The Anatomy of American Fascism, part 1: Fascist Foot Soldiers and their Patrician Funders
Introducing Jozef Mlot-Mroz, Salem, Massachusetts' most famous Nazi troll (ca. 1960-2000) and the wealthy Exeter/Harvard law grad named Richard J. Cotter who secretly funded his exploits
Jozef Mlot-Mroz (1921-2002) emigrated to the US from Poland in 1952 and spent the rest of his life as a sporadically-employed manual laborer in Salem, Massachusetts. From the late 1950s up through the late 1990s, this self-described “anti-communist Christian Patriot” and President of the Polish Freedom Fighters in the USA, Inc., made himself a figure of some local and national renown by staging innumerable public protests against Communism, in favor of the Vietnam War, against the Civil Rights movement, against school desegregation, against abortion rights, and so on. Over the course of his career as a right wing provocateur he engaged in over a thousand protests like the ones pictured below. As you’ll see, Mlot-Mroz had a real flair for the dramatic and a knack for attracting the attention of news photographers and editors.
Decatur [IL] Herald, 10 September 1959.
New London [CT] Evening Day, 21 April 1960
Des Moines Register, 1 July 1960
Boston Globe, 18 February 1964
Sunbury [PA} Daily Item, 23 April 1965. This photo appeared in scores of newspapers across the country
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 31 January 1967. Though it’s a bit obscured in this picture, his sign read “Communism is Jewish, from start to finish. Fight Communism.”
Palm Beach Post, 24 January 1989
As indicated by the geographically dispersed datelines of those images, Mlot-Mroz’s exploits appeared in newspapers across the country and even around the world. A newspapers dot com search for Mlot-Mroz’s distinctive name turns up almost 2500 hits—quite a public impact for an immigrant manual laborer who boarded with relatives in their small apartment in Salem, Massachusetts until he got married late in life.
The mainstream media coverage of Mlot-Mroz generally described him as “a freedom fighter,” “an anti-communist,” or “a conservative.”1 But as evidenced by the only obituary of Mlot-Mroz I could find—which appeared in the National Socialist Vanguard newsletter published in The Dalles, Oregon—Mlot-Mroz was, to put it more accurately, a Nazi-sympathizing fascist. And he wasn’t some lone wolf Nazi either. For almost four decades he was a fairly well-known and active participant in a nationally-networked fascist political subculture that spoke openly about its desire to transform the US into a homeland for white Christians, by force if necessary. These fascists called themselves “Christian Patriots.”
I can’t help but note that one of these Nazis’ struggles apparently involved following the basic rules of grammar.
While it’s highly unlikely that Mlot-Mroz ever met Walter Huss (the chair of the OR GOP in 1978 who is the usual focus of this newsletter), that obituary indicates that those two men traveled in many of the same circles. Huss’s archive contains reams of materials from Jack Mohr and Jim Townsend, as well as a significant amount of material from Western Front, the Gerald LK Smith-linked organization that hosted the “Communism Summit Conference” in LA that Mlot-Mroz attended in 1984 along with a “who’s who” list of American Nazis. The central commitment that bound that community together was their special “knowledge” that the only way to defeat Communism and “save America’s white Christian Civilization” from immanent destruction was to end the hammerlock that Communist Jews supposedly had over every important institution in the country.
Like Huss, Mlot-Mroz admired the work of the Liberty Lobby (see below) which was run by America’s leading promoter of Holocaust denial, Willis Carto. The Liberty Lobby, which was known to celebrate Hitler’s birthday in their Washington DC offices, was one of the nation’s more influential far right organizations from the late 1960s into the 1980s. In the mid-1970s the Liberty Lobby began publishing The Spotlight which would go on to become the leading media outlet for the antisemitic, populist, and conspiracy-inclined nationalist right that provided the grassroots foot soldiers for the Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul insurgencies of the 1990s. Whenever Huss recommended media sources to his friends and associates, The Spotlight was always at the top of his list. And when Huss was elected chair of the OR GOP in 1978 he got a glowing write up in The Spotlight which he clipped and saved in a special place in his files.
