The Eternal Batshittery of the Right Wing Mind

The 55 year history behind the conspiracy theories dogging today's advocates of 15-minute cities

This morning I listened to this interesting story about the “15-minute city” idea and the conspiracy theory-informed death threats its advocates have been receiving. Though the story doesn’t mention this, these conspiracy theories about city planners have been ubiquitous on the US right and go back to the 1950s. Today it’s supposedly the WEF that’s behind this evil cabal, but in the past it was either the Council on Foreign Relations or the Trilateral Commission or the Rockefellers or just, you know, the Jews.

One of Walter Huss’s most cherished conspiracy theories was based on Jo Hindman’s books and articles about “Metro Government” and the one worlder globalists who were using a seemingly innocuous set of ideas about city planning to turn the US into a Communist totalitarian state run by UN central planners. This is a leaflet Huss printed up in 1968.

I did a quick search on newspapers dot com for articles that mention “1313,” “metro,” and “Jo Hindman” and turned up almost 400 hits. The first one that came up was an article in the Knoxville News Sentinel from May 1959. Local officials who were trying to make changes to how the city and county governs itself found themselves barraged with letters from conspiracy theorists claiming they're part of a secret one world gov't takeover. As this writer notes, this idea came out of the antisemitic and fascist fever swamps of the far right and had absolutely no basis in fact. I want to emphasize again, this is a local Tennessee writer in a local Tennessee paper, but even he could not squash this batshittery.

The most recent reference to Jo Hindman and 1313 Metro I discovered appeared in a Binghamton, NY paper in December 2006. I also found this positive reference to the work of Jo Hindman in this 2017 article from a libertarian “property rights” think tank.

Just as today’s “anti-globalist” conspiracy theorists braid together a host of different issues—from Covid vaccines to education to city planning to climate change initiatives—into one unifying theory about a shadowy Communist cabal that wants to destroy AmericaAsWeKnowIt, Jo Hindman also had some thoughts in 1959 about how federal education bureaucrats were trying to do Communist/one world brainwashing on America's school children.

Palm Beach Post, 8 April 1959

Despite this conspiracy theory about "Metro" being completely baseless and getting debunked multiple times in mainstream outlets, it became a stock set piece in US right wing culture. This 1980 flier is from a California Republican named Gary Arnold. It was owned by Walter Huss, OR GOP chair in 1978-9.

Dedicated readers of Rightlandia will recognize Gary Arnold as a key player in the story about how a batshit conspiracy theory about the Trilateral Commission ended up becoming a major topic of conversation at the 1980 GOP Convention at which Reagan was coronated. Good old Gary Arnold appears in both Part 1…

And part 2…

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Walter Huss would have been a receptive audience for Gary Arnold’s 1980 flier about Metro Government, because Huss had printed up his own flier in 1968 warning about that same conspiracy hatched by an evil globalist cabal at 1313 East 60th St. that Jo Hindman had blown the whistle on.

This flier for Hindman’s book (that I found in the papers of a right wing GOP activist and Chamber of Commerce member based in Bellingham, WA named Lee J. Adamson) is noteworthy for how Hindman describes herself, as someone who only “reports facts with careful objectivity laced with mature understanding and empathy.” These right wing conspiracy theorists always present themselves as brave, objective truth tellers whose consensus-destroying insights are being systematically censored by “the controlled media” that feeds you propaganda in order to control you.

The difference between a “successful” conspiracy theory and one that vanishes into the ether usually has to do with who is amplifying and disseminating it. Jo Hindman’s “Metro” conspiracy was given life by The American Mercury (a fascist periodical that was the source of much of Walter Huss’s material in his early 1960s newspaper) and Phoebe Courtney (who promoted the Metro conspiracy as part of her highly influential “tax fax” leaflet series).

John Huntington’s excellent book is the go-to source on Kent and Phoebe Courtney, Louisiana segregationists who played an immensely important (but too often overlooked) role as organizers of the far right insurgency that sought to take over the Republican Party beginning in the mid-1950s and continuing on into the 1960s and 70s.

Sometimes it feels empowering to have this arcane knowledge of the various conspiracy theories that have fired up the US right for the past 60+ years. At other times it’s just plain depressing because it seems as if we as a culture have not learned a single thing about how to blunt the impact of this ratfuckery. I call it “ratfuckery” because the people who spread this effective propaganda don’t actually care about truth in any meaningful way. They may actually believe this stuff, but they believe it because it confirms their apocalyptic and fascist priors about how any form of democratic power that might in any way cut into their power and privilege must be part of some massive coordinated conspiracy against them. For the true initiates, it’s always just one conspiracy with multiple tentacles linking together everyone to their left who is involved with education, public health, banking, the media, civil rights activism, higher education, feminism, etc. The centralized head of that octopus is always some “fill in the blank” multi-national body controlled by rootless cosmopolitan billionaires who also are Christianity-hating Communists. And the takeaway lesson always ends up being that every institution that our modern democratic society has created to help serve the common good is ackshually just an arm of a vast conspiracy trying to control and/or destroy good Christian patriots like you.

It’s so mind-numbingly stupid, and also so incredibly seductive for a significant subset of Americans. These conspiracy theories have almost always been immune to fact-checking, even in the golden age of Walter Cronkite. They were kept slightly in check by the structure of the media that enabled gatekeepers to keep these bullshit ideas at least on the margins of public conversation, but these voices always had quite a large constituency and more than a few elected “conservatives” willing to give these conspiracy theories air.

I wish I could end with a grand theory of how we combat the effectiveness of this sort of shit, but I’m just a poor country historian and that’s far above my pay grade.

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Update: I just discovered that the same July 1959 edition of the American Mercury in which Jo Hindman published one of her early pieces on Metro…

…featured this iconic moment in the history of American Conservatism. For background, Bill Buckley (who had gotten his start writing for the American Mercury in the early 1950s) decided in the late 1950s that the periodical’s new owners/editors were simply too antisemitic and fascistic for his tastes, so he announced that the National Review (founded in 1955, only 4 years earlier) would establish its “responsible” bona fides by not including on its masthead anyone who appears on the masthead of the American Mercury. [In typical Buckley form, he didn’t go so far as to say he wouldn’t publish anyone who also published in the Mercury. Wouldn’t want to engage in cancel culture, of course, because one could still be “a fine person” and publish in an antisemitic and fascistic conspiracy rag.]

For more on Buckley’s profoundly lame way of dealing with the problem of antisemitism on the right, this recent episode of Know Your Enemy with John Ganz is great. And for more on this episode involving Buckley and the American Mercury, this article by David Austin Walsh is excellent, as will be his forthcoming book.