How Kevin Kruse Became History’s Attack Dog

Mark Abramson for The Chronicle

Kevin M. Kruse is swamped. Hunched over his desk on a Wednesday in October, fresh off a lecture that morning, the Princeton University history professor needs to prep for a dissertation defense. He has letters of recommendation to read and emails to answer. Ungraded essays sit in fat stacks on his desk.

Like his colleagues, Kruse balances many responsibilities. But there’s one he’s been neglecting all morning: He hasn’t checked Twitter.

He logs on to shocking news: Pipe bombs have been mailed to Democratic leaders and prominent critics of President Trump, in what appears to be a coordinated series of assassination attempts. Like with so many news stories, people are wondering what it means. Kruse has work to do.

If you’ve heard of Kruse, it’s probably because you’ve read his tweets. Online, the historian specializes in serialized posts, called threads, that lend historical context to breaking news or skewer a version of history spouted by right-wing agitators. Yes, there’s precedent for athletes protesting during the national anthem, he wrote when Colin Kaepernick made national news. No, Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t like Trump, he said in another.

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In this era of political crisis, people turn to social media, where pundits are waiting to reassure them that history is on their side. But most of them haven’t studied history as carefully as Kruse. The Princeton professor and his like-minded peers don’t think they can afford to confine their knowledge to classrooms, journals, and the occasional book. Some are wading into the more rambunctious realm of Twitter, and it takes special skills to land punches and avoid getting chased back to the ivory tower. Kruse is the best at it, and he’s showing others the way.

It’s intense. He’ll leave for class, and come back with thousands of notifications from strangers, some of them demanding: You have to correct this. Please, we need you. He has a hard time staying off his phone. There is always an emergency — tons of people saying something ignorant or cherry-picking half-truths about American history, and only so many experts like Kruse who are qualified to offer a swift, accurate rebuttal.

Historians like Kruse are staring down a challenge: How do we cope with being this relevant?

In his office, Kruse is already connecting dots. He alternates between hunching at his computer and slouching back in his chair, temporarily hiding the fact that he’s 6-foot-3. When he’s formulating a point, the clues appear in his body language. His wife, Lindsay, says that she can tell when her husband is mapping out arguments in his mind because his head moves a certain way. He’s obsessive about word choice, a trait he picked up from a poetry professor who made him look up his own name. (Kevin Michael Kruse means handsome, holy, and curly-haired.)

At 46, Kruse wears his dark brown hair wavy and clipped short, the ends starting to silver.

He starts drafting a thread about the pipe-bomb attacks out loud, sweeping his large hands through the air as if he’s directing a symphony.

In 1919, he explains, pipe bombs were mailed to prominent politicians, a Supreme Court justice, and a Rockefeller. There were coordinated arrests, kangaroo courts, unjust deportations. And that year, America already felt like it was on fire. In Chicago, a black boy swimming in Lake Michigan had drifted to the “whites only” side; white people threw stones at him until he drowned, and police refused to arrest the culprits. The killing led to race riots, which were followed by widespread labor strikes. The pipe bombs only added to the sense that things were coming apart.

The history lives in his head. But when Kruse composes his Twitter threads, he likes to take the time to find primary sources and work over his sentences.

Right now, he has no time. He has to go hear a graduate student defend her dissertation. Kruse’s 200,000 followers want his wisdom. But they’ll have to make it through this news cycle without the professor explaining how America has been through this before.

In 1972 the country was reeling from the civil unrest of the late 60s as the Vietnam War dragged into a second decade. In Washington, D.C., burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters, setting in motion the country’s most profound political crisis since the Civil War.

A thousand miles away, in Kansas City, Kan., Kruse was born into a conservative middle-class family. A precocious adolescent, young Kevin would putter through the living room when Jeopardy was on and answer whatever question Alex Trebek had just asked, said Amy Hubbuch, the oldest of the four Kruse kids. His mom once gave him a Hallmark-store figurine of a little boy with his nose shoved in a book. It reminded her of him.

She and his father, an accountant, moved the family to Nashville, and Kruse ended up at Montgomery Bell Academy, a private, traditional all-boys school. That’s where he learned how to hold an audience. He wrote for the yearbook and the newspaper and got involved in theater. He and his friends put on a performance of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Among other roles, Kruse played a stubborn king who builds beautiful castles in a swamp.

He discovered satire at around the same time that he was discovering the politics of class and privilege. There were a lot of rich kids at Montgomery Bell. Kruse remembers one kid who bragged about avoiding a speeding ticket in his brand-new car because his father was a judge. Kruse drove a Buick. And his father went bankrupt his junior year, which would have meant leaving the private school if the headmaster hadn’t stepped in and given him a scholarship.