Regular readers of Rightlandia will recognize the ubiquitous Pedro del Valle, a retired Lt. Gen., admirer of Hitler, persistent fascist coup plotter, and father-in-law of the US Ambassador to Peru in the 1960s.
In the early 1960s Mlot-Mroz even cultivated a relationship with the John Birch Society, though his interest and support does not seem to have been reciprocated in the years after the picture below was taken. Even the John Birch Society had higher standards than to openly associate themselves with such a rank antisemite as Mlot-Mroz.
Boston Globe, 18 June 1961
By hosting these various public “awards” events that would then result in a picture and a story in the local paper, Mlot-Mroz and other Nazis like him were trying to normalize and mainstream their white Christian supremacist vision for the nation. They hoped their fellow citizens would consider an America that had been purged of Jews and people of color as just one viable political future amongst many on the buffet line of American politics. This fascistic vision, however, was a complete rejection of the dominant, starting premise of post-WWII American political culture—that the nation was a secular, multi-racial democracy defined by its commitment to religious and ethnic pluralism. Anyone advocating for that sort of America, Mlot-Mroz argued, was really just advocating for Communism. These fascists offered their fellow Americans a choice between strawberry ice cream and cyanide, and their primary goal was to get the press to talk about the situation as if it was a choice between strawberry ice cream and mint chocolate chip. “Some people say the best way to fight communism is to create a just society for all in which prosperity is widely shared, other people say we should fight communism by eliminating the Jews, sending Black people back to Africa, and abolishing the federal income tax and the federal reserve…ah America, a land of contrasts.” Although the fascists knew their political cyanide in its most undiluted form appealed to only a small handful of their fellow Americans, the more watered down, “Christian Patriot” version of it was far more likely to meet with approving (or just neutral) coverage in the press and would thus get a less hostile response from the readers these fascists sought to reach and radicalize with their message.
Below is a brief biography of Mlot-Mroz that appeared in a 1988 ADL publication entitled “Extremism on the Right.” I offer it here as an accurate summary of his activities in lieu of me marching through his full resume of shitty behavior. It’s reportage like this (which rarely made its way into the mainstream press) that largely explains why Americans on the right long harbored a deep and abiding hatred for the ADL.2 A hit dog hollers, as they say.
I worry that adjectives like “racist” and “antisemitic” have lost some of their power these days, so here are some representative pages from Mlot-Mroz’s December 1969 newsletter to illustrate what sorts of ideas he espoused. Note also how the apocalyptic emotional/rhetorical tenor is reminiscent of the conspiratorial content that dominates MAGA media outlets these days.
Throughout Mlot-Mroz's career as a Nazi provocateur, observers of the far right often wondered how an immigrant manual laborer could afford to travel as much as he did, show up at so many weekday protests, and print up and mail out so many copies of his antisemitic and racist magazine. Some answers emerged after the 1999 death of reclusive Duxbury, MA millionaire and show horse hobbyist Richard J. Cotter, a former assistant Attorney General, Exeter and Harvard Law grad, heir to a family insurance fortune, and secret funder of a host of American fascists including Jozef Mlot-Mroz.
