This morning, I started writing a post about Eleanor Roosevelt’s work on human rights. I ended up with a post about the Ron DeSantis/Donald Trump of the 1950s, Mississippi Congressman John Rankin. Within moments of finishing the post, I happened on a Jeet Heer essay in The Nation, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Their Nazi Fanboys. “The DeSantis and Trump campaigns,” he teased, “are hurling accusations of racism against each other. Both are right.” Also homophobia. So here I am, straight from watching this powerful clip about the making of Gentlemen’s Agreement and, boom— GOP anti-Semitism is shoved into my consciousness. Turns out right-wing pundit Pedro Gonzalez, political editor at Chronicles, a small paleoconservative journal, is a virulent Jew-hater… and more chatty about it than most virulent GOP bigots, who know they’re not supposed to talk about that anymore.
Who cares what Pedro Gonzalez thinks? Well, the Trumpets and MAGAts at Breitbart do since it was a way to attack DeSantis, Gonzalez’s hero. “The abundant evidence that Gonzalez, a vocal DeSantis supporter, is a racist and anti-Semite,” wrote Heer, “provided Breitbart with a useful way to deflect criticism of Trump for bigotry. Gonzalez’s sordid private messages were particularly helpful as a way to whitewash one of Trump’s major recent missteps, his meeting last November with Holocaust denier and white nationalist Nick Fuentes. The Breitbart/Gonzalez knife fight can be seen as a particularly ugly battle in the larger civil war between Team Trump and Team DeSantis. In this conflict, both sides are accusing the other of being Nazi-friendly. Outsiders have no need to prefer one party over another in this battle, since both sides are right.”
A self-loathing racist, Gonzalez wrote that “Minorities like me see America for what it is— a country built by whites, that can only survive if whites survive. And it is my job to make whites wake up.” He “asserted that Jews, including most conservative Jews, are a major roadblock to preserving white domination… Criticizing former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka for writing an article hostile to the John Birch Society (JBS), Gonzalez wrote, ‘Members of the JBS were unafraid to call out subversive Jews. Gorka is totally owned by Zionists. He needs their money.’ In another December 2019 message, Gonzalez derided Gorka for being ‘totally in the thrall of his Jewish donors. The problem with being a big con is that you become dependent on the money. Who do you think bankrolls conservatives? Mostly Jewish/Zionist types who, surprise!, are just as opposed to white racial consciousness as the left is.’ Gonzalez also repeatedly praised Fuentes as the future of right-wing politics in America. Breitbart shamelessly uses the Gonzalez story as an occasion to praise Trump for eventually distancing himself from Fuentes.”
Writing in 2017 in the aftermath of the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., where Trump notoriously praised “very fine people on both sides,” the journalist Alex Pareene predicted that the event was a presage of the future of the Republican Party. Pareene argued, “Racial resentment has been a driving force behind College Republican recruitment for years, but at this point it’s really all they have left to offer. In the age of President Donald Trump, what inspires a young person not merely to be conservative or vote Republican, but to get active in organized Republican politics?”
Pareene has proved prophetic. Both the Trump and DeSantis campaigns know that to excite the young activists on the right, they have to make overtures to sometimes embarrassing figures like Fuentes and Gonzalez. At the same time, the two campaigns will also try to highlight the bigotry of the opposing team— an easy enough task.
In truth, there are bad people on both sides.
That question about what, in the Age of Señor Trumpanzee, inspires a young person not merely to be conservative or vote Republican, but to get active in organized Republican politics, is an interesting one, worth contemplating. Republicans have been undermining public education for decades— many decades. Last year, Jon Schwartz wrote a piece for The Intercept you may have missed, The Origin Of Student Debt: Reagan Advisor Warned Free College Would Create A Dangerous “Educated Proletariat”. That was very perceptive of Roger Freeman, a former Nixon advisor and it sure did reveal the right’s motivation— then and ongoing— for their ruthless war against higher education.