Kruse kept writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, when he penned a humor column for The Daily Tar Heel under the title, “Kevin Kruse: Public Embarrassment.” Kruse struck a lighthearted tone and picked the targets you’d expect for a college columnist in 1993 and 1994 — Tonya Harding, drunk frat boys.

Then Chapel Hill’s student congress moved to defund the campus gay-and-lesbian group. It was purely spiteful, Kruse says, and fundamentally unfair. He wrote a column suggesting that the student congress be defunded instead. It was righteous and provocative.

“I think I found a voice that I should have had all along,” he says.

All the while, Kruse had been noticing things in college that made politics and history seem real and urgent, less like “some airy thing, out there.” During his freshman year, a student who lived down the hall told him that he could not vote for a senate candidate who was black. Kruse was shocked. He thought about that interaction when he started seriously studying civil-rights history. He realized that tendons from the past tug at the present. “Oh,” Kruse remembers thinking, “this is the information I needed to understand that conversation.”

He wrote his dissertation on white flight in Atlanta in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. By the time he interviewed for a job at Princeton, Kruse could tie the past to the present with a bow. One of the white suburbs he had studied elected Newt Gingrich to Congress. Gingrich, who became speaker of the house, married white Christian conservatism to the Republican Party. So white flight in Atlanta led directly to the polarization of partisan politics in Washington.

Jeremy Adelman, a history professor who sat on Kruse’s hiring committee at Princeton, was impressed. Some historians, says Adelman, feel that “the past is another country.” Kruse could straddle the border with the present.

“Nobody saw this one coming,” Adelman says, talking about today’s political environment. “But Kevin did.”

Mark Abramson for The Chronicle

Eighteen years later, Kruse sits in a conference room at Princeton and waits to give feedback on someone else’s research. Technical difficulties have created a typical Wednesday-afternoon academic farce: three overeducated older scholars trying in vain to make a PowerPoint presentation load correctly. It’s not going well. An audience member is knitting in the front row.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, the world is on fire, and people are desperate for Kruse to make sense of it all.

“Put away the booze. Get the coffee brewing,” one person writes. “Your going to need your full attentions and faculties today.”

Rush Limbaugh has been “claiming only Libs mail bombs,” complains another, and “needs a history lesson.”

This happens a lot. People are constantly trying to alert Kruse to troubling news, or sic Kruse on conservative pundits, like they’re scheduling their own Twitter Fight Club. He calls these pleas the "@-signal” — like the Bat-Signal, but less cool. And it’s weird, Kruse says.

It’s weird because Kruse thinks of himself as an introvert who doesn’t seek out confrontation, which is the opposite of who he is to his fans on Twitter. In one-on-one conversations, “I invariably find myself backing away,” he says, even when the conversation is pleasant. (He used to tell people he was a math teacher to avoid talking about history at parties.) The closest Kruse has gotten to being in a fight was when a kid sucker-punched him in middle school. He worked as a bouncer in college and had to bust up a few drunken brawls, but mostly he sat on a stool, smoking Camels, paging through a biography of Harry S. Truman.

Writing as an academic, Kruse has always tried to keep a broader audience in mind. Working on his dissertation, which later became his first book, he says he wrote for two readers: his adviser and his mom. His second book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, earned him appearances on Larry King Now and Fresh Air. But for a while, he stayed off social media. He thought Facebook was for bragging and Twitter was for jokes.

His publisher strongly encouraged him to get on Twitter, so he finally did, in 2015. Kruse’s feed wasn’t very popular then. “It was all very boring, History Channel type stuff,” he says. (Sample tweet: “Happy 100th Birthday, Orson Welles. Hard to pick a favorite work of his, but ‘Touch of Evil’ always impresses me. So many great shots.”)

Then, later that year, a young white man shot and killed nine people in a historically black church in Charleston, S.C., a rampage fueled by his racist beliefs. In the aftermath, people demanded that the state remove the Confederate flag from its honorary place at South Carolina’s statehouse. Others fired back: Confederate iconography wasn’t about race. It was about Southern pride and nobility.

Like the UNC-Chapel Hill student government’s push to defund the student gay-and-lesbian group, the way people were talking about Southern heritage in the wake of Charleston seemed fundamentally wrong to Kruse.

In college, he had a column. Now, he had a Twitter feed.

Mark Abramson for The Chronicle

The day after the massacre, Kruse posted a history lesson. “Two decades ago,” he wrote, “South Carolina’s Republican governor tried to have the Confederate flag removed from statehouse.” He posted a 1996 press clipping from The Washington Post that included quotes from the governor: “Do we want our children to be debating the Confederate flag in 10 years? If we stay on the present course, such will be their fate. And the debate will not subside, it will intensify.”

In that tweet and others that followed, Kruse laid out his thesis: Confederate iconography is unavoidably about race. “Sorry for flooding my feed with what’s obvious to most — the Civil War was about slavery,” Kruse tweeted, “but my mentions are filling up with denialists.”

