Sending Spit to Ms. Safron

Walter Huss and the little-known subculture of "Granola Nazis"

In 1983 Walter and Rosalie Huss sent samples of their spit through the mail to an herbalist in Venice, CA named Ms. Safron. They received in return an analysis that informed them as to which supplements they should take so as to achieve optimal health.

This is just one of scores of examples I could provide from Huss’s archive that attest to his deep interest in what we today would call alternative medicine and “health food.” He and Rosalie ran a health food/alternative medicine store in the 1980s at the corner of 23rd and Belmont in SE Portland at which they sold Spirulina, whey powder, and all sorts of supplements. We often think of these subcultures as vaguely “on the left,” in part because of their links to the counterculture of the 1960s. But one feature of this “crunchy” subculture that often gets overlooked is that it has often attracted a fair share of people on the far right. In some cases, a generalized interest in “non-mainstream” health and food culture can lead individuals down what historian Kathleen Belew has called “the crunchy to alt-right pipeline.”

Now Huss did not need to be led down any sort of pipeline from alternative food/health culture to white power, because for his entire life he was what the author of this excellent article calls “a Granola Nazi.”

For example, Huss had a copy of this fairly obscure Theodore Fitch (1893-1991) book from the late 1950s or early 1960s in his “Health” file. Fitch, a devotee of of the racist theology known as British Israelism or Christian Identity, wrote other books with titles like “Our Lord’s Plan for the White Race” and “Are All White Men Israelites?” I have yet to discover how it is that Huss came to know of Fitch, the author of “the white books.” Fitch, like Huss, was just one of many of these “traditionalist” white nationalist types who traveled in the same general circles as more well-known far right conspiracy theorists like Gerald LK Smith, so I assume it was through these sorts of networks that Huss came to own this pamphlet.

Another important source for Huss’s ideas about alternative medicine (and conspiracy theories about the evils of modern medicine) was The Spotlight, a newsletter produced by the neo-Nazis at the Liberty Lobby. If you read the recent Rightlandia newsletter about that time Huss was busted for importing Pau d’Arco tea, it was most likely The Spotlight that gave him the idea that he could make a killing selling that “miracle cure.”

One point I want to state very clearly is that not everyone who is interested or deeply invested in alternative medicine and health food is a Nazi, or even on the political right. There are many good reasons to be critical of and skeptical about the modern industrial food system and modern Western medicine. The problem, in my mind, comes when that skepticism and critical attitude fades into a blanket rejection of modernity, an embrace of conspiratorial ideas about (((who))) controls those modern food and medical systems, and an escape into historically-inaccurate, nostalgic visions of some bucolic past in which pure blooded people ate pure food that made them hale and hearty and unpolluted by modern degeneracy.

I doubt that many of the peace and love hippies who wondered into Huss’s SE Portland store to buy spirulina got converted into white power activists. That said, there were a good number of left-wing conspiracy theorists who lived in Huss’s neighborhood who, much to their chagrin, found skinheads and other far right extremists attending their gatherings and nodding along in agreement with much of what they were saying.

This video was filmed at an art gallery at 30th and Belmont in SE Portland, seven blocks from Huss’s political headquarters and his health food/alternative medicine store. To this point I have not found any evidence that Huss attended any of Ace Hayes’s Secret Government seminars, though I have no doubt that Hayes would have been on Huss’s radar as a “Communist” subversive.

The strange political bedfellows made by these “alternative” subcultures and the conspiracy theories they embraced goes some way toward explaining why very liberal Portland is one of the few major metropolitan areas in the US that does NOT fluoridate its water. So yeah, it’s complicated, and also, there’s a reason why I called this newsletter “Rightlandia.”

In other news, I was interviewed by Thomas Zimmer for the excellent podcast he does with Political Scientist Liliana Mason, Is This Democracy? So if you want to listen to Thomas and I talk about Walter Huss and what he might teach us about the past and present of the far right in the US, check it out.