The World According to Lyle Hartford VanDyke, Jr.

A special edition of Rightlandia for the conspiracy theory aficionados out there, and a more serious discussion of why weirdos like VanDyke are worth knowing about

If you’re the kind of sicko who might be inclined to devote an hour or so of your Labor Day weekend to watching a video featuring the conspiracy theory stylings of Lyle Hartford VanDyke, Jr., Walter Huss’s “long time friend and fellow patriot of many campaigns,” then this post is for you! But if you’re not quite THAT much of a sicko, there’s still plenty to engage a few minutes of your attention here. For the truly dedicated sickos out there, you can download Hartford’s full corpus of writing here.

Lyle Hartford VanDyke, Jr. (1940-2023) was the ultimate “I’ve done my own research” sort of guy. Like many of the self-described “Christian Patriots” who Walter Huss surrounded himself with, Hartford excelled at generating elaborate conspiratorial rationales for why he didn’t have to follow the same rules as everyone else—like paying income taxes, or refraining from printing and circulating $3 million of his own made up money.

The Columbian, 13 October 2002

Hartford eventually served about 7 years in prison for these financial shenanigans. The judge who sentenced him in 2003 described him as “a hopeless sociopath” because of his disruptive behavior in the courtroom and the bizarre legal theories that he used to justify his positions.

And boy did the “self-taught” Hartford have theories. Three years ago a Qanon podcaster/influencer/grifter friend of his recorded a 2-hour monologue in which Hartford shared many of those theories. If you click below you can listen to the section of the interview where he gives his rendition of the well-worn Rothschild story about the origins of the federal reserve that explains why Hartford was totally in his rights to print his own money. If you stick around for the 1 hour and 31 minute mark you will learn how all of this “information” that “they” have been keeping from you solves the mystery of JFK’s assassination. And did I mention that the first 30 minutes of this video explains how Pearl Harbor was an inside job orchestrated by FDR? And if you fast forward to the 1 hour and 42 minute mark you can hear Hartford’s account of how he almost brought his dead wife back to life after three days of working on her corpse, but then the evil coroner came and took her away before he could complete the job. But first, the Rothschilds.¹

Hartford first came on my radar screen because he worked as a “non-union lawyer” for the Husses in 1986, despite the fact that Hartford had no legal training. Hartford devised an elaborate historical interpretation that explained why the legal profession in the US was illegitimate and evil, and why he was justified in declaring himself a lawyer, but I won’t bore you with that here.

In 1982 the Husses had been busted by the FDA and Customs for illegally importing Brazilian bark tea that they intended to sell under the false pretense that it cured cancer. In 1985-6 Hartford was living in an apartment the Husses rented out, and since he had little money (he hadn’t decided to just print his own yet) he offered to do legal work for them in return for rent. The brief he wrote up and submitted on the Husses behalf was, as you can see, quite a ride. The short version is, the Husses did nothing wrong but rather were being persecuted by the Jewish Mafia that controlled Oregon because the Husses were such effective anti-Communists, and since Communism was a Jewish plot to dominate the world…you get the idea. The brief was 3 pages in total, but I’ve just included the final section where it goes entirely off the rails.

When Hartford wasn’t drafting self-undermining legal briefs for the Husses, he was working for tips at a nearby Mexican restaurant as a piano-playing Elvis impersonator. He was apparently quite good at it.

More than 20 years before Hartford was doing legal work for Walter Huss, the two worked together as part of a right wing insurgency that tried (unsucessfully at that time) to take over the Multnomah County GOP. The two stories below from The Oregonian in June 1962 feature a barrage of names, so let me highlight just a few of the key players. Lyle (Hartford) VanDyke you now know.² Syl Ehr was the ringleader of this insurgency. Ehr was a Portland sign painter who had been a Silver Shirt in the 1930s, hosted meetings of “Constitutionalists” at his shop throughout the 1960s and 70s, and was one of the leaders of the Oregon Posse Comitatus in the 1970s and early 1980s. He was also a longtime anti-fluoridation activist in Portland. Wallace Lee was the head of a Portland John Birch Society chapter. William Gardiner was an anti-tax “Christian Patriot” who moved steadily rightward over the course of the 1960s and 70s until he was imprisoned for refusing to pay his income taxes in the 1970s. His lawyer in the case was none other than Hartford VanDyke. Gardiner moved to the Oregon coast in the 1970s where he hosted an AM radio show and tried to organize a movement for the coastal counties to secede from the rest of the state. Gardiner corresponded frequently with Pedro del Valle (who I discussed in this recent post) and in the 1980s he became associated with the Oregon neo-Nazi movement. William Moomau was a far right activist affiliated with Young Americans for Freedom who’d been dispatched to Oregon in 1962 by Bill Rusher to try to push the OR GOP to the right. Another relative newcomer to Portland Republican politics in 1962 was Walter Huss, who’d set up his anti-communist Freedom Center in town only two years before this meeting. Sixteen years later, of course, Huss would be at the head of the statewide far right insurgency that would elevate him to the chairmanship of the OR GOP.

