John Birch Society JBS
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/cpac-to-allow-goproud-john-birch-society-to-continue-sponsorship/ sponsor at CPAC?
no merri
agenda 21, obama secret socialist, nat ass schol
see rwhist . wingnuts, perlstein etc
name keeps popping 2016, trump?
some red text below
bak 5 23
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AN 9 24
alternet-no lnx
Inside the billionaire's trick to keep people from voting
Thom Hartmann
September 23, 2024
Outside of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan (and a hedge fund guy), just about all American billionaires are white. And while their white privilege helped most of them to become billionaires in the first place, for the politically active billionaires on the right, it’s their money that they care about the most.
Fred Koch, the founding patriarch of the Koch family, was an early supporter of the John Birch Society (JBS), which vigorously opposed any efforts to reduce the powers of the very wealthy white people or elevate the wealth or political power of poor or working-class people. Their most public positions in the 1950s and 1960s were against racial integration and communism— the ultimate method for leveling the fortunes of the rich. The JBS opposed virtually all “welfare” legislation, from Social Security to Medicare to unemployment insurance, calling it socialism and equating it with a softer version of communism. Around that same time, a Russian immigrant who’d fled the Soviet Union (her father had lost his pharmacy shop to the Bolshevik Revolution) came to America with dreams of becoming a great author or actress. Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum chose the stage and pen name of Ayn Rand, and in the 1950s she wrote a rather simplistic novel celebrating inherited wealth.
In Atlas Shrugged, a young woman and her hapless brother inherit a railroad from their father and try to grow it strong over opposition from the unions, which want a safe workplace and reasonable pay. As George Monbiot wrote:
In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife “who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing.”35
It means nothing, in other words, if average people are ground into the dirt. But when people who inherited wealth face challenges, particularly those from average working families, they should be able to utterly destroy them.
ALSO READ: Trump has a brand new front in the Haitian conspiracy push
In a subsequent novel, The Fountainhead, one of the “producers” of her mythology rapes a woman, but it’s all good because the woman decides that she enjoys it mid-rape. Monbiot boils it down simply: “Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge, and greed.”
While Fred Koch was helping the JBS in its fight against taxes and regulation, his sons were apparently reading Ayn Rand and taking her philosophy of radical selfishness to heart. They were also, by the 1970s, running the Koch oil operation and having constant struggles with regulators, particularly during the Carter administration.
Looking for political juice, David Koch joined and then largely took over the Libertarian Party in the late 1970s.
That political party had been created by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a lobbying group formed in 1946 that represented the Big Three carmakers, the top three US oil companies, Monsanto, DuPont, GE, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly, and both US Steel and Republic Steel. Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, was on its board of directors, as were United Fruit president Herb Cornuelle; National Association of Manufacturers director and DuPont and GM board member Donaldson Brown; and Leonard Read, a longtime US Chamber of Commerce executive.
The mission of the new libertarian movement was straightforward: to lobby for the interests of big business and the uber-wealthy people that such business had created.
The same year that the FEE was created and they began the rollout of libertarianism, Congress busted an obscure University of Chicago economist named Milton Friedman for illegally shilling for the real estate industry.
As Mark Ames wrote:
The purpose of the FEE—and libertarianism, as it was originally created—was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up its policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations.
This background is important in the Milton Friedman story because Friedman is a founder of libertarianism and neoliberalism, and because the corrupt lobbying deal he was busted playing a part in was arranged through the Foundation for Economic Education.36
Friedman was later implicated in the aftermath of the brutal and violent takedown of democracy in Chile, and his acolytes helped privatize the state-owned properties of the Soviet Union, creating the kleptocratic and oligarchic government that now runs Russia and many of the former Soviet states. Libertarianism, it turns out, has had real-world impacts, which include the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
No country has ever successfully established a libertarian form of economy or governance; it was, after all, a scam set up to front for the very rich, and the corporations that made them that way. But that hasn’t stopped libertarian and corporatist ideologues from trying.
While Chile and Russia are well-known examples, few Americans seem to remember how George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld simply stood on the sidelines watching as the treasures of Iraq were looted after the United States took down their government.
It was to be a Grand Experiment: they’d finally prove that without government interference in a nation’s economy or social systems, an utopia would emerge. L. Paul Bremer was their front man, arriving in Iraq on May 2, 2003, to begin the process of “freeing” the country’s economy so that the world’s corporations would flood in and create a paradise.
As Naomi Klein wrote for Harper’s Magazine in an article titled “Baghdad Year Zero”:
The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business.”
One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the invasion, Iraq’s non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” he said, “is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.” It would be the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.37
Once again, Milton Friedman, the FEE’s heirs, and libertarianism made a few more billionaires and destroyed the lives of literally millions of people.
The source of the funds being channeled to Friedman back in 1949 was a man named Herbert Nelson, who was the chief lobbyist and executive vice president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, which not only was opposed to rent control laws but also had one of the largest lobbying budgets in Washington, DC.
Congressional investigators found a letter he wrote in 1949 saying:
“I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I don’t think anybody except direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote.
“I don’t believe women should be allowed to vote at all. Ever since they started, our public affairs have been in a worse mess than ever.”38
Although the details are still a bit fuzzy, it appears that libertarianism (and the creation of a political party using that name) was Nelson’s idea, or at least one he promoted vigorously. With a budget of over $60 million (in today’s dollars), Nelson hired the FEE to come up with a third party that would argue for the interests of the wealthy developers and landlords he represented. The FEE, in turn, hired Milton Friedman.
Reason Magazine, heavily funded by the Kochs, was the main voice of the libertarian movement in the 1970s, and in 1977 it published a fascinating article by Moshe Kroy that described how libertarians should market their free-market fundamentalism to skeptical Americans.
Noting that it was important not to lie to people outright, Kroy wrote:
“The point is that you can use tricks—and you’d better, if you really want libertarianism to have a fighting chance.”39
The tricks involved repackaging and reframing libertarian dogma and using “salesmanship.”
For example, Kroy asserted that the average person wouldn’t understand an abstraction like individual rights. So don’t even bother explaining how libertarianism would shrink government and empower corporations and the rich. “Instead,” Kroy wrote”
“[W]hat you can do is to explain to him that libertarianism is just against one thing: CRIME. By crime you mean just what he means: theft, robbery, kidnapping, enslavement. He will of course agree, because he thinks this is obvious. Then you just explain (at great length, and with many examples) that taxation is armed robbery, that inflation through deficit spending and money printing is theft—as well as forgery of money—that draft is basically kidnapping, etc.”40
This was something the average person could understand. The government that people thought would protect them from polluting corporations, would provide an efficient court and fiscal system to protect their jobs and bank accounts from corporate grifters, and would defend their lives in war if necessary—that government was, in fact, an evil thing.
If the billionaires could get the average American to look at government the way that oil, chemical, real estate, and banking industry billionaires did, and just elect politicians who were bought and paid for by those industries, then things would get very, very easy.
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at Texas GOP convention, Republicans call for spiritual warfare]
(https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/28/texas-gop-convention-elections-religion-delegates-platform/)" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
SAN ANTONIO — From his booth in the exhibit hall of the Texas GOP’s 2024 convention, Steve Hotze saw an army of God assembled before him.
For four decades, Hotze, an indicted election fraud conspiracy theorist, has helmed hardline anti-abortion movements and virulently homophobic campaigns against LGTBQ+ rights, comparing gay people to Nazis and helping popularize the “groomer” slur that paints them as pedophiles. Once on the fringes, Hotze said Saturday that he was pleased by the party's growing embrace of his calls for spiritual warfare with “demonic, Satanic forces” on the left.
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From left: Conservative activists Steven Hotze and Jared Woodfill enter the Senate gallery during the afternoon session of Day 1 of the Ken Paxton impeachment trial in the Texas Senate on Sept. 5, 2023. Credit: Bob Daemmrich for The Texas Tribune
“People that aren’t in Christ have wicked, evil hearts,” he said. “We are in a battle, and you have to take a side.”
Those beliefs were common at the party’s three-day biennial convention last week, at which delegates adopted a series of new policies that would give the party unprecedented control over the electoral process and further infuse Christianity into public life.
Delegates approved rules that ban Republican candidates — as well as judges — who are censured by the party from appearing on primary ballots for two years, a move that would give a small group of Republicans the ability to block people from running for office, should it survive expected legal challenges. The party’s proposed platform also included planks that would effectively lock Democrats out of statewide office by requiring candidates to win a majority of Texas’ 254 counties, many of which are dark-red but sparsely populated, and called for laws requiring the Bible to be taught in public schools.
Those moves, delegates and leaders agreed, were necessary amid what they say is an existential fight with a host of perceived enemies, be it liberals trying to indoctrinate their children through “gender ideology” and Critical Race Theory, or globalists waging a war on Christianity through migration.
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Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick speaks during the Texas GOP Convention on Thursday, May 23, 2024 in San Antonio. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune
Those fears were stoked by elected officials in almost every speech given over the week. “They want to take God out of the country, and they want the government to be God,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Thursday morning.
“Our battle is not against flesh and blood,” Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, said Friday. “It is against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
”Look at what the Democrats have done,” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said Saturday. “If you were actively trying to destroy America, what would you do differently?”
Controlling elections
The Texas GOP’s conventions have traditionally amplified the party’s most hardline activists and views. In 2022, for instance, delegates approved a platform that included calls for a referendum on Texas secession; resistance to the “Great Reset,” a conspiracy theory that claims global elites are using environmental and social policies to enslave the world’s population; proclamations that homosexuality is an “abnormal lifestyle choice”; and a declaration that President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected.
The 2024 convention went a step further.
It was the first Texas GOP convention set against the backdrop of a civil war that was sparked by the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton and inflamed by scandals over white supremacists and antisemites working for the party’s top funders, West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. This year’s convention was also sparsely attended compared to past years, which some longtime party members said helped the Dunn and Wilks faction further consolidate their power and elect their candidate, Abraham George, for party chair.
“What we're seeing right now is a shift toward more populism,” said Summer Wise, a former member of the party’s executive committee who has attended most conventions since 2008, including last week’s. “And the [party’s] infrastructure, leadership, decision-making process, power and influence are being controlled by a small group of people.”
(https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/_X93OkVqWjKf0MF0YqIovXarXM4=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/37d777dfbb61f282f112bd04a575cbbc/0523%20GOP%20Convention%20EH%20TT%2055.jpg)
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, wave to attendees during the Republican Party of Texas convention in San Antonio on Thursday, May 23, 2024. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune
That shift was most evident, she said, in a series of changes to the party’s rules that further empower its leaders to punish dissent. The party approved changes that would dramatically increase the consequences of censures — which were used most recently to punish House Speaker Dade Phelan for his role in impeaching Paxton, and against U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales for voting for gun safety legislation.
Under the changes, any person who is censured by the party would be banned for two years from appearing on GOP primary ballots — including judges, who are elected in partisan races but expected to be politically neutral once on the bench. The party also voted to unilaterally close its primaries, bypassing the Legislature, in a move intended to keep Democrats from voting in Republican primaries.
“It’s pretty hypocritical,” Wise said of the changes, which legal experts and some party members expect will face legal challenges. “Republicans have always opposed activist judges, and this seems to be obligating judges to observe and prioritize party over law — which is straight-up judicial activism.”
The convention came amid a broader embrace of Christian nationalism on the right, which falsely claims that the United States’ founding was God-ordained and that its institutions and laws should reflect their conservative, Christian views. Experts have found strong correlations between Christian nationalist beliefs and opposition to migration, religious pluralism and the democratic process.
Wise said she has seen parts of the party similarly shift toward dogmatic political and religious views that have been used “to justify or rationalize corrupting the institution and stripping away its integrity, traditions, fundamental and established principles" — as if “‘God wants it, so we can rewrite the rules.’”
“Being Republican and being Christian have become the same thing,” she said. “If you're accused of being a (Republican in Name Only), you're essentially not as Christian as someone else. … God help you if you're Jewish.”
The “rabbit hole”
Bob Harvey is a proud member of the “Grumpy Old Men’s Club,” a group in Montgomery County that he said pushes back against Fox News and other outlets that he claims have been infiltrated by RINOs.
“People trust Fox News, and they need to get outside of that and find alternative news and like-minded people,” Harvey, 71, said on Friday, as he waited in a long line to meet Kyle Rittenhouse, who has ramped up his engagement in Texas politics since he was acquitted of homicide after fatally shooting two Black Lives Matter protesters.
Rather, Harvey’s group recommends places such as the Gateway Pundit, Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News or the Epoch Times, a far-right website that also had a booth at this year’s convention and is directly linked to the Falun Gong, a hardline anti-communist group.
Such outlets, Harvey said, are crucial to getting people “further down the rabbit hole,” after which they can begin to connect the dots between the deep-state that has spent years attacking former President Donald Trump, and the agenda of the left to indoctrinate kids through the Boy Scouts of America, public schools and the Democratic Party.
Harvey’s views were widely-held by his fellow delegates, many of whom were certain that broader transgender acceptance, Critical Race Theory or “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives were parts of a sinister plot to destroy the country and take over its churches.
The culprits behind the ploy differed — Democrats, socialists or “globalists,” to name a few. But their nefarious end goals loomed over the convention. Fearing a transgender takeover of the Republican Party of Texas, delegates pushed to explicitly stipulate that the party’s chair and vice chair must be “biological” men or women.
At events to recruit pastors and congregations to ramp up their political activism, elected leaders argued that churches were the only thing standing between evil and children. And the party’s proposed platform included planks that claim gender-transition care is child abuse, or urge new legislation in Texas that's "even more comprehensive" than Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, which prohibits the teaching of sexual orientation or gender identity in public schools.
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Kyle Rittenhouse shakes hands with conventioneers at a meet and greet during the Texas GOP convention on Thursday in San Antonio. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune
“Our next generation is being co-opted and indoctrinated where they should have been educated,” Rep. Nate Schatzline, R-Fort Worth, said at a Friday luncheon for pastors and churches. “We are in a spiritual battle. This isn't a political one.”
For at least a half-century, conservative Christian movements have been fueled by notions of a shadowy and coordinated conspiracy to destroy America, said Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University who focuses on movements to put the Bible in public schools.
“It's like the boogeyman that won't go away, that gets summoned whenever a justification is needed for these types of agendas,” he said. “They say that somebody is threatening quintessential American freedoms, and that these threats are posed by some sort of global conspiracy — rather than just recognizing that we're a pluralistic democracy.”
In the 1950s, such claims were the driving force behind the emergence of groups such as the John Birch Society, a hardline anti-communist group whose early members included the fathers of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Trump. After decades of dwindling influence, the society has seen a revival since Trump's 2016 election. And in the exhibit hall last week, so-called Birchers passed out literature and pamphlets that detailed the New World Order's secret plans for "world domination."
Steve Oglesby, field director for the Birch Society's North Texas chapter, said interest and membership in the group has been on the rise in recent years — particularly, as COVID-19 lockdowns and international climate change initiatives have spurred right-wing fears of an international cabal working against the United States.
"COVID really helped," he said, adding that the pandemic proved the existence of a global elite that has merely shifted its tactics since the 1950s. “It’s not just communism — it’s the people pulling the strings.”
Throughout the week, prominent Republicans invoked similar claims of a coordinated conspiracy against the United States. On Friday, Patrick argued that a decadeslong decline in American religion was part of a broader, “Marxist socialist left” agenda to “create chaos,” including through migration — despite studies showing that migrants are overwhelmingly Christian. Attorney General Ken Paxton echoed those claims in his own speech minutes later, saying migration was part of a plan to "steal another election."
“The Biden Administration wants the illegals here to vote,” he said.
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Ella Maulding and Konner Earnest watch as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick speaks during the Republican Party of Texas convention in San Antonio on Thursday, the first day of the gathering. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune
As Paxton continued, Ella Maulding and Konner Earnest held hands and nodded their approval from the convention hall’s front row. Last year, the two were spotted outside of a Tarrant County office building where Nick Fuentes, a prominent white nationalist and Adolf Hitler fan, was hosted for nearly seven hours by Jonathan Stickland, then the leader of Dunn and Wilks' most powerful political action committee. They eventually lost their jobs after The Texas Tribune reported on their ties to Fuentes or white nationalist groups.
Maulding has been particularly vocal about her support for Great Replacement Theory, a conspiracy theory that claims there is an intentional, often Jewish-driven, effort to replace white people through migration, LGBTQ+ acceptance or interracial marriage. Once a fringe, white nationalist worldview, experts say that Great Replacement Theory has been increasingly mainstreamed as Republican leaders, including some who spoke last week, continue to claim that migration is part of a coordinated effort to aid Democrats. The theory has also been cited by numerous mass shooters, including the gunman who murdered 22 Hispanic people at an El Paso WalMart in 2019.
