bubs, iβve only got two, maybe three Motown puns left in me. Four tops.
you know how i know im a 44yo dad? how much i laughed at this shit
06.12.2025 03:31 β π 2913 π 494 π¬ 45 π 36@sethcotlar.bsky.social
Teaches US History at Willamette Univ. Working on a book about the long history of the US Right. https://rightlandia.ghost.io/
bubs, iβve only got two, maybe three Motown puns left in me. Four tops.
you know how i know im a 44yo dad? how much i laughed at this shit
06.12.2025 03:31 β π 2913 π 494 π¬ 45 π 36Treasury Department @USTreasury U.S. Treasuries are having their best year since 2020, and the investors who had confidence and faith in President Trumpβs economic policies have been richly rewarded. Never bet against @POTUS or America! πΊπΈ
We literally found the stupidest people in the country and put them in charge.
06.12.2025 05:48 β π 222 π 43 π¬ 6 π 4You didn't hear this from me (and Leonard is no longer with us, so there are no royalties for him to not get), but if you go to archive dot org and search for the book there is a full version there you can read.
06.12.2025 03:59 β π 5 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0On my living room wall hangs a framed twenty-four-inch reproduction from the Sarajevo Haggadah, given to me by dear friends. The Haggadah is a book of prayers, stories, and songs used by Jews at ritual meals during the Passover holiday, which remembers the ancient Hebrews' passage from Egyptian slavery to freedom. Jews of every generation and every locale have created and re-created their own editions of this book, the Sarajevo Haggadah being one of the most beautifully illustrated. Written on bleached calfskin around 1314 in Spain, it came to the Yugo peninsula with Sephardic Jews expelled after the beginning of the Inquisition in 1492. At the end of the nineteenth century it entered the Sarajevo Museum and was saved from the grasping hands of German troops only by the clever and brave machinations of the museum's Croatian director. It was then protected by Muslim clerics in a village mosque for the duration of World War Two. Today the Haggadah is kept in the vault of the National Bank of Sarajevo, where Bosnian Serbs, Croatians, and Muslims all regard it as one of their own national treasures.' 8
The Sarajevo Haggadah's existence over the centuries and its survival during the Nazi deluge are a tragic reminder of the former Yugoslavia's multiethnicity, and it remains a sharp contrast with the horrors that ethnic nationalist wars wreaked during the 1990s. It is useful to remember that at one time a hodgepodge of religious and ethnic groups lived together in relative harmony. Places like Sarajevo were cosmopolitan centers of learning and culture for centuries. But in a matter of a few historical seconds the whole place went up in flames, like a refugee hostel attacked by arsonists. People who had lived and worked next to one another for years found themselves with divided loyalties. Families once united by interethnic marriages mourned their dead separately. As they dismembered this multiethnic state in a sea of blood, a generation of combatants cited religious and ethnic grievances hundreds of years past, as well as complaints just weeks and months old, to justify their own nationalist politics. In the end that city's remains stood in stark testimonial to its short steep slide from civilization to barbarism.
The United States, unlike the former Yugoslavia, has well cemented the foundations of its federal order in the 150 years since our own Civil War, and the election of a black man, Barack Obama, has broken the white monopoly on the presidency. Nevertheless, collective identities based on race and religion have remained just under the skin of American life. As such, we will continue to be vulnerable to the machinations of the generations of white nationalists that follow Willis Carto and William Pierce, particularly as population demographics shift in the next few decades. For those of us who hope to protect and extend our multiracial democracy, and the cosmopolitanism of the type that preserved the Sarajevo Haggadah, we ignore this white nationalist movement at our own peril. In the book that follows, dear reader, I have sought to make its history available now, so that we may not be destroyed by it in the future.
The last few paragraphs of the introduction are a useful and still relevant reminder of the stakes of our present moment, stakes that didn't seem nearly as pressing to most people in 2009, the first year of Obama's presidency, when this book appeared.