I would argue that in this hotly contested June 1962 meeting of the Multnomah County GOP, we can see the beginning of the very long, drawn out process through which the OR GOP was gradually transformed from the party of moderates like Mark Hatfield, Bob Packwood, and Tom McCall into the party of far right populists like Walter Huss and (more recently) anti-vax and Qanon-supporting Senate candidate JoRae Perkins. Knowing the backstories of the obscure grassroots activists behind this 1962 insurgency enables us to see the deep roots of the far right, conspiracy-obsessed political culture of today’s OR GOP.

I want to emphasize the important role that Syl Ehr, a fascist from the 1930s who would organize a violent anti-government group in the 1970s, played in incubating the political culture that would eventually come to dominate the OR GOP. In Hartford VanDyke’s 2020 interview, he briefly mentions the Thursday night meetings that Syl Ehr began hosting in 1967 where Portland’s “Constitutionalists” got together to share ideas, discuss reading material, and strategize. Based on Huss’s decades-long ties with multiple Portland-area Posse Comitatus members, I strongly suspect that he would have attended these meetings with Hartford and Syl. While it’s just one data point, this single moment in this video (posted by a Qanon influencer) connects the pro-Hitler Silver Shirts of the 1930s to the pro-Hitler “Christian Patriots” of the 1960s to the Qanon movement of the contemporary day.

Syl Ehr’s early 1960s far right effort to take over the OR GOP was temporarily thwarted by Bob Packwood (who would eventually be elected to the US Senate in 1968 where he served until his resignation in 1995). In the run up to the 1964 election Packwood got financial backing from Ernie Swigert, the head of Hyster Corporation and one of the richest men in Oregon, to recruit a slate of moderate (and hence electable) Republican candidates for the Oregon House and Senate. Swigert and Packwood accurately perceived that a GOP slate of candidates chosen by the likes of Syl Ehr, Hartford VanDyke, William Gardiner, Wallace Lee, Bill Moomau, and Walter Huss was unlikely to meet with much success at the ballot box. Thanks to Packwood’s efforts, Oregon was (according to Packwood) the only state in 1964 where Republicans gained seats in the state legislature. The shellacking of Goldwater, the proud “extremist,” at the hands of LBJ created quite a drag on other Republican candidates.

Ironically, Ernie Swigert, the guy who funded Packwood’s moderate counter-insurgency in 1964, was a founding member of the John Birch Society in 1958. It’s not that much of an exaggeration to say that the two factions battling for control of the OR GOP in the early 1960s were very rich anti-communist conspiracy theorists like Ernie Swigert who were strategic enough to bankroll more moderate and reality-based candidates like Packwood vs. middle and working class anti-communist conspiracy theorists like Syl Ehr, Huss, and VanDyke who donated large quantities of sweat equity to building the ultra-conservative GOP of their conspiratorial white Christian supremacist dreams that had little chance of winning general elections, but would soon become quite adept at winning GOP primary elections.

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VanDyke last shows up in Huss’s archive in 1990 when Huss used his connections to a Christian broadcasting company that had been co-founded by Jim and Tammy Bakker to wrangle Hartford a $695 tax deductible donation credit for a crate of phone cradles he claims to have invented and manufactured. To sweeten the deal, Huss chipped in a $500 donation to the network.

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Despite the tone of levity in which this post has been written, I firmly believe that historians of the right should take the conspiracy theories of people like Hartford VanDyke seriously. These conspiracy theories were not isolated one-offs, they were patterned and predictable. They formed an influential culture of conspiracy; they were not just the “kooky” effusions of lone wolf weirdos. They also cultivated a powerful cultural imaginary that replicated itself over time as people excitedly shared the red-pilled “brilliance” of conspiracy mongers like VanDyke or G. Edward Griffin with new generations of populist “free thinkers” who built their identities around a refusal to accept what “they” want you to believe.

