The Trilateral Shitpost Fire that was the 1980 GOP convention, part 2

How did the Trilateral Commission go from being a ho hum news item to the salacious talk of the 1980 GOP convention?

This is a continuation of Part I from about a month ago, so if you haven’t read that yet you might want to start there.

This installment of Rightlandia seeks to answer this question: how did a fairly wonky and uninteresting non-governmental organization like “the Trilateral Commission” come to be such a ubiquitous topic of heated, conspiratorial conversation at the 1980 GOP convention in Detroit? I want to stress that there was nothing necessarily right wing or conspiratorial about criticizing the Trilateral Commission in the 1970s and early 1980s. The TC had many critics on the left as well as on the right. The mode of talking about the TC that I’m focusing on is the mode that fed the TC into the meat grinder of pre-existing right wing conspiracy thinking, reducing it to just another virtually indistinguishable iteration of the conspiracy of “international bankers” and “elitist Communist intellectuals” and “anti-Christian one worlders” that was supposedly behind the illuminati and the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderbergers and [fill in the blanks]. Most of the right wing conspiracy mongering about the Trilateral Commission did not substantively engage with what the TC actually did. And it wasn’t as if the Trilateral Commission was uniquely secretive—the organization published reports and transcripts of their meetings and their gatherings were covered fairly extensively by the press. The right wing discussions of the TC I’ve seen rarely go beyond apocalyptic, Pavlovian propaganda that breathlessly recycled a combination of the same anti-Rockefeller, anti-internationalist, and/or antisemitic themes that animated earlier conspiracy theories from the Silver Shirts of the 30s to the anti-UN obsessives of the 1950s to the John Birchers of the 1960s to the Posse Comitatus/Christian Patriots of the late 1970s. The Trilateral Commission was just a new bottle for a very old whine.

So if right wing talk of the Trilateral Commission was so mind-numblingly simplistic and unoriginal, then why is it worth researching and writing about? While there’s no reason to write an intellectual history of the sources I’ve read, the Trilateral Commission discourse served as a culturally and politically potent imaginary. A willingness to live inside that imaginary (or just entertain it as a viable possibility) served as a marker of belonging to a community of populist conservatives who thought they knew better than to trust the media, the GOP establishment, or other brainwashed normies who refused to see the Trilateral Commission as the scary boogeyman they knew it to be. Nowadays we’re familiar with how a willingness to believe in or at least nod along with an intricately elaborated universe of empirically-challenged conspiracy theories about stolen elections or Hunter Biden or QAnon functions as an important marker of belonging to the political community of MAGA Republicans. The Trilateral true believers comprised a much smaller subset of Republicans back in 1980, but they were a not insignificant fraction of Reagan’s most avid supporters, and in many ways they embodied the future into which the party was headed.

Watching as a meme like the Trilateral Commission conspiracy theory moved from the far right edges of American politics in 1974 onto the main floor of the 1980 GOP convention helps us better understand the process of right wing radicalization inside the GOP. There was nothing inevitable about the 1980 GOP convention becoming the convention where the TC was the talk of the town—that resulted from the actions of a discernible set of populist activists skillfully utilizing alternative media and their political networks to pursue goals which their “establishment” counterparts were largely unaware of until it was too late.

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The first critical notice of the Trilateral Commission I’ve found appeared in this December 1974 newsletter from Youth Action, a neo-Nazi/white power publication from Alexandria, Va. [For context, the TC held its first meeting in 1973, so it didn’t take long for the conspiracy theories to emerge.]

Note how there was nothing obviously neo-Nazi, antisemitic, or racist about this account of the Trilateral Commission, but the very small audience for this publication would have readily picked up on the dog whistles embedded in the term “new world order” and in the idea that Nelson Rockefeller, who was a known champion of civil rights and religious pluralism, was about to suspend the Constitution and institute some sort of authoritarian rule over “real Americans like us.” [If you want to get a flavor of just how much of a white nationalist, antisemite, and advocate of right wing domestic terrorism CB Baker was, spending a few minutes with his publication Statecraft should do the trick.]

