JBS Hidden from Public Scrutiny

by Oui Mon Nov 4th, 2024 at 11:50:44 AM EST

The John Birch Society, or Birchers, as Matthew Dallek calls them in his new history, slots into a long genealogy of rightwing conspiracy movements that date back to the republic's founding.

Tap here to read the FT's review of the new title: [_link]
— FT Weekend (@ftweekend) May 7, 2023

In small-town Wisconsin, looking for the roots of the modern American conspiracy theory | El PAÍS - 22 Jan 2024 |

Conspiracy theories have a long history in the United States, going back at least to 1800, when secret forces were said to be backing Thomas Jefferson’s presidential bid
Back when the Cold War loomed and TV was still mostly in black and white, the John Birch Society mattered. There were dinners at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and meetings with powerful politicians. There was a headquarters on each coast, a chain of bookstores, hundreds of local chapters, radio shows, summer camps for members’ children.
Well-funded and well-organized, they sent forth fevered warnings about a secret communist plot to take over America. It made them heroes to broad swaths of conservatives, even as they became a punchline to a generation of comedians.
“They created this alternative political tradition,” says Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University and author of “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.” He says it forged a right-wing culture that fell, at first, well outside mainstream Republican politics.
Conspiracy theories have a long history in the United States, going back at least to 1800, when secret forces were said to be backing Thomas Jefferson’s presidential bid. It was a time when such talk moved slowly, spread through sermons, letters and tavern visits.

From my diary @BooMan in 2011 ...

John Birchers Rejuvenate Within FreedomWorks Tea Party | 22 June 2011 |
Initially, the Birch Society drew its strength from two directions, according to the 1970 book, The Politics of Unreason: Right wing Extremism in America, 1790 to 1970, by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab: Opposition to changes unleashed by the black freedom movement, and unhappiness with the sitting Republican President Dwight Eisenhower-particularly his inability and unwillingness to turn back the clock on civil rights and on the growth of the welfare state.

Couldn't help myself after interesting comments on another thread ... a one off 😅

... the emergence of a new fascism?
In my analysis of 21st century developments you refer to secondary effects only. The roots of the alt-right started for the Republicans under Barry Goldwater (1964)and it went underground but quietly expanded. The Clinton years set the stage for both isolation of the Russian Federation and the upheaval of the Middle East with ally Israel. Netanyahu Zionist policy took hold and expanded from there. The 9/11 attacks were visible from mid 90s and changed the Western world ... Netanyahu personally equated the Palestinian question with Al Qaeda terror ... the Neocon wars according to the Project for the New American Century too were rooted in the mid 90s.
The Covid-19 pandemic became the upbeat for Trump's MAGA policy shunning Communist China a decade ago a fool's errand to treat Kim Jong Un and Putin as "friendly" dictators. Trump clearly went off the reservation.
The BreXit drama and flow of Syrian refugees into Europe (2015) was the result of xenophobia and Islamophobia post Bush's War on Terror. The role of NATO in the Iraq and Afghan wars was a setting to let the "defense alliance" grow far beyond its founding principles ... it became an expeditionary force for Washington elites.
Fascism is just a small step away ... Joe Biden to my disappointment had been clearly a warmonger and added fuel the Trump's MAGA policy and helped ruin the Middle East along with Zionist buddy Bibi.
European Union expansion YES .... NATO expansion and aggression NO.
It is a choice between Peace ☮️ and War with destruction 🔥 🔥
My diary @BooMan in 2018 ...
Signs of Fascism in a Post-Democratic State

History of development JBS as undercurrent in the fringe of GOP

Barry Goldwater Rebuke of Robert Welch (JBS)

Debunking a Longstanding Myth About William F. Buckley

The popular notion that the National Review founder expelled the fringe ( John Birch Society) from the conservative movement is wrong. [_link]
— Pete Quily (@pqpolitics) April 1, 2023

Before Tea Party candidates, MAGA and QAnon with Proud Boys, the John Birch Society operated as a kind of shock force for the far right in the 1960s. Led by Robert Welch, an ultra-conservative (and wealthy) retired candy manufacturer.

Ford Congressional Papers: Press Secretary and Speech
File at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.
Society/Extremism, 1965

Gerald Ford Press Releases - Birch Society/Extremism, 1965 ... patriotism extremism 🇺🇸

On this point I am joined by our two most recent Republican Presidential nominees,Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, as well as Republican leaders in. Congress ...

