An Underground Civil War and Control of Nebraska
by Paul A. Olson
Nebraskans for Peace Board Member
I have been accustomed to saying that Nebraska conservatism is different from that in the Rust Belt, deep South, or some parts of the coasts. I was thinking of much Rust Belt, Southern, and coastal conservatism as a species of Fascism such as that generated by the late Sen. Joe McCarthy. Clear connections exist between the neo-Fascism of the late 40s and 50s in the U. S. and that of the 2020s. In both cases, the figure of Roy Cohn is important. Mr. Cohn was Sen. Joe McCarthy’s chief advisor and invented many of the senator’s techniques of false accusation, grievance, and intimidation to accuse numerous faithful government employees of being agents of Soviet Russia and the Communist Party. Mr. Cohn and Sen. McCarthy invented the notion that there were thousands of American collaborators with the Soviet Union and that a vast conspiracy existed in the late 40s and early 50s to overthrow the government of the United States. For some years, most Republican candidates had to espouse McCarthyite notions to win. Richard Nixon sailed to national prominence on the wings of McCarthyism by accusing his California election opponents of collaboration with the Communists. Ronald Reagan first acquired a taste of power when he headed the actor’s union in Hollywood and turned in people that he thought to be Left so that they could be blacklisted by the motion picture industry.
That sort of Fascism fell out of favor in the 1960s and 70s, but not until after thousands of Americans had been gratuitously asked to swear that they were not members of the Communist Party and had never advocated the violent overthrow of the government of the United States. Many were fired for refusing—on the grounds of the defense of academic or personal freedom—to take the oath. When McCarthyism fell out of favor during and after the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, Roy Cohn went to New York, where he became the lawyer for, among other clients, Donald J. Trump, who met Cohn in 1973 and asked him to become his and his father’s lawyer in cases where they were being sued by the Justice Department for discriminating against African-Americans wishing to rent apartments from the Trumps’ real estate company. Cohn taught Trump the tactics of intimidation and counter-suing that became his hallmark. Trump is said to have remarked that he learned everything from Roy. In times of difficulty, he would say, “Where’s my Roy Cohn” or “Where’s my Roy Cohn when I need him.” A direct connection through Cohn exists between the intimidation and counter-punching tactics used by the neo-Fascists of the late 40s and 50s and those of the late teens and 20s of our century, including those of the last administration.
But there’s also a difference between the self-expression of the two. In the 40s and 50s, the Republican claim was that people who wished reform in America were trying to overthrow the government of the United States and substitute a Russian-Soviet style administration. The claims were never substantiated save in the cases of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and uncertainly there. However, in 2021, some Republicans and their allies on the alt-right did try to overthrow the government of the United States. They sponsored an insurrection whose targets were Nancy Pelosi, Mike Pence, the Congress of the United States, and Joe Biden’s orderly succession to the presidency of the United States. Simultaneously, the people whom the insurrection wished to keep in office were people who had close ties with Russia and with a Russian faction in the Ukraine through Paul Manafort and Donald Trump. The latter bragged that he got along well with Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB operative. The putative roles were reversed, only this time, the conspiracy to overthrow the government became real on January 6.
This reversal of roles has been reenacted in Nebraska with some differences. Though, because of McCarthyism here, some people had their jobs threatened at the University of Nebraska in the 1950s; though some Nebraska political leaders espoused a sort of prairie McCarthyism, McCarthy was never the dominant force in the Nebraska Republican Party. Old-fashioned Nebraska Republicanism was a combination of our moneyed interests looking after their money, peasant conservatism that resisted any change of any kind, particularly change that might require increased taxation to support public services, and liberal Republican sentiment that people of color should be given a better shake in our national political life than the southern Democrats were willing to offer them in the 40s-60s. In this connection, I am thinking especially of Republican Governors Crosby and Tiemann.
Now, the conservatism that had some merits in the 50s and 60s is being replaced by another kind of conservatism that seems hell-bent on insurrection or civil war of one sort or another: violent or cultural warfare, or both.
