Mark PitcavageVerified account

While a history grad student in the 1990s I had the honor & pleasure of meeting John Hope Franklin in person and learning firsthand some of his tribulations as an African-American historian trying to do research in the Jim Crow south--including having to be sneaked into archives.https://twitter.com/JMitchellNews/status/993874063276822528 …

Disappointed in @nytimes for publishing the self-serving, extraordinarily uncritical "intellectual dark web" piece.

I saw "Rodney Hood" trending and I thought, is today the anniversary of the sinking of the Bismarck? But no, that was a couple of weeks away. It was just some basketball thing. I am sure the HMS Rodney and the HMS Hood will be trending on May 27.

12. and other sovereigns who are people of color, who are for the most part completely unaware that the movement they consider themselves part of was originally started, in the 1970s/80s, to a significant degree by white supremacists. The movement as a whole is not much better.

11. as much about pseudohistory as it is about pseudolegality, so it tends to invent its own past rather than paying attention to the real one. The best example of how blithely unaware the movement is of its origins can be found among the thousands of African-American sovereigns

10. movement. Though the movement has viewed a few ancient gurus with reverence, such as Roger Elvick, this movement, a half-century old, is largely unaware of its own history--where its ideas came from, where its tactics came from, etc. This is partly because the movement is

9. the New World Order waiting for? But most who promote that conspiratorial notion today are unaware that the same idea (often verbatim) was promoted a generation earlier. The most historically unaware right-wing extremist movement, though, has to be the sovereign citizen

8. notion from 1993-94 that there were 600 (or 800) empty concentration camps in the US, fully manned, and waiting for "patriots" to be rounded up and placed in them. If the movement had more self-awareness, it would wonder why these camps had been empty for 24 years--what was

7. 2008. The movement attracted many new members, but had relatively few holdovers from its early years to impart the movement's history to the newbies. This has had the fringe benefit of allowing the movement to recycle many of its theories as if they were fresh--such as the

6. identify any prominent militia leader from the period 1994-1997. One reason for this is that the militia movement reached a very low point in the early 2000s, when it had lost most of its membership, then limped along for a few years, to finally rebound strongly starting in

5. "patriot" movement, the tax protest movement may be the most aware of its history. The militia movement, on the other hand, even though it is only a quarter of a century old, does not have much awareness of its own history. Most people in the movement today probably could not

4. an objective, accurate or fair understanding; they present very distorted versions of their own past, in keeping with their ideology. Anti-government extremists, on the other hand, seem to have far less knowledge of their own past. Of the three main movements in the broader

3. The far right in the US, however, is more complicated and varies by movement. In general, white supremacists tend to have at least a fair awareness of the history of their movement (or their segment of the movement, at least), though here, too, their understanding is in no way

2. overall quite aware of its own history--not surprising, really, considering the amount of navel gazing the far left does. This does not mean that its take on its history is accurate or objective; on the contrary, it tends to romanticize, idealize and whitewash its own past.