06.12.2025 03:57 β π 32 π 5 π¬ 1 π 0I was finishing my dissertation in US History in 1999-2000. I'm not proud to admit that I would have likely dismissed Zeskind's assessment of America's future as far too pessimistic had I read it.
06.12.2025 03:44 β π 41 π 2 π¬ 2 π 0"As the century wore on, [Zeskind] wrote [in 1999], white nationalists would push toward instituting new forms of racial apartheid and other antidemocratic measures."
06.12.2025 03:40 β π 33 π 5 π¬ 1 π 0In 1999, "[Zeskind] predicted a mid-21st century conflict within the US as white people became a minority in a nation of minorities & were no longer able to preserve a system of white privilege through majority-rule winner-take-all democracy."
06.12.2025 03:40 β π 27 π 7 π¬ 2 π 0As the last century ended and the year 2000 began, my hometown newspaper, The Kansas City Star, asked me to write a short guest opinion piece predicting the course of the new century. It was part of a journalistic time capsule, an editor said, and would likely be read a hundred years hence. The same had been done by the newspaper's forebearers on January 1, 1901, when men considered "prominent" in Kansas City wrote short pieces about the future. A bit nervous about prognosticating in general, particularly in fewer than five hundred words, I asked the editor to send, as a guide, copies of the articles written one hundred years prior. Each had been penned by a religious, civic, political, or economic captain of the city. A great hopefulness pervaded their expectations of scientific and industrial advances. In this regard, these city fathers (and they were all fathers) reflected the optimistic spirit of the age. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was then immensely popular, for example, as one of almost fifty utopian novels published during that period. One of the most fascinating aspects of these turn-of-the-century opinion pieces is that several predicted a happy future in explicitly racist terms. Not that they didn't worry about challenges to white supremacy's permanence. The city's "leading lawyer" feared that "the yellow peril threatens the world with untold disaster." One preacher fretted that the Fourteenth Amendment, which constitutionally guaranteed the rights of citizenship to black people, had been a "capital blunder." But a more prominent Baptist minister prophesied a noble century to come, including the end of war and the uplift of the poor, all under "the
growing supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon."2 In this regard also, the city's sires reflected the spirit of the nation's elites at that time. University deans then taught that humanity could be improved through eugenics, the supposed science of selective "up breeding."3 The Supreme Court had recently ruled that "separate" was equal, and newspapers uncritically published accounts steeped in these and related ideas. The twentieth century did not end as it had begun. Science and technology, as predicted, did reach new heights. They split the atom, took us to the moon, and created a global cyberspace communications system. They could have also provided food to every hungry soul on the planetβ but they didn't. Instead, scientific advances fed an unending series of wars, genocides, and man-made disasters. And the ethic of Aryan supremacy, so prevalent a hundred years earlier, (temporarily) buried itself beneath the mountains of human ash produced by Hitler's crematories. After World War Two, Europeans ceded legal sovereignty over Africa, Asia, and Latin America to their noticeably more darkly hued (former) subjects, even as the strains of four centuries of colonial exploitation were not erased. And in Kansas City, the newspaper-for-the-future included opinions by four women and three persons of color, including the city's first black mayor.
My contribution to that time capsule stemmed directly from the subject under consideration here. I predicted a mid-twenty-first century conflict within the United States as white people became a minority in a nation of minorities and were no longer able to preserve a system of white privilege through majority-rule winner-take-all democracy. As the century wore on, I wrote, white nationalists would push toward instituting new forms of racial apartheid and other antidemocratic measures. The outcome in the year 2100, I argued, would depend on what we learned today about white supremacy and white nationalism. 4 This book does not pretend to predict prospective events, but it is not simply an account of the past either. While it is a history focused on the last decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first, it is my intention that it serve as part of a prolegomenon to the future discussion of racial egalitarianism and democracy. My hope is that it will provide the reader a view of the contemporary white nationalist movement that is both comprehensive and instructive. Though it takes into account organizations, individuals, and
events such as the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, and the Oklahoma City bombing-things ascribed more to memory at this point than daily lifeβthe objective is to demonstrate that this movement, driven by a vision well within the mainsprings of American life, is already self-consciously pitching itself toward the future. Perhaps when white nationalism's next iteration emerges, our country will better understand it.