Boston Globe, 7 January 2001
In the mind of Harvard Nazi lawyer Richard J. Cotter, Jozef Mlot-Mroz was fighting the same fight as William Luther Pierce (the author of the The Turner Diaries), Ernst Zundel (one of the world’s leading Holocaust deniers), and James K. Warner (who was a member of George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party and then went on to be a key co-worker with David Duke in the resurgence of the KKK in the 1970s and 80s.) The ideas these men espoused resided on the fringes of American political culture and they reveled in their self-claimed status as “rebellious” outsiders, but they were also determined to bring their very old, stale, and long discredited ideas into the mainstream using creative propaganda techniques. Like Walter Huss, their theory of change involved not just menacing their “enemies” with threats of violence. They also embraced a more traditional political strategy that involved taking over the Republican Party in order to use it as a vehicle for advancing their white Christian supremacist view of America’s future. As evidenced by neo-Nazi James K. Warner’s role in the Louisiana Republican party in 1990 (see below) and David Duke’s surprisingly strong electoral showing at the same time (despite ads in which Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush implored Republicans NOT to vote for Duke), these Harvard-millionaire-backed Louisiana fascists met with at least some success. [That same year, 1990, another Nazi attendee at that 1984 Communism Summit in LA, Ralph Forbes, got 46% of the vote in the first round of the GOP primary for Arkansas Lt. Governor.]
Shreveport Journal, 10 January 1990.
Although Walter Huss almost certainly never met the reclusive Richard J. Cotter, his life intersected with Cotter’s in the form of the many newsletters and books Huss owned that were produced by a prolific Nazi publication outfit that was kept afloat by Cotter’s largesse, James K. Warner’s “Sons of Liberty” and “New Christian Crusade” operation in Metairie, Louisiana.
This is just one example of the sorts of book order forms and other materials from James K. Warner’s organizations that I found in Huss’s archive. I wrote about Bend, Oregon resident Robert Edmondson in this post, and Elizabeth Dilling makes an appearance in this post. If you want to learn more about the WWII seditionists and the people who tried to hold them accountable, Rachel Maddow’s Prequel is excellent. It’s noteworthy here the extent to which Warner in the 1980s was encouraging his followers to see themselves as the heirs to the same cause that motivated WWII era American fascists.
Note that the addressee on this New Christian Crusade letter from James K. Warner was Walter’s wife, Rosalie Huss. I suspect, though I can’t say this for sure yet, that Walter made it a point to have Rosalie serve as the contact person for the more explicitly Nazi-oriented organizations he corresponded with. In 1985 Walter had been informed that the FBI suspected him of being involved with the Nazi Party, and so he had reason to be careful given that he still aspired to be an influential figure in the Republican Party. Indeed, just a few months after Rosalie received this letter from Nazi James K. Warner, Huss had his picture taken at a Republican fundraiser with Vice President Dan Quayle. In 1991 Huss was sending financial contributions and letters containing dating advice to James K. Warner’s compatriot David Duke, and also proudly mounting a framed picture of himself and Dan Quayle on the living room wall of his SE Portland home. From Huss’s perspective, it made perfect sense to donate money to a Hitler-admiring klansman running for office in Louisiana AND a Christian conservative Republican like Dan Quayle.
Although there’s no way to prove this counterfactual, I would hypothesize that were it not for Richard J. Cotter’s decades of financial support, neither James K. Warner nor Jozef Mlot-Mroz would have generated nearly as much publicity or had as much reach as they had. Both Warner and Mlot-Mroz were true believers willing to sacrifice for their cause, there’s no doubt about that. But they were also cash-poor grifters who were constantly in need of money to finance their life work of producing attention-getting stunts and fascist propaganda. While Richard J. Cotter was enjoying his show horses, filling his bookshelves with Nazi publications, and seeming like “a nice guy who was pretty conservative” to the handful of people in his social circles, he was using his inheritance to financially prop up a genocidal political movement that he knew stood little chance of finding success on the free market of ideas.
Let’s look closely at one example of the sort of fascist stunt (and attendant free media coverage) Cotter got in return for his money. On July 19, 1975 the Louisville Courier-Journal devoted a full page to the pressing issue of busing and desegregation. Two-thirds of that coverage focused on a meeting organized by Richard J. Cotter-funded3 James K. Warner and David Duke.