One of the candidates in the primary for the Republican nomination for governor of Nebraska was Charles Herbster. Mr. Herbster, who contributed $1.3 million to Trump, was in the room on January 5 when the last touches on the insurrection of January 6 were being planned by Trump’s inner circle. Herbster approved a Facebook account of his meeting with the President’s minions on the evening of the January 5. This Facebook page was then sent out by one of Mr. Herbster’s staff in his name, and part of it reads as follows:
Right now, I stand in the White House with patriots joining me in a battle for justice and truth. U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville, Alabama; Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani; Mr. Donald Trump Jr.; Mr. Peter Navarro, Assistant to President Donald J. Trump, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and the National Defense Production Act Policy Coordinator; Mr. Eric Trump; Mr. Adam Piper, Executive Director Republican Attorney General Association; Mr. David Bossie, President and Chairman of Citizens United and Deputy Campaign Manager of the 2016 Donald J. Trump Presidential Campaign; Mr. Corey Lewandowski, 2016 Donald J. Trump for President Campaign Manager; and General Michael Flynn, 25th United States National Security Advisor. These faithful servants of freedom need our prayers, and the U.S. Congress. Tomorrow, on Capitol Hill, they open sealed electoral voting certificates from each state. This joint session is the last official chance for our members of Congress to object to the widespread voter fraud that happened on November 3. God Bless America.
As the January 6 committee hearings have established, the “faithful servants of freedom” who “need our prayers” were the people central in the effort to overthrow the election and keep Mr. Trump in office.
A little later, Mr. Herbster wrote: Correction we are not at the White House we are in the private residence of the president at Trump International sorry in the meeting with General Flynn.
Later, during the height of the riot, Mr. Herbster’s staff tweeted that they were concerned about how the riot would look and that any tweets would affect Herbster’s campaign. Hush-hush would be best. This is a later exchange between Herbster and staff:
3:10 p.m., Herbster campaign adviser: President needs to calm this too if you can get to him
3:11 p.m., Herbster: There is a much bigger threat possible Iran but can’t say anymore that is why they rushed out.
Herbster chose to believe that a fictitious Iranian threat was more important than the attack on Congress and a timely intervention by the President to prevent further murder and mayhem and threats to Mike Pence.
On the other side, Mr. Herbster at about 2:00 also wrote on Twitter:
While I support the right for every American to peacefully protest, what is happening at the Capitol is unacceptable and dangerous. We must be better than this. Please pray for peace, our country and safety of all Americans.
Herbster knew the attack was wrong and did not ask Trump to stop it, rather calling for prayers.
Herbster eventually lost the gubernatorial election to candidate Jim Pillen. However, forces representing his ideology later took over the Nebraska Republican party in their July 2022 state meeting. They did so under the leadership of Eric Underwood who was elected chairperson of the state GOP, defeating the Pillen people. It remains to be seen whether the January 6 insurrection grievances and the effort to change election rules will be endorsed by the whole Nebraska Republican Party. Thus far, so far as I can discern, only Sen. Sasse has spoken out against Mr. Trump and his insurrection by saying that the riot was not “legitimate political discourse.”
Mr. Underwood’s supporter and perhaps the primary organizer of his victory at the Nebraska Republican convention, Fanchon Blythe, has written in her Twitter account of the meeting when Underwood was elected and the Trump forces triumphed over Ricketts ones, “Patriot delegates, pure MAGA[,] overthrow Rickett’s machine in Nebraska after epic daylong battle for control of the GOP.” This sounds like Trumpism to me. Of course, both factions are making nice to each other in public in preparation for the Fall elections, but the fact that the dominant political party in the state is controlled by the MAGA forces is not reassuring. Ms. Blythe was at the January 6 riot and said after it that “said events some U.S. leaders called insurrection were nothing like the Black Lives Matter protests she condemned.”(LJS, January 7, 2021); also that perhaps some rioters were overzealous and took the idea that the Capitol is the people’s house a little too literally but that she had no regrets about attending the event and would attend again in a heartbeat if another were to be held.
The intertwining of one of our political parties with an insurrectionist movement that chose to disrupt the orderly succession to the presidency is not promising, whether that party be Republican or Democratic, Right or Left. In the next part of this study, I wish to examine the movement toward militias and hate groups in Nebraska because a January 6-style effort to control the government cannot be done by leaders alone. It takes foot soldiers organizing in the villages and cities and countryside of Nebraska. Such foot soldiers exist. The question is whether they are strong enough, numerous enough to create a movement that can control the state or create genuine civil strife in our midst.