The suspicions we see in this 1974 piece about over-educated elites and a too-socially-liberal “east coast establishment” would have resonated with many self-described “conservatives” in that year because they echoed the sort of conspiracy theories that had animated the pro-Goldwater right since the early 1960s. The right wing activists inside the GOP, like Phyllis Schlafly, were always convinced that some shadowy cabal was about to steal a nomination or election from them, and hence they needed to steel themselves for the battle inside the party to ensure that those nefarious liberal Republicans wouldn’t thwart the will of the virtuous, “real conservatives” yet again. This conviction that “we, the real conservatives” were about to have something stolen by “them, the fake conservatives/Republicans” has been a central and consistent feature of the far right imaginary from the 1950s right on up to Trump’s obsessive talk of the “globalist RINOs” who are supposedly out to get him.

In the clipping below, for example, we see Ginni Thomas’s mother, Mrs. Donald Lamp, protesting the 1967 election for president of the National Federation of Republican Women because it had been “rigged” against the more conservative candidate, Phyllis Schlafly. I include this example because it shows just how deeply grooved this sort of conspiracy thinking was for folks on the right edge of the GOP coalition. If “they” could steal a relatively unimportant election from Schafly, imagine what “they” would do when the Presidency of the United States was at stake?

Lincoln Star, 27 May 1967.

And indeed, the Trilateral Commission talk ramped up in early 1976 as the Presidential election approached. According to folks on the far right, TC-head David Rockefeller’s clever strategy for world domination involved two options: either his brother Nelson would do his bidding as GOP VP under Ford, or Rockefeller’s handpicked Trilateral stooge, Jimmy Carter, would become president as a Democrat. The Trilateral Commission and the “international bankers” who controlled it would win in 1976 regardless of which interchangeable political party won, and the “real American people,” of course, would be the losers. THAT was the meaning of the upcoming election.

At the end of the document below, which was in Walter Huss’s “Carter” folder, we see an additional wrinkle to the Rockefeller-TC conspiracy. The Democratic establishment opposed Carter, which you’d think would be a good thing in the eyes of these people, but according to the author of this piece the Democratic establishment only opposed Carter because that it was controlled by a competing set of evil globalists, the “Rothschild-Zionist” gang. I have to admit that I only barely understand what the hell they’re talking about at this point, and I’m not even sure if there’s anything there TO understand. I guess my main takeaway from that part of this document is that the more complicated your baseless conspiracy theories are, the more you can keep readers like Walter Huss hooked and primed to pay for more revelations to come.

My hypothesis that CB Baker’s Youth Action was the most important early disseminator of the Trilateral Commission talking point is supported by two letters I recently found in Pedro del Valle’s papers. Two separate correspondents identified Baker’s publication as their initial source for “the truth” about the TC that they were eager to share with their Nazi-sympathizing comrade del Valle.

Pedro del Valle Papers, Box 1. Kathryn Lange is a fascinating person who I intend to write about in a future installment of Rightlandia. She was a former newspaper editor and upper-middle class socialite in Palm Beach who carried on an extensive correspondence with del Valle in which she praised the virtues of Adolf Hitler and the Americans who recognized his brilliance. She also eagerly fantasized about a future in which an American Franco would engage in a military takeover of the country to restore it to its true Christian foundations.

Excerpt of letter from Delmas McClendon in Tulsa to Pedro del Valle, 10 April 1977.

Based on how little public discussion of the TC I’ve seen before 1976, it would appear as if it was not yet a widespread conspiracy theory familiar to more mainstream conservatives, but was rather a fairly niche form of special “knowledge” that only truly dedicated right wingers had access to. But thanks to The Spotlight, that began to change in 1976.

As I mentioned in Part I of this series, The Spotlight was the media outlet most responsible for bringing “news” about the nefarious Trilateral Commission to hundreds of thousands of self-described “populist” and “conservative” readers. The Spotlight was published by Nazi-sympathizer, white nationalist, and Holocaust denier Willis Carto, the founder of the DC-based Liberty Lobby. At its height in the late 1970s and early 1980s, The Spotlight had over 300,000 subscribers, and it put out a radio show that was carried on 470 AM stations around the country. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Carto had been a funder and promoter of C.B. Baker, the editor of Youth Action News, so it makes sense that the same Trilateral Commission meme would find its way from the pages of Baker’s rag into The Spotlight. It’s important to note that The Spotlight conveyed its neo-Nazi sensibilities in a plausibly deniable, dog whistled form that marketed itself as “populist,” “common sense,” and “conservative.” It was kind of like the Breitbart of its day in that the Steve Bannon-edited Breitbart would scan neo-Nazi outlets like Stormfront for compelling story lines and then repackage them for their Breitbart audience with the sharper edges sanded off.

