john birch society racist
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John Birch Society
The John Birch Society (JBS) is an American right-wing political advocacy group.Founded in 1958, it supports anti-communism and social conservatism and is associated with ultraconservative, radical right, or far-right politics.
The society’s founder, businessman Robert W. Welch Jr. (1899–1985), developed an organizational infrastructure of nationwide chapters in December 1958. The society rose quickly in membership and influence, and was controversial for its promotion of conspiracy theories.In the 1960s the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review pushed for the JBS to be exiled to the fringes of the American right. More recently Jeet Heer has argued in The New Republic that while the organization’s influence peaked in the 1970s, “Bircherism” and its legacy of conspiracy theories have become the dominant strain in the conservative movement.Politico has asserted that the JBS began making a resurgence in the mid-2010s, while the JBS has argued that it shaped the modern conservative movement and especially the Trump administration.
Writing in The Huffington Post, Andrew Reinbach called the JBS “the intellectual seed bank of the right.” Originally based in Belmont, Massachusetts, the John Birch Society is now headquartered in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, a suburb of Appleton, Wisconsin,with local chapters throughout the United States. It owns American Opinion Publishing, which publishes the magazine The New American.
Political positions
The John Birch Society supports limited government and contends that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. It opposes collectivism and, by extension, communism and big government . It also opposes wealth redistribution, economic interventionism, totalitarianism, and anarchism. Welch, its founder, infused constitutionalist and classical liberal principles, in addition to his conspiracy theories, into the JBS’s ideology and rhetoric. In a 1983 edition of the political-debate television program Crossfire, Congressman Larry McDonald (a conservative Democrat from Georgia), then the society’s newly appointed chairman, characterized it as belonging to the Old Right rather than the New Right.
The society opposes “one world government”, and it has an immigration reduction view on immigration reform. It opposes the United Nations, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and other free trade agreements. It argues the U.S. Constitution has been devalued in favor of political and economic globalization, and that this alleged trend is not accidental. It has cited the existence of the former Security and Prosperity Partnership as evidence of a push towards a North American Union.
The JBS supports auditing and eventually dismantling the Federal Reserve System. The JBS holds that the United States Constitution gives only Congress the ability to coin money, and does not permit it to delegate this power, or to transform the dollar into a fiat currency not backed by gold or silver.
Publisher Information
The Oregon Historical Society (OHS), founded in 1898, is a private not-for-profit organization that serves as Oregon’s steward of history, gathering and preserving documents, manuscripts, publications, films, recordings, and artifacts and making them available to researchers. The Oregon Historical Society also creates and displays exhibits and provides services to educators, students, and scholars through its website, collections, and publications. A 29-member Board governs OHS, whose mission is preserving and interpreting Oregon’s past in thoughtful, illuminating, and provocative ways.
How the GOP Surrendered to Extremism
It’s an image that still shocks in its feral intensity: On July 14, 1964, supporters of Barry Goldwater, the arch-conservative senator from Arizona whom the Republican Party was preparing to crown as its presidential nominee, unleashed a torrent of boos against New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as he spoke at the party’s national convention in San Francisco.
More than half a century later, Goldwater’s army of conservatives from cookie-cutter Sun Belt subdivisions howling their discontent at Rockefeller—the embodiment of the GOP’s centrist, East Coast establishment—remains a milestone in the right’s conquest of the party. The atmosphere so heated that Jackie Robinson, who was a Rockefeller supporter, nearly got into a fight on the floor with a Goldwater acolyte from Alabama.
nomination
What’s less remembered is why Rockefeller, who had lost the nomination to Goldwater, was standing behind the lectern in the first place: to speak in support of an amendment to the party platform that would condemn political extremism. The resolution repudiated “the efforts of irresponsible extremist organizations,” including the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society, a rapidly growing far-right grassroots group obsessed with the alleged communist infiltration of America.
The resolution failed, which testifies to the GOP’s long-standing reluctance to draw a bright line against the extremists who congregate at its fringes. But the fact that such a resolution was debated at all—in such a visible venue, with such high-profile advocates—also says something about Republicans today: In the past, the GOP had a stronger core of resistance to extremism than it’s had in the era of Donald Trump, QAnon, the Proud Boys, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Once Again, the Commies
In a bit of political symmetry, the John Birch Society headquarters is located in Appleton, Wis., about two miles from where the remains of Sen. Joseph McCarthy are buried on a serene bluff overlooking the Fox River. The great American commie hunter died in 1957, cut down by a conspiracy of acute hepatitis and alcoholism.