Five hours after Paxton and Patrick spoke, Maulding took to social media, posting a cartoon of a rabbi with the following text: “I make porn using your children and then make money distributing it under the banner of women’s rights while flooding your nation with demented lunatics who then rape your children.”
David Barton
Kason Huddleston has spent the last few years helping elect Christians and push back against what he believes is indoctrination of children in Rowlett, near Dallas. Far too often, he said, churches and pastors have become complacent, or have been scared away from political engagement by federal rules that prohibit churches from overt political activity.
Through trainings from groups like Christians Engaged, which advocates for church political activity and had a booth at this year’s convention, he said he has been able show more local Christians that they can be “a part of the solution” to intractable societal ills such as fatherlessness, crime or teen drug use. And while he thinks that some of his peers’ existential rhetoric can be overwrought, he agreed that there is an ongoing effort to “tear down the family unit” and shroud America’s true, Christian roots.
“If you look at our government and our laws, all of it goes back to a Judeo-Christian basis,” he said. “Most people don’t know our true history because it’s slowly just been removed.”
He then asked: “Have you ever read David Barton?”
Since the late 1980s, Barton has barnstormed the state and country claiming that church-state separation is a “myth” meant to shroud America’s true founding as a Christian nation. Barton, a self-styled “amateur historian” who served as Texas GOP vice chair from 1997 to 2006, has been thoroughly debunked by an array of historians and scholars — many of them also conservative Christians.
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David Barton, left, of WallBuilders, at a Texas Eagle Forum reception at the Republican Party of Texas convention in Fort Worth on June 7, 2012. Credit: Bob Daemmrich for The Texas Tribune
Despite that, Barton’s views have become widespread among Republicans, including Patrick, Texas Supreme Court Justice John Devine and U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson. And his influence over the party was clear at last week’s convention, where his group, WallBuilders, maintained a booth and delegates frequently cited him.
This year’s platform, the votes for which are expected to be released later this week, included planks that urged lawmakers and the State Board of Education to “require instruction on the Bible, servant leadership and Christian self-governance,” and supports the use of religious chaplains in schools — which was made legal under a law passed by the state Legislature last year.
Warren Throckmorton, a former Grove City College professor and prominent conservative, Christian critic of Barton, told the Tribune that the platform emblematized Barton’s growing influence, and his movement’s conflicting calls to preserve “religious liberty” while attempting to elevate their faith over others. The platform, he noted, simultaneously demands that students’ religious rights be protected, and for schools to be forced to teach the Bible.
“What about the other students who aren’t Christians and who don't believe in the Bible?” he said. “This is not religious liberty — it’s Christian dominance.”
As Zach Maxwell watched his fellow Republicans debate and vote last week, he said he was struck by the frequency and intensity with which Christianity was invoked. Maxwell previously served as chief of staff for former Rep. Mike Lang, then the leader of the ultraconservative Texas House Freedom Caucus, and he later worked for Empower Texans, a political group that was funded primarily by Dunn and Wilks.
He eventually became disillusioned with the party’s right wing, which he said has increasingly been driven by purity tests and opposition to religious or political diversity. This year’s convention, he said, was the culmination of those trends.
“God was not only used as a tool at this convention, but if you didn’t mention God in some way, fake or genuine, I did feel it was seen as distasteful,” he said. “There is a growing group of people who want to turn this nation into a straight-up theocracy. I believe they are doing it on the backs of people who are easily manipulated.”
Nancy Leclerc poses for a photo in front of a GOP elephant statue during the Texas GOP convention in San Antonio on Thursday, May 23, 2024. Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/28/texas-gop-convention-elections-religion-delegates-platf
rww5 23
- Erik Maulbetsch @ Colorado Times Recorder: Boebert Promotes ‘Globalist’ Conspiracy at Rally Opposing World Health Organization.
no lnx grt pix
NEWS
Boebert Promotes ‘Globalist’ Conspiracy at Rally Opposing World Health Organization
by
Erik Maulbetsch
posted on
May 18, 2023
Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO) joined many of her Freedom Caucus colleagues in a full-blown “globalist” conspiracy press conference yesterday.
In addition to a dozen or so members of Congress, the “Exit the WHO [World Health Organization]” event at the Capitol featured organizer Frank Gaffney, a notorious Islamophobe whose Center for Security Policy is an anti-Muslim hate group.
Gaffney and the lawmakers, including Boebert, made numerous unsubstantiated claims, from the World Health Organization being controlled by China, to blaming it for the COVID pandemic, to claiming it is the vehicle for a plot to force all nations under a single worldwide government.
Image created by Gaffney’s Sovereignty Coalition blames the WHO for all American COVID deaths.
Gaffney kicked off his remarks with a claim that has been repeatedly debunked:
“The Chinese Communist Party runs the World Health Organization,” said Gaffney. “It runs the World Health Organization in furtherance of its long-standing objective of global governance- that’s one world government.”
In advance of the rally, Gaffney’s Sovereignty Coalition has created a “meme library” for the purpose of attacking the WHO. The images are rife with unsubstantiated conspiracies, including one that says: “The W.H.O. killed over One Million Americans?” presumably blaming the organization for all American COVID deaths.
None of this is true. The fact checks debunking the various claims are legion, and longstanding. Here’s a line from the Associated Press:
“CLAIM: A legally-binding World Health Organization ‘pandemic treaty’ will give the organization the authority to control U.S. policies during a pandemic, including those on vaccines, lockdowns, school closures and more.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The voluntary treaty, which is in draft form and is still far away from ratification, does not overrule any nation’s ability to pass individual pandemic-related policies, multiple experts, including one involved in the draft process, told The Associated Press.”
Boebert mentioned several classic conspiracy tropes in her brief speech. As the fact-check above makes clear, the U.S. is not surrendering its sovereignty to the WHO. She then lists three reasons the WHO is bad: she claims it’s controlled by China, it’s linked to the World Economic Forum, and it sabotaged the investigation of COVID’s origin. None of these are true. The WHO is a specialized agency of the United Nations, governed by an executive board of 34 countries that currently includes the United States and China.
While there are disputes over how aggressively the WHO pursued the COVID origin investigation, it’s Boebert’s second point that raises the conspiracy red flag. Without any context or follow-up, she links the WHO to the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is a dog-whistle reference that “globalist” conspiracists no doubt heard loud and clear.
“On Day One Biden made it clear he wasn’t fit for the job when he brought the United States back into the World Health Organization,” said Boebert. “The results of Biden’s failed foreign policy is absolutely astonishing. The Biden Administration plans to surrender U.S sovereignty to unelected bureaucracy— [interrupted by heckler]. To paint a clear picture the Biden Administration is giving the same organization that is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, the same [that has an] affiliation with the World Economic Forum, and the same organization that sabotaged an investigation into the origin of COVID, more control over the American people’s lives. The WHO continues to spread lies and disinformation by praising China’s response to the virus as transparent, which frankly isn’t true.
“Before Biden took office the WHO was unable to do anything without written permission from our government. Now, if Joe Biden gets his way the WHO will have even more control over the most most private parts of our lives. This is not about public health! The WHO made it very clear they will censor anyone who does not agree with their agenda to control every aspect of people’s lives. They want total control over vaccinations, digitalization of health records, and your travel. Under this plan the Biden Administration is adopting Marxism by distributing medicine based on “equity.” This is not what a constitutional republic looks like. This is a dictatorship and we must defund the WHO and stop this radical agenda being put forward by the Biden Administration.”
:{
}:
Sovereignty Coalition tweet promoting John Birch Society’s petition to defund the WHO.
Responding to an email request for evidence of her claims and comment on her participation in the rally, a spokesman for Congresswoman Boebert sent a number of links to previous statements and two published reports.
With regards to why she references the World Economic Forum, the spokesman offered five previous tweets she wrote attacking the WEF.
Those include:
“Rather than trying to please Klaus Schwab and George Soros, the people elected to serve our nation should try and actually make the lives of the American people better.”
“Klaus Schwab: ‘The future is being built by us.’ Take it from me, you don’t want to be a part of ANY FUTURE designed by the WEF – because globalism isn’t about YOU, it’s about THEM CONTROLLING YOU.”
Another tweet references a conspiracy that “the WEF announced they hired hundreds of thousands of “information warriors” to police the social media narrative.” The conspiracy was debunked the same day as Boebert’s tweet.
Conspiracies accusing the World Economic Forum of attempting to control the planet and place all humans under a single global government are widely understood to be antisemitic.
Her office also shared a May 2022 opinion column by former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson that contained nearly all the points Boebert made in her speech, some in nearly identical language.
A week prior to yesterday’s rally, Gaffney’s group also shared content from another organization making the same “call: “defund and withdraw” call: the infamously racist and conspiracist John Birch Society.
U.S. Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Chip Roy (R-TX) urged the public to call Congress and demand passage of a pair of bills they have introduced that would end American payments to the WHO and withdraw the United States from the agency.
The John Birch Society also supports their legislation, as well as the overall “Exit the WHO” demand. It echoes the Sovereignty Coalition’s conspiracist claims on its own website:
“The WHO’s threat to national sovereignty and individual freedom is becoming increasingly blatant and obvious,” claims the John Birch Society. “Not only is the WHO effectively controlled by Communist China and other subversive globalist interests, but it is actively seeking greater, totalitarian control over its member nations, along with all of humanity. If the WHO gets its way, U.S. national sovereignty will become a thing of the past, and the WHO will have total power to mandate vaccinations, impose vaccine passports, and implement a digital health ID— worse, the Biden administration is trying to help the WHO achieve its tyrannical goals.”
Another Sovereignty Coalition meme links the WHO to drag queens, apparently implying some sort of international plan to introduce LGBTQ content to children.
Boebert isn’t the only Coloradan connected to the Sovereignty Coalition. Dede Laugesen, a former Trump campaign staffer and wife of Colorado Springs Gazette editorial page editor Wayne Laugesen works for Gaffney.
She promoted the rally on social media and was praised by longtime anti-WHO activist James Roguski, who after the event wrote “All the credit for the press conference goes to Frank Gaffney, Reggie Littlejohn, DeDe Laugesen, everyone at Sovereignty Coalition.”
The full video of the press conference is available to watch here.
libtard massie: Massie describes himself as a constitutional conservative. He believes in intellectual property and thinks it is necessary for incentivizing innovation. Massie has remarked that this is one of the areas where he is not a libertarian.[156]
Massie spoke at the John Birch Society’s 60th anniversary celebration. He talked about government corruption and spoke out against the advisability of an Article V Convention to amend the Constitution.[157][158]
https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/how-a-joseph-mccarthy-speechwriter-and-franco-fanboy-became-the-supreme-courts-inspiration-author/
Back in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the late Republican L. Brent Bozell Jr. was controversial even on the right. Many conservatives and libertarians denounced him as a crackpot and an extremist, and with good reason. Bozell was a proud member of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s staff, considered Richard Nixon much too liberal, slammed the Supreme Court’s Brown v. the Board of Education ruling of 1954 as an assault on states’ rights, and was an apologist for Spain’s fascist dictator Francisco Franco, a.k.a. El Generalísimo.
When Bozell temporarily moved to Spain in 1965, he loved the fact that Franco favored a very strict version of Catholicism; Bozell opposed not only abortion, but also, contraception. And even though Bozell was married to National Review founder William F. Buckley’s sister, Buckley eventually distanced himself from Bozell’s politics.
Bozell was 71 when he died on 1997. Journalist/author Jacob Heilbrunn, in an essay published by Politico on July 7, argues that Bozell’s far-right ideas are much more influential now than they were when he was alive— ideas that, according to Heilbrunn, are a blueprint for the radicalized U.S. Supreme Court and former President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
“Ever since Donald Trump’s ascension in the GOP,” Heilbrunn writes, “a kind of intellectual treasure hunt has taken place to try and identify the true source of the political right’s embrace of radicalism…. With the Supreme Court’s dismantling of Roe v. Wade and its decision to examine the ‘independent state legislature’ theory this fall, it’s time to nominate a fresh candidate: Buckley’s brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, Jr. Often dismissed as a kook during his lifetime, ‘Hell Bent’ Bozell did more than perhaps anyone to create the blueprint for the militant conservatism now triumphant at the High Court and the grassroots.”
Heilbrunn describes Bozell as the Republican Party’s “first theocon,” noting that after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, Bozell angrily railed against the “tide of death set loose by the contraceptionalists, the population planners, the war planners, the pornography legitimizers, the sex educationists, the women’s and gay liberators, the genetic manipulators, and of course, by the abortionists’ own massive successes in the great population centers.”
Heilbrunn interviewed Niskanen Center historian Geoffrey Kabaservice, who discussed Bozell’s influence.
Kabaservice told Heilbrunn, “Bozell valorized the theocratic authoritarianism of Spain under Francisco Franco. The radical conservatives on today’s Supreme Court, wittingly or not, have channeled Bozell’s vision and are in the process of overthrowing the rights-based liberal vision of equality that in many ways began with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.”
McCarthy, Heilbrunn notes, thought enough of Bozell to hire him as a speechwriter and an adviser during the 1950s. And in the early 1960s, according to Heilbrunn, Bozell “became a fan boy of Franco whose strict adherence to the Catholic creed and readiness to crush dissent struck a chord with him.”
Heilbrunn also points out that Bozell had a falling out with Buckley when his brother-in-law decided to “excommunicate the John Birch Society from the conservative movement.” And like the MAGA movement, Heilbrunn observes, Bozell was willing to resort to violence.
“In June 1970, Bozell organized the first violent anti-abortion protest, leading a Spanish Carlist faction calling itself the Sons of Thunder to a George Washington University Student Clinic,” Heilbrunn recalls. “Bozell was later convicted on several counts, including assaulting a police officer with a 5-foot wooden cross.”
https://www.mediamatters.org/war-christmas/war-christmas-story-how-fox-news-built-dumbest-part-americas-culture-war
parker m
no lnx many 1 vid
On December 3, 2004, Fox News’ now-defunct The O’Reilly Factor debuted a recurring segment called “Christmas Under Siege.” Though Christmas was not and has never been “under siege” in any meaningful way, disgraced former host Bill O’Reilly and Fox were set on pushing this victimization narrative, laying the groundwork for what became known as the “War on Christmas.” In the 15 years since, onlookers watched the very concept of objective reality fracture along political lines. Consumers of conservative media drifted ever deeper into a world where a school’s nonexistent ban on red and green clothing became national news and paranoid delusions were freely floated about a future in which people may be prohibited from displaying Christmas decorations.
For 15 years, cable news Don Quixotes have battled these windmills, rejoicing in their victories and basking in their acts of bravery while warning their audiences to remain vigilant. Imaginary culture war issues like the War on Christmas make for good politics, as the people arguing that these are real issues can at any time simply dust off their hands, declare victory, and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. Like Lisa Simpson and her tiger-repelling rock, the protectors of Christmas are simply saving the holiday from nonexistent threats.
Deep down, they must know that there’s no actual “war” on Christmas, but it makes for good politics. Rather than having to address issues actually facing Americans -- such as health care, the economy, and climate change -- the fake battles in the fake War on Christmas give right-wing media a convenient way to manufacture divisions between the left and the right. The bombardment of misinformation playing up imaginary (or wildly overblown) examples of political correctness run amok are intended to scare and create a seeming sense of partisanship even on issues that are agreed upon nearly universally.
Of the many impacts of the War on Christmas, Donald Trump’s decision to run for president seems the most consequential.
In a 2016 interview, Eric Trump explained why his father ran for president (emphasis added):
:{
}:
He opens up the paper each morning and sees our nation’s leaders giving a hundred billion dollars to Iran, or he opens the paper and some new school district has just eliminated the ability for its students to say the Pledge of Allegiance, or some fire department in some town is ordered by the mayor to no longer fly the American flag on the back of a fire truck. Or, he sees the tree on the White House lawn has been renamed “holiday tree” instead of “Christmas tree.” I could go on and on for hours.Those are the very things that made my father run, and those are the very things he cares about.
:{
}:
Each of those claims is dubious at best, but the idea that the White House Christmas tree was renamed the “holiday tree” is flat-out false.
Claims that Christmas traditions are being threatened date back nearly 100 years, and it’s remarkable how little the arguments have changed.
In 1921, industrialist and notorious anti-Semite Henry Ford published a piece decrying the secularization of Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter:
Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone's Birth. Easter they will have the same difficulty in finding Easter cards that contain any suggestion that Easter commemorates a certain event. There will be rabbits and eggs and spring flowers, but a hint of the Resurrection will be hard to find.