In 1976 The Spotlight issued an 8-page special edition dedicated to telling readers “the truth” about Jimmy Carter…and a big part of that “truth” involved Carter’s status as the “hand-picked puppet” of the Rockefeller/Trilateral Commission cabal.

Faye Brice, who hosted a thrice-weekly radio show in National City, CA and sent out show transcripts to her mailing list, was another relatively early disseminator of the Trilateral Commission conspiracy theory. Like CB Baker at Youth Action, she understood the TC to be just another manifestation of the Marxist/Communist conspiracy to destroy America, only her 1977 gloss on it was more of the anti-communist evangelical variety rather than the anti-communist neo-Nazi variety.

Below is a picture of Faye Brice. Needless to say, she traveled in slightly different social circles than the ranting and menacing neo-Nazi, CB Baker. In 1980 she received the key to the city from the Mayor of Imperial Beach, CA at an event honoring her life of anti-communist work. Paul Scott, the source for much of her information on the Trilateral Commission, was a “conservative” columnist syndicated in scores of mainstream newspapers across the country. His writing also frequently appeared in the John Birch Society’s outlet The Review of the News in the 1970s and he spoke several times at meetings organized by that group.

So by 1977 the TC meme has moved from the neo-Nazi Youth Action to the veiled neo-Nazis at The Spotlight, to the more respectable John Birch Society-linked “conservative” columnist Paul Scott, to the newsletter of relatively staid evangelical anti-communist Faye Brice. With all that said, the TC had not gone truly viral yet.

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And this is where Texas small businessman Johnny Stewart enters the picture, the Johnny Tin-foil-hat-seed of the Trilateral Commission conspiracy theory if you will. Note the impressive list of affiliations Stewart proudly noted in the second paragraph below. Who would ever think of calling an upstanding, successful businessman and Chamber of Commerce member like Johnny Stewart a crackpot?

[I can’t resist pointing out that it’s just a little too on the nose that Johnny Stewart made his pile manufacturing bird calls that hunters would use to deceptively attract and then kill their prey.]

Stewart’s role in the TC conspiracy theory involved funding the production of millions of copies of squint-inducing charts like the one below. It was charts like these that right wing ratfuckers Gary Arnold and Anthony Hilder took to the GOP convention in Detroit in 1980 where they put them in the hands of as many delegates and members of the press as they could. [Arnold and Hilder are the guys who wrote the first hand accounts of the 1980 convention that I foregrounded in part I of this series.]

This is the 1989 “memorial edition” of Johnny Stewart’s iconic CFR/Trilateral Connection flier of which Walter Huss was the proud owner.

Johnny Stewart was such an effective and well-connected evangelist for the TC cause that in 1981 he convinced the VFW and the American Legion to issue official resolutions calling on Congress to investigate the CFR and TC as threats to American sovereignty.

Stewart reminds me a bit of a 1980s version of Mike Lindell, a moderately successful right wing entrepreneur who “saw the light” and decided to devote his modest fortune and his free time to spreading “the good word” about the nefarious globalist conspiracy that was on the verge of destroying traditional Christian America. One difference is that Stewart did not use his political activism as a way to drum up business the way Lindell does. And also, where Lindell has the ear of former President Trump, I’ve seen no evidence that Ronald Reagan even knew Johnny Stewart existed.

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Materials referencing the Trilateral Commission conspiracy are littered across many different folders in Walter Huss’s archive. This attests to just how successful and broad-based this far right propaganda campaign was. Huss seems to have been bombarded with information about it in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I’ll offer just one more example of the sort of TC materials Huss owned (aside from the CB Baker materials) that shows how interlaced this TC conspiracy was with much older antisemitic conspiracy theories. It’s noteworthy that Huss chose to store the item below in his “Jews” folder. The organization he received this information from in 1980, Western Front, was a Nazi sympathizing, white power organization headed up by Walter White in Los Angeles. White was married to Opal Tanner, one of the leading writers and organizers in Gerald LK Smith’s Christian Nationalist organization. Recall that Huss had been the chair of the OR GOP in 1978-9 and that he attended the 1980 GOP convention as a Reagan delegate, and THIS was the sort of literature he was receiving, reading, and saving in his “Jews” folder.