People started listening. Kruse’s following grew. He learned that teaching history on Twitter isn’t just about trying to coax people into eating their vegetables. It’s about getting people to love vegetables. One way to do that is by throwing broccoli at Dinesh D’Souza.

D’Souza, a far-right commentator and filmmaker, had amassed his own Twitter following — many times larger than Kruse’s — after years as a speaker on the college circuit, where he touted his Ivy League degree and decried academe as a cesspool of liberal groupthink. He has fashioned himself a high priest in the church of Owning the Libs, an ideology centered on making liberals look and feel foolish.

Last summer D’Souza was challenging a liberal on Twitter to name the Southern Democrats who became Republicans in protest of the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights. “Put up or shut up,” D’Souza said.

“Sure,” the Princeton professor cut in. “Let’s do this.”

Over the course of 28 tweets, Kruse not only name-checked two dozen Dixiecrat candidates and officeholders who switched parties during the civil-rights era, he also explained why counting the number of party-switching politicians doesn’t help people understand how the parties realigned around racial issues during that period. Scholars, he said, tend to measure those changes by looking at voters, not politicians.

“Looking at elected officials is the worst way to measure these changes,” wrote Kruse, adding: “Of course, that’s why D’Souza insists on doing it that way.” (D’Souza did not respond to a request for comment.)

Kruse had owned D’Souza, and the libs loved him for it. And it wasn’t the only time. A few days later, D’Souza was tweeting about how, in Abraham Lincoln’s day, Republicans favored protecting the rights of immigrants — but only legal immigrants. Kruse responded by pointing out that, in Lincoln’s day, there was no legal distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants.

“My God, you are just awful at this,” Kruse told D’Souza.

Over the next three months, Kruse’s Twitter following doubled, to 160,000.

Kruse says he didn’t do it to change D’Souza’s mind. He assumes D’Souza argues in bad faith. Kruse says he does it for the people who encounter these counternarratives and think that they’re wrong, but don’t know enough to back it up; people who need a counterpoint to their uncle at Thanksgiving, or to their co-worker in the breakroom.

“People are hungry for context,” Kruse says. And that context, he believes, is enhanced with justified mockery. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan thrived on fear, he says. It was only when people pointed and laughed at them, in public, that they crumbled.

Kruse believes in taking a similar approach to racists on the internet. “When I say you’re a horrible bigot,” he would tell them on Twitter, “I mean you’re really bad at it.”

He seems to enjoy it. The professor is a cut-up with a friendly demeanor, but he has a quick temper. He knows that social media can bring out the worst in him — the part that sees someone being a moron and unleashes the urge to fight back.

“It’s bloodlust,” he says. “I don’t see the person’s face I’m talking to. I just see the words they’ve written.”

Thinking about Kruse, Eric Rauchway, a history professor at the University of California at Davis, was reminded of a line Ralph Waldo Emerson once used to describe John Quincy Adams: “He’s no literary old gentleman, but a bruiser, and loves the melee.”

A bruiser attracts a different kind of crowd than a scholar of American history. Many of Kruse’s new followers weren’t there for a lesson, they were there for a beatdown. It was flattering, but it was also exhausting. “I took down a couple people in threads and people said, ‘Yes, that’s good.’ I basked in the approval, and that was great,” Kruse says. “But then it was, ‘Dance again, monkey.’”

If he feels like a dancing monkey, he can seem to others like an alpha dog; and when he barks, others bite. He can start a melee by accident, just by weighing in.

It makes him feel guilty at times, but not as guilty as he would feel if he logged off. In high school, Kruse resented classmates who had lots of privilege and weren’t interested in using it for much beyond making traffic tickets disappear. Now he’s the one with privilege, and he feels he has to use it.

“This sounds corny,” he says, “but I have no excuse not to.”

Hired to Princeton at 27, tenured at 33, Kruse exists in rarefied air in academe. He ticks off his advantages on his fingers: straight, white, Christian, male, full professor at an Ivy League institution. He likens it to hitting a powerful poker hand.

Because of this, Kruse has a license to say what some of his colleagues can’t. Unlike graduate students and junior faculty, he doesn’t feel like he’s risking his job when he tweets, despite the efforts of the cranks who email his department chair saying he should be fired. He can scold the bigots and the sexists without being dismissed as an angry black man or a shrill woman. And his trolls aren’t nearly as vile or relentless as the ones women and minority academics have to deal with.

Kruse gets accused of being “left-wing,” says N.D.B. Connolly, an associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University and a friend of Kruse’s. The Princeton professor says he’s definitely a liberal, but if liberalism is a sliding scale, he puts himself somewhere in the middle: too progressive on issues of race and corporate excess to call himself a centrist, too amenable to compromise and coalition-building to be an avatar of the far left.