Nebraskans for Peace Board Member
I have been accustomed to saying that Nebraska conservatism is different from that in the Rust Belt, deep South, or some parts of the coasts. I was thinking of much Rust Belt, Southern, and coastal conservatism as a species of Fascism such as that generated by the late Sen. Joe McCarthy. Clear connections exist between the neo-Fascism of the late 40s and 50s in the U. S. and that of the 2020s. In both cases, the figure of Roy Cohn is important. Mr. Cohn was Sen. Joe McCarthy’s chief advisor and invented many of the senator’s techniques of false accusation, grievance, and intimidation to accuse numerous faithful government employees of being agents of Soviet Russia and the Communist Party. Mr. Cohn and Sen. McCarthy invented the notion that there were thousands of American collaborators with the Soviet Union and that a vast conspiracy existed in the late 40s and early 50s to overthrow the government of the United States. For some years, most Republican candidates had to espouse McCarthyite notions to win. Richard Nixon sailed to national prominence on the wings of McCarthyism by accusing his California election opponents of collaboration with the Communists. Ronald Reagan first acquired a taste of power when he headed the actor’s union in Hollywood and turned in people that he thought to be Left so that they could be blacklisted by the motion picture industry.
That sort of Fascism fell out of favor in the 1960s and 70s, but not until after thousands of Americans had been gratuitously asked to swear that they were not members of the Communist Party and had never advocated the violent overthrow of the government of the United States. Many were fired for refusing—on the grounds of the defense of academic or personal freedom—to take the oath. When McCarthyism fell out of favor during and after the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, Roy Cohn went to New York, where he became the lawyer for, among other clients, Donald J. Trump, who met Cohn in 1973 and asked him to become his and his father’s lawyer in cases where they were being sued by the Justice Department for discriminating against African-Americans wishing to rent apartments from the Trumps’ real estate company. Cohn taught Trump the tactics of intimidation and counter-suing that became his hallmark. Trump is said to have remarked that he learned everything from Roy. In times of difficulty, he would say, “Where’s my Roy Cohn” or “Where’s my Roy Cohn when I need him.” A direct connection through Cohn exists between the intimidation and counter-punching tactics used by the neo-Fascists of the late 40s and 50s and those of the late teens and 20s of our century, including those of the last administration.
But there’s also a difference between the self-expression of the two. In the 40s and 50s, the Republican claim was that people who wished reform in America were trying to overthrow the government of the United States and substitute a Russian-Soviet style administration. The claims were never substantiated save in the cases of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and uncertainly there. However, in 2021, some Republicans and their allies on the alt-right did try to overthrow the government of the United States. They sponsored an insurrection whose targets were Nancy Pelosi, Mike Pence, the Congress of the United States, and Joe Biden’s orderly succession to the presidency of the United States. Simultaneously, the people whom the insurrection wished to keep in office were people who had close ties with Russia and with a Russian faction in the Ukraine through Paul Manafort and Donald Trump. The latter bragged that he got along well with Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB operative. The putative roles were reversed, only this time, the conspiracy to overthrow the government became real on January 6.
This reversal of roles has been reenacted in Nebraska with some differences. Though, because of McCarthyism here, some people had their jobs threatened at the University of Nebraska in the 1950s; though some Nebraska political leaders espoused a sort of prairie McCarthyism, McCarthy was never the dominant force in the Nebraska Republican Party. Old-fashioned Nebraska Republicanism was a combination of our moneyed interests looking after their money, peasant conservatism that resisted any change of any kind, particularly change that might require increased taxation to support public services, and liberal Republican sentiment that people of color should be given a better shake in our national political life than the southern Democrats were willing to offer them in the 40s-60s. In this connection, I am thinking especially of Republican Governors Crosby and Tiemann.
Now, the conservatism that had some merits in the 50s and 60s is being replaced by another kind of conservatism that seems hell-bent on insurrection or civil war of one sort or another: violent or cultural warfare, or both.
