Journal of Right-Wing Studies

In 1949, two riots rocked Paul Robeson concerts in Peekskill, New York. The riots were provoked by local veterans’ organizations and were not anomalous, as the American Legion and other groups intentionally targeted Robeson and his public appearances. Though scholars have examined the Peekskill riots and their relationship to Paul Robeson’s increased radicalism and his declining popularity, this article centers veterans’ organizing against Robeson as intentional, and the violence as unexceptional. Cold War anti-communism empowered veterans’ organizations to engage in what I call populist fascism—grassroots organizing against progressives and radicals that restrained citizens’ rights, especially those of Black citizens, and sometimes erupted in violence. As the Peekskill riots show, law enforcement and the criminal legal system did little to prevent violence against the Robeson concerts, and the rioters faced fewer punitive consequences than alleged communists. Robeson was targeted because of anti-Black and anti-communist hysteria. The violence at the Peekskill concerts was not spontaneous protest but part of a larger conspiracy to restrain Robeson’s political radicalism and contain progressive gains. Anti-communism enabled popular political expression that likened progressive anti-racism to treason and encouraged populist fascism among those who felt empowered to set the terms of Americanism, defined as defense of free enterprise and the “American way of life.” 

Despite growing research on American hate movements, the history of digital hate prior to 2000 has received little attention. Recent work on American white power movements has identified a rhetorical and organizational tradition of white supremacy in the United States but stopped short of identifying the specific mechanisms by which this rhetoric and organization moved online. Recent web histories, however, have opened the door for inquiry into the online past of white power movements. To recover white power’s early digital history, this article focuses on the efforts of George Dietz to operate and maintain Liberty Bell BBS, the first hate site ever put online. While digital hate is often traced back to websites of the early 2000s like Stormfront or viewed as a precursor to the alt-right of the 2010s, Liberty Bell BBS and contemporaneous peer sites demonstrate that digital hate began in the 1980s. Recovering the earliest computerized hate network establishes a direct organizational link between far-right extremists of the digital age and white power organizations of the twentieth century, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance. 

Through an analysis of Moms for Liberty’s rhetoric and organizing strategies, this article situates the group’s “parental rights” advocacy within a broader historical framework. I define a white maternalist political tradition that connects Moms for Liberty to twentieth-century maternalist groups, demonstrating how the organization reproduces strategies developed by activists who, from the 1950s through the 1980s, portrayed “communism” and “secular humanism” as creeping threats to children and violations of parental rights. Like its predecessors, Moms for Liberty claims that children are being indoctrinated—now by a sinister “woke” ideology allegedly infiltrating schools across the nation. I argue that white maternalist groups organizing around education consistently employ three strategies: 1) suturing a range of progressive causes into a single, conspiratorial container of threat; 2) mobilizing grassroots maternal surveillance to identify and uproot those threats within local schools and communities; and 3) engaging in cultural organizing that reproduces the nuclear family and weaponizes motherhood as a source of moral—and ostensibly apolitical—authority. By presenting themselves not as political actors but as concerned mothers, these activists recast efforts to preserve racial, gendered, and sexual hierarchies as a brave and selfless defense of home and family. Tracing these continuities across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries denaturalizes the rhetorics of apolitical motherhood and child protection that propel these movements, demonstrating instead that these rhetorics are political tools through which far-right activists advance their agendas.

Starting in 1966 with the founding of the Church of Satan, modern Satanism has established itself as a religious and philosophical tradition that continues to this day. And as part of this, Nazi-Satanism has also established itself as a subcurrent within both modern Satanism and neo-Nazism. This article outlines the history of this current, which is often downplayed or ignored by scholars. Profiled groups and organizations include Nazi-Satanist groups proper (Order of the Black Ram, Joy of Satan, Order of Nine Angles); Satanist organizations that have had connections to neo-Nazis (Church of Satan); neo-Nazis who have embraced working with Satanists (James Mason, George Eric Hawthorne, Atomwaffen Division); and new online forms that include Nazi-Satanist ideas (764, Maniac Murder Cult). This article seeks to create a baseline account of Nazi-Satanism in order to show that it is not a recent or isolated phenomenon, as well as to spur further study.

While historians have generally looked to the Ruby Ridge siege as the genesis of the 1990s militia movement or as a flare-up in the long conflict between white nationalists and federal law enforcement, I argue that the clash between the Weaver family and federal forces at Ruby Ridge should be understood most immediately as blowback from a volatile FBI sting operation that preceded the siege, a sting that was itself the product of emerging anticipatory counterterrorism practices that participated in the orchestration of right-wing terrorism as a way to prevent it. I reconstruct the overlooked role of Rico Valentino, an FBI informant embedded in Aryan Nations whose undercover work collided with an ATF investigation of Randy Weaver. Due to conflicting and uncoordinated agency incentives, Valentino exposed the ATF’s informant to preserve his own cover, thus allowing Valentino and his FBI handlers to successfully carry out a high-tech sting operation that concocted and then disrupted a bomb plot involving three Aryan Nations members, among whom was a close friend of the Weaver family. This action helped precipitate the chain of events that caused the Weavers to double down on their refusal to cooperate with law enforcement and ultimately brought federal agents to the Weavers’ mountain cabin.

Anaheim, California, was one of the first battlegrounds in the wars over sex education that started erupting in the 1960s. Radical libertarians found themselves playing notable parts on both sides of the conflict. This paper examines the roles of R.C. Hoiles on the anti-sex-education side of the debate and of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea on the pro-sex-education side; it also describes how another radical libertarian, Ralph Raico, essentially synthesized the Hoiles and Wilson/Shea positions. These rival approaches reflect conflicting ideas about liberty that can also be found outside the libertarian movement, sometimes in ways that confound conventional models of the political right and left.