John Birch Society records (Ms.2013.003)
Brown University Library
The John Birch Society was founded in Indianapolis, Indiana, on December 9, 1958. Robert Welch, Jr. (1899-1985), a retired candy manufacturer, led the organization from its founding until his retirement in 1983. The original twelve founding members included Fred Koch (1900-1967), founder of Koch Industries, and Robert Waring Stoddard (1906-1984), president of Wyman-Gordon, a manufacturer of complex metal components. The Society's purpose was to combat communism and promote various ultraconservative causes. It was named in honor of John Birch, an American Baptist missionary and United States Army intelligence officer who was killed by Chinese communists on August 25, 1945, making him, in the Society's view, the first casualty of the Cold War. Although it does not release membership numbers, the Society was estimated to have between 60,000 and 100,000 members at the height of its activities during the 1960s. By 1985 the membership was estimated to be about 50,000.
The Society has local chapters in all fifty states. It uses grassroots lobbying, educational meetings, petition drives and letter-writing campaigns to gain members and influence public policy. Because of its belief in limited government and its belief in an international conspiracy whose goal is to replace Western nations with a one-world socialist government, the Society has opposed any trade or diplomatic relations with communist countries as well as American membership in the United Nations. In addition, the Society has opposed the federal income tax and the Federal Reserve system, Social Security, the Medicare program, the creation of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), the transfer of control of the Panama Canal from the United States to the Republic of Panama, the Civil Rights Movement, sex education in public schools, and efforts to add fluoride to water supplies. While it supports the American military, it has opposed American military intervention overseas. The Society has operated Summer Youth Camps across the United States and has produced radio programs, newspapers columns, and films.

The Birchers & the Trumpers | June 2022 |

A new biography of Robert Welch traces the origins and history of the conspiracy-obsessed anti-Communist John Birch Society and, in the process, provides historical perspective on the far-right populism of the Trump era.

No kidding ... JBS is alive and kicking, doing well 🤢

Video at your own risk ... The Witch Hunt for Trumpism | JBS |

Decades before QAnon, far-right conspiracists were already pushing a conservative political agenda.

We discuss the history of far-right populism - from the John Birch Society to Trumpism. [_link]
— On Point (@OnPointRadio) July 18, 2022

Goldwater lost the '64 presidential election in a landslide to Democrat Lyndon Johnson, and the influence of the John Birch Society eventually faded, but its ghosts remained. In fact, in 2016, another far right populist Republican with the support of conservative conspiracists, won the presidency.
So how has the spirit of the John Birch Society lived on? And what does the history of the John Birch Society teach us about far-right populism in America today?

Related reading ...

The U.S. Government overlaps existing conspiracies with propaganda to wage wars. Setting the war narrative for a compliant corporate media. 🤬

JBS Hidden from Public Scrutiny | 9 comments (9 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: JBS Hidden from Public Scrutiny (none / 0)

McCarthy and His Enemies. By William F. Buckley, Jr., and L. Brent Bozell Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1954. Pp. 413. $5.00.

This volume is the development of a theme expressed by Christopher Fry's mayor in The Lady's Not for Burning:'

"That's enough!
Terrible frivolity, terrible blasphemy,
Awful unorthodoxy. I can't understand
Anything that's being said. Fetch a constable.
The woman's tongue clearly knows the flavour
Of espiritu maligno. The man must be
Drummed out of this town."

Buckley wrote another book which Regnery published.' This is more of the same.

Philip B. Kurland*
* Associate Professor, University of Chicago Law School.

'Sapere aude'

by Oui (Oui) on Mon Nov 4th, 2024 at 01:35:42 PM EST

Getting the Right All Wrong (none / 0)

Getting the Right All Wrong | Claremontre Review of Books by Gerard Alexander |
A review of To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party, by Heather Cox Richardson.
A professor at Boston College, Richardson associates the progressive Republican impulse with Abraham Lincoln, above all. He offered federal land grants for the construction of a transcontinental railroad, transferred federal land to states to create what would become land-grant colleges, passed the Homestead Act, which offered federal land to farmers, and assaulted the "property" rights of the Southern plantation elite by liberating their slaves. For Richardson, these policies helped spawn a tradition of legislation, regulation, and government program-building aimed at broad-based economic development and promotion of social mobility, one carried forward by Theodore Roosevelt, who busted trusts, and Dwight Eisenhower, who embraced the New Deal legacy and built the interstate highway system.
Lined up against Lincoln, T.R., and Eisenhower in this book are William McKinley, the robber barons of the Gilded Age, Calvin Coolidge, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and, more generally, the "Movement Conservatism" that has dominated the GOP since the 1960s. [link to Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, a/k/a "Mr. Republican"]
These right-wingers stood for low taxes, rigid protection of private property rights, and as little regulation of business activity as possible, which in her view contributed not only to concentrations of wealth and power, but also to economic disasters including the 1873 recession, the Great Depression, and the 2008-09 financial crisis.
In Richardson's telling, Movement Conservatism's control of the GOP is virtually complete. If the larger history of the party is a struggle between opportunity and property, it seems property has won decisively, at least for now. It is important to say "for now," because her story is one of wide swings across time. But at least for now, the worst elements are in charge.