Reading the opening of Leonard Zeskind's 2009 book Blood and Politics in the midst of Trump 2.0 is quite a gut punch. In 2000 he warned of a rising tide of violent white nationalism & Christian nationalism on the American right...few people took those warning seriously. And now here we are.
06.12.2025 03:36 β π 168 π 49 π¬ 8 π 5This banger from Reaganβs catalog seems relevant here. bsky.app/profile/seth...
06.12.2025 02:01 β π 81 π 17 π¬ 5 π 0After this 1983 story broke about Reagan and a Bircher corresponding about MLK being a commie, Reagan perfunctorily apologized to MLKβs family and then went golfing at Augusta National, which notoriously had no black members at the time. www.nytimes.com/1983/10/22/u...
06.12.2025 01:58 β π 116 π 30 π¬ 2 π 1In 1983 Reagan voters were 48/44 opposed to MLK day and Reagan himself still thought MLK might have been a Communist. We know this because he said it to his friend Meldrim Thompson, a former NH governor who sat on the board of the John Birch Society in 1983.
06.12.2025 01:56 β π 157 π 55 π¬ 6 π 0It's definitely a sign of moral rot inside the GOP that they would even consider being associated with such vile stuff....but we shouldn't assume that such rank cruelty will be greeted favorably by most or even many of the Americans who see it.
06.12.2025 00:10 β π 72 π 8 π¬ 2 π 0Having posted that horrifying Facebook meme from DHS, I feel like it's important to point out that a significant number of the comments on it, the majority of the ones I saw when I scrolled for a minute or two, were highly critical of DHS for posting this. Not sure this fascist shit is working.
06.12.2025 00:08 β π 98 π 8 π¬ 8 π 1Pulls up a chair, spins it around to sit in it backwards, youth pastor style... bsky.app/profile/ding...
05.12.2025 23:55 β π 87 π 12 π¬ 3 π 0The people posting these Christmas and children's literature memes celebrating sadistic state violence against "the stranger," are the same people who whine about how talking with kids about sexuality in an age appropriate and respectful manner robs them of their innocence. bsky.app/profile/alka...
05.12.2025 23:52 β π 77 π 19 π¬ 3 π 1This was in 2013. We've been in this terrible place for a long time...Trump was a symptom and a catalyst, not a cause. www.theguardian.com/media/video/...
05.12.2025 23:40 β π 87 π 10 π¬ 4 π 0These Christian Nationalists do this sort of shit and then they wonder why so many Americans are voting with their feet and rejecting their toxic and hateful brand of Christianity.
05.12.2025 23:37 β π 171 π 20 π¬ 4 π 1ORARTMAy Department of Homeland Securi... is in North Pole. β’ Follow 2h β’ β’β’β’ X YOU'RE GOING HO HO HOME. POLICE POLICE POLICE CHRISTMAS
The "War on Christmas" is coming from inside the house.
Get ready for the official government videos of Santa on Christmas Eve deploying cutting edge Palantir technology to distinguish between the children asleep in their beds who are naughty/deportable, and those who are nice and can stay.
This is a cruel act of bigotry against an amazing woman who served her country with distinction.
05.12.2025 22:59 β π 564 π 121 π¬ 3 π 3If so, it is quite possible that the suspect reached this belief by consuming media produced by the current Director and Deputy Director of the FBI.
05.12.2025 20:31 β π 430 π 130 π¬ 10 π 3I for one am thankful that Donald J. Trump has ensured that we will have peace in our time.
05.12.2025 20:35 β π 40 π 0 π¬ 3 π 1A participation trophy for the very good boy who sits atop a movement comprised of Americans who resent how the libs have supposedly created a world in which children are rendered weak by all of the participation trophies they receive.