On Twitter, centrist liberals and leftists often do battle; bridging those worlds can be difficult. But Kruse is helped by the fact that he is a straight white man. Critics, even the trolls, have no choice but to engage his Twitter lectures on the merits. That, in itself, is a privilege.

“He doesn’t get accused of being unqualified,” says Connolly, who is black. “He doesn’t get called porch monkey … the way that I do.”

Mark Abramson for The Chronicle

One time, Kruse went a week without talking to anybody except for the security guard at the Emory University archives.

That was back when he was reading everything he could find about white flight in Atlanta. It was unglamorous, solitary work — no followers, no retweets, no promise that anyone but his mom would read the fruits of his labor.

Even now, Kruse sometimes holes up in the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton, doing what people imagine scholars do. On a recent Thursday, he sat in a back room at a large wooden table and pulled out Folder 3 from Box 57 of Collection 244. He leafed through sheaves of aged paper, snapping a picture of each page while his back stiffened.

Kruse sees his Twitter hobby as a way of creating historical primers for people who don’t spend hours and hours in university archives. He has gathered all his threads in a “thread of threads,” which he has pinned to the top of his Twitter profile like a little library.

Some scholars have taken issue with the fact that Kruse’s library includes what are essentially highlight reels of the professor dunking on right-wing agitators, arguing that that is beneath the role of a historian.

Moshik Temkin, an associate professor at Harvard University, wondered on Twitter why historians should bother debating people like Dinesh D’Souza, a “propagandist” who isn’t really interested in the truth.

“The best way to minimize him is to treat him like the con man he is,” Temkin wrote. “Not to dignify him with historical debate.”

Academic takedowns don’t necessarily have the effects on public discourse that Kruse’s fans think they do, says Adam Laats, an education professor at Binghamton University. Laats points to evolutionary scientists who have found fun ways to publicly shame creationists. In 2003, the National Center for Science Education launched “Project Steve” to make fun of creationists who compile lists of scientists who doubt evolution. The center counted 1,432 scientists named Steve who support evolution.

“It would be comforting to think that this display of overwhelming scientific support for evolutionary theory would deflate creationists’ claims, but unfortunately that has not been the case,” wrote Laats in an essay for the History News Network. In some cases, scorn from academics has cemented their certainty.

Likewise, Kruse’s method of “dunking” on the historically ignorant might not do much to elevate the discussion. “The things that we find convincing often have no influence outside of our own charmed circles of Kevin Kruse fans,” Laats says. “Indeed, they often have the opposite effect.”

An admirer on Twitter once compared Kruse to King Canute, an 11th-century English ruler. In popular lore, Canute journeys down to the seashore and orders the tide to stop rolling in. Nature does not listen. The waves submerge his toes.

“I often say,” Kruse responded, “it feels like mopping back the ocean.”

He believes the alternative is far worse: Without experts speaking up, the public square will be sacrificed to the most aggressive voices, regardless of fact. History survives only if historians fight to keep it alive.

“This is a problem a lot of historians don’t grasp,” Kruse says. “We think that because we know it, because we’ve proven it, and because we’ve written it down in a book and put it on a shelf somewhere, that everyone knows it. And they don’t.”

Becoming an academic celebrity has been strange. Kruse’s followers include actual celebrities like John Legend, Chrissy Teigen, and Questlove. In Princeton, people have approached him — at the grocery store, at the pool, at a local pizza restaurant — after recognizing him from his profile picture. Earlier in the week, someone slipped a note under Kruse’s office door, thanking him for his Twitter account. While on the way to giving his kid a bath, he’s seen his tweets pop up on the nightly news.

The obligation of being somebody to so many people sometimes encroaches on his other obligations. Kruse and his wife have an 11-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son. His family sometimes has to tell him to put his phone down. More than once. At his daughter’s soccer scrimmages, Kruse has scrolled through Twitter while she wasn’t in the game, then looked up to realize she was playing. That’s a “shitty feeling,” he says.

Kruse finishes in the archive early enough to catch the end of his daughter’s soccer practice. He pulls up to the field and idles his minivan. A cover of Toto’s “Africa” by the rock band Weezer plays on the car speakers. His daughter, wearing neon cleats, is the shortest kid on the field. He watches her kick a soccer ball and wonders aloud what kind of day she’s had.

His phone stays in his pocket. On Twitter, strangers want his input. They want him to talk about the past and the present, about bombs and assassination plots, about zealots and bigots. They want him to explain a world that’s cracking open.

The next day, Kruse will call in reinforcements, tweeting a list of fellow historians who are also working to “push back against the peddlers of fake history,” and encouraging his fans to follow them.

Then he apologizes to his colleagues. They might not be used to the attention.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.