Goldwater / Reagan Messengers of Prosperity Gospel

'Sapere aude'

by Oui (Oui) on Mon Nov 4th, 2024 at 02:40:22 PM EST

Colonialism, Apartheid and White Supremacy (none / 0)

The scourge of Dutch Reformed Church, slave trade and white supremacy is persistent to this date ....

Western Michigan and the Dutch colony of Trumpism.

My diary ...

Preaching Open Rebellion; Trump Unhinged | 18 April 2020 |

I don't know who needs to hear this but--my freedom doesn't end where your fear begins.

I invite you to stay inside and order GrubHub for the rest of your life, but the rest of us would like to get back to work.

Keep the protests up, Patriots! [_link]
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) April 16, 2020

Michigon Protests and Trump's DeVos Funding

My earlier reporting on the DeVos family, Erik Prince, Dutch Reformed Church of slavery and apartheid and its roots in the old country.

○ Dutch Colonial Heritage Reaches Xenophobic Zenith
○ Political Divide UAE (Trump) and Qatar (Clinton)

'Sapere aude'

by Oui (Oui) on Mon Nov 4th, 2024 at 07:16:19 PM EST

Re: Colonialism, Apartheid and White Supremacy (none / 0)

The Dutch Reformed Church and white supremacy | Stellenbosch University |
Introduction
We live in a time when, as Roy Foster (1999), a leading Irish historian, observes "apology is easier than explaining." He urges historians to remind their public that "the continuums and inheritances of history are matters of complex descent." This article revisits key moments in the history of the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa and also offers critique of the scholarship, mainly by non-theologians, on the issues of race, nationalism and what Moodie (1975) calls the Afrikaners' civil religion.
These issues are sometimes discussed with reference to the history of Nazi Germany where a vőlkisch theology dominated the Protestant churches and prepared the way for the advent of Hitler. This article argues that the volkskerk tradition in the DRC was substantially different and that there is no real evidence that Nazism significantly influenced DF Malan and the other members of the Afrikaner nationalist intelligentsia of the Western Cape, who were the main authors of the apartheid ideology.

German Christians celebrating Luther-Day in Berlin in 1933 (Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-15234 / CC-BY-SA 3.0)
[...]
One could write paraphrase for the Afrikaners: Perhaps it would have been better if Protestants from northwestern Europe had not settled here at the Cape, and had not lived for the first 150 years under the rule of a company that imported slaves and saw little profit in missions. Perhaps it would have been better if these colonists had not developed an inflated notion of their status as burghers and as "born Christians", had not married the strong women they did and had not attended a church like the Dutch Reformed Church, which in 1857 condoned segregated worship if the "the weakness of some" necessitated it. But that would then have been someone else's history and not our own. To accept our history as our own and not wish for a different one that is the first principle in any revision of the history of the DRC, which seems urgently required.
The first rule of writing history is never to impose on the past the moral precepts of today. Some choices and options that are available today were absent in the past. The fact that in both the Cape Colony and the American South the church took root in a slave society severely restricted the church's options. Slavery pervaded the entire ethos of society. From the time of Antiquity the slave's deference and servility determined the master's honour, dignity and manhood (Patterson 1991). Slaveholders in the American South interpreted their revolutionary heritage of freedom to mean the right to white supremacy, self-governance and to hold human property. The Northern states disagreed. Not for nothing did Abraham Lincoln remark. "We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word, we do not all mean the same thing." For the North it included the freedom to sell one's labour and to move about freely; for the South it meant to "to do as one pleases with other men and the product of other men's labour" (Wyatt-Brown 1997).
At the Cape slaveholding was much more widespread than in most European colonies with half the whites owning at least one slave by the mid-eighteenth century. Here, too, the slaveholders defended the almost total control they wielded over slaves as a pivotal part of their liberty, dignity and honour. Here, too, whites collectively defended the symbolic distinctions that underpinned the gulf between freemen and slaves.