It all finally caught up with Julius Evola in the early sixties. His discretion slipped up and he had to either rat on some of his neofascist coup-plotting buddies in open court or wind up in the slammer himself. After that, Italy held little appeal, so he upped sticks for pastures new. He had plenty of money and wanted to be somewhere where he could look at mountainous. Switzerland? Nah, boring. Tibet? Full of Red Chinamen. Colorado? Problematic, sure, but American right-wingers, as he knew from GLADIO, are rich and gullible. Soon enough he’s ensconced in Aspen and reasonably happy. He writes, makes connections with other right-wingers (including the Coors family), and indulges in a new pastime: watching football. He had long held that sports was the one way in which the common people reached something like transcendence through noble action, and the way Americans teach their boys the way of the gridiron from youth strikes him as a promising sign in this otherwise culturally dead land. He became an open-handed patron to the local high school football team; they still call their set of blocking sleds “Mr. Julius” after the man who bought it for them. The camaraderie he witnesses among the boys on the team and the requests of his friends in the rising New Right lead him into a new form of literary genre: the novel-cum-film-treatment. He writes a tale of communist subversion and invasion, and the high school football team that rises above their low stations to fight them. His new friends at the National Review take the manuscript off his hands, edit out some of the weirder bits, and translate the title from “Alba Rossa” to “Red Dawn.”

In “Freak Power in the Rockies,” Hunter S. Thompson briefly describes an encounter with Evola as HST was making the rounds on behalf of the Freak Party’s epic run at civic power in Aspen (or Fat City, as they planned on renaming it). Some of the naiver hippies in the movement thought (like the New Agers that came after them) that Evola might be a kindred spirit. HST was skeptical but went along with some of them to Evola’s cabin, where Evola treated them all to a Radical Traditionalist harangue that Thompson didn’t deign to quote in his report, opting to quote Dashiell Hammett instead: “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.”