“In May 1970, [Gov.] Reagan had shut down all 28 UC and Cal State campuses in the midst of student protests against the Vietnam War and the U.S. bombing of Cambodia. On October 29, less than a week before the election, his education adviser Roger Freeman spoke at a press conference to defend him. “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat… That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college]. If not we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.” Schwartz noted that “Freeman also said— taking a highly idiosyncratic perspective on the cause of fascism—‘that’s what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.’” Schwatz provided some context:
[UC] Berkeley, then nearly free to attend for California residents, had become a national center of organizing against the Vietnam War. Deep anxiety about this reached the highest levels of the U.S. government. John McCone, the head of the CIA, requested a meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, to discuss “communist influence” at Berkeley, a situation that “definitely required some corrective action.”
During the 1966 campaign, Reagan regularly communicated with the FBI about its concerns about Clark Kerr, the president of the entire University of California system. Despite requests from Hoover, Kerr had not cracked down on Berkeley protesters. Within weeks of Reagan taking office, Kerr was fired. A subsequent FBI memo stated that Reagan was “dedicated to the destruction of disruptive elements on California campuses.”
Reagan pushed to cut state funding for California’s public colleges but did not reveal his ideological motivation. Rather, he said, the state simply needed to save money. To cover the funding shortfall, Reagan suggested that California public colleges could charge residents tuition for the first time. This, he complained, “resulted in the almost hysterical charge that this would deny educational opportunities to those of the most moderate means. This is obviously untrue… We made it plain that tuition must be accompanied by adequate loans to be paid back after graduation.”
The success of Reagan’s attacks on California public colleges inspired conservative politicians across the U.S. Nixon decried “campus revolt.” Spiro Agnew, his vice president, proclaimed that thanks to open admissions policies, “unqualified students are being swept into college on the wave of the new socialism.”
Prominent conservative intellectuals also took up the charge. Privately one worried that free education “may be producing a positively dangerous class situation” by raising the expectations of working-class students. Another referred to college students as “a parasite feeding on the rest of society” who exhibited a “failure to understand and to appreciate the crucial role played [by] the reward-punishment structure of the market.” The answer was “to close off the parasitic option.”
In practice, this meant to the National Review, a “system of full tuition charges supplemented by loans which students must pay out of their future income.”
In retrospect, this period was the clear turning point in America’s policies toward higher education. For decades, there had been enthusiastic bipartisan agreement that states should fund high-quality public colleges so that their youth could receive higher education for free or nearly so. That has now vanished. In 1968, California residents paid a $300 yearly fee to attend Berkeley, the equivalent of about $2,000 now. Now tuition at Berkeley is $15,000, with total yearly student costs reaching almost $40,000.
Student debt, which had played a minor role in American life through the 1960s, increased during the Reagan administration and then shot up after the 2007-2009 Great Recession as states made huge cuts to funding for their college systems.
I went to Stony Brook in New York. Tuition was as low as it was at Berkeley and most other state universities. They were all virtually free, even the best. Today annual tuition is prohibitive for kids from working class families (like I was).
College of William and Mary- $18,687
Penn State- $18,454
University of Illinois (Champaign)- $16,862
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)- $16,350
UCLA- $13,240
University of Georgia (Athens)- $12,080
University of Texas (Austin)- $10,824
University of Wisconsin (Madison)- $10,555
University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill)- $8,980
Stony Brook University- $7,070
Consider how Schwartz ended his essay and consider the Republican perspective on public education, particularly as voiced by characters like Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, Betsy DeVos, Rick Scott, Randy Paul, Thomas Massie, and reactionary former governors like Scott Walker (R-WI), Rick Perry (R-TX) and Jeb Bush (R-FL). Schwatz began with a James Madison quote, one I recall well, having gone— as did Bernie, to James Madison High School in Brooklyn: “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” Schwartz then noted that “Freeman and Reagan and their compatriots agreed with Madison’s perspective but wanted to prevent Americans from gaining this power. If we want to take another path, the U.S. will have to recover a vision of a well-educated populace not as a terrible threat, but as a positive force that makes the nation better for everyone— and so should largely be paid for by all of us.”