This page captures two competing visions of what sort of country America should be. At the top of the page we see Louisville civic, education, and business leaders recognizing that desegregation is both a moral and legal imperative that will likely meet with some white resistance. Their goal was to gradually unwind centuries of racism to work toward a multi-racial future for Louisville, and they hoped to learn from what had worked in other localities. And at the bottom of the page we hear from a Black reporter for the newspaper who unapologetically made his way into that KKK meeting and reported accurately about the white supremacist and Christian supremacist vision of the nation being espoused there. [Note also the perhaps strategically placed announcement of “Latin American Heritage Weekend” on the bottom left hand corner of the page.]
But there in the middle of the page we see the beneficiaries of Richard J. Cotter’s largesse demagoguing around the issue of busing so as to drive a flaming white cross into the heart of the multi-racial democracy struggling to be born at the top and the bottom of that page. Their goal was to give white Kentuckians permission to be their most hateful, disruptively racist selves in a context where their civic leaders, their schools, the judiciary, and their newspapers were encouraging them to let go of the racism into which they’d been socialized, and instead look upon Black Kentuckians as their fellow citizens and fellow public school students with whom they share the nation and its institutions as equals. In this political battle between the advocates of white supremacy and the diverse coalition of people who were NOT on board with that exclusionary vision of America, Richard J. Cotter’s money and James K. Warner’s sweat equity helped put a finger on the scale on the side of white supremacy. It’s hard to say how consequential the actions of people like Warner and Duke were in regard to Louisville’s process of desegregation, but imagine how different the city’s conversation on the topic would have been had those jobless fascists not had the financial ability to fly in, rent a venue, print up publicity, put on their show, and set the agenda for two-thirds of one day’s media coverage of school desegregation.
Another Cotter beneficiary, Jozef Mlot-Mroz, also attracted a great deal of attention for his opposition to school desegregation. In dozens of newspapers across the country on October 5, 1974 (the image below is from the Durham, NC Morning Herald) Mlot-Mroz made an appearance as a “Polish freedom fighter” and anti-busing protester who had his sign forcibly taken away from him.
Some readers probably looked at Mlot-Mroz’s sign and thought “see, those are exactly the sort of racist kooks who oppose busing.” Others probably thought it was unfair to highlight that one extremist’s sign as if it spoke for the other white people who opposed busing. Regardless, the idea that at least some people thought school desegregation was part of a broader Jewish/Communist/globalist conspiracy against white Christian Americans got pumped into the nation’s political bloodstream, thanks to Mlot-Mroz’s activism. And the general atmosphere of chaos and division that surrounded the process of school desegregation was amplified by the actions of Cotter’s Nazi foot soldier beneficiaries, thereby making an effective, democratic resolution of the issue just that much harder to achieve.
"Issuing correction on previous press coverage of the genocidal Nazi named Jozef Mlot-Mroz, we did not, under any circumstances, have to 'hand it to him.'"
Mlot-Mroz’s most high profile moment came on May 10, 1968,4 three weeks after MLK, Jr.s assassination, when he was reportedly attacked and stabbed at the Boston Poor Peoples March that he’d attended as a counter-protester. Mlot-Mroz’s “vicious stabbing” was widely covered in the nation’s papers, and usually in a way that generated enmity toward the civil rights protesters who were trying to carry forward the work of MLK in the wake of his death. The violence Mlot-Mroz suffered, which press reports said had left him in critical condition, fed into a familiar story line about the violent excesses of a civil rights movement that was being coddled by liberal leaders who cared nothing for the patient suffering of “hard working” and law abiding white American citizens like poor, innocent, bleeding Jozef Mlot-Mroz who got stabbed for just trying to exercise his freedom of speech.
The only problem with this story that appeared in scores of papers across the country was that it was wildly inaccurate. The wound Mlot-Mroz suffered required only two stitches to mend, after which he was immediately released from the hospital in perfectly fine condition. The context in which he received this wound also makes it clear that Mlot-Mroz was hardly a passive, innocent victim in this scenario. This is how a white eyewitness described the event.
