archive are significant. Huss received this 5 months after assuming his position as chair of the OR GOP, and two months before he flew to Washington DC to participate in the usual round of Republican National Committee meetings in his capacity as state chair. This document is located in a folder labeled “Congressmen,” and the other material in that folder is comprised entirely of Huss’s correspondence with the conservative Republican legislators he individually met with in DC in January of 1979—Jack Kemp, Barry Goldwater, Jake Garn, and Larry McDonald. Given the way Huss’s archive is organized, it seems likely that he took this document with him on his trip to DC and perhaps even discussed it with people he met there. After all, this is how the 16-page Western Front mailer framed the dire stakes of the current moment and the world-shaking significance of the “most sensational manuscript of its kind” it was sharing with the reader.

This Western Front mailer in Huss’s “Congressman” folder consists primarily of a fabricated “interview” with Harold Wallace Rosenthal, an assistant to Senator Jacob Javitz who was murdered in a 1976 terrorist attack in Istanbul. That supposed “interview” (given just days before Rosenthal died, how convenient!) reads like an updated version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and is a fascinating window into what fascists like White and Huss imagined the Jews were up to. White, of course, knew the text was fabricated because he had fabricated it himself, but I have little doubt that Huss believed he’d been made privy to a blockbuster expose that blew the lid off the Jewish conspiracy.

The Franklin Prophecy appeared at the very end of that 16-page document from Western Front, as if that fake 1787 prophecy had been vindicated by the newfound “information” about the Jewish conspiracy that preceded it. Walter White’s conclusion to his “Rosenthal interview” told readers that it was their duty to awaken their fellow conservatives to the great danger the nation faced. “These Jew protecting conservative Americans are knowingly or unknowingly helping to destroy their own country…if they will UNITE with REAL Americans who know the TRUTH, in a battle to save our Country, we can escape from the clutches of CHRIST'S WORST ENEMIES -- THE ANTI-CHRIST JEWS…This means that whoever forgets or omits the Jewish question, be it through ignorance, or fear, is unfit to be a preacher, teacher or official. This means that every Security Risk, ONE WORLDER, ATLANTIC UNION PLOTTER and Alien ANTI-CHRIST ZIONIST, whose loyalty is to another Country, and all of their TRAITOR agents and stooges MUST BE BANISHED BY "REAL" AMERICANS.” Some people might look askance at you when you tell them the truth about the Jewish conspiracy, Walter White was saying, but the evidence in this mailer can help you open their eyes and get them to join with you to act swiftly and decisively. It seems likely that this was an important dimension of how Huss understood the meaning of his trip to Washington DC in January 1979, the apex of his career as a political activist and the goal toward which he’d been working for almost two decades.

Huss had been obsessed with the existential threat of “Jewish Communism” since the late 1930s, but this obsession took on new meaning in December 1978 now that Huss was headed to DC as an official delegate to the RNC, had meetings scheduled with powerful Congressmen and Senators, and was booked for a 30-minute appearance on the 700 Club. After decades of doing his bit to thwart the Jewish conspiracy as an activist in Oregon, Huss was finally in a position of national power and influence that would enable him to bring the “truth” of “the Jewish Question” to the centers of American political power and share it with people who had the power to do something about it. Huss hoped that a truly “conservative” and “Christian” version of the Republican Party, purged of the RINO squishes, could finally destroy the internal enemy, “the Jewish conspiracy,” for good.

Huss of course wouldn’t have called this fascism or Nazism, it was wholesome Christian Patriotism, as Benjamin Franklin’s 1787 statement about the Jews proved! It also had nothing to do with hatred of Jews, as Huss saw it. After all, a Jew named Howard Rosenthal was the very person who had told Walter White all about the Jews’ evil intentions!

It’s absurd and pathetically funny that Walter Huss was credulous enough to believe this, but we can find it funny now, in hindsight, because we know that OR GOP chair would be the pinnacle of Huss’s power and influence. While I’ve found no evidence attesting to how the people in DC responded to Huss’s conspiratorial antisemitism, it seems likely that most people he would have run it by at the RNC meeting in January 1979 gave him a polite smile and then suddenly remembered they had a very important phone call to make. That “Franklin Prophecy” that Huss toted with him to DC never got circulated in mainstream “conservative” or “Republican” publications because the people who ran them would have done the 5 minutes of due diligence it would have taken to suss it out as an obvious forgery. This is not to wax nostalgic about how great the Republican party used to be, only to draw to attention to how thoroughly Trumpism has eradicated whatever guardrails the GOP and the conservative movement once had.

Huss’s absurdly conspiratorial and empirically-baseless antisemitism didn’t come anywhere near carrying the day at the 1979 RNC, but it did have a seat at the table. He probably found a few other fellow travelers there with whom he could speak openly about “the real threat” that America faced.

But what was once a relatively small, conspiracy-obsessed fringe of the party’s leadership ranks, has now become the defining culture of the party. Try speaking truthfully about climate change at this year’s RNC meeting. Try speaking truthfully about the 2020 election or January 6 at this year’s RNC meeting. Try speaking truthfully about vaccines at this year’s RNC meeting. Try saying anything not dismissive about Davos or the World Economic Forum or the World Health Organization or Anthony Fauci. Now that Trump’s post-Truth style has completed its complete takeover of the GOP, I suppose the question now is how long it’ll be until we have to drop the prefix on the term “pre-fascism.”

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For more “fascist fake founders quotes,” here’s a post from last summer. As far as I know, Senator Hawley, a Stanford History grad, never apologized for or retracted that fake founders quote (that was actually written by a 1950s fascist) he tweeted out.

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And finally, a podcast recommendation and a preview of coming attractions

I highly recommend this podcast on the GOP’s shift to the right in the 1970s.

Next month, I’ll be interviewing Ben Bradford, the maker of that podcast, and will share it with you here. This will be a partnership between me and the good folks at the Is this Democracy? podcast. So, as they say in the biz, stay tuned. And in the meantime, give Landslide a listen. If you’re the sort of nerd who finds Rightlandia interesting, then this show will definitely be up your alley.

1. In 1997 the editor of the Benjamin Franklin Papers, Claude-Anne Lopez, published a piece in The New Republic on the history of the “Franklin prophecy” hoax. It was republished starting on page 3 of the newsletter linked here.