Ford’s sentiment is quite similar to that of O’Reilly in 2004:
All over the country, Christmas is taking flak. In Denver this past weekend, no religious floats were permitted in the holiday parade there. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled the holiday tree and no Christian Christmas symbols are allowed in the public schools. Federated Department Stores, [that's] Macy's, have done away with the Christmas greeting, “Merry Christmas.”
And to the claims in this piece from conservative columnist Jay Nordlinger in 2010:
Some have said, “You just can't find cards that say ‘Merry Christmas.’ It gets harder and harder.” I know. Kind of like trying to find products not made in China (for who's to say whether they come from laogai, the gulag?). I gave up on the China front long ago. Shameful, I know. But have you ever tried to buy an umbrella not made in China? Also, globalization has done wonders for the average Chinese, gulag or no gulag. Kind of a thorny, upsetting issue.
I gave up on the “Merry Christmas” front too, where cards are concerned. I just get a pretty card that says “Season’s Greetings” or “Whass Happenin' on the Holidays?” or whatever. Life's too short to hunt down “Merry Christmas.”
While O’Reilly’s frustrations were aired during an episode of The O’Reilly Factor and Nordlinger’s were published in the National Review, Ford’s came in the second volume of a collection titled The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, hammering home what the War on Christmas was actually about for Ford: antisemitism and Christian supremacy.
In 1959, the right-wing John Birch Society published a pamphlet titled There Goes Christmas?! in which its authors argued that the United Nations and communists were trying to “take Christ out of Christmas.” In 2000, white nationalist blog VDare published what’s thought to be the first online mention of the “War Against Christmas,” warning that Amazon’s use of the phrase “Happy Holidays” in an email was symbolic of “the struggle to abolish America.”
https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/the-radical-rights-terrorist-faction-has-long-followed-the-anti-communist-blueprint-from-the-1960s
no lnx many
The radical right’s terrorist faction has long followed the ‘anti-Communist’ blueprint from the 1960s
Written by David Neiwert / Daily Kos February 3, 2020
Far-right terrorist gangs are all in the news these days, thanks to the recent arrests of members of The Base for planning to cause violence at the Richmond, Virginia, gun rally of Jan. 20, as well as to murder a couple believed to be antifascists in Georgia. But this is hardly the first such operation in the United States.
Their history, in fact, offers some real-life context about the nature of more recent iterations, including Atomwaffen Division and the Rise Above Movement, as well as The Base, not to mention Friday’s sentencing of would-be domestic terrorist Christopher Hasson. Gather ‘round, then, for the saga of Robert DePugh and the Minutemen—probably the progenitor of what we would now call a modern-day, far-right militant terrorist group. And like all of them, the Minutemen wrapped themselves in the flag.
First, let’s be clear: We’re not talking about those Minutemen—the border vigilantes who prowled the Mexico border during the first decade of the 2000s. I am talking about an even earlier iteration of a right-wing action/terror organization supposedly inspired by the Revolutionary War heroes, concocted by a vitamin salesman in the late 1950s.
Robert Bolivar DePugh was a Missouri man, born in 1923, who gained some wealth through a veterinary drug firm called BioLabs, which specialized in a vitamin for dogs that promised to increase their lifespans. In the mid-1950s he also began producing a malt-flavored, ultra-compact storage food designed for human consumption, called Minuteman Survival Tabs. You can still find a version of these tabs in stores today.
DePugh became devoted to the anti-Communist cause as an early member of the John Birch Society (JBS) in the late ‘50s, and became friends with JBS founder Robert Welch. But within a few years he had decided even it was too namby-pamby for his tastes.
DePugh was all about a militant approach, and in 1960 formed an offshoot he called the Minutemen. As a consequence—and because his rhetoric was so extreme—he was ejected from the JBS. In 1961, he published a manual for organizing guerilla-warfare militias, and published a monthly newsletter titled On Target.
Not only did the Minutemen preach an even more rabid, wildly conspiracy theory-fueled style of anti-Communist paranoia than the Birch Society, but their activities also manifested, for the first time, the violent undercurrent of these beliefs.
DePugh, like Welch, believed that government had been infiltrated at its highest levels by Communists, but that moreover a takeover was virtually inevitable, and the most important thing for a “patriot” to do would be to prepare for the counterattack. So the Minutemen told their members to arm themselves with anything at hand that could be used strike back when the “Communist takeover” finally happened.
DePugh also was fond of attention from the press. At one gathering of reporters he donned a “germ warfare protector”—essentially just a large clear-vinyl bag—that would-be survivalists might need in 1961.
His “Minute Men” operations—paramilitary training operations in the woods (DePugh in fact had washed out of the U.S. Army for “nervousness and depression”)—were the clear progenitors of today’s Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, playing soldiers. Most of these operations were held in the woods near BioLabs’ Norborne, Missouri, headquarters.
Walt Kelley’s satirical daily “Pogo” comic strip hilariously lampooned DePugh as the free-shooting Wiley Cat, whose “Minute-Men” were the scourge of the Okeefenokee Swamp.
DePugh also told his followers to harass “the enemy,” and compiled at his headquarters a list of 1,500 people he identified as members of the “Communist hidden government,” with the intent to assassinate them in the event of the Communist coup. In his newsletter, DePugh listed the names of 20 congressmen who had criticized the then-active House Committee on Un-American Activities.
The newsletter also contained a warning (which later became a flyer circulated by the Minutemen), featuring the image of a crosshair, and text reading:
Traitors Beware!
See the old man at the corner where you buy your papers? He may have a silencer-equipped pistol under his coat. That extra fountain pen in the pocket of the insurance salesman who calls on you might be a cyanide gas gun. What about your milk man? Arsenic works slow but sure. Your auto mechanic may stay up nights studying booby traps. These patriots are not going to let you take their freedom away from them. They have learned the silent knife, the strangler’s cord, the target rifle that hits sparrows at 200 yards. Traitors beware. Even now the cross hairs are on the back of your necks.
Now outside even the realm of the Birchers, the Minutemen soon became associated with neo-Nazi groups like Wesley Swift’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian, a Christian Identity church located in Hollywood. Swift preached the “two-seed” brand of Identity, holding that not only are white people the true Israelites, but that blacks, Asians, and other non-whites thus are “pre-Adamic” people without souls, and Jews are either descendants of Satan or practitioners of a Satanic religion.
Among Swift’s more notable adherents: retired Col. William Potter Gale, a former MacArthur aide who eventually became a key figure in Posse Comitatus;and a quiet-spoken Lockheed engineer named Richard Girnt Butler. The latter would later take over and move the church to the Idaho Panhandle, renaming it the Church of Jesus Christ-Christian at the Aryan Nations. It became its own wellspring of criminality, violence, and ugly hatred.
Also attending Swift’s services was Keith Gilbert, a Minutemen member and gun shop owner convicted in 1965 of stealing 1,400 pounds of TNT that he later claimed was intended as abomb under the Hollywood Palladium stage during a speech by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.Released from prison in the 1970s, Gilbert migrated north to Idaho, where he became a prominent part of the Aryan Nations scene.
Other Minutemen were getting into trouble around the nation. Some 19 members were arrested in October 1966 by the FBI in New York for plotting to bomb three summer camps operated by liberal East Coast organizations. Charges were later dropped because of warrant violations.
By this point, though, DePugh had decided to move into the political arena. Using the Minutemen’s agenda as a platform, he formed the Patriotic Party, whose platform insisted that “all known or suspected communists now holding jobs in government” should be fired and put on trial.
DePugh made public speeches around the country touting the Patriotic Party as a “conservative alternative” in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential election defeat. Two of those appearances were in Seattle in 1966.
A mailroom employee of Seattle City Light named Duane I. Carlson put up $500 of his own money to sponsor the Northwest convention of the Patriotic Party at the Hyatt House. A few months later, DePugh made a stump speech for a November Patriotic Party gathering. Some 600 people, paying $1 apiece, were in attendance. DePugh, however, only spoke to the crowd by a telephone hookup. The Minutemen’s fearless leader was temporarily indisposed: He and an associate had been recently convicted on a variety of felony firearms violations and sentenced just the week before to four years in prison.
Over the next year, DePugh fought that conviction, and managed to stay out of jail through a string of appeals. But the legal troubles started taking their toll on the organization’s finances, and pressure mounted to find alternative sources of revenue. This is apparently when his most ardent supporters, such as Duane Carlson, moved into transforming their paramilitary training into acts of terrorism—with a steady eye on profits, as with all far-right terror groups. Because public meetings became an afterthought.
Carlson gathered a group of six other Seattle-area men—a longshoreman, a church sexton, a grocery clerk, a civilian driver at the Fort Lewis Army Base, a self-employed draftsman, and an unemployed ship’s oiler—and began plotting ways to finance the Minutemen’s arms operations. Of course, it was all couched in language about striking a blow against the “Communist controlled” government at the same time. But the centerpiece of the whole plot was plain old bank robbery.
Their plan: set off a bomb at the city hall of a small Seattle suburb, Redmond, while simultaneously detonating another at the local power station, thereby creating a major distraction while taking out police communications at the same time. This would enable the gang to strike three Redmond banks they had targeted for a series of successive robberies.
Their downfall, however, came when a federal informant infiltrated the group. On the day the Minutemen planned to strike—January 26, 1967—the FBI swooped down on them in two parking lots, one in Bellevue and another in Lake City, and arrested all seven.
DePugh denied they were part of his organization, claiming Carlson had been dropped from his rolls for “non-payment of dues.” Federal prosecutors, who found evidence that DePugh actually was party to the plan from its early stages, put out a warrant for his arrest. DePugh went into hiding but was caught a few months later hiding out in Spokane, where he was charged in the Redmond plot. He then went on the lam for two years, and was finally captured in 1969 in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
Five of the seven plotters were charged, and all five were convicted. DePugh, convicted in September 1970, wound up serving four years out of a 10-year sentence on the original firearms charges, but by then, his career in politics was in the ash heap.
He later tried to resuscitate his ambitions by heading up an ultra-conservative organization called the Committee of 10 Million, but those numbers remained a fantasy. DePugh was imprisoned again in 1992 for sexual exploitation of a minor, but later beat the rap. When he died in 2009 at age 86, he had been living alone in an apartment beneath a storefront church in Richmond, Missouri.
The Minutemen, however, created a lasting blueprint for far-right terrorism organizations that has been followed ever since—by everyone from The Order (the 1984 gang, organized out of the Aryan Nations, that murdered a radio talk-show host and robbed multiple banks and armored cars) to the Phineas Priesthood (another inland-Northwest gang that bombed a newspaper, a Planned Parenthood clinic, and robbed several banks in 1996) to AWD and The Base. It works in steps:
A) Begin with a core of rabid anti-communism which reduces opponents to inhuman vermin. Defense of the “white race” and overt anti-Semitism often is included in this core.
B) Expand the fear of communism into a culture of extreme paranoia dominated by conspiracy theories, and encourage the belief that it controls all levels of government.
C)Whip the paranoia into an enclosing circle of cultism by accusing every person outside the circle of being not just dupes, but active communist conspirators—including your own former political allies.
D) Begin organizing paramilitary operations and other forms of survivalism, ostensibly to prepare for the collapse of American society and the “communist takeover.”
E) Redefine “self-defense” against communism to include aggressive acts of violence against “socialist” targets, including banks and government facilities. Prepare for these acts with more paramilitary exercises.
F) Carry out these offensive measures, or attempt them. Get caught. Go to prison.
Robert DePugh created a blueprint that is still being followed to this day.
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aha omg UN evil is JBS BS but also xian wacko: 2 of 4 interlocks? big XIAM // lehaye etc
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/01/evangelicals-are-anticipating-the-end-of-the-world-and-trump-is-listening/
no lnx
Evangelicals Love Donald Trump for Many Reasons, But One of Them Is Especially Terrifying
End Times.
Stephanie Mencimer January 23, 2020
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wapo 1/20
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/outlandish-conspiracy-theories-didnt-start-with-trumps-presidency-republicans-have-been-promoting-fringe-crackpots-for-decades-political-historian/
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Outlandish conspiracy theories didn’t start with Trump’s presidency. Republicans have been promoting ‘fringe crackpots’ for decades: political historian
Written by Alex Henderson January 2, 2020
Supporters of President Donald Trump have promoted a variety of right-wing conspiracy theories, from the Crowdstrike theory (which claims that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election) to the racist “birther” nonsense (which claimed that President Barack Obama was really born in Kenya, not the United States). But author Matthew Dallek, in a January 2 article for the Washington Post, stresses that Republicans were promoting outlandish conspiracy theories long before Trump decided to run for president in 2015.
“The intellectual life of the American right since Sen. Joe McCarthy’s rise to prominence in 1950 can be seen partially as a series of flirtations with conspiracists and a dedicated reluctance to read fringe crackpots out of its ranks,” Dallek explains.
Back in the 1950s, Dallek recalls, two of the leading right-wing conspiracy theorists were Sen. McCarthy of Wisconsin and Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. There was very bad blood between Welch and journalist William F. Buckley, founder of the conservative National Review: Buckley had no use for Welch’s ridiculous claim that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” But Dallek emphasizes that while Birchers were not welcome at the National Review, they found their niche in the Republican Party.
Dallek explains, “Yes, William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review attacked John Birch Society founder Robert Welch…. But conservative leaders more typically embraced the passion and support of the Birchers at the grass roots. At its 1964 national convention, the GOP rejected a plank condemning the Society, along with its conspiratorial beliefs. Birchers such as John Rousselot and John Schmitz served in Congress as Republicans in good standing, while conservative oilman and family patriarch Fred Koch was a founding member of the Society.”
Had Gen-X radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones been alive in the 1950s and 1960s, he would have loved some of the theories that the John Birch Society promoted. For example, Dallek notes, Birchers believed that “fluoride in drinking water was part of a communist plot to cause cancer or control Americans’ minds.” Another Bircher conspiracy theory (which Dallek doesn’t mention in his article) was that the bad blood between the Soviet Union and the Maoist government in Communist China was a fabrication — and that the two hoped to join forces and invade the United States.
In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was the most conservative Democratic president in generations. Regardless, many Republicans absolutely hated him. And Dallek points out that Clinton-related conspiracy theories came from everyone from billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife to the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr. (founder of the far-right Morality Majority).Scaife, who later became active in the Tea Party, claimed that Clinton was part of a drug smuggling ring.
“During the Clinton years,” Dallek explains, “the crackpot theorizing became harder and harder to distinguish from the Republican Party itself.”
Dallek wraps up his article by emphasizing that Trump is merely a symptom of the Republican Party’s willingness to embrace far-out conspiracy theories, not the cause.
“Ultimately, Trump was the logical consequence of a posture followed for decades at the top echelons of the conservative movement: the batty screeds are silly, but since they help us, we won’t work zealously to purge them,” Dallek observes. “Trump’s conspiracy-based capture of the GOP has less to do with him and his perspective than with a party that sought and often won the support of people who believe those notions.”
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no lnx ref
Swamp fever
Don’t blame Trump for the rise of right-wing conspiracy theories. The GOP helped cultivate them — until they took over.
The Washington Post)
By Matthew Dallek
JANUARY 2, 2020
To explain the impeachment inquiry, the GOP has promulgated a flurry of baseless conspiracy theories about the forces arrayed against President Trump. It has been surreal to hear some of the nation’s most influential elected officials spouting ideas basically concocted from thin air. The House Intelligence Committee’s ranking Republican, Devin Nunes (Calif.), denounces “Ukrainian election meddling in 2016 .?.?. aimed against the Trump campaign.” The Judiciary Committee’s Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) claims that if Congress could only talk to a certain three Democratic officials, then “every fact of this investigation” would be unearthed. Conservatives online hold that former White House aide Fiona Hill was a mole planted by George Soros.
[Outlook • Perspective
Matthew Dallek is a professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, and is author of "Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security." Follow @MattDallek]
Of course, no one purveys these theories with as much verve as Trump. The president has suggested that the nation’s first African American president was born abroad (he wasn’t), that the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) had a part in JFK’s assassination (he didn’t), that Ukraine rather than Russia was responsible for election interference (it wasn’t), that the Mueller investigation empaneled by his own administration was a Democratic plot against him, that the Clintons orchestrated the prison killing of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (who committed suicide, according to an autopsy) and that the Obama administration spied on his campaign, a claim debunked by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s recent report on the FBI’s Russia investigation.