Portland [ME] Press Herald, 26 May 1968 [This is the only newspaper that I’ve been able to find that ran this corrected version of the story of Mlot-Mroz’s stabbing.]
Even though marchers took steps to protect Mlot-Mroz after he had forcibly tried to stop the speech of the march organizers, and even though the injury he received from someone not involved with the march was quite minor, that sure didn’t stop white op-ed writers around the country from waxing apocalyptic about what Mlot-Mroz’s “stabbing” demonstrated about the woeful state of American progressive politics ca. 1968. I mean, what is the world coming to when a Hitler-lover who wants to forcibly deport Black people from America and eliminate the nation’s Jews has to suffer through getting a couple stitches after forcibly trying to disrupt a civil rights gathering in a Black neighborhood three weeks after MLK’s assassination? Surely what we as a nation should be wringing our hands about are the pathologies of liberal politicians, the media, and Black Americans, not the fascist pathologies of “freedom fighting Patriot” Jozef Mlot-Mroz.
Appleton [WI] Post Crescent, 17 May 1968. Taylor’s syndicated column appeared in scores of newspapers across the country.
Indianapolis Star, 30 May 1968, reprinted from the Logansport [IN] Pharos Tribune. FWIW, the Indianapolis Star was published by Eugene Pulliam, Dan Quayle’s uncle. Pulliam endowed a visiting fellowship in journalism at Hillsdale College that was recently held by anti-CRT propagandist Chris Rufo.
“Strange, isn’t it, how uninterested America is in a man working for decency?” The conservative victimology around the false idea that liberal politicians and the media are engaged in a conspiracy to silence and undermine “decent” white Americans who are constantly being harmed with impunity by Black Americans has been with us quite a long time. And by 1968 there was ample evidence available to anyone who took a few minutes to find it that there was absolutely nothing “decent” or “day of national observation” worthy about that hateful Nazi named Jozef Mlot-Mroz.
I can’t leave this story without pointing out the absurdity of Mlot-Mroz’s sign that told Black Americans to stop protesting, get a job, and work for a living like he does. While this would not be known until 2001, in 1968 a reclusive Nazi millionaire was likely one of several rich right wingers shoveling money Mlot-Mroz’s way so that he could spend his time being a trollish Nazi protester while spending little to no time in the sort of gainful employment that would have enabled him to financially support himself.
While the mainstream press far too often treated Mlot-Mroz as just a normal, freedom fighting participant in American political life, one Jewish resident of Mlot-Mroz’s hometown of Salem, MA wrote frequent letters to the editor in the 1980s directly calling out his neighbor’s antisemitic and racist activism. Ted Simons was disappointed, however, that both Salem’s mayor and the Chamber of Commerce hesitated to say anything publicly about Mlot-Mroz, a well known local figure by then.
Boston Globe on 9 August 1992
The Mayor’s office and Chamber of Commerce weren’t the only Salem institutions that abnegated their responsibility to speak out about Mlot-Mroz. As early as 1988 a local expert on the far right, Chip Berlet, had infiltrated Mlot-Mroz’s organization and observed a local Catholic pastor participating happily in a neo-Nazi meeting at Mlot-Mroz’s home.
Boston Globe, 6 September 1992
One year after these two 1992 stories about Mlot-Mroz appeared in the Boston Globe, the same paper ran a story about rising numbers of racist and antisemitic hate crimes in the Boston area. The silence of people in positions of power like Salem's mayor, archdiocese, and the Chamber of Commerce surely didn't help matters. Perhaps if those people in positions of authority and influence had been able to accurately perceive Mlot-Mroz not as some “harmless lone wolf eccentric,” but rather as a local organizer for a nationally-coordinated, genocidal neo-Nazi movement that threatened the safety of their community, then they would have been more inclined to say or do something.
This is another place where Richard J. Cotter’s money seems relevant. Because Mlot-Mroz was not dependent upon an employer or the good will of his neighbors for his livelihood, he was freed up to be a publicly-known, absolutely obnoxious, hateful asshole-about-town. Cotter’s money insulated Mlot-Mroz from the sort of community norms that might have incentivized him to keep his Nazi ideas to himself and his circle of like-minded friends.
