5/18/23

John Birch Society still alive and kicking: author

In about 1970 or so, my very furious, retired Air Force, Republican father wrote a letter to the editor of the Sioux Falls Argus Leader after the paper ran a photo during what Americans called the Vietnam War. 

Dad charged Senator George McGovern with what he believed was the unforgivable offense of a civilian wearing a USAF flight suit. The letters in the paper that followed afterwards accused Dad of nitpicking while he got volumes of support in the mail from agents of the John Birch Society. Dad never forgot it and clearly I haven't either. 

Reservation border towns are still influenced by the Klan, John Birch Society, the TEA movement and now by the extreme white wing of the Republican Party. Recall the Birch Society billboards along I-90 across South Dakota that urged voters to get US out of the United Nations, pray to end abortion and how close travelers are to Wall Drug.

In 2010 Fresh Air's Terry Gross interviewed Jane Mayer after The New Yorker outed David and Charles Koch as members of the John Birch Society. In 2011 Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary, Robert Reich appeared as a panelist at a super secret Bircher-inflenced, Koch-hosted retreat in Palm Springs. In 2012 a normally routine meeting of the Missoula City Council erupted as members of JBS began a protest of payments to the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, or ICLEI. Republican Utah Senator Mitt Romney's mentor was a rabid Bircher.

Marjorie Taylor Greene and her Christian Nationalists support Donald Trump because they're convinced he’s the Antichrist who will enable them to conquer the Seven Mountains. The End Times fulfill a prophesy and welcome a supernatural extraterrestrial to create a one-world government. No higher being could be anything but predatory. It's dystopian fantasy run amok.

On January 6, 2021 the attack on the US Capitol was a  climax of the JBS movement.

Last Wednesday Terry Gross invited Matthew Dallek to talk about his new book, Birchers: How The John Birch Society Radicalized The American Right.
So the John Birch Society was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, a retired and very wealthy candy manufacturer. His company made Sugar Babies, Junior Mints, Pom Poms. He came from a family of Baptist preachers and farmers. He was home-schooled. 
Impeach Earl Warren was one of their most successful. The chief justice of the Supreme Court - they saw him as not only the architect of the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision, but as responsible for a number of decisions that gave the communists inroads into America, including a ban on prayer in public schools or giving more rights to criminal defendants. 
You know, the assumption I think that I had, a lot of people had, is that if MAGA Republicans, Trump Republicans, if they lose enough elections, they might get pushed to the side because the only thing that will do that is if - is enough defeat. And yet, you know, three arguably - as Chris Christie and others are saying, three election defeats in a row and they're still not pushed aside. [excerpt, A historian details how a secretive, extremist group radicalized the American right]
Just say it: radical christianic terrorism.

Jane Mayer has more at The New Yorker.
 

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