It certainly seems, more than ever, that “the truth itself is on trial,” as Peter Baker recently wrote in the New York Times. Some conservatives say Trump, and Trumpism, represent a new frontier of conspiratorial politics — that the theories are unique to Trump’s sensibilities and peculiar to his paranoid White House. “Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication,” former president George W. Bush said in a 2017 speech. The “main problem” behind the proliferation of political conspiracy theories “is a president who is also a self-invented fabulist,” argued Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson.
But in truth, the stew of “alternative facts” has been simmering for more than half a century on the right fringe. The GOP had endless opportunities across the decades to banish these theories — about scheming bureaucrats, Jews, the Federal Reserve, the United Nations — and its leaders often saw them as absurd. But they were also useful, helping to rally support from an aggrieved government-hating base, so the party’s mandarins allowed them to fester and grow until they spread from the toxic fringe to the mainstream, which they have finally overtaken. It’s no wonder someone who embraced those ideas would become successful; Trump validates notions that his voters have long believed, ideas that the party refused to condemn and failed to repudiate.
Trump, then, isn’t what caused these conspiracy theories. He’s what happens when nobody stands in their way.
The intellectual life of the American right since Sen. Joe McCarthy’s rise to prominence in 1950 can be seen partially as a series of flirtations with conspiracists and a dedicated reluctance to read fringe crackpots out of its ranks. Yes, William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review attacked John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, who called Dwight Eisenhower a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy,” in an iconic moment of movement history.
But conservative leaders more typically embraced the passion and support of the Birchers at the grass roots. At its 1964 national convention, the GOP rejected a plank condemning the society, along with its conspiratorial beliefs. Birchers such as John Rousselot and John Schmitz served in Congress as Republicans in good standing, while conservative oilman and family patriarch Fred Koch was a founding member of the society. Birchers took active part in Republican election campaigns and ran right-wing bookstores packed with conspiratorial treatises such as John Stormer’s “None Dare Call It Treason” (about Soviet “infiltration of American government”) and Fred Schwarz’s “You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists).” They served as members of local school boards and state legislatures.Other Republicans rarely spoke up to debunk the Birch view that fluoride in drinking water was part of a communist plot to cause cancer or control Americans’ minds.
At times, the wild-eyed conspiracism came from the top. Vice President Spiro Agnew delivered speeches identifying a cabal of Washington- and New York-based power brokers who supposedly controlled the news media, whipping up what journalists at the time considered a frenzy of anti-Semitism on the far right. (In 1976, a few years after he’d been indicted on bribery and other charges, Agnew published a novel pushing the anti-Semitic trope that the media’s “Zionist lobby” was controlling America’s foreign policy in the Middle East.)
At other times, understanding that they had to court the conspiracy-minded activists of “the base,” the party’s leaders went out of their way to confer legitimacy on extremists. Take the GOP’s relationship with Christian Coalition leader Pat Robertson, who won four states in the 1988 Republican presidential primary contest. In 1991, Robertson published “The New World Order,” holding that scheming government pooh-bahs were working to set up “world government, a world police force, world courts, world banking and currency, and a world elite in charge of it all.” He even suggested that President George H.W. Bush was complicit in establishing this new world order. Still, Republicans wanted votes and donations from Robertson’s acolytes, so Newt Gingrich, Oliver North, William Bennett, Jack Kemp, Jesse Helms and Dinesh D’Souza all happily spoke at his “Road to Victory” conferences. Sen. Bob Dole, a pillar of the Republican establishment and at the time a presidential candidate, told Robertson’s followers in 1995 that “I am proud to stand up here and say that I’ve been awarded a 100 percent voting record in ’93 and 100 percent in 1994 and 100 percent in 1995” from the Christian Coalition.
During the Clinton years, the crackpot theorizing became harder and harder to distinguish from the Republican Party itself. Conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife sent investigators to Arkansas to dig up dirt on the president’s past, and when they failed, they settled for salacious fabrications that Bill Clinton was part of a drug-smuggling ring. Scaife became what The Post called “a guiding force” behind Speaker Gingrich’s Contract With America and a later generation of tea party activists. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, a leader of the religious right (his son is a big Trump supporter), started selling a $43 videotape that among other charges said Clinton was responsible for the deaths of “countless people.”
Of course, Republican leaders didn’t always or uniformly tolerate gonzo conspiracy theories. Presidential nominee John McCain, for instance, contradicted one of his supporters at a 2008 campaign event, telling her that Barack Obama was not, in fact, “an Arab.” Onetime senator and 1996 presidential hopeful Arlen Specter (Pa.) also stuck up for the truth when he assailed two leading GOP conspiracy theorists, Robertson and Pat Buchanan, as leaders of the “intolerant right.”
Yet over the past seven decades, such voices — pro-fact, pro-science and pro-reason — lost the internal debate over how to treat the tinfoil-hat folks. And such moments of truth-telling by Republicans at all levels have been fleeting and rare.
While the GOP was actively courting allies who propagated conspiracy theories, the Democratic Party took much the opposite tack — mostly rejecting the left-wing theories that surfaced from time to time. Although some research has found a recent uptick in Democratic support for conspiracy theories (a jump caused by a lack of political power), elected Democrats have typically fenced their party off from wild-eyed claims promulgated on the left. They never embraced the theory that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job” carried out by the Bush administration, for example. During the 2004 presidential primary race, even the most lefty antiwar candidates — Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, Carol Moseley Braun — largely eschewed conspiracy theories that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had gone to war for oil or to enrich their friends in the construction business. The left has its share of anti-vaxxers who believe that vaccines cause autism, yet Democratic officials have battled these lies (some of which Trump himself has promoted).
One reason is that Democrats have been reluctant to use anti-government theories to tear down the things they would prefer to burnish, such as government and international institutions that they believe work for social justice and economic progress. Republicans’ conspiracy theories about powerful secret actors are consistent with their small-government views; it is a shorter leap for conservatives to portray Washington as a swamp where individualism, justice and decency go to die.
Thanks to years of GOP tolerance for surreal thinking on the right, conspiracy theories have moved from the fringe to the center. A 2018 poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that 63 percent of registered voters subscribe to at least one such theory. Some social science research suggests that people who feel alienated from politics are more prone to thinking conspiratorially. Trump capitalized on that climate of suspicion.
It’s easy to see the line from older conspiracy theories to the fact-free claims by Trump supporters today. White House adviser Stephen Miller has drawn anti-immigration rhetoric from white-nationalist publications like the 1973 French novel “The Camp of the Saints,” which envisions hordes of immigrants obliterating Western civilization. Breitbart News has featured anti-immigrant, anti-gay and anti-black theories that could have been found in an earlier generation of far-right publications, including American Opinion and American Mercury.
Perhaps the biggest change of the Trump era is the approach of Republican leaders. In the past, they indulged these theories but never really espoused them. Today, elective officeholders embrace them openly, in the face of explicit counterevidence from the government they purport to run. National security officials have repeatedly warned in recent weeks that Ukraine did not meddle in the 2016 election and that those who repeat the claim are advancing pro-Russian propaganda. Yet most Republican members of Congress now seem to believe this theory. Trump’s racism (calling Mexican immigrants “rapists”; telling four congresswomen of color who are all U.S. citizens to “go back” to their “crime infested” home countries) and anti-Semitism (he thinks Jews are loyal primarily to Israel and motivated mostly by money) align well with old allegations that Jewish bankers and assorted globalists have enriched themselves while inflicting economic havoc on “the people,” as his closing 2016 television ad suggested.
Polarization has also made mainstream American culture hospitable to ideas once relegated to the margins. Voters have grown more tolerant of political leaders’ failings as long as they adhere to the correct ideological positions, opening a space for someone like Trump to win the presidency and then govern with the support of a minority of the electorate. And grass-roots opinion has shifted in favor of conspiracy theories, a pattern that both follows the cues of political leaders and incentivizes those leaders’ abasements. For instance, Twitter equips Trump to instantaneously air any theory, no matter how nutty, to raucous and affirming plaudits.Fox News also capitalizes on this shift to amplify Trumpian claims (“Russia didn’t hack our democracy,” Fox host Tucker Carlson recently parroted). It’s no wonder that, as Gallup found in February, 30 percent of Republicans see Russia in a favorable light. One recent Post survey of attitudes toward 2016 election conspiracy theories found that 26 percent of Americans believed that CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, invented a story of Russian election meddling in order to hide Ukraine’s efforts to help Hillary Clinton.
Ultimately, Trump was the logical consequence of a posture followed for decades at the top echelons of the conservative movement: The batty screeds are silly, but since they help us, we won’t work zealously to purge them. Trump’s conspiracy-based capture of the GOP has less to do with him and his perspective than with a party that sought and often won the support of people who believe those notions.
https://books.google.com/books?id=_pQ4DwAAQBAJ&dq=clarence+manion+radio+jbs&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Hayek: A Collaborative Biography: Part IX: The Divine Right of the 'Free' Market
edited by Robert Leeson
:{
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reed larson natl rtw w/ manion and jbs
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http://documentedinvestigations.org/2018/07/12/janus-decision-rooted-koch-wishlist/
With last month’s monumental Janus decision by the Supreme Court, the Koch family won a major victory in their multi-generational attack on unions.
The ruling spreads to the entire public sector one of the laws the Koch fortune first helped push through in Kansas 60 years ago: “right-to-work.” And in doing so it enshrines the union-busting agenda their fossil fuel money has helped advance for decades.
(This story was first published by In These Times.)
Through a single vote, the Court’s 5-4 Janus decision reverses decades of legal precedent that had obstructed part of the Koch’s pro-corporate agenda. That vote was secured with the Kochs’ help in bankrolling efforts that include: helping to maintain a GOP Senate majority; helping the Senate block President Obama from filling the February 2016 Supreme Court vacancy; and helping to win the confirmation of right-wing corporate activist Neil Gorsuch.
Janus helps cement the nation’s highest court as the Koch Court, and Charles Koch wants to keep it that way.
As Documented first detailed in partnership with the Intercept, for months the Kochs had been investing heavily in anticipation of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement from the Court, which was announced on June 27, the same day as Janus. Earlier this year, the Koch group “Americans for Prosperity” (AFP) hired Sarah Field from the Koch-funded Federalist Society to spearhead its campaign to extend the Koch hold on the Court for perhaps a generation or more.
Despite claims by AFP that helping to seat Gorsuch was their “first” foray into Supreme Court nominations, the Koch effort to influence who becomes a judge and how they interpret the law goes back much further.
In fact, the Kochs have been investing in reshaping the law to suit their personal agenda for decades.For example, the Koch group Citizens for a Sound Economy, AFP’s predecessor, backed Clarence Thomas’ controversial confirmation to the Court more than 25 years ago.
The Kochs’ long-term agenda to remake the United States in their image is a multi-pronged effort that includes changing both the law and who makes or interprets the laws, including the anti-union Janus decision.
THE SEEDS OF JANUS
The effort to roll back union rights actually began almost a century ago, as wealthy industrialists objected to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, known as the Wagner Act, which enshrined the right to collective bargaining in the United States.
Many tycoons of the time, like Alfred Sloan, head of General Motors, opposed those rights along with other business reforms of FDR’s New Deal.
Fred Koch, co-founder of the corporation that later became Koch Industries, harshly criticized American workers under New Deal policies in 1938. He extolled the economic policies of Emperor Hirohito and fascists Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini:
Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard… The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.
Only recently, through the investigative work of Jane Mayer, has the public learned that the Koch fortune was actually built in part on directly aiding Hitler by building the oil-cracking factory that became “a key component in the Nazi war machine.” As Mayer noted in her 2016 book Dark Money:The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, that factory refined high-octane fuel needed for the Luftwaffe, which targeted, terrorized, and killed many thousands of innocent civilians. Fred Koch’s praise of Germany came afterHitler’s air bombers helped murder 136 men, women, and children in Guernica in the Basque region, a tragedy made famous by the mural painted by Pablo Picasso.
Meanwhile, industrialists like Sloan pursued efforts to undo New Deal reforms. In 1947, Congress amended the Wagner Act with the Taft-Hartley Act. It gave states the power to pass “right-to-work” laws that undermined collective bargaining by not requiring workers who benefit from bargained rights to pay dues to the unions that secured and enforced them.
HOW THE KOCHS FERTILIZED “RIGHT-TO-WORK”
As Mayer noted:
[Fred Koch] was an early and active member of the Wichita-based DeMille Foundation for Political Freedom, an anti-labor group [founded in 1945] that was a forerunner of the National Right to Work Defense Foundation. In a revealing private letter, one of its staff members explained the group’s ‘Astroturf’ strategy. In reality, he said, big-business industrialists would run the group, serving as its ‘anonymous quarterbacks,’ and ‘call the turns.’ But he said they needed to sell the ‘yarn’ that the group was ‘composed of housewives, farmers, small businessmen, professional people, wage earners-not big business industrialists.’ Otherwise, he admitted, the movement was ‘almost certainly doomed to failure.’
By 1954, an engineer from Wichita, Kan., Reed Larson,took a leave from his job at the Coleman Company, to launch Kansans-for-the-Right-to-Work. The following year, former Rep. Fred Hartley, Jr., (R-N.J.) co-founded the National Right to Work Committee (NRTWC). By 1958, the NRTWC was targeting six states to adopt right-to-work laws but it failed in every place, except Kansas.
“Fred [Koch] co-led a referendum drive to alter the state constitution in order to make it harder for unions to take root in Kansas,” Duke University Professor Nancy MacLean noted.
On Nov. 9, 1958, the New York Timesreported that right-to-work won in Kansas because anti-union views had taken hold, noting:
More campaign efforts and more money were expended on the emotion-provoking issue than on the campaigns of all Republican and Democratic state and Congressional candidates combined. … For the last 10 days or so before Election Day an organization called Kansans-for-the-Right-to-Work flooded newspapers, television channels and other advertising media with appeals to ‘vote yes.’ These by far outnumbered the ‘vote no’ advertisements of unions opposing the amending.
A month later, Fred Koch joined Robert Welch and ten other men in Indianapolis to found the extreme rightwing group dubbed the “John Birch Society” (JBS).
As the Washington Post noted in its 1961 profile of JBS:
At the top of the Society’s structure in Wichita are several very wealthy industrialists. Oil engineer Fred Koch is president of the Rock Island Oil and Refining Co. A millionaire several times over, he is on the Society’s national council. … Wichita is the John Birch Society’s center of strength in Kansas, and one of its greatest in the country. … The leadership of the Birch Society overlaps heavily with the leadership of the organizations that successfully campaigned in 1958 for a right to work amendment to the State’s Constitution.
As detailed by Group Research Inc. in its 1962 history of JBS, Koch worked with both NRTWC and the Christian Crusade in arguing against union dues like those at issue in the Januscase.
A History of Hostility
In 1959, Fred Koch joined the Executive Committee to plan the JBS strategy to push back against what it viewed as communism in nearly every American institution.
In 1960, Koch published his polemic “A Business Man Looks at Communism” and distributed it to JBS chapters across the country. That pamphlet makes a variety of hysterical claims against unions, including:
Labor Unions have long been a Communist goal. How far they have been penetrated by Communists I have no idea, but it must be very far indeed, judging the hatred andvenom poured out in some labor papers….
Koch also accused the U.S. Supreme Court under former Gov. Earl Warren (R-CA) of issuing pro-Communist decisions, the universities of having thousands of Communist professors, the United Nations of being subversive, and former GOP President Dwight Eisenhower of being soft on Communism.
Similar sentiments were expressed in numerous other publications the JBS also pushed. The organization pitched a screed against the union workers who organized against Kohler fixtures in Wisconsin. It pushed attacks on the UAW’s Walter Reuther, who was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
It published and peddled right-wing writer Rosalie Gordon’s attack on the U.S. Supreme Court for decisions enforcing collective bargaining rights as protecting the “labor-union monopoly,” along with what she called the “plague” of desegregation caused by Brown v. Board of Education.
The JBS also pushed reprints of tomes by Ludwig von Mises attacking unions as illegitimate intervenors in the “free market,” artificial inflators of wages for workers, and thieves of the profits of tycoons. It promoted F.A. Hayek’s vilification of government regulation of corporations as leading to fascism and Hilaire du Berrier’s conspiracy theories that American labor unions were supposedly using union dues to finance communist terrorist violence abroad.
Fred Koch’s son Charles urged visitors to the John Birch Society bookstore in Wichita to read copies of JBS pamphlets, including those by anti-labor writers from the Austrian School of Economics, like Mises.
Indeed, as the present author first documented for the Center for Media and Democracy, Charles Koch became active in JBS after returning home to Wichita to help with the family business. Charles was a leader and fundraiser for JBS, including underwriting its publications and national radio network, while it attacked collective bargaining and leaders of the civil rights movement such as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks.