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There’s one more key player in this story of how the Trilateral Commission conspiracy moved from the neo-Nazi edges of the conservative coalition to the floor of the 1980 GOP convention, and that’s “Mr. Conservative” himself, Barry Goldwater. Goldwater’s 1979 memoir “With No Apologies” contained a chapter titled “The Nonelelected Rulers” that laid out virtually every talking point that would be used by Johnny Stewart in his conspiracy theories about the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

Barry Goldwater, With No Apologies (1979)

Johnny Stewart’s 1981 flier using Goldwater’s 1979 memoir as “proof” that Stewart’s conspiratorial fears about the Trilateral Commission were shared by patriotic Americans in positions of great power and influence.

I highly doubt that Goldwater had any idea what sort of batshittery he was lending his clout to. After all, his slapdash “memoir” seems to have been cobbled together by an assistant out of a bunch of speeches and notes that Goldwater handed over. So it’s hardly as if Goldwater was rubbing his hands together as he wrote this book, thinking “hmmm, what kind of right wing conspiracy mongering can I breathe new life into today?” It seems more likely that Goldwater was just being his usual slightly unhinged and paranoid shoot-from-the-hip sort of guy who thought it would be interesting to toss some provocative and apocalyptic musings out there into the public sphere.

But regardless of Goldwater’s intent, the impact of his book (a book which went largely unnoticed by most mainstream outlets and readers) was to pour massive amounts of gasoline on the Trilateral Shitpost Fire that folks like Johnny Stewart, Anthony Hilder, and Gary Arnold had set about building.

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And now we turn to the final two players in out story: Gary Arnold and Anthony Hilder, the two right wing merry pranksters who assiduously spread the word of the Trilateral Commission to the as-yet-uninformed Republicans who attended the GOP convention in 1980.

Figures like Johnny Stewart, Faye Brice, CB Baker, Anthony Hilder, or Gary Arnold rarely show up in histories of the GOP or American conservatism, but grassroots activists like them (and Walter Huss, of course) were instrumental in pushing the GOP ever rightward. Their actions help explain how we got here today.

Anthony Hilder is well-known in the circles of right wing conspiracy obsessives, but probably is a new name to you (as he was to me when I first ran across him.) Below is a 2010 video of him discussing the theory that Obama was part of the global Marxist conspiracy against America. He’s being interviewed by Jim Marrs, a 9/11 truther and UFO “expert” whose “research” on JFK’s assassination inspired Oliver Stone’s film on that subject.

Hilder had a daily radio show in Ventura in the 1980s where he kept the flames of the Trilateral Commission conspiracy theory alive. The ad below was from September 1986. Note the interview with Johnny Stewart and also Jim Townsend, the publisher of the the National Educator which was also a purveyor of a wide variety of right wing conspiracy theories.

Though Hilder died in 2019, his conspiracy franchise has lived on in the form of a Twitter account and other social media channels. Unsurprisingly, that account was very into conspiracies about the 2020 election.

Hilder began his working career in the 1950s as a producer of surf rock recordings, and like many grassroots conservatives he seems to have been first politicized by the Goldwater campaign in 1964. He produced a campaign record, Stars for Barry, that featured the voices of John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Strom Thurmond, Mary Pickford, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and Efram Zimbalist, Jr.

As we see in this 1974 description of Hilder in the LA Times, by then he had come to identify as someone far to the right of the John Birch Society and a believer in the international bankers’ conspiracy.

In 1976 most people on the far right (like Huss) were eager to see Reagan unseat Gerald Ford atop the GOP ticket. But not Hilder, because he’d seen enough of Reagan as the governor of California to know that he was ackshually a “pink pimp” for the globalists.

Village Voice, 2 February 1976.

What should we make of extremists like Anthony Hilder and Gary Arnold who thought Reagan had been captured by the Jewish/Communist conspiracy even before he got elected President in 1980? If they really thought that, then why would they bother to go to the 1980 GOP convention to spread the word about GHWB’s Trilateral connections so as to try to thwart his VP nomination?

It’s possible that Arnold and Hilder didn’t believe any of this crap and were just grifting nihlists who recognized they could make easy money off the credulous reactionaries who filled the ranks of the GOP electorate. Given that both of them devoted their entire lives to the same political project and never appear to have broken character, I think it’s probably safe to assume that they really believed the stuff they were saying. Either that or they were Andy Kaufman-level performance art geniuses.