05.12.2025 20:27 β π 229 π 55 π¬ 17 π 2The White House surrenders at 138 million views. Sabrina wins.
05.12.2025 19:55 β π 27145 π 4985 π¬ 340 π 241There was a decent amount of overlap, but the Populist Party folks generally regarded the Birchers as a bit too leftist for their tastes. By "leftist" what these "Populists" meant was, the Birchers were not willing to be as openly racist and antisemitic as they were.
05.12.2025 15:50 β π 2 π 0 π¬ 1 π 0SCOOP: The Jan. 6 pipe bomb suspect told the FBI he believed in 2020 election conspiracy theories.
www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...
Now official policy of the United States:
βImmigration is exclusively harmful
βAll nations must βonly rarelyβ grant citizenship to foreigners
βImmigration will βeraseβ Europe within 20 years and the US must act to prevent that
Read it yourself.
To the extent MAGA has a policy platform, it is largely indistinguishable from the platform of the late 1980s and early 1990s Populist Party--the party of David Duke that was founded by a guy who had 4 busts of Hitler in his office. bsky.app/profile/seth...
05.12.2025 14:49 β π 59 π 21 π¬ 9 π 3Harry Bertram: "America First Radio" (WWCR) The "America First Radio" program was sponsored by the Populist Party, an extremist political group founded in 1984 by Liberty Lobby's Willis Carto. The Populist Party, which promotes itself as an incarnation of the late-19th century populist movement, is in reality a political amalgam of the far-right wing in America, an effort of organized political extremists and agents of bigotry to cloak themselves in the seeming respectability of nationwide electoral politics. Harry Bertram, the host, is the state chairman of the West Virginia Populist Party, and according to The Populist Observer (the newspaper of the Populist Party, now called The Nationalist Times) has interviewed on his show far-right attorney Kirk Lyons; Tom Metzger, the leader of White Aryan Resistance: Jim Townsend. the editor of the racist paper, The National Educator: Kevin Strom of the neo-Nazi National Alliance; and the Holocaust-denier Mark Weber, described by The Populist Observer as "the well-respected scholar from the Institute for Historical Review, the world-renowned revisionist organization now under vicious attack from the ADL and Liberty Lobby.""' According to The Populist Observer, "Many Patriots keep their shortwave radios set permanently on 5.065 [WWCR's frequency). where such well-known shows as those hosted by Bill Cooper, Mark Koernke and others are heard..."
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the more popular radio shows amongst the largely underground community of American neo-Nazis and white supremacists was called "America First Radio." How unpredictable that today's America First movement might attract people like Nick Fuentes's groypers.
05.12.2025 14:46 β π 128 π 34 π¬ 6 π 0OFA Media is in Eagle, ID. β’ Follow β’ X 11h β’ Β© NEW: An Idaho man has won free beer for a month after reporting Republican Idaho State Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen for HIRING ILLEGALS at her farm The contest was put on by Old State Saloon in Eagle, Idaho who posted on their social media: "Anyone who helps ICE identify and ultimately deport an illegal from Idaho gets FREE BEER FOR ONE MONTH at Old State Saloon!" The state Rep says the promotion is "despicable" because it encourages "targeting" based on skin color. Give this man keys to the city MAKE AMON GREAT AGAI @DAVIDMEDINAPDX IDA HOMAN WINS FREEBEER @
This story came on my radar because this avowedly βChristian,β Oregon MAGA activist (and indicted J6er) posted this racist meme about it on Facebook yesterday.
05.12.2025 13:18 β π 35 π 7 π¬ 5 π 0We found the narc who is terrorizing Republicans in Idaho. Turns out heβs an ultra-MAGA county-level GOP activist who moved to Idaho from California because he wanted o live in a place more amenable to his racist politics. Story is from March. idahocapitalsun.com/2025/03/27/r...
05.12.2025 13:15 β π 89 π 28 π¬ 5 π 2