CHARLES KOCH IN ACTION
Though he left JBS in 1968, Charles Koch never abandoned its core anti-union agenda and the lessons of his father’s commitment to right-to-work. He did try to shed some of the rhetoric around communist conspiracies, though of late he was painted by Koch political strategist Richard Fink as a martyr against “collectivism,” in audio obtained by the Undercurrent, which also included outlandish claims linking fascism and the minimum wage.
It was Charles Koch’s investment in lifting up the work of Mises and Hayek, who made similar claims, that helped preserve and extend their legacy. As Stephen Moore noted in a 2006 profile on Charles for the Wall Street Journal:
The authors who have had the most profound influence on his own political philosophy include
, Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Simon, Paul Johnson and Charles Murray. Mr. Koch says that he experienced an intellectual epiphany in the early 1960s, when he attended a conference on free-market capitalism hosted by the late, great Leonard Reed.
Charles brought Mises to Wichita to speak and deployed F.A. “Baldy” Harper’s Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) to promote Mises and his protégé Hayek. As lauded by Reed’s Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), Hayek argued that unions violated the very idea of the “rule of law” and that the Wagner Act was central to that violation, a sentiment he promoted in numerous writings.
Charles Koch is deeply devoted to an alternative universe in which collective bargaining undermines the rule of law and is not a major cause of increased wages.Moore noted in his interview:
As we continue, Mr. Koch becomes increasingly animated. He discusses another seminal work in his collection, F.A. Harper’s 1957 Why Wages Rise. The book demonstrates ‘that wages rise not because of unions or government action, but because of marginal productivity gains — people get more money when they produce more value for other people.’ Then he confides, “I was so thrilled by this revelation that I had what Maslow called a ‘peak experience.’'”
Koch has also supported the NRTWC, which “sought to put a new face on the anti-union campaign by building its rhetoric on the arguments of Hayek, Mises, and others with a ‘respectable’ pedigree.” The NRTWC argues that:
Compulsory unionism itself violates the dignity of the individual worker, regardless of how the forced union tribute is spent. As the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich A. von Hayek wrote: “[T]he coercion which unions have been permitted to exercise … is primarily the coercion of fellow workers.
Deep Devotion and Investment
Hayek and Mises are not the only two virulently anti-union economists Charles Koch backed. As Nancy MacLean documented in Democracy in Chains, one of the key architects of the Koch agenda domestically and internationally,James Buchanan, also railed against the so-called “union monopolies” for distorting “free market” wages.
And, as UnKoch My Campus has detailed, Koch money has funded scores of academics to push their agenda at universities, buying control over content and personnel with restrictive dictates attached to their donations.
Many of the rightwing groups Charles Koch is known to have made a major investment in since the 1970s have pushed right-to-work or attacked collective bargaining rights. These include Reason magazine, the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the State Policy Network and many more.
During David Koch’s 1980 bid to become vice president, running on the ticket of Libertarian Ed Clark—which was pushed by Charles and fueled with Koch cash—the campaign platform included making right-to-work the law of the land:
[W]e urge repeal of the National Labor Relations Act, and all state Right to Work Laws, which prohibit employers from making voluntary contracts with unions. We oppose all government back-to-work orders as imposing a form of forced labor.
That is, there would be no need for state right-to-work laws if there were no NLRA that protects collective bargaining rights. As a result, right-to-work would be effectively nationalized at the determination of the employer.
After badly losing that election, the Kochs have invested heavily in changing the culture—and courts of America—to make their anti-union vision a reality.
Right-to-work is part of that vision.
MILLIONS SPENT
A leak of the Kochs’ summer retreat in 2010 revealed that they featured NRTWC leaders at their gathering of billionaires to plot plans for that year’s midterm elections.
In 2012, before most of America even knew that the Kochs had branded their billionaire conclave as “Freedom Partners,” that group injected $1 million directly into the NRTWC among the more than $200 million of its known spending that cycle.
In 2016, they focused much of their known political spending on keeping a GOP majority in the Senate, and they influenced the make-up of the U.S. Supreme Court by helping to block Judge Merrick Garland’s confirmation.
For the 2018 election, they’ve pledged to spend more than $400 million through the Seminar Network, the latest rebranding of their network of tycoons.
To be clear, the Koch family fortune is not the only one that has been expended pushing right-to-work laws to try to weaken the power of ordinary people to negotiate through unions. A major funder of right-to-work effort has been the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, along with Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which Mother Jones has dubbed “the ATM” of the right wing.
Collective bargaining has provided women with greater economic opportunities and job security. Right-to-work laws also have a disproportionate impact on people of color, who are union members at a higher rate than whites. Black women will likely be the group most adversely affected by the Janus case. Notably, workers in right-to-work states also have lower wages than in states that have rejected this agenda.
UNDERMINING PROGRESSIVES TOO
The spread of right to work through Janusalso will affect our elections.
As In These Times has documented with the Center for Media and Democracy,the national push for right-to-work is designed to undermine the power of unions and to “defang and defund” them as a way to weaken the chances for progressives to win in politics and policy.
The Koch investment in making right-to-work a national reality represents one of the longest and deepest commitments to this agenda, aside from NRTWC itself.
And this year marks the 60th anniversary of Fred Koch’s victory of making right-to-work legally binding in Kansas.
Now, six decades later, Charles Koch has helped make his father’s wish binding on the rest of America through helping to make the Janusruling a reality.
Lisa Graves
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/16/the-john-birch-society-is-alive-and-well-in-the-lone-star-state-215377
Robert Welch, founder and president of the John Birch Society, in a May 1961 photo.
LETTER FROM TEXAS
The John Birch Society Is Back
Bircher ideas, once on the fringe, are increasingly commonplace in today’s GOP and espoused by friends in high places. And the group is ready to make the most of it.
By JOHN SAVAGE July 16, 2017
THE FRIDAY COVER
A Wayne Lapierre illustration is shown.
On an unseasonably warm Saturday in January, Jan Carter, a short, graying, 75-year-old retiree, appears pleased. The Central Texas Chapter of the John Birch Society, which Carter leads, is conducting a workshop titled “The Constitution Is the Solution” in the farming town of Holland—home to 1,200 residents, three churches, one stoplight and an annual corn festival. Carter was unsure if anyone would drive to such a remote area early on a weekend morning to get lectured about the Constitution, but, one by one, people are showing, renewing Carter’s “hope that the country can be saved.”
In the Holland Church of Christ, around the corner from a main street lined with abandoned buildings, Carter sits down to talk. She says that the John Birch Society—a group she was convinced could save the nation from a global conspiracy of leftists and communists more than half a century ago—has come roaring back to life in the nick of time. The more she thinks about the situation, the more she sees parallels to the 1950s and 1960s: evil domestic and international terrorists threatening to undo all that is good and holy in the United States.
These days, to the extent that most people know of the John Birch Society—that far-right group founded in the thick of the Cold War to fight communists and preach small government—it’s purely as a historical relic of a bygone era of sock hops and poodle skirts. But the John Birch Society lives. And though it is not the same robust organization it was in its 1960s heyday—when, by some counts, it had as many as 100,000 dues-paying members around the country and 60 full-time staff—after decades of declining membership and influence, the Birchers insist they are making a comeback. And they point to Texas as the epicenter of their restoration.
“There definitely is an increase in [our] activity, particularly in Texas, because Americans are seeking answers, but they can’t quite put their finger on what some of the real problems are,” says Bill Hahn, the John Birch Society’s vice president of communications, who spoke to Politico Magazine on the phone from the Society’s headquarters in Appleton, Wisconsin.
Carter, the head of the Central Texas Chapter, says that statewide, the group’s membership has doubled over the last three years (she declined to disclose exact numbers, as did Hahn, citing Society policy). “State legislators are joining the group,” she says, citing it as proof that their ideas are gaining salience as “more and more people are ready to fight the liberals who preach globalism and want to take away our freedom, our guns, religious values and our heritage.”
In that quest, they have common cause with powerful allies in Texas, including Senator Ted Cruz, Representative Louie Gohmert and a smattering of local officials. Recently at the state level, legislators have authored Bircher-esque bills that have made it further through the lawmaking process than many thought possible in Texas, even just a few years ago—though these are less the cause of the John Birch Society’s influence than an indication of the rise of its particular strain of politics. These include bills that would forbid any government entity from participating in “Agenda 21,” a UN sustainable development effort which JBS pamphlets describe as central to the “UN’s plan to establish control over all human activity”; prevent the theoretical sale of the Alamo to foreigners (since 1885 the state has owned the former mission, Texas’ most visited historic landmark, where the most famous battle of the Texas Revolution occurred); and repeal the Texas DREAM Act, which allows undocumented students who graduate from Texas high schools to pay in-state tuition at public colleges. And last month, Governor Greg Abbott signed the “American Laws for American Courts” Act into law, guarding against what the society has called “Sharia-creep” by prohibiting the use of Islamic Sharia law in Texas’ court system.
This is what the 21st-century John Birch Society looks like. Gone is the organization’s past obsession with ending the supposed communist plot to achieve mind-control through water fluoridation. What remains is a hodgepodge of isolationist, religious and right-wing goals that vary from concrete to abstract, from legitimate to conspiracy minded—goals that don’t look so different from the ideology coming out of the White House. It wants to pull the United States out of NAFTA (which it sees as the slippery slope that will lead us to a single-government North American Union), return America to what they call its Christian foundations, defund the UN, abolish the departments of education and energy, and slash the federal government drastically. The John Birch Society once fulminated on the idea of Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government; now, it wants to stop the investigation into Russia’s 2016 election meddling and possible collusion with the campaign of President Donald Trump.
The Society’s ideas, once on the fringe, are increasingly commonplace in today’s Republican Party. And where Birchers once looked upon national Republican leaders as mortal enemies, the ones I met in Texas see an ally in the president. “All of us here voted for Trump,” says Carter. “And we’re optimistic about what he will do.”
***
The John Birch Society formed on a frigid Monday morning in December 1958, when 11 of the nation’s richest businessmen braved single-digit temperatures to attend a mysterious meeting in suburban Indianapolis.
They had arrived at the behest of candy magnate Robert Welch, who had made a fortune with his caramel-on-a-stick confection known as the “Sugar Daddy,” and now intended to spend that money defeating the wide-slung Communist conspiracy he was certain had infiltrated the federal government. Welch had invited these men to Indianapolis without giving a reason, and asked them to stay for two days.
After exchanging firm handshakes in the breakfast room of a sprawling, Tudor-style house in the tony Meridian Park neighborhood, Welch explained why he had brought this group together: The United States faced an existential threat from an “international Communist conspiracy” hatched by an “amoral gang of sophisticated criminals.” The power-hungry, God-hating, government worshipers had infiltrated newsrooms, public schools, legislative chambers and houses of worship. They were frighteningly close to total victory—Welch felt it in his gut. “These cunning megalomaniacs seek to make themselves the absolute rulers of a human race of enslaved robots, in which every civilized trait has been destroyed,” Welch wrote in The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, the organization’s founding history.
The chosen few gathered here would form the vanguard of a new political movement, an army of brave American patriots dedicated to preserving the country’s Christian and constitutional foundations. Welch christened the group the John Birch Society—named in memory of a U.S. soldier-turned-Baptist missionary killed by Chinese Communists in 1945—and laid out its goal: Destroying the “Communist conspiracy … or at least breaking its grip on our government and shattering its power within the United States.”
Among the John Birch Society’s pet causes in the 1960s was advocating for the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warrenover his support for integration and civil rights laws. In this June 1963 photo, a billboard along a highway in Birmingham, Alabama, urges passersby to “Save our Republic!”
Among the John Birch Society’s pet causes in the 1960s was advocating for the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren over his support for integration and civil rights laws. In this June 1963 photo, a billboard along a highway in Birmingham, Alabama, urges passersby to “Save our Republic!” | AP Photos
The Society was Welch’s attempt to root out the reds—an end goal he offered as justification for his opposition to the United Nations (“an instrument of Communist global conquest”), the civil rights movement (an attempt to establish an “independent Negro-Soviet Republic”), public water fluoridation, and Dwight Eisenhower (“a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”), among myriad other targets of his suspicion.
Prominent Texans quickly became fans. Dallas oilman H.L Hunt, the richest man in the world and a major Republican donor, espoused Bircher views on his popular radio program starting in the 1950s. Dallas Reverend W.A. Criswell, a segregationist and head of the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the world, praised Bircher positions from his pulpit and railed against “the leftists, the liberals, the pinks, and the welfare statists who are soft on communism and easy towards Russia.” Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker, born in small-town Texas and commander of 10,000 troops stationed in post-war Europe, distributed Bircher material to the men under his command. Walker, who called Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt “definitely pink,” resigned after being investigated by the Kennedy administration for engaging in partisan political activity on the job in 1961. East Texas Congressman Martin Dies, the founder of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, was a regular contributor to the Society’s publications in the mid-1960s. These sons of the Lone Star State saw a nation careening towards unfettered Communism. They refused to remain silent.
Popular as Welch’s brand of post-McCarthy McCarthyism was with a certain segment of the right-wing populace, many other conservatives found his beliefs a mixture of detestable and impolitic—including, most famously, William F. Buckley, the founder and editor of National Review.
In the 1950s, Buckley was friendly with Welch, writes Buckley biographer Alvin Felzenberg, even promising to give a “little publicity” to his upstart organization. But the acidity of Welch’s anti-communist paranoia—alleging, for instance, that the cabal of communist agents atop the U.S. government included President Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles among its ranks—ate away at any relationship with Buckley, who saw such ramblings as a danger to conservatives.
By 1961, Buckley began to see the John Birch Society in general and Welch in particular as threats to the nascent presidential campaign of Senator Barry Goldwater, the rock-ribbed conservative whom Buckley wanted to receive the GOP’s presidential nomination in 1964. If conservatives counted the Birchers as allies, Buckley wrote in an April 1961 National Review column, the left could “anathematize the entire American right wing.”
In the popular memory, it was the first in a series of increasingly antagonistic columns in which Buckley “expelled” the Birchers from the conservative movement. But in reality, the John Birch Society never went away. It was weakened, yes, and its ranks have atrophied drastically. As an organization, the Society lacks its former influence and numbers. It is a pale imitation of its former self. But the increased popularity of the brand of paranoid, conspiracy-minded conservatism it pioneered suggests its finger is still firmly on the pulse of a certain type of anti-government ideology—one that is closer to the levers of power than ever before, especially in Texas, home of Alex Jones, Ron Paul and Ted Cruz.
***
In the annex of the Holland Church of Christ, Carter invites me to look at the assorted John Birch Society literature spread across a white plastic table. Pamphlets forecast the threat posed by Agenda 21, the “UN’s plan to establish control over all human activity.” The New American magazine, the Society’s house organ, warns about the federal government gathering personal data from the pervasive technology all around us—toys, smartphones, appliances, even pacemakers. Nearby, there’s a stack of DVDs with titles like “Exposing Terrorism: Inside the Terror Triangle,” which promises to reveal the real culprits behind global terrorism.
Six people have shown up for part one of the “Constitution Is the Solution” workshop, which consists of six 45-minute lectures on DVD, divided over two Saturday mornings. The session’s official facilitator is Dr. Joyce Jones, a thin, neatly coiffed, middle-aged woman who is, by day, a professor of psychology at Central Texas College in Killeen. Jones hands us worksheets with fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice questions to answer while we watch. “In other words, we won’t be just zoning out in front of the TV,” she says.
In the first video, “The Dangers of Democracy,” lecturer Robert Brown, a clean-cut white man in a dark suit, defines democracy as “mob rule,” and emphasizes that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. “It wasn’t what government did that made America great,” Brown says in the recording. “It was what government was prevented from doing that made the difference.”
After the first video lecture ends, Dr. Jones offers a quote from Mao Zedong: “Democracies inevitably lead to collectivism, which leads to socialism, which leads to communism, which leads to totalitarianism.”
Welch, who called democracy a “weapon of demagoguery,” ran the JBS as an autocracy, based on his own opinions about what was best, governing it without the democratic nods found in many other members-based groups, lest it suffer from, as he put it, “infiltration, distortion, or disruption.” Considering how much the JBS has declined since its glory days when Welch governed it by fiat, it’s hard not to read the Birchers’ opinions of democracy as words spoken from experience.
The second video lecture stresses that the federal government has overstepped its constitutional authority and encroached on states’ rights.Most of the attendees, all of whom who are white, nod their heads at the mention of state’s rights. Two hours into the workshop we start the third video, which advocates that the Federal Reserve be abolished and the United States return to the gold standard.