One of the candidates in the primary for the Republican nomination for governor of Nebraska was Charles Herbster. Mr. Herbster, who contributed $1.3 million to Trump, was in the room on January 5 when the last touches on the insurrection of January 6 were being planned by Trump’s inner circle. Herbster approved a Facebook account of his meeting with the President’s minions on the evening of the January 5. This Facebook page was then sent out by one of Mr. Herbster’s staff in his name, and part of it reads as follows:
Right now, I stand in the White House with patriots joining me in a battle for justice and truth. U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville, Alabama; Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani; Mr. Donald Trump Jr.; Mr. Peter Navarro, Assistant to President Donald J. Trump, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and the National Defense Production Act Policy Coordinator; Mr. Eric Trump; Mr. Adam Piper, Executive Director Republican Attorney General Association; Mr. David Bossie, President and Chairman of Citizens United and Deputy Campaign Manager of the 2016 Donald J. Trump Presidential Campaign; Mr. Corey Lewandowski, 2016 Donald J. Trump for President Campaign Manager; and General Michael Flynn, 25th United States National Security Advisor. These faithful servants of freedom need our prayers, and the U.S. Congress. Tomorrow, on Capitol Hill, they open sealed electoral voting certificates from each state. This joint session is the last official chance for our members of Congress to object to the widespread voter fraud that happened on November 3. God Bless America.
As the January 6 committee hearings have established, the “faithful servants of freedom” who “need our prayers” were the people central in the effort to overthrow the election and keep Mr. Trump in office.
A little later, Mr. Herbster wrote: Correction we are not at the White House we are in the private residence of the president at Trump International sorry in the meeting with General Flynn.
Later, during the height of the riot, Mr. Herbster’s staff tweeted that they were concerned about how the riot would look and that any tweets would affect Herbster’s campaign. Hush-hush would be best. This is a later exchange between Herbster and staff:
3:10 p.m., Herbster campaign adviser: President needs to calm this too if you can get to him
3:11 p.m., Herbster: There is a much bigger threat possible Iran but can’t say anymore that is why they rushed out.
Herbster chose to believe that a fictitious Iranian threat was more important than the attack on Congress and a timely intervention by the President to prevent further murder and mayhem and threats to Mike Pence.
On the other side, Mr. Herbster at about 2:00 also wrote on Twitter:
While I support the right for every American to peacefully protest, what is happening at the Capitol is unacceptable and dangerous. We must be better than this. Please pray for peace, our country and safety of all Americans.
Herbster knew the attack was wrong and did not ask Trump to stop it, rather calling for prayers.
Herbster eventually lost the gubernatorial election to candidate Jim Pillen. However, forces representing his ideology later took over the Nebraska Republican party in their July 2022 state meeting. They did so under the leadership of Eric Underwood who was elected chairperson of the state GOP, defeating the Pillen people. It remains to be seen whether the January 6 insurrection grievances and the effort to change election rules will be endorsed by the whole Nebraska Republican Party. Thus far, so far as I can discern, only Sen. Sasse has spoken out against Mr. Trump and his insurrection by saying that the riot was not “legitimate political discourse.”
Mr. Underwood’s supporter and perhaps the primary organizer of his victory at the Nebraska Republican convention, Fanchon Blythe, has written in her Twitter account of the meeting when Underwood was elected and the Trump forces triumphed over Ricketts ones, “Patriot delegates, pure MAGA[,] overthrow Rickett’s machine in Nebraska after epic daylong battle for control of the GOP.” This sounds like Trumpism to me. Of course, both factions are making nice to each other in public in preparation for the Fall elections, but the fact that the dominant political party in the state is controlled by the MAGA forces is not reassuring. Ms. Blythe was at the January 6 riot and said after it that “said events some U.S. leaders called insurrection were nothing like the Black Lives Matter protests she condemned.”(LJS, January 7, 2021); also that perhaps some rioters were overzealous and took the idea that the Capitol is the people’s house a little too literally but that she had no regrets about attending the event and would attend again in a heartbeat if another were to be held.
The intertwining of one of our political parties with an insurrectionist movement that chose to disrupt the orderly succession to the presidency is not promising, whether that party be Republican or Democratic, Right or Left. In the next part of this study, I wish to examine the movement toward militias and hate groups in Nebraska because a January 6-style effort to control the government cannot be done by leaders alone. It takes foot soldiers organizing in the villages and cities and countryside of Nebraska. Such foot soldiers exist. The question is whether they are strong enough, numerous enough to create a movement that can control the state or create genuine civil strife in our midst.