Jozef Mlot-Mroz, Richard J. Cotter and the rhizomatic history of American fascism
For some good reasons and some bad reasons, Americans have long been squeamish about using the f-word (fascist) to describe their contemporaries. These days, when the presumptive POTUS nominee of one party has hosted two avowed Hitler fans (Nick Fuentes and Ye) for dinner and publicly attacked the leftist “vermin” he wants to “destroy” and the immigrants who are “poisoning the blood of our country,” there are still plenty of people who consider it excessive to refer to that leader and the people who avidly cheer him on as “fascists.” The hesitance to use such language is, in part, a product of how bad we are at talking with nuance and accuracy about the history of American fascism. It’s almost as if some people need to see swastika wearing paramilitaries goose stepping in the streets before they’ll concede the use of the f-word. I’m obviously not going to solve all of the problems related to our historical memory of American fascism in the next few paragraphs, but here are some initial thoughts based on the story of Mlot-Mroz and Cotter.
I was socialized into a political culture that encouraged me to think that the best way to deal with Nazi weirdos in America like Mlot-Mroz was to ignore them. “They want us to pay attention to them so they can get more attention for their extreme ideas, so don’t play into their game.” I’ll grant that back in the day there was a case to be made for that approach, but here’s the thing, the political culture into which I was socialized clearly didn’t abide by that rule, because it PUT MLOT-MROZ IN THE NEWSPAPER ALL THE FUCKING TIME! 2500 times at the very bare minimum, and that’s only counting the papers that are part of the newspapers dot com database. Editors put Mlot-Mroz in the paper because they fell for his attention-getting, polarizing stunts that were designed to weaken support for the basic institutions of American democracy and build support for a popular movement open to the idea that violently overthrowing the duly elected US government was perhaps a good and necessary thing to do to stop those radical leftists from destroying traditional, white Christian America. Nowadays, especially in the wake of January 6, it seems silly to simply ignore the authoritarian things that Donald Trump and his surrogates say, given that the guy tried to stage a coup in 2021 and currently has a 50/50 shot at being the next president. But yet the instinct to resist using the f-word to describe blatantly fascist statements persists.
Fifty five years ago, in the month I was born, May 1968, Mlot-Mroz landed in the nation’s newspapers over 600 times in the form of universally sympathetic but wildly distorted coverage of his fake critical injury at a civil rights march in Boston. That story fanned the embers of an emerging conservative narrative that sought to metabolize MLK’s recent assassination as a symptom of the generally “divided” nature of the nation at the time, rather than as a sign of the ongoing power of America’s anti-democratic white supremacist tradition. A mere three years after the nation finally became a multi-racial democracy with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, already the divide between advocates of multi-racial democracy and enemies of it like Mlot-Mroz was being framed in our political culture as just two different flavors of political ice cream. And the synecdotal stories depicting Mlot-Mroz as the white “free speech loving” victim of “savage violence” at the hands of civil rights protestors signaled to the nation’s newspaper readers that it was the “silent majority” of white people who were the real victims in modern day America—the victims of a press that was supposedly overly generous to Black Americans, and the victims of weak liberal politicians who ignored or outright punished white people and Christians in order to give unearned advantages to un-American others who “hated real Americans like you.” Sounds familiar, no?
There are obviously softer and harder versions of these “silent majority” narratives about victimized white Christian patriots. In Mlot-Mroz’s publications and his frank conversations with his fellow fascists we hear the harder version, the populist and exclusionary nationalism with an edge sharp enough to draw blood. It would be an overstatement to describe as “a fascist” everyone who read that 1968 false story about Mlot-Mroz getting stabbed and found themselves feeling empathy for him and enmity toward the Poor Peoples’ marchers. But such stories, as they got repeated and recirculated in new and different forms over the years, created a seedbed of reactionary resentment conducive to the germination of ever angrier, more apocalyptic, and sharper-edged forms of right wing political culture. And whenever that growing cohort of aggrieved and alienated people went looking for explanations, there were plenty on offer in the voluminous library of publications and array of public events sponsored by the fascist movement of which Mlot-Mroz and James K. Warner were foot soldiers, and which was generously financed by Richard J. Cotter.