One week later, I returned to Holland for part two. While the lectures from the first weekend explained a political theory that could be boiled down to a few things—government programs and socialism are bad; the free market and Christianity are good—the titles of the second set of lectures suggested a more provocative call to action: “Exposing the Enemies of Freedom” and “Constitutional War Powers and the Enemy Within.”
I picked up the worksheet for this week’s video lessons. A multiple-choice question asks you to identify “the Illuminati.” Is it: (A) a myth, (B) an alien race of shape-shifters, or (C) a group founded in the late 1700s, seeking world government? Correct answer: C.
The town of Holland, Texas, has a plaque celebrating it as the center of Texas, by population. The exact spot, at least as of 2011, actually lies in a grove of maples 2.8 miles northeast of town, according to the Dallas Morning News.
The town of Holland, Texas, has a plaque celebrating it as the center of Texas, by population. The exact spot, at least as of 2011, actually lies in a grove of maples 2.8 miles northeast of town, according to the Dallas Morning News. | AP Photo/The Temple Daily Telegram, Rusty Schramm
The accompanying lecture warns about a massive, well-organized conspiracy of elites that is determined to destroy religion, glorify immorality, take children from their parents and give them to the state and ultimately form a one-world government. These global elites, we are told, coalesced in Bavaria in 1776 and call themselves the Illuminati. Though the “Illuminati” conspiracy theory has been, of late, widely known and ridiculed, it’s a longtime Bircher hobbyhorse; the Illuminati, Welch wrote in a 1966 essay, has “grandiose dreams of overthrowing all existing human institutions, and of rising out of the resulting chaos as the all-powerful rulers of a ‘new order’ of civilization.”
After learning about the Illuminati, we are lectured about a much newer, but no less pernicious conspiracy: the Council on Foreign Relations. Founded in 1921, the nonpartisan think tank and publisher’s mission is to advocate globalization and free trade. Board members have included banker David Rockefeller, journalist Tom Brokaw and former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell. For $19.95, you can order a documentary film from the John Birch Society website called “ShadowRing,” which promises to “set the record straight” on the “criminal deeds” of the Council on Foreign Relations. To the Birchers, CFR shares the same goals as the Illuminati: “to destroy the freedom and independence of the United States and lead our nation into a world government,” in the words of John McManus, the John Birch Society’s president emeritus.
And the last, best hope of fighting these nefarious elitist outfits happens to be a group founded by a millionaire at an invitation-only meeting of wealthy industrialists.
***
The John Birch Society isn’t just gaining purchase in the Lone Star state’s tiny backwaters. Texas’s largest cities, Houston and Dallas, are home to active JBS chapters. At 10 minutes past noon on a Thursday in February, about 40 members of the Houston chapter gather at Christine’s Steaks and Seafood in the Bayou City. They have come to the restaurant, which sits next to an eight-lane road lined with shopping centers, to hear a speech from the most famous of the country’s founding fathers.
But George Washington is running late.
Mark Collins, who has a robust career as both a pastor at a Baptist church and an impersonator of America’s first president, had to drive in from Yorktown, Texas, about an hour away. He has portrayed Washington on the floor of the Texas House of Representatives, at former Texas Governor Rick Perry’s Prayer Breakfast, and in the Nicholas Cage movie “National Treasure 2: The Book of Secrets.” When he finally enters the dining room, the 6’4” Collins looks every bit the part, bedecked in yellow breeches, a blue military coat with gold epaulettes and brass buttons the size of half dollars, and a gray revolutionary pigtail. “So happy to be here with you patriots,” he bellows. “The JBS is the tip of the spear.”
Today, Collins is preaching his Americanist gospel to fervent believers in frenetic Houston. The sprawling metropolis, home to the nation’s biggest oil companies, the world’s largest rodeo and former President George H.W. Bush, has exploded from a sleepy mid-sized town to become the nation’s fourth largest city. It’s also among the most ethnically diverse cities in America, though Collins’ audience in the restaurant is entirely white. The pastor stands in front of a banner featuring a bald eagle, a slogan (“Less government, more responsibility, and—with God’s help—a better world.”) and the John Birch Society’s toll-free telephone number, 1-800-JBS-USA1.
“We must teach our children their heritage,” Collins tells the crowd. “We’ve slowly forgotten our principles.” But there is a powerful reason to rejoice, Collins adds, a reason for renewed optimism: God has sent America a new, powerful leader. He’s a good man, a moral man. God has delivered Donald J. Trump to save the United States of America.
The great struggles American patriots face today are not new, Collins shouts. The enthusiastic crowd—people are smiling and clapping—seems to invigorate Collins. He is pacing back and forth, brimming with energy. “And don’t forget this is not the first time the United States has gone to war with Muslims terrorists. In 1801, we waged war against Muslim terrorists in Tripoli.”
Collins is referencing the First Barbary War, which pitted the United States against Algiers, Morocco, Tunis and Tripoli. In 1801, Tripoli seized American merchant vessels and demanded ransom for their return. President Thomas Jefferson refused to pay, and instead sent the Navy. Academic consensus holds that religion had little to do with the war, but Collins’ remark about fighting Muslim terrorists resonates with the crowd, and many in the audience nod their heads as Collins continues.
“And let us not forget in 1774 the government, the British government, tried to ban the original assault rifle … the Brown Bess. That attempt to seize weapons brought about a revolution.” More than a dozen audience members applaud. “Just horrible,” says an elderly woman sitting next to me in a wheelchair.
Collins’ voice grows louder. “Many today don’t realize that we are facing the same gun-control tactics by our own federal government that our forefathers faced from the British,” he says. “Just horrible,” the elderly woman says again.
For 15 minutes, Collins orates on George Washington’s close relationship with Christ. Washington spent the first and last hour of every day in prayer, Collins says. Then, the presidential impersonator lays down a challenge: “Make no mistake, there is a war for the soul of this nation. But with work and sacrifice the United States can be restored as a nation. All it takes is an on-fire minority setting fire in the minds of men.”
***
Chip Berlet, former senior analyst at Political Research Associates in Somerville, Massachusetts, a left-leaning think tank, and co-author of “Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort,” has studied the John Birch Society for three decades.
Berlet tells me the resurgence of the John Birch Society taps into populism which surfaces periodically, especially during times of cultural and demographic upheaval. The nation’s demographic landscape has undergone dramatic shifts since the Birchers’ heyday. From 1955 to 2014, the percentage of U.S. citizens who identified as Protestant sunk from 70 percent to 46 percent, according to polls by Gallup. The percentage of citizens who identified as non-Hispanic white decreased from 89 percent to 63 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Such changes, mixed with man’s evolutionary tendency toward tribalism, means that many white Christian Americans are full of anxiety.
“The John Birch Society views white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethnocentrism as the true expression of America,” Berlet says. “They use constitutionalist arguments and conspiracist scapegoating to mask this.”
Placing blame on conspiracies is seductive to social conservatives because of the way their brains are hardwired, says Colin Holbrook, an evolutionary psychologist and research scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s not a pathology, nor because they’re less intelligent,” Holbrook tells me.
Holbrook co-authored a 2017 study for the journal Psychological Science, in which subjects were presented with a series of false statements such as, “Terrorist attacks in the U.S. have increased since Sept. 11, 2001,” and “Hotel room keycards are often encoded with personal information that can be read by thieves.”
In Holbrook’s study, social conservatives were more credulous about claims of danger in the world, and the phenomenon has roots in evolutionary psychology—being hyper-aware of threats could potentially save your life. But that evolutionary advantage also makes social conservatives more susceptible to claims about things that could potentially hurt them, according to Holbrook. “That’s what you’re probably seeing with the John Birchers in Texas and the conspiracies they fear,” he says.
After speaking with Holbrook, I thought back to a conversation I had with Jan Carter after the “Constitution is the Solution” workshop in Holland. I told her that it was hard for me to believe that our elected officials are part of a secret conspiracy to form a one-world government, or that they are members of the Illuminati. What about staunchly conservative Texas Republicans, like Gov. Abbott or President George W. Bush?
Carter immediately corrected me. “George W. Bush didn’t have noble intentions. He wanted a one-world government.”
I suggested to Carter that Abbott, at least, seems to genuinely distrust the federal government. He’s a man who, after all, when serving as Texas’ attorney general, sued the Obama administration at least two dozen times. And in April 2015, when some Texans feared that a U.S. military training exercise called “Jade Helm 15” was a covert attempt by the federal government to invade the state, seize Texans’ guns, and imprison conservative citizens in abandoned Wal-Marts, Abbott deployed the Texas State Guard to monitor the U.S. military. It’s tough to imagine a more Bircher-friendly move.
Carter shrugged her shoulders.
“Sometimes politicians do things just for show,” she said.
John Savage is a freelance journalist based in Austin, Texas. He can be reached at johnmsavage1@yahoo.com and on Twitter.
==
https://www.thenation.com/article/growing-john-birch-society/
rick p
Claire Conner was about 13 years old when her parents handed her a John Birch Society membership form and told her, “You are old enough to take part in saving the nation.” For Claire that meant getting her dollar-a-month dues automatically subtracted from her allowance—and doing a whole lot of cringing. Her father, who was the first Bircher in Chicago, and her mother, who was the second, had taken out lifetime memberships, which cost $2,000 ($12,000 in today’s money). For years they had been convinced that the John Birch Society’s founder, Robert Welch, was one of America’s truest heroes—certainly after they received a numbered, mimeographed copy of a black-covered book called The Politician. I interviewed Claire, who is now a retired teacher and a most un-retiring liberal activist based near Orlando, Florida, about her memoir of growing up Birch, Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America’s Radical Right, at the Seminary Co-op bookstore in Hyde Park, where every month I host an author or activist for an interview in my “Rixonland” series. That particular sunny afternoon, she picked up a prop I had brought along for the occasion, and the audience’s attention was riveted:
“The Birchers call this the ‘Black Book. They call their bible the ‘Blue Book,’ because it has a blue cover…. Thisbook”—she waved my copy of The Politician, a spiral-bound thing that I had ordered from John Birch Society headquarters in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1997—“is a tract written over a period of years showingDwight Eisenhower as a dedicated Communist. Who reported, by the way, in Mr. Welch’s theory, to his brother Milton”—the president of Johns Hopkins University—“in the Communist Party. This book was given—secret copies, numbered copies—to certain individuals. Bill Buckley had one. Barry Goldwater had one. My father had one. My father got it in 1955, when I was 10, three years before the John Society ever existed…. You had to sign a pledge that you would never reveal the contents of this book. So, as the John Birch Society developed, there were rumors that developed that there was this”—she whispered—”secret book. ‘There’s a secret book! There’s a secret book! There’s a secret book! And it names real Communistsin the government!’ And my father would say, all the time, at every meeting, when people said, ‘What about the secret book?’ that, ‘There is no secret book.' "So I didn’t believe there was such a book.”
Her father and mother were fanatic adherents of Joseph McCarthy, who had been censured by the Senate the year before, and who died two years later. Basically, he drunk himself to death, but you couldn’t tell her mother that. “She said, ‘They killed him because he knew too much.’ And my father said, ‘It will take a lot more Joes to save this country.’ And as I say in the book, I didn’t realize that three years later my dad would be one of those Joes!”
By 1960, her dad, Jay Conner, was the leader of Chicago’s Birchers. That summer was a hot one, so the Society was holding its recruitment meetings in the nice, cool basement of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Glenview. (The pastor, she is sure, was a Bircher.)
“My dad was speaking to 200 people and giving his standard speech—about the United Nations and the conspiracy and so on—and during the question-and-answer period this woman [was] waving her hand, and my dad called on her, and she said, ‘What about this secret book?’
“So my father said, ‘There is no secret book. There is no such book. There will never bea book’—he went through this whole thing.”
The woman then reached into her satchel, pulled out the secret book, and partook to read from the section that said Dwight David Eisenhower was a secret Communist.
There happened to be in the audience a columnist for the Chicago Daily News, Jack Mabley, who wrote the first article that revealed to the non-wingnut majority the existence of this strange political sect who believed that the nation’s beloved Republican president was a Communist five days later, and wrote a second article a day after that focusing on the Birchers’ Chicago sachem, Claire Conner’s father.
It’s no small thing to see your own father exposed nationally not just as a lunatic but a liar. I wrote about much of this stuff, and what happened next, in my first book, Before the Storm: how the John Birch Society suddenly became a national sensation; how the Republican power structure and the “mainstream” conservative movement led by William F. Buckley and National Review purged Robert Welch from their ranks, careful, however not to alienate the massive Birch membership that formed its most determined activist cadre in elections; and how the “Birch issue” came to largely to define the civil war within the Republican Party over the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater—his famous convention-speech line “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice” was, in context, largely a tacit defense of the Birchers’ patriotic bona fides. And I think I tell the story well. But it’s something else altogether to read it, as I put it in my blurb of Claire’s book, “from the inside out”—from the perspective of a family within which right-wing extremism served as an efficient machine for something just short of child abuse. Like I said in that blurb, I’ve been waiting for a book like this for a long time. I recommend it with the only reservation that it is too short.
Hear what happened when her mother returned from a rhapsodic tour of a literally fascistic nation. “The first night—now, I was 12 years old—we were sitting over dinner. And my mother said, ‘I want to tell you children a story about Spain.’ She lights her cigarette.” She told her children about the left-wing general who kidnapped the son of one of Franco’s generals and said that unless certain political prisoners were released he would kill the son. That boy, her mom was careful to explain, was exactly her age. “The general said to his son on the phone, ‘say your prayers like a good Spaniard.’ And he was shot.’ ” She writes in the book eloquently about her reaction: “Something happened to me after that night. I had frequent headaches and stomaches. A rash appeared on my neck, arms, and legs…. After Mother and Father were dead, I knew that one of the Commies would put a pistol to my head and pull the trigger.”
She told me, “When they walked down this path, I sort of walked with them. Because there was no other way to go”—that’s how families work. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. And then you work to unfuck yourself: “I’ve been trying to make some sort of peace with this for, oh, thirty-five years.” Of such stories great family memoirs are made. And this is a great family memoir.
But it also bears a political argument we need to absorb. Explained Conner in Chicago, “The John Birch Society built the most effective, best-funded right-wing populist organization in the United States of America. Now, not all my friends on the left want to hear this. It’s so easy to say, ‘These people were crackpots.” But Robert Welch “was a brilliant man. That doesn’t mean he was correct about anything. But he was a brilliant man. And he loved to sell.” And what comes through strikingly in the book is that, even as Welch and his organization were excoriated, the stories they told, frequently through carefully disguised front groups with pleasant-sounding names—say, the one from the 1960s about how sexual education was teaching children how to be sexually promiscuous; or the one in the early 1990s promoting the impeachment of Bill Clinton—were sold quite effectively to the broader political culture. They achieved things.
We really, really don’t want to believe this. Even Claire Conner did not want to believe this. She writes, remembering the Kennedy assassination, blamed in the wider political culture as a product of just the sort of extremism Birchers were promoting, “the whole right wing is kaput. My parents and the Birchers just became ancient history.” Less than eight months later, of course, Barry Goldwater was the Republican presidential nominee. She writes of her conviction of how the miserable failures of the Bush years were “killing America’s appetite for right-wing Republicans.”
And yet now we have thirty states with Republican majorities, many of them veto-proof.
And at that point, in Chicago, Claire Connner concluded in thunder. “These people are at the point of changing our government. If you want to see how, look at Texas, look at Florida. Look at Ohio. Look at Wisconsin, for God’s sake—my state. Look at Michigan, for heaven’s sake: they think they elected a moderate, but they elected a right-wing radical. That’s how this game is played.They’re changing the policy.And the whole thing is so deep that when they vote them out of office, number one, half of them won’t be able to vote. And number two, we will have yearsof problems to fix…. We were so happy that we won the popular vote, but they’re buying the place….they’ve virtually stoppedthe government for five years.”
Claire Conner knows of what she speaks. She was there at the inception—as a sad-eyed, vulnerable adolescent—then watched as the machine was put together: a machine whose deceptively smooth surface has always only barely hid the corrosive ugliness and cunning anti-democratic cleverness underneath, convincing too many liberals, too many times, that the ugliness could not but fade away in the fulness of time—convincing them wrong. Read her, and listen well: there is nothing new under the wingnut sun.
==
https://www.jbs.org/
stop con-con!
monuments bk
Mr. Thompson’s extensive knowledge of the subject, he is the perfect host of a brand new show, “Myths vs. Facts” streaming LIVE every Tuesday on Facebook at 2 PM CT. By tuning in, you’ll discover what inspired “To the Victor Go the Myths and Monuments” as well as how history has been fogged over, what is behind the war on the U.S. Constitution, and instrumental organizations that have worked within theDeep State such as the Illuminati, Bohemians, Skull and Bones and more!
