The anti-communist circular firing squad that is the Oregon GOP

Some observations on yesterday's failed effort to recall Oregon Republican National Committeeman Solomon Yue

Short version: On June 3, a group of Oregon Republicans tried (but failed) to recall the state’s long-serving Republican National Committeeman Solomon Yue claiming (in part) that he was a Communist. Meanwhile, Yue’s Republican defenders (rightly) dismissed that as a ludicrous charge and went on to claim that it is ackshually the Republicans behind Yue’s recall that look suspiciously like an arm of the deep state/CCP conspiracy that’s trying to take down Donald Trump and his supporters like Yue because Trump is the only person who can save Oregon and America from the pro-Chinese Communist hell-hole they have already become under Biden’s regime. Got that? Republicans on Team A say Team B are Communists, while Republican Team B responds by saying that Team A are the real Communists, and if there’s one thing that both teams can agree on, it’s that Oregon is already basically Communist. Communism, of course, has almost nothing to do with what’s going on in Oregon or American politics, but when you’ve built much of your identity around being a freedom-loving anti-communist hammer, everything looks like a communist nail.

---

Solomon Yue has served as a National Committeeman for the Oregon GOP for more than two decades. He’s a very conservative Republican, a strong backer of Donald Trump, and a well-connected co-founder of the more far right “conservative caucus” in the national Republican National Committee (which, in that crowd of 168 top GOP activists, is saying something). Yue fled to America from Communist China and his outspoken opposition to the CCP (and communism more generally) is a prominent part of his public persona.

Despite his undeniable anti-communist and MAGA bona fides, a number of county-level GOP activists filed a petition last month to recall Yue in which they suggest that Yue might be a secret Communist.

This is not the first time Yue has been called a Communist by his fellow Oregon Republicans. Last year, Former State Senator Dallas Heard (a very pro-Trump America First populist from Southern Oregon) stepped down as the chair of the OR GOP, claiming that he had been the victim of “Communist psychological tactics” at the hands of Yue and others.

The grassroots Republican attacks on Yue also included this recent action that the state’s pro-Yue Republicans (who generally think racism doesn’t exist in Oregon or the US) decried as a reprehensible throwback to the terroristic racism of the KKK era

This morning I listened to this almost 2 hour Twitter space hosted by pro-Yue activists. They expressed outrage that any of their fellow Republicans could stoop so low as to accuse Yue of being a Communist. A fair point….BUT….

Another theme that emerged in that conversation was that Oregon is currently being run by actual Communists and that Barack Obama was an anti-American radical who wanted to turn the United States into a socialist/communist hellhole. Below is a clip in which the host of that Twitter space describes Oregon as “Communism central.” She was not being hyperbolic or sarcastic. [Note: I live in Oregon and can assure you that full Communism has not been achieved, nor has it even begun to be attempted by anyone with even the tiniest amount of political power in the state, unless by “Communism” you mean center-left policy proposals intended to solve the state’s problems and respond to the wishes of the state’s Democratic majority. For context, Biden won the state by 15 points.]

It’s unclear how the movement to recall Yue started or who organized it. It’s not like the pro-Yue and anti-Yue camps can be easily sorted along ideological lines. Both sides love Trump, both sides hate Democrats, both sides think the 2020 election was probably stolen, both sides think abortion is murder, both sides hate “gender ideology” and “woke indoctrination” in schools, both sides think most J6 defendants are victims of political persecution, both sides think the nation is in an existential battle between good and evil.

Rumors and theories abound as to why Yue was subjected to a recall vote now when he’s up for re-election next year. At the most recent RNC gathering Yue abided by the wishes of the OR GOP grassroots and voted for Harmeet Dhillon over Ronna McDaniel for chair. Some suspect that McDaniel might be trying to get revenge by orchestrating Yue’s removal, but there doesn’t appear to be much evidence to support that theory. In the absence of a good explanation backed by evidence, two speakers in that Twitter space floated the idea that this might be part of a “deep state conspiracy” to undermine Trump and do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party. [The first voice in the clip below is that of the current chair of the Marion County GOP and the second voice is that of the former chair of the Multnomah County GOP.]

For those keeping score at home, we now have critics of Yue suggesting that he’s a secret Communist, and the defenders of Yue suggesting that his critics are part of a “deep state” plot masterminded by the Chinese Communist Party. Circular anti-communist firing squad commence, and Occam’s Razor be damned.

As an outsider to this infighting amongst Oregon Republicans, I’m tempted to point out that when you build a political culture around the dopey idea that every American you don’t agree with is part of a nefarious Communist conspiracy to destroy America, then you shouldn’t be surprised when factions inside your own party articulate their disagreements by dopily accusing each other of being Communists. The problem with such Manichaean rhetoric is that it obscures the real sources of disagreement or conflict, thereby preventing authentic deliberation and compromise. It’s like when a kid says they punched their sibling because “they’re a doodoohead.” I mean, obviously there’s a conflict to be addressed there, but naming it imaginary things like “doodooheadedness” or “Communism” doesn’t really get anyone any closer to addressing the real conflict and moving forward.

---

So what does all of this have to do with former OR GOP chair Walter Huss? He’s been dead for 17 years and I’d be surprised if any of the actors in this Solomon Yue drama even know Huss’s name. But when I listen to the apocalyptic, anti-communist conspiracy mongering of these avid readers of esoteric right wing websites and books, I can’t help but see them as the descendants of a style of Oregon Republican politics that was considered fringe and kooky when Walter Huss engaged in it in the 1970s and 1980s, but which his tireless activism helped normalize as part of the mainstream of the party’s grassroots culture over time.

The host of that pro-Yue Twitter space is an admirer of the Proud Boys, and her co-host refers to herself as a “based” enemy of woke Marxism. The main speaker in that space has written a book arguing that the Democratic Party is being controlled by a handful of radical left socialist billionaire puppet masters like George Soros. I don’t know if these particular Yue supporters are extreme antisemities and white nationalists like Huss was, but I do know that the shape and texture of their evidence-free conspiracy theories about “the Marxist enemy” who supposedly controls the media and the government would have been quite amenable to Walter Huss.

Both the pro-Yue and the anti-Yue conspiracy theories are, of course, insane, just as Huss’s obsession with the Oregon Jewish Mafia that was out to get him was also bonkers. The ubiquity of tin foil hat conspiracy theories in OR GOP messaging goes a long way toward explaining why the party has met with so little electoral success over the past few decades. But there’s little sign that Oregon Republicans are going to start spending less time ranting about the phantom Communist menace and more time devising and promoting policies a majority of their fellow Oregonians might support any time soon. And so it seems likely that Oregon for the foreseeable future will continue to be a de facto one-party state with an obstructionist minority party far more interested in concocting cockamamie conspiracy theories than participating in the give and take of democratic governance.