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To distract myself while walking on a bitter November morning, I tuned into a podcast episode of the bowtie bloviator Tucker Carlson, interviewing a guy named Nick Fuentes who has become a darling of the MAGA crowd for voicing the kind of words that should get his mouth washed out with soap.

At age 27 and lacking a college degree, Fuentes has cleverly exploited social media to sell his brand of White Christian Nationalism that preaches virulent antisemitism, Holocaust denial, misogyny, and authoritarian government, among other outrages. That the establishmentarian Carlson agreed to host a friendly interview with Fuentes tells me Tucker is brandishing his credentials with the post-Trump MAGA world to earn a spot on the stage with the next covey of Republican Presidential candidates. 

During my long life, I have learned this: Just when you believe right-wing extremism is defeated, it reappears like poison mushrooms. It first invaded my generation in the early 1950s when the House Unamerican Activities Committee — and a little later Senator Joseph McCarthy — unleashed an anti-communist crusade that nabbed the infamous Alger Hiss and a few others but went on to ruin the lives of thousands of loyal Americans, ranging from government officials to Hollywood actors and producers. McCarthy's weekly hearings where he harangued the innocent were carried live on a new medium called television, putting the awed American public in his grip.

As a young kid addicted to our new 12-inch Capehart television, I spent after-school hours mesmerized by the drama. Eventually, McCarthy’s villainy was called out in a Senate Censure that effectively ended his career, but not his anti-Communist cause.

That cause reappeared in 1958 with the founding of the John Birch Society, the MAGA crowd of yesteryear. The organization’s list of advocacy grew from simple anti-communism to a whole menu of today’s favorites: opposition to the United Nations and World government, free trade agreements, civil rights movement, the Equal Rights Amendment, and immigration. Like Trump today, their leaders also called for the dismantlement of the Federal Reserve System. The Society’s most outrageous claim was that President Dwight Eisenhower was a communist.

My life once again came in touch with Radical Right when one of my college jobs was as a weekend driver for the family of the famous conservative Phyllis Schlafly, who self-published a book entitled “A Choice Not an Echo”, which became the right-wing manifesto for the 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign.

Again the mushrooms appeared, this time across the Mississippi River from St. Louis in Alton, Illinois, where Schlafly worked with a group of volunteers at her beautiful home. One Saturday, after ferrying boxes of the best seller to the post office, I picked up a copy and read it. I was surprised that it focused less on conservative issues than an attack on the “Eastern Establishment” symbolized by Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, and the New York Times.

Goldwater was nominated but was defeated by Lyndon Johnson by the largest margin in history up to that time. LBJ brought with him huge majorities in the House and Senate that led to the passage of Medicare, Medicaid, and Voting Rights Act — life-changing victories that even today the right is working to reverse.

The Vietnam War and a divided Democratic Party led to the victory of Richard Nixon only four years after the Goldwater debacle, but the President who opened relations with Communist China and created the Environmental Protection Agency was a disappointment to the right wing. Few shed tears when Nixon resigned in disgrace.

The right soon reappeared with a smile in the form of Ronald Reagan, who won plaudits for military buildup and attack on “welfare queens," but the right was disappointed with Reagan’s outreach to Tip O’Neill on many issues. The right also resented the tough tax reforms President Reagan and Democratic Senator Bill Bradley authored.

Not until the rise of Donald Trump did the full force of the Republican extremism take power.

Think of an acre field of sunflowers replaced by the poison mushrooms planted in the right-wing platform known as Project 25. This is the dream that the radicals have been planning for more than a half-century that asserts the power of a single man over the entirety of American life. Even its authors have been surprised by such a supportive Supreme Court and supplicant Congress. Only the lower federal courts have acted to moderate the lawless gangs sent to our streets in the name of immigration control.

America is at a tipping point, but I have faith in our people. We see the injustice and thievery and the despoiling of precious institutions and will act to end it at the ballot box.