The Email from Chris Gordon stated: “Wyatt, I just picked up Peter Adams from the airport. He's speaking tomorrow for History Is Lunch about his new book on Gen. Edwin Walker. As we were driving to the Old Capitol Inn where he's staying, he mentioned that he knew you—that y'all had in fact been roommates many years ago.”
One of the delights of old age is true blasts from the past. In this case, 43 years ago.
I was a reporter for Florida Today living in Cocoa Beach, having just graduated from Harvard. It was my first job. I shared a house with several other reporters, including Peter Adams.
It was the heyday of newspapers. Florida Today had a beautiful new building and a circulation of over 100,000 subscribers. I was young, single, healthy, employed and living in a Florida bachelor pad. Life was good.
I remembered Peter instantly: Smart, witty, fun, playful, warm. We were immediate friends. A year later, I went off to UCLA business school. He headed north. We never saw each other again, until this week.
I picked him up at the Old Capitol Inn in my poppy red ‘65 Mustang, the same car that was parked in the driveway of our Florida bachelor pad 43 years ago. He couldn’t believe it.
We drove around downtown a bit, grabbed a bottle of wine and enjoyed a long dinner at Aladdin’s Greek restaurant in Fondren. He was the same Peter and I was the same Wyatt that made us friends so many years ago. There was so much to talk about. So many life stories to tell. There was not enough time.
They say that when you get older, your early memories often remain intact. Those early years are so meaningful and impactful. We laughed a lot telling stories about those days in Florida.
Even more interesting was how his new book was relevant to my life in Mississippi and the current political times we find ourselves in.
I had never heard of General Edwin A. Walker, but he led the insurrection at Ole Miss when federal marshals were protecting James Meredith as he enrolled as the first African American student. What’s more, he was a lightning rod for right-wing conspiracies back in the early 1960s — conspiracy theories that are finding fertile ground today, having morphed slightly from back then.
Walker believed there was a worldwide conspiracy of communist and intellectuals to transform the world into a gunless, raceless, propertyless world government. The United Nations was in on it. The Council on Foreign Relations was running the show. There was a secret organization of intellectuals and powerful people determined to destroy America and create a new world order. Does this sound familiar?
Walker, along with U. S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, became the figurehead of the right-wing conspiracy movement, rallying the Citizens Council, the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society. As a speaker, he was in huge demand, filling rooms with thousands of rapt listeners.
His political extremism got him pushed out of the Army. The culmination of his extremism was at Ole Miss, where he led 800 rioters from the Confederate monument to confront 500 U. S. marshals in the Lyceum. Two people died and hundreds were arrested, including Walker, who was charged with various federal conspiracy charges, similar to the charges now facing Donald Trump.
Ole Miss students made up a small portion of the rioters, Adams said. The overwhelming majority were whipped-up thugs from all over the south who fell for the call to arms from Walker to save America from destruction. Sound familiar?
James Meredith, who I know well, as do many Northsiders, was lucky to get out alive. God was protecting him.
Ironically, Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle bullet missed Walker by inches six months before Oswald killed Kennedy. If Oswald’s bullet had not missed, Kennedy may have lived.
There were so many bizarre interconnections between unlikely events involving Walker and many other historical figures of that time. Give yourself a treat. Google History is Lunch Mississippi and listen to Peter Adams’ 40-minute talk.
Adams points out that right-wing conspiracy theories arise during times of cultural and social upheaval. The change frightens people and their fears turn into paranoia. Paranoia is one of the most universal features of mental illness. Adams believes the disruption of technology and the Internet is causing similar social and cultural upheaval, creating a new resurgence of right-wing conspiracy theories. The ultimate manifestation of this was Germany in the 1920s, when disruption from World War I caused an entire nation to follow a madman into living hell.
In 1995, Congress didn’t think the Internet could get off the ground if it had to deal with libel and slander lawsuits from fake news on its platforms. So Congress made one of the biggest mistakes in our nation’s history: It gave Internet platforms legal immunity from libel laws. This gave platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Google the ability to disseminate fake news and dangerous content without any accountability.
Fear and paranoia from rapid social and cultural change has now merged with the perfect vehicle to promote crazy conspiracy theories. This will not end well.