Knowing that a conspiracy is nothing more than a plan formulated in secret by a group of people, the solution is exposing this plot.Education is the key to bringing prospects down the funnel of understanding the conspiracy.Our goal is to have anyone jump on board at any level they may be at. Be a part of the solution. The John Birch Society has the persistence, buoyant attitude, and coordinated effort to tenaciously keep America the land of the free.
Those behind the Deep State have no problem stepping on the Constitution and shredding liberty, but The John Birch Society’s excellent education base provides the light in the darkness. By moving forward with long-lasting effective solutions, we can turn the situation around. So today, we invite you to join us in this epic undertaking.
...
National Council
The National Council of the John Birch Society is made up of distinguished members of our Society. They serve to show the caliber of membership, give advice to the CEO, and name his successor.
Art Thompson
Art Thompson
(Chief Executive Officer) Art Thompson was born in Seattle, Washington in 1938. Art attended the University of Washington, the Washington…
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hief Executive Officer)
Art Thompson was born in Seattle, Washington in 1938. Art attended the University of Washington, the Washington Military Academy and other business related institutions, before going into business for himself.
He joined the Society in May, 1964 and rose through "the ranks" becoming a successful Area Coordinator for The John Birch Society in the 1970's. He left the staff to go back into business in 1981 and returned to the staff again in the 1990's.
In the 1980's and early 90's, his business took him all over the United States. A frequent visitor to Western Europe on business, as a tourist, and once on a political fact-finding tour for the JBS, Art was at the Berlin Wall as it was coming down. During this tour, he became acquainted with many businessmen, academics, and members of the German cabinet and European Union.
Art has also served on his small town City Council, as the chairman of his local Chamber of Commerce, as an official and an elector for the Republican Party, and as a local leader in the state of Washington for the Christian Coalition. He also served as an officer in the Select Reserve Force of the Army and National Guard.
Art has held virtually every volunteer and staff position in the Society, including National Director of Development and Communications and National Director of Field Activities. For several years, he represented the Society in a variety of media events, including appearing on "60 Minutes," and was for a short time on our Speakers Bureau. Art resides in Appleton, Wisconsin with his wife Joanne.
Ray Clark
Ray Clark
(President) Ray Clark was born in 1941 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. His family relocated to Southern California in 1951. He…
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Clark Curry
Clark Curry
(Chairman of the Board) Clark was born and raised in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He received a bachelor’s degree in accounting…
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Lloyd Bailey
Lloyd Bailey
Lloyd W.Bailey, M.D. was appointed to the JBS Council in…
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Robert Bell
Robert Bell
Robert K. Bell has never called anywhere but Tulsa, Oklahoma,…
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William Blewster
William Blewster
William H. Blewster first saw the light of day in…
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Ronald Britton
Ronald Britton
We are pleased to announce that Ronald Arlen Britton of…
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Arthur Crino
Arthur Crino
Arthur D. Crino was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1924.…
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Tom DeWeese
Tom DeWeese
Tom DeWeese, a resident of Virginia since 1982, is Founder…
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Andy Dlinn
Andy Dlinn
Andy "Hirsh" Dlinn, President and Senior Portfolio Manager with Senior…
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Donald R. Griffin
Donald R. Griffin
Born in Sardis, Mississippi; Donald. R. Griffin was raised in…
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Dr. Robert Henderson
Dr. Robert Henderson
Robert W. Henderson, P.D., N.D., is Chairman of the Board…
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Kurt Hyde
Kurt Hyde
Kurt Hyde was born in Texas 1945 and raised in…
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David B. Jorgensen
David B. Jorgensen
Born in Utah in 1939, David Jorgensen has always lived…
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Sterling Lacy
Sterling Lacy
Judge Sterling E. Lacy’s life is as interesting as it…
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Paul Leithart
Paul Leithart
A member of The John Birch Society since 1960, Paul…
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Mr. John F. McManus
Mr. John F. McManus
John F. McManus joined the staff of The John Birch…
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Darr Moon
Darr Moon
Mr. Moon is a graduate of the University of Idaho,…
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Robert Owens
Robert Owens
Robert M. Owens was born in Connecticut in 1973. He…
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Deborah Pauly
Deborah Pauly
The Honorable Deborah Pauly is currently a full-time student pursuing…
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Dr. Duke Pesta
Dr. Duke Pesta
Dr. Duke Pesta received his M.A. in Renaissance literature from…
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Jess Roques
Jess Roques
My original interest in the JBS came from hearing Charlie…
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F. Ward Rowley
F. Ward Rowley
F. Ward Rowley was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in…
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Glenn Schmitz
Glenn Schmitz
Glenn J. Schmitz was born in Springfield, Minnesota, in 1935.…
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Thomas Sellers
Thomas Sellers
Thomas D. Sellers was born in Detroit in 1933 and…
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George Wallace
George Wallace
George B. Wallace was born in Minnesota in 1932, but…
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Lori Watt
Lori Watt
Lori Watt is President and Founder of Investors Advisory Group…
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Hillard Welch
Hillard Welch
Hillard W. Welch was born to Marian Probert and Robert…
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JBS 60th
tom deweese
SUSTAINABLE: THE WAR ON FREE ENTERPRISE, PRIVATE PROPERTY AND INDIVIDUALS
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Damaged/Slightly Scuffed - World Federalism 101
==
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/john-birch-society-at-cpac One of the hallmarks of post-Buckley, Movement Conservatism has always been the conscious exclusion of the John Birch Society as an extremist group. But at this weekend’s CPAC conference they were finally allowed in. Here’s John Birch Society President John F. McManus, at the Society’s sponsor table.
==
https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/trump-appears-delusional-modern-day-gop-led-way
Trump’s tenuous relationship with the truth has always been somewhat of a mystery, and it has often been difficult to tell whether the president is truly delusional or simply the biggest con man on the planet.
Since he announced his presidential candidacy more than two years ago, Trump has peddled conspiracy theories and falsehoods to the public like a false prophet selling hope, displaying an almost pathological disregard for the truth. As a result, many critics have assumed that he is a liar who deliberately and knowingly deceives the public. Others have contemplated whether he truly believes some of the nonsense that come out of his mouth, thus challenging the notion that he is consciously lying.
Both of these scenarios are disturbing in their own way — and, of course, they are not mutually exclusive. Trump may be a true believer one day and a liar the next; a credulous crackpot in one tweet, and a con artist in another.
Last week, however, the New York Times and the Washington Post published separate articles that suggest the president actually believes in his own BS most of the time, and that he has come to live in his own warped version of reality (call it “Trumptopia”). The coinciding reports, published on the same day, both portray the president as an increasingly deranged man who decides what is true and what is false (i.e., “fake news”), regardless of the evidence. According to both articles, the president has even come to question certain things that he had previously acknowledged as true, including the "Access Hollywood" tape in which he is heard bragging to Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women. “We don’t think that was my voice,” Trump reportedly said to a Republican senator in January — a claim he has repeated in private since.
“Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape are part of his lifelong habit of attempting to create and sell his own version of reality,” the New York Times reporters write. “Advisers say he continues to privately harbor a handful of conspiracy theories that have no grounding in fact.”
Some of these conspiracy theories, according to the Times, include the "birther" conspiracy about former President Barack Obama (which Trump has publicly disavowed) and the discredited theory that Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton last year because of widespread voter fraud. The president’s friends “did not bother denying that the president was creating an alternative version of events,” the Times reports. “One Republican lawmaker, who asked not to be identified, said that Mr. Trump’s false statements had become familiar to people over time.”
The Washington Post article is no less disturbing, and the reporters note that even “when presented with irrefutable evidence, Trump finds a way to question unflattering facts.” Whether it’s his defeat in the popular vote, Robert Mueller's probe into possible Russian campaign collusion or Obama’s birth certificate, Trump doesn’t let concrete facts get in the way of his alternative reality. Peter Wehner, a conservative writer who served in the three previous Republican administrations, told the Post that the president “creates his own reality and lives in his own reality and tries to bend reality around himself and his own deep narcissistic needs.” What makes this especially troubling is the fact that Trump is surrounded by enablers who have simply come to accept his delusional worldview as a kind of harmless idiosyncrasy.
These reports seem to confirm that Trump is often a true believer in the conspiracy theories and falsehoods that he spreads. This is not to say that the president isn’t a liar, which he almost certainly is, but that he has been a bullshit artist for so long that he has come to believe in much of his own bullshit. When one builds his entire career on fabrications and “truthful hyperbole” — a euphemism coined by Trump himself — it is not surprising that he eventually comes to believe the hype (especially when surrounded by sycophants who would gladly bend the knee and call him “Your Majesty” upon request).
It is slightly more surprising that a deluded conspiracy theorist like Trump could vanquish numerous Republican opponents and then win the general election without facing any repercussions for his repeated transgressions against the truth. But it shouldn’t be. The GOP was the party of “alternative facts” long before it became the party of Trump, and conspiracy theorists took over the conservative movement long before Trump launched his campaign. Trump’s meteoric rise wouldn’t have been possible without a longstanding tradition of bullshit and paranoia on the right.
Right-wingers have historically been more susceptible to conspiracy theories and paranoia than liberals and leftists. When the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote his seminal essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in 1964, it was Trump’s antecedents in the John Birch Society who were espousing elaborate conspiracy theories about the communist takeover of the government. One explanation for this excessive paranoia is the fact that conservatives are driven more by fear than their liberal counterparts. This has been demonstrated by various peer-reviewed studies over the years, including those conducted by Yale psychology professor John Bargh, who found that inducing “feelings of complete physical safety” in conservatives made them more likely to express liberal viewpoints.
Even though some on the left have become increasingly paranoid and hysterical since last year’s election, right-wingers remain the leading purveyors of conspiratorial nonsense in the age of Trump. This is partly due to the president’s inability to get anything passed by Congress, coupled with the endless scandals that have plagued his administration. Failing to accomplish even a fraction of what he promised, the president and his defenders deny reality and blame their problems on evil conspirators, whether that means "deep state" agents, the “fake news” media or the globalist elite. In his essay on the paranoid style, Hofstadter observed that paranoids have hopelessly unrealistic goals and, because these goals are unattainable, “failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.”
“Even partial success,” he writes, “leaves [the paranoid] with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.”...
http://www.jbs.org/jbs-news
President-elect Donald Trump's federal budget is a big believer in gold, according to financial disclosures.
Mick Mulvaney, Trump's pick to lead the Office of Budget and Management, owns significant amounts of precious metals and gold-mining stocks based on financial disclosures compiled by Bloomberg.
According to the filings, Mulvaney held $50,000 to $100,000 in precious metals at the end of 2015. In addition, the South Carolina congressman holds stock in numerous gold and silver mining corporations totaling $252,000 to $855,000, according to the filing.
Bloomberg found that Mulvaney had sold significant amounts of the gold miners' stock in early 2016, citing financial filings from the end of June.
The heavy investments into gold is not surprising given past criticism by Mulvaney of the Federal Reserve. In a speech obtained by Mother Jones, Mulvaney told the John Birch Society, a group that believes the only legal forms of currency are gold and silver coins, that the Fed had "effectively devalued the dollar" and "choke[d] off economic growth."
In the same speech, Mulvaney also praised bitcoin, saying the cryptocurrency could not be "manipulated" by the government.
Gold-mining stocks have had an up-and-down year. VanEck's Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF — the largest gold-mining sector exchange-traded fund in which Mulvaney had an investment ($15,001 to $50,000) — is up 45% year-to-date but is down roughly 35% from its 2016 high in August.
The dollar has strengthened by a little over 5% since the US presidential election, while gold has fallen by roughly 10%. Bitcoin has been surging in the past week, hitting its highest level since November 2013 on Thursday.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/john-birch-society/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-bottari/who-is-behind-the-nationa_b_5451743.html
s the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 session comes to a close, one of the major cases left for a decision is Harris vs. Quinn, which could affect millions of public sector workers in the United States.
The case originates in Illinois, where home health care workers have been successfully organized by public sector unions. Now, a small group of these workers, represented by lawyers from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, have sued and their lawyers contend that the agency fees, or the fair share dues that even non-union members of a bargaining unit are required to pay to unions that bargain for higher wages on their behalf, violate the First Amendment. Agency fees are barred in so-called “right to work” states, which have much less unionization and lower wages and benefits.
Joel Rogers, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Wisconsin, calls it“the most important labor law case the court has considered in decades.” This is because when the Supreme Court decided to take on the case, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation dramatically expanded the scope of the case beyond the home health care workers to include all public sector workers, from teachers and firefighters to sanitation workers to librarians. If the court follows National Right to Work’s lead, every state in the country would essentially turn into an anti-union “right to work” state, which would be a significant blow to public sector unions’ collective bargaining efforts and also complicate thousands of existing contracts between organized workers and municipalities, cities, counties, and states across the country.
National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTWLDF) is the 501(c)(3) arm of the National Right to Work Committee” (NRTWC), a 501(c)(4) organization. Additionally, the National Institute for Labor Relations Research is an affiliated anti-union research shop. Founded nearly 60 years ago, the NRTWC has been a national leader in the effort to destroy public and private sector unions. The groups have increased their funding and staffing in recent years. In 2012, the three groups combined reported over $25 million in revenue, making them a powerful instrument of the corporate and ideological interests that want to keep wages low and silence the voice of organized labor in the political arena.
NRTWC’s success and the demise of unions in the United States has directly contributed to the erosion of high-paying middle-class jobs and to growing inequality, as this chart from the Economic Policy Institute graphically illustrates.
National Right to Work’s History With the Koch Brothers and the John Birch Society
The NRTWC has deep connections within the national right-wing network led by the Koch brothers. Reed Larson,who led the NRTW groups for over three decades, hails from Wichita, Kansas, the hometown of Charles and David Koch. Larson became an early leader of the radical right-wing John Birch Society in Kansas, which Fred Koch (the father of Charles and David) helped found. Several other founders and early leaders of the NRTWC were members and leaders of the John Birch Society, specifically the Wichita chapter of which Fred Koch was an active member.
The groups remain tied to the Kochs. In 2012, the Kochs’ Freedom Partners group funneled $1 million to the National Right to Work Committee, while the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation gave a $15,000 grant to the NRTWLDF, which has also received significant funding from the Koch-connected DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. Today, at least three former Koch associates work as attorneys for the NRTWLDF.
In June 2010, Mark Mix, the current head of the NRTW groups, attended the Kochs’ exclusive Aspen strategy meeting to give a presentation on how to mobilize conservatives for the 2010 election, along with representatives from Koch-backed groups such as the Center to Protect Patient Rights (now called American Encore) and Americans for Prosperity.
In addition to the Koch brothers, the NRTWLDF has received significant funding from many big name conservative donors, including the Walton Family Foundation(of Walmart),the Coors family’s Castle Rock Foundation, Wisconsin’s Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Searle Freedom Trust.
A $33 Million Anti-Worker Lobby Shop with Ties to ALEC, SPN, and More
In order to push their extreme agenda, the NRTWC has launched a massive lobbying effort at both the state and federal level. In the U.S. Congress alone, the NRTWC has spent over $33 million on lobbying between 1999 and 2013. NRTWC has lobbied Congress to pass a national “Right to Work Act,” which is sponsored by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY). Paul has lent his name to several NRTWC advocacy and fundraising letters and received over $27,000 in campaign contributions from the NRTWC’s federal political action committee. The NRTWC also strongly opposed the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made it easier for workers to organize, while supported legislation that would weaken the regulatory authority of the National Labor Relations Board over employers.
The NRTWC also does extensive lobbying on the state level. In 2012, lobbyists registered with the NRTWC were on the ground in Indiana and Michigan when both states passed anti-union “right to work” bills and are big supporters of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his efforts to crush public sector unions. The NRTWC was an exhibitor at the 2011 annual conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the corporate bill mill exposed by CMD in 2011. ALEC’s “Right to Work Act,” which has been in the ALEC library since at least 1980, is one of its most commonly used “model” bills. When Republicans took trifecta control of 26 state houses in November of 2010, it was a top agenda item at the December 2010 ALEC meeting. According to a 2010 email from ALEC to Wisconsin legislators that CMD obtained, ALEC referred to its “Right to Work Act” as a “solution... for your state’s most pressing issues.” Currently 24 states are so-called “right to work” states. In 2013, 15 states introduced legislation based on ALEC’s “Right to Work Act.”