This is what I mean when I analogize American fascism to a rhizome…an underground network that occasionally sends shoots up into the sunlight of public attention with the hopes of gathering a bit more energy in the form of resources or new recruits. That fascist rhizome built upon the conspiracy-obsessed and hyper-nationalist fascist movements of earlier eras like the Silver Shirts of the 1930s and the 2nd KKK of the 1920s. It also added new elements from the McCarthyite anticommunism of the 1950s and the neo-Nazi and massive resistance movements of the 1950s and 60s. It linked up with the Christian Identity movement and the Posse Comitatus movements that flourished in the 1970s and 80s, and which then bled into the militia movement of the 1990s and beyond. It could pop up out of the soil in the form of David Duke’s political campaigns of the late 80s and early 90s, or in the more directly violent form of the murder of Denver radio host Alan Berg by The Order in 1984 or Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in 1995.
Because our national memory has no structured “history of American fascism” to help us see the rhizomatic evolution over time of the American fascist tradition, we are left viewing what look like isolated incidents and “lone wolf” individuals that are easy to condemn and then dismiss as unrepresentative of anything significant. Sure some Nazis came very close to winning elections as Republicans in the late 1980s and 90s, but they didn’t win! Sure a guy with substantial ties to Nazis who was a vicious antisemite his entire life and had ties to an array of fascist domestic terrorists became the chair of the Oregon Republican Party in 1978, but he was removed in 1979 and then everything just went back to normal. Right? I mean, it’s not like Oregon Republicans ever again came to believe that it was their duty to smoke out and destroy an imaginary secret cabal of globalists who controlled the media, higher education, the medical profession, and the federal government and who worked in cahoots with leftist/Communist protestors and other moral degenerates in a conspiracy to destroy the purity of America’s great Christian civilization…right? Right?
The anti-communist circular firing squad that is the Oregon GOP
Ok, I’ll stop here in the interest of not trying your patience. In a future installment of this series I’ll introduce you to Countess Guardabassi, the Palm Beach, Florida heiress who funded a wide range of Mlot-Mroz’s neo-Nazi and white supremacist compatriots in the 1950s and 60s and whose son endowed a Heritage Foundation Journalism fellowship in the family name.
Beginning in the late 1970s it became more common for newspapers to identify Mlot-Mroz as an “antisemite,” but even then, that was not a universal (or even predominant) practice. I have found only two instances in which Mlot-Mroz was identified as a “fascist,” and that was from stories that appeared in the early 1990s in which that word was used by scholars of the far right who journalists were quoting. One exception to this soft-pedaling coverage of Mlot-Mroz is the Jewish press which was fairly direct and blunt in their discussions of him beginning in the late 1960s.
Since the early 1990s, and especially lately, the ADL has taken positions that have earned it the opposition of people on many different points on the political spectrum, and not just the far right. Ironically enough, the rise of aggressive (and often implicitly antisemitic) Zionism on the evangelical right has brought the ADL and far right Christian Nationalists into coalition in recent years.
There’s no way to know, of course, if Cotter’s money funded this exact stunt in Louisville. We do know, however, that Warner claimed that a close associate of his regularly met for lunch with Cotter in the 1980s, suggesting that their connection was already well established by then. I think it’s safe to assume that whatever income Warner had in 1975, at least some of it was likely to have come from Cotter or other wealthy fascists like him.
Entirely unrelated, but this also happens to be the day I was born.
Fantastically presented, and very informative. Thank you for your work!