To a great extent, the American “far right” has been constituted by these conspiratorial imaginaries that not only claim to explain virtually everything, but also point toward the potentially extreme measures one must take in order to cure what ails American society. One must not trust anything one sees in non-far right media sources. One must not trust most politicians aside from the rare few who truly “get it.” One must arm oneself in preparation for the coming, apocalyptic showdown when those of us who “get it” will have the chance to finally destroy “them.” One might even need to storm the US Capitol to prevent a traitorous Vice President and the cabal of evil pedophiles he covers for from “stealing” an election that everyone knows was won by Donald Trump.

The fact that these conspiracy theories are easily debunked and contain innumerable logical fallacies is kind of beside the point. The problem isn’t that they’re wrong or logically inconsistent—I mean, show me the person who doesn’t believe at least a few questionably true things and whose world view is rigorously logical, present company included. What makes this right wing conspiratorial imaginary so potent and dangerous is that membership in that authoritarian community demands an extra degree of credulity and a foundational belief that the more outlandish something seems, the more likely it is to be true (as long as the source is “one of us”). In this sort of cognitive universe, Joe Biden is simultaneously a drooling dementia-addled non-entity, AND a cunning Cultural Marxist who is systematically destroying everything that was once good about America. Undocumented people are low IQ mooches who want to live off your tax dollars, brilliant and tireless criminal masterminds, and also compliant automatons who work so hard and so cheaply that “real Americans” can’t compete with them. Oregon is both an insufferably liberal place dominated by Communists, and also a state where if we only had “election integrity” to prevent Democrats from stealing elections then Republicans would get elected by landslides.

For those who don’t inhabit this far right imaginary, there’s often a sort of pleasure that comes with pointing out these logical inconsistencies. But again, that’s really not the point if one’s goal is to understand the dynamics that power the far right. These conspiracy theories work because they enable people to imagine themselves to be the protagonists of a story in which an innocent and virtuous “us” is being systematically and intentionally victimized by a small and shadowy group of sinister others. The most effective conspiracy theories deploy well worn racist or antisemitic tropes, but usually do so in such a way that can preserve a shred of plausible deniability and invite in relatively apolitical reactionaries who maybe don’t want to think of themselves as racists or homophobes or antisemites.³ The evil “other” behind the conspiracy could be the deep state, it could be Cultural Marxists, it could be “the gay agenda,” it could be “radical left antifa BLM activists,” it could be SJWs, it could be Communists, it could be “the Democrat Party,” it could be “the globalist elite,” it could be “international bankers,” or it could just be that old standby “the Jews.” Or it could be some almalgam of some or all of these.

The most effective conspiracies strike a balance between being specific enough to invoke a sense of menace, while being vague enough that they won’t alienate too many potential recruits. This is why “the woke mind virus” is such a potent tool for today’s right…do they mean professors, doctors, bankers, feminists, LGBTQ folks, DEI instructors, public school administrators, public health officials? Depending on who you are, you can fill in the blanks with whichever “bad guy” most resonates with you; and you can overlook the rest if you so wish, especially the ones who might very well be your friends, relatives, teachers, or neighbors who you know full well aren’t part of some conspiracy to destroy you.

These conspiracy theories gain traction when they are extravagantly elaborated enough to hook and sustain the audience’s long-term attention, yet also general and opaque enough to deflect critical scrutiny. As I argued in this earlier post, these conspiracy theories about culturally and/or ethnically foreign others who seek to destroy traditional Christian America were not just a colorful flourish atop Walter Huss’s far right political vision, they were foundational to it. Whether we like it or not, tens of millions of our fellow Americans, and a significant portion of people who identify as Republicans, inhabit the sort of far right conspiratorial imaginary that people like Hartford VanDyke and Walter Huss devoted their lives to constructing and disseminating. It would be nice if we lived in a world where we could just laugh at such things and go on with our lives…but sadly, that far right conspiratorial imaginary has become far too influential and powerful for us to simply ignore.

1. For those interested in learning more about the history of this particular conspiracy theory, journalist Mike Rothschild (no relation to those other Rothschilds) has a book on the subject coming out in a few weeks.

2. There’s a small chance this was Lyle Hartford VanDyke, Sr, our Hartford’s father who also lived in Portland at the time. Given that I’ve not seen any indication that Hartford, Sr. was involved with politics before this and given Hartford, Jr’s ties to all of the other people involved with this 1962 insurgency, it seems most likely that this was Jr.

3. Note, for example, that in that video Hartford never says anything about “the Jews.” Given his longstanding ties with several neo-Nazis, he knows exactly what sort of political energies that story about the Rothschilds taps into.