Across town at the Birch Society, the senator’s spiritual kin soldier on from two single-story buildings connected by a subterranean passageway on a bland commercial strip. There, the society publishes its magazine, The New American, and runs a website that lists the group’s various “action projects,” including its campaign to stop Agenda 21. The website also includes weekly video updates presented by the society’s CEO, Arthur R. Thompson, who, sitting in the group’s underground TV studio made up to look like a book-lined study, has covered in recent weeks such topics as “ObamaCare Supports Euthanasia,” “Zombie Attack” and “Russia Rising.”
In an interview with the Intelligence Report in his Appleton office, Thompson, an affable, white-haired man from Seattle who constantly fidgets with his glasses, twirling them in his fingers as he talks, said that two of the hardest “sells” the society has to the American people are that “communism is alive and flourishing” and “what is behind terrorism.”
Race and the Society
Once considered by the right and the left as the political equivalent of an addled uncle sent down to the basement rec room to drink, rant and hopefully pass out before saying anything too nutty in front of the guests, in recent years the John Birch Society has been invited back upstairs and has even hosted a dinner party or two. In 2010, the society was a co-sponsor of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. “It’s a fallacy to say that we ever went into hibernation,” Thompson said in the interview with the Report. “We’ve always been active. We’ve always influenced the conservative movement. We just don’t bang the drum and wave the flag about everything we do.’’
Contemporary counterparts
The John Birch Society is also directly linked to conservative politics today.
Most notably, Fred Koch, the father of David and Charles Koch, was among the Birch Society’s first 11 members and its main financial backers. The billionaire Koch brothers have pumped massive amounts of money into libertarian causes and conservative political campaigns for decades.
As investigative journalist Jane Mayer explains in her book “Dark Money,” Fred Koch strongly encouraged his sons to follow in his political footsteps, something Charles and David did in general. For a time, both brothers belonged to the Birch Society, but they had moved on by the 1970s.
Additionally, in their exhaustive examination of the tea party movement, political scientists Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto argue that Obama’s election instigated the rise of today’s far right. Much like how the John Birch Society arose as a rejection of progress on civil rights, tea party supporters felt anxious about what they saw as the “real” America slipping away when the country chose a black man to be its president.
Birchers called Justice
Just as Birchers called Justice Warren a communist for overruling state and local segregation laws, the tea party labeled President Obama a socialist because of his plan to expand health insurance coverage. And, similar to Birch Society claims that the civil rights movement was a treasonous ploy to divide the country, Trump and his surrogates paint the Black Lives Matter movement as a force working toward the collapse of social order.
Moreover, in 2017, as the Trump administration got underway, violent incidents involving white supremacists and mass shootings were becoming more common. Yet, Jeff Sessions, Trump’s attorney general at that time, tasked the FBI with compiling a report on so-called “black identity extremists” with the “potential to incite irrational police fear of black activists.”
Modern conservatism’s founding act wasn’t purging the extremist conspiracists like Welch. Instead, the far right better represented the “mainstream” right’s vanguard.
It was years before Roe v. Wade but smack in the middle of a wave of abortion-law liberalization in state after state. It was the John Birch Society that first discovered the power of the nascent Christian right’s most galvanizing issue. And because the John Birch Society was a secular organization with members of all faiths, it pioneered the sort of operational unity between evangelical Protestants and Catholics that the Moral Majority received credit for when it came along, nine years after the Supreme Court’s landmark abortion rights decision in Roe—a group that Ronald Reagan hugged tight as an ally, even as Birchers were officially personae non gratae.
The John Birch Society leaders’ motivations for joining this fight, as always, were fantastical. They believed abortion was part and parcel of the strategy of the “Insiders”—the shadowy globalists who directed the Communist conspiracy—to weaken America by shrinking its population. It was “people control,” just like “gun control.” That is how front groups work: Find an inviting come-on with the power to arouse an angry citizenry, even if it is just to win their vote; and if this becomes the gateway drug to sell the whole crazy conspiratorial package, all the better.
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