That’s from a twitter thread by Seth Cotler:
A dispatch from the same shit, different day files. In 1976 Jon Voight’s great-uncle, a virulent anti-semitic far right propagandist named Joseph Kamp, wrote an article for The Spotlight (published by neo-Nazis) identifying Jimmy Carter as a puppet of radical left “globalists.”
That same 1976 newspaper (that was in the possession of Oregon's Walter Huss, a far right activist with neo-Nazi ties who became chair of the OR GOP in 1978) featured this story about how Carter was supposedly going to grab all of your guns.
The same 1976 newspaper quoted far right, Christian Reconstructionist theologian R.J. Rushdoony to "prove" that Carter, with his affinity for the Bilderbergers and other "globalists," was a strange (and wrong) kind of Christian.
The back page summed it up nicely. Carter is controlled by "a globalist clique" and his main advisor is a beta male who is dominated by his wife but who is also an all-powerful pinko brainwasher.
Wouldn't be a far right moral panic without drugs thrown in there somewhere…and as we all know, Carter was totally a cocaine runner who was just running a peanut farm as a front. Uh huh. s/
The Spotlight was a very widely read "conservative" periodical back in the 70s and 80s. It was a few clicks to the right of National Review, but almost certainly had a larger circulation. In 1980 it had about 310K subscribers. National Review was probably about 1/3 of that.
The Spotlight targeted racially resentful readers who worried Reagan was a squish, who had admired George Wallace back in '68 & would avidly cheer on Pat Robertson in '88 and then Pat Buchanan in '92. It was also for folks who didn't trust modern medicine.
There were very few elected officials or conservative intellectuals who took The Spotlight seriously. They would have regarded it as embarrassingly conspiratorial, racist, and antisemitic.
But the problem was that the populist version of "conservatism" that was developed in The Spotlight spoke to and for the emerging "conservative base" far more authentically than anything that spilled from William F. Buckley's erudite pen.
Coda: I received this fundraising email from the presumptive front runner for the GOP POTUS nomination today. He's asking people to give him money so he can "save America" from George Soros and his globalist efforts to destroy it.
So if you're wondering when large segments of the US Right became captured by an alternate media ecosystem that just spun out the wildest racist lies for a credulous audience willing to believe anything about "the radical left"…well, that story goes way back unfortunately.
The difference was that both the GOP as an institution and the media environment had guardrails in place to prevent the tinfoil wackiness of The Spotlight from coming to dominate the Republican Party or conservative institutions like National Review.
For example, when Walter Huss, the avid reader of The Spotlight who owned the copy I've used here, became OR GOP chair in 1978, Gerald Ford wrote to his Republican friends in OR to ask if they'd managed to oust "that nut" who'd been elected chair.
Oregon had two Republican Senators in 1978, Bob Packwood and Mark Hatfield. Both reviled Huss's far right extremism and took steps to get him removed from his position as party chair.
The kind of Alex Jones/Newsmax/OANN/Daily Wire/Mark Levin/Dinesh D'Souza/etc. empirically-challenged conspiracy/fear mongering we see today was present in the 1960s and 70s, but it rarely crossed over the blood/brain barrier into mainstream media or public awareness.
As revealed by the Fox/Dominion suit, the institution that passes for a "gatekeeper" on the right these days is terrified that if it doesn't provide sufficient batshit fan service for the residents of MAGAville, then they're doomed.
There’s a lot more at this link and it’s quite interesting. You can click here to read the whole thing on twitter.
So it’s the same old stuff from the far right. Their tired old rap just never, ever ends. Even Trump, with his showman’s spin wasn’t really different. But unlike 50 years ago, the Republican Party is completely dominated by these people and the media that supports it is completely in thrall to their deluded audience. They are mainstream now.
Originally tweeted by Seth Cotlar, mostly now at the other places (@SethCotlar) on February 19, 2023.