The Liberty Lobby reference in that Village Voice story might be an important clue as to what Hilder was up to. Remember that the (likely) originator of the TC conspiracy theory, CB Baker, was affiliated with the Liberty Lobby. Note also that the person who was most vocal in resisting GHWB’s nomination and was able to wrangle a primetime speaking spot at the GOP convention as a concession for ultimately endorsing GHWB was Jesse Helms, the Senator most closely aligned with the Liberty Lobby. The Liberty Lobby had been in operation since 1958 and its mission was to drive the GOP and the nation’s politics as far as possible toward the white supremacist and neo-Nazi beliefs of its founder, Willis Carto. Liberty Lobby affiliated activists knew this was a very long game and that the election of a single president like Reagan was not going to be the end of it. So what Reagan-haters Hilder and Arnold were doing at the 1980 GOP convention, when they handed out fliers that had Reagan’s smiling face on the outside and information about the Trilateral Commission on the inside, was using this occasion to keep nudging the political culture of the GOP rightward. Where most commentators looked at the 1980 GOP convention and thought “holy cow, I can’t believe they nominated such a right winger,” people like Hilder and Arnold were thinking “if we get our ultimate wish, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Ultimately, the GOP was able to put somewhat of a lid on the Trilateral circus. Whenever rank and file participants in the convention tried to raise the issue in public forums where the media was present, the party leaders put the kibosh on any such potentially embarrassing tom foolery. In the newspaper article below, for example, we hear from a Youth for Reagan delegate from California who expressed frustration that he wasn’t allowed to ask any questions about the TC, because this was one of the issues he was most concerned about.

As we now know, Reagan won the 1980 election handily and managed to sell much of the country on the idea that he was not a right wing nutter who had any truck with Trilateral Commission conspiracy theories. But Gary Arnold wasn’t done with Reagan. In 1982 Arnold ran for Congress and when he was invited to the Reagan White House for an event with other GOP candidates he stood up during what was supposed to be a friendly gathering and began hectoring Reagan about his tax policies, tylenol, and how he was coddling the international banking elite. Reagan bantered with him for a second but ultimately just told him to “shut up.” Here’s how the Washington Post reported the encounter.

This was the much more sympathetic coverage of the Arnold/Reagan tete a tete in the Tyler [TX] Courier Times on November 7, 1982.

At both the 1980 convention and at the stunt he pulled at that 1982 encounter at the White House, Gary Arnold accomplished his goal of drawing more conspiratorial attention to the Trilateral Commission and to amplifying the work of the elves in Johnny Stewart’s workshop who were churning out TC fliers by the thousands. I’m sure many people looked at Arnold’s slap down at the hands of Reagan and the electoral shellacking he took at the hands of Leon Panetta (140K votes for Panetta vs. 24K votes for Arnold) and thought “haha, what a pathetic fool that Gary Arnold is.” And yes, I will grant that Arnold is a pathetic fool, but while he did not win as an electoral candidate, he did succeed in drawing grassroots attention to his batshit crazy but propagandistically-effective conspiracy theories about the global elite. It’s through attention-grabbing stunts like this that the far right continued to build momentum and keep its talking points in front of the public.

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By 1992 the Trilateral Commission fever had passed such that the Washington Post could run an article that both described in a straightforward manner what it was, and also mocked those on the right like the LaRoucheites, Pat Robertson, and the folks at The Spotlight who thought it was some nefarious conspiracy. Thank goodness that in 1992 those fever swamp days of American conspiracies were all behind us, eh!?!?

One of the defining features of what it means to live inside of history is that we never know what the future holds. In hindsight we can look at that 1992 WaPo article or the hubris of the establishment Republicans of the Reagan era and be critical of them for not taking seriously enough the grassroots populist insurgency that was gathering momentum under their feet. But there was nothing inevitable about the ultimate ascendancy of that apocalyptic, conspiracy-obsessed, far right grassroots political culture inside the GOP. It was comprised of the assiduous work of alternative media outlets like The Spotlight and tireless grassroots activists like Johnny Stewart, Anthony Hilder, and Gary Arnold. If the anti-democratic radicalization of the GOP is the most important political story of our times (as I believe it to be), then hopefully histories like this might help us get a more precise handle on how that dynamic has worked in the past and is continuing to work today.