The NRTWLDF is also an associate member of the State Policy Network (SPN), an $84 million dollar network of 64 state-based “think tanks.” The State Policy Network’s affiliate in Michigan, the Mackinac Center, was one of the major supporters behind “right to work” when the legislature passed the bill in 2012. Through its board, staff, and other activities, the NRTW groups also have close connections to Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the American Conservative Union, and the Republican National Committee.
Crossing the Line: Whistleblower Alleges New Election Law Violations
From the beginning, the NRTWC had a focus on influencing U.S. elections. The NRTWC has spent millions in dark money electoral ads, including $7 million during the 2012 election. Although a leading group on the right, the NRTWC has also attacked Republicans such as John Boehner and Bob Dole for not adhering to their extreme policy agenda.
The NRTWC’s long history of pushing the line in campaign finance and electoral activity as a nonprofit led to an FEC case against it at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1982, in which the court ruled against the NRTWC for illegally raising money for electoral activities. The NRTWC continued to engage in controversial campaign-related activities, and evidence suggests that the National Right to Work Committee spent $100,000 on private detectives in 1984 to infiltrate the AFL-CIO, NEA, and Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign. By the time that case was brought to court, the statute of limitations had expired.
Today, the NRTWC continues to generate controversy for engaging in campaign related activities. In January 2014, the Center for Responsive Politics detailed whistleblower allegations that the NRTWC was running “a massive off-the-books mass mailing operation” attempting to influence the 2010 election in Iowa and possibly other states. The NRTWC did not disclose that it was participating in political activity that year to the IRS. The whistleblower also alleged that the NRTWC was coordinating its activities with candidates’ campaigns during the election. Former IRS official Marcus Owens commented to the news outlet that “people have gone to jail for precisely the facts that you are describing.” At the center of the controversy was then-NRTWC Vice President Doug Stafford, who is the former chief of staff for U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY).
NRTWC Lawyers Push Their Agenda through the Courts
The legal arm of NRTWC was launched in 1968 to take the anti-worker agenda to the courts. With the Harris v. Quinn case, the NRTWLDF is seeking to re-litigate theAbood vs. Detroit Board of Education Supreme Court case it lost in 1977, which upheld the constitutionality of fair share dues. Over the years, the NRTWLDF has done little to improve wages, benefits, health or safety protections for American workers, but has tried scores of cases against unions and organized labor revealing its political agenda. With a large team of lawyers and millions in funding from national right-wing sources, the NRTWLDF is currently trying cases in Arkansas, Missouri, California, Michigan, Colorado, and Ohio.
NRTWLDF’s also recently filed suit to block workers in the Volkswagen Chattanooga plant from voting for union representation and to prevent Volkswagen from voluntarily consenting to any future organizing drives.
Professor Rogers and other labor experts contend that the NRTWC’s success in the U.S. Supreme Court “would be a disaster for labor, particularly for the public sector unions that traditionally rely more heavily on agency shop agreements.” As Rogers points out, it is technically possible to form a union in a “right to work” state, but when union members are free to stop paying their dues, the union becomes a weak and ineffective organization. The results for American workers are clear.Research shows that “right to work” states have lower wages, less health care and more poverty.
More:
Koch Brothers Right To Work American Legislative Exchange Council Michigan Right To Work John Birch Society
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maddow
...
Another issue the nice people at the John Birch Society say that we got wrong on this show was their position on the fluoridation of drinking water. In their online retort to our segment from last week, the John Birch Society said it never labeled fluoridation of water as a communist mind control plot, because that sounds crazy, right? They wrote that actually, the John Birch Society opposed water fluoridation because it represented, quote, "a precedent for the socialized medicine Maddow supports."
I know they would love that to be true. But, well, heres a page from the March 1960 John Birch Society bulletin. Youll see that there is a section here at the bottom of the page -- do we have here? Yes.
A section at the bottom of page 13 titled, "How to Defeat Fluoridation in Your City." After advising the reader to paper his or her city council school board PTA and church community with anti-fluoridation pamphlets, the John Birch Society warns, quote, "If you live in a large enough city, or if the communists have been able to beguile a sufficiently large enough, powerful enough, and determined enough clique into supporting fluoridation, the above formula, alone, may not stop them."
John Birch Society, you may wish that you hadn`t said that fluoridation was a secret communist plot -- but you did in writing, and we have a library card.
I do have to say though that the most amusing complaints/clarification against us by the John Birch Society was this. They wrote, quote, "The John Birch Society ways always cautious in accusing people of being part of a conspiracy."
All right, gather around here for a second. I know were on the eve of a holiday and everything, and I just want to read to you for a sec from the minutes of the first meeting of the John Birch Society National Council on January 9th, 1960. We got this document, thanks to a freelance researcher named Ernie Lazar. Hes used FOIA request to the FBI and original John Birch Society records to put together a pretty amazing archive of the group`s history.
So, this is John Birch Society founder Robert Welch. "Today, gentlemen, I can assure you without the slightest doubt in my own mind that the take-over at the top is, for all practical purposes, virtually complete. Whether you like it or not, and whether you believe it or not, our federal government is already literally in the hands of the communists. Our Congress now contains a number of men who are certainly actual communists, and plenty more who are sympathetic to communist purposes for either ideological or opportunistic reasons."
He then lists a number of contemporaneous members of Congress at that time, including John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. And he says they`re definitely commies or at least commie symphs.
And then there`s this, quote, "Our Supreme Court is so visibly pro- communist that no argument is even needed. Our State Department is loaded with communists from top to bottom, to the extent that our roll call of ambassadors almost sounds like a list somebody has put together to start a communist front. It is estimated, from many reliable sources, than from 70 percent to 90 percent of the responsible personnel in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare are -- guessed it -- communists.
Our Central Intelligence Agency under Allen Dulles is nothing more nor less than an agency to promote communism throughout the word. Almost all of the other departments are loaded with communists and communist sympathizers. And this generalization most specifically does include our whole Defense Department."
But, remember, the John Birch Society has always been very cautious about accusing any one of being part of a conspiracy. You know, except for that one time when they accused everybody of being part of a giant conspiracy.
...
http://crooksandliars.com/heather/rachel-maddow-exposes-john-birch-society-c
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http://www.alternet.org/texas-gun-nuts-scary-ritual-how-hatred-president-turned-profane?paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark
parton
Three weeks before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a concerned citizen from Dallas named Mrs. Nelle M. Doyle wrote a letter to White House press secretary Pierre Salinger. She was worried about the president’s visit. This is what she wrote:
Although I do not consider myself an ‘alarmist’, I do fervently hope that President kennedy can be dissuaded from appearing in the city of Dallas, Texas as much as I would enjoy hearing and seeing him.
This ‘hoodlum mob’ in Dallas is frenzied and infuriated that their attack on Ambassador Adlai Stephenson on the 24th, backfired on them. I have heard that some of them have said they “have just started.”
No number of policemen, plainclothes men or militia can control the “air” Mr Salinger — it is a dreadful thought but all remember the fate of President McKinley.
These people are crazy, or crazed, and I’m sure that we must realize that their actions in the future are unpredictable.
Unfortunately, her prediction wasn’t alarmist enough as it turned out.
The right-wing hatred for John F. Kennedy was in some ways as extreme as the hatred for Barack Obama and nowhere was it more energized than Dallas in 1963. Three years earlier, right-wingers in the city had signaled their anti-Kennedy zeal by turning on its native son, Lyndon Johnson, after he accepted the nomination for vice president. He and his wife, Lady Bird, were accosted by a shrieking mob of conservative women in front of their hotel armed with signs saying he’d sold out to “Yankee Socialists.” It was downhill from there. Over the next three years the simmer burst into a full boil as various luminaries of the John Birch Society such as millionaire oil man H.L. Hunt and the anti-communist fanatic Gen. Edwin Walker, a zealot so far to the right that he even believed Eisenhower was a communist, fanned the flames of anti-Kennedy hatred.
Walker was at the center of the plot against Adlai Stephenson to which Mrs. Doyle referred in her letter. He had exhorted his followers (some of whom belonged to group that unironically called itself the “National Indignation Convention”) to confront the U.N. ambassador when he came to town and they did, hitting him with signs and spitting in his face before he could be rescued by the police. At the scene he famously asked, “Are these human beings or are these animals?”
It’s estimated about 5,000 of these fliers were distributed all over downtown Dallas in the days leading up to the presidential visit.
[
](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-m_kjUJZcjuE/U9A18l6zmjI/AAAAAAAATVg/0QvP0e2P_sc/s1600/TreasonFlyer.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg)
The morning of Nov. 22, the Dallas Morning News featured a full-page ad “welcoming” the president to Dallas. After a preamble in which they proclaimed their fealty to the Constitution and defiantly asserted their right to be conservative, they demanded to be allowed to “address their grievances.” They posed a long series of “when did you stop beating your wife” questions asking why Kennedy was helping the Communist cause around the world. Here’s an example:
WHY has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party praised almost every one of your policies and announced that the party will endorse and support your re-election in 1964?
WHY have you banned the showing at U.S. military bases of the film “Operation Abolition”–the movie by the House Committee on Un-American Activities exposing Communism in America?
WHY have you ordered or permitted your brother Bobby, the Attorney General, to go soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you, your administration, and your leadership?
WHY has the Foreign Policy of the United States degenerated to the point that the C.I.A. is arranging coups and having staunch Anti-Communists Allies of the U.S. bloodily exterminated.
WHY have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the “Spirit of Moscow”?
MR. KENNEDY, as citizens of the United States of America, we DEMAND answers to these questions, and we want them NOW.
You get the drift. And you probably recognize the tone. The subject may have changed somewhat but the arrogant attitude combined with the aggrieved victimization is a hallmark of right-wing politics even today.
As we all know, later that day the president was gunned down in Dealey Plaza. The entire world was shocked and traumatized by that event and the course of history was changed.
So why bring this up today? That was a long time ago and we’ve moved on from those days, right? The John Birch Society is a relic of another time. Anti-communism is still a rallying cry on the right, but without the Soviet threat, it’s lost much of its power.
Unfortunately, the venom, the incoherent conspiracy-mongering, the visceral loathing still exist. In fact, in one of the most obliviously obtuse acts of sacrilege imaginable, Dealey Plaza is now the regular site of open-carry demonstrations. That’s right, a group of looney gun proliferation activists meet regularly on the site of one of the most notorious acts of gun violence in the nation’s history to spout right-wing conspiracy theories about the president while ostentatiously waving around deadly weapons.
Travelers from other nations who come to Dealey Plaza to pay their respects are undoubtedly startled to see yahoos carrying guns and passing out extremist literature very much like the literature that was distributed in Dallas in the fall of 1963. In most places in this world such contempt for national hallowed ground would be frowned upon by decent people. But in America, armed men and women marching around spouting hatred for the president at the very spot where a former president was assassinated is business as usual. We are “free” here to carry guns in public and dare others to argue with us. But that doesn’t make it any less vulgar and profane to do it in a place of national grief — and what should be a monument to right-wing ignominy.
On the 50th anniversary of the assassination, historian Darwin Payne, who was a journalist in Dallas in 1963, said, “You could feel it in the air. When I hear some people express hatred for Obama, it feels the same. But I never have felt we are on the verge of anything like the events I witnessed back then.” Let’s hope he’s right. There are a whole lot of people with a political ax to grind who are wandering around our streets armed to the teeth. As Mrs. Doyle said in her letter, “These people are crazy, or crazed, and I’m sure that we must realize that their actions in the future are unpredictable.”
Here’s the
of the Dealey Plaza open carry event.
==
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/8/the_kochs_anti_civil_rights_roots
charles koch :
The Progressive magazine and Center for Media and Democracy have released new documents that show billionaire oil industrialist Charles Koch was an active member of the controversial right-wing John Birch Society during its campaigns against the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Charles Koch was following in the footsteps of his father, Fred Koch, a leader of the John Birch Society from its founding. We speak with The Progressive’s Lisa Graves about her new article, "The Koch Cartel: Their Reach, Their Reactionary Agenda and Their Record." Graves details how the reactionary ideas absorbed during Charles Koch’s youth continue to animate many of his actions decades later. Charles and his brother, David Koch, have used their wealth to push a similar agenda into the mainstream through the tea party and "dark money" political coalitions that allow donors to shield their identity while funding attack ads against Democrats.
ag21 orientation video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3qW2XJZdSA New American mag
attacks ICLEI local regs Int'l council, unconst.; subsidy and regulationregime; BO pick winners ie green products/energy (note it's an energy indep speech, to stay econ competative
wiki
John Morrison Birch (May 8, 1918 – August 25, 1945) was an American military intelligence officer and aBaptist missionary in World War II, who was killed during a confrontation with supporters of the Communist Party of China.
Politically conservative groups in the United States consider him to be a martyr and the first victim of theCold War. The John Birch Society, an American conservative organization formed 13 years after his death, was named in his honor. His parents joined the Society as Life Members.
Contents
- 1 Early life
- 2 Missionary work
- 3 Military career
- 4 Memorials
- 5 See also
- 6 Notes
- 7 References
- 8 External links
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Birch was born to Baptist missionaries in Landour Mussoorie, a hill station in the Himalayas in northern Indiastate of Uttarakhand (then Uttar Pradesh). In 1920, when he was two, the family returned to the United States. Birch was raised in New Jersey, Floyd County, Georgia[1] and Macon, Georgia, in the Fundamental Baptist[1] tradition. He graduated from Lanier High School for Boys, now Central High School, followed byGeorgia Baptist–affiliated Mercer University in 1939 magna cum laude.[1] "He was always an angry young man, always a zealot", said a classmate many years later. In his senior year at Mercer, he organized a student group to identify cases of heresy by professors, seeking to uphold the Scriptural definition of conversion and other doctrines.[2]
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While a student at Mercer, Birch decided to become a missionary. He enrolled in J. Frank Norris' Fundamental Baptist Bible Institute,[1] Fort Worth, Texas. Completing the two-year curriculum in a single year, he was sent to China by the World Fundamental Baptist Missionary Fellowship.[1] Arriving in Shanghaiin 1940, he began an intensive study of Mandarin Chinese. After six months, he was assigned to Hangzhou, an area as yet occupied by the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese sent troops to Hangzhou to arrest Birch as an enemy national. He and the other missionaries fled inland. Cut off from the outside world, Birch began trying to establish new missions in Zhejiang province.[2]
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In April 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle and his crew crash-landed in China after the Tokyo raid. They had flown from the aircraft carrierUSS *Hornet* (CV-8), bombed Tokyo, then flown to the Chinese mainland. After bailing out, they were rescued by Chinese civilians and smuggled by river into Zhejiang province. Birch went to meet them, assisting them and directing them to friendly territory.
When Doolittle arrived in Chongqing, he told Colonel Claire Chennault, leader of the Flying Tigers, about Birch's help. Chennault could use a Chinese-speaking American who knew the country well and he commissioned Birch as a first lieutenant, though Birch later wrote he had been willing to serve as a private.[citation needed]
Birch joined the Fourteenth Air Force on its formation on 5 March 1943 and was later seconded to the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He stated he would be willing to be accepted into the OSS only if he was allowed to work as normally as he had before. He built a formidable intelligence network of sympathetic Chinese informants, supplying Chennault with information on Japanese troop movements and shipping, often performing dangerous incognito field assignments, during which he would brazenly hold Sunday church services for Chinese Christians. In his diary, Major Gustav Krause, commanding officer of the base, noted: "Birch is a good officer, but I'm afraid is too brash and may run into trouble."[citation needed] Urged to take a leave of absence, Birch refused, telling Chennault he would not quit China "until the last Jap" did; he was equally contemptuous of Communists. He was promoted to captainand received the Legion of Merit in 1944.[2]
V-J Day, August 14, 1945, signaled the end of formal hostilities; but, under terms of the Japanese surrender, the Japanese Army was ordered to continue occupying areas it controlled until they could hand power over to the Nationalist government, even in places where the Communist-led government had been the de facto state for a decade. This led to continued fighting as the People's Liberation Army fought to expel all imperial forces, a category it perceived to include U.S. personnel now openly collaborating with the remaining Japanese forces. On August 25, as Birch was leading a party of Americans, Chinese Nationalists, and Koreans on a mission to reach Allied personnel in a Japanese prison camp, they were stopped by Chinese Communists near Xi'an. Birch was asked to surrender his revolver; he refused and harsh words and insults were exchanged. Birch was shot and killed; a Chinese Nationalist colleague was also shot and wounded but survived. The rest of the party was imprisoned but released shortly. Birch was posthumously awarded a Distinguished Service Medal.
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Birch is known today mainly by the society that bears his name although Jimmy Doolittle, who met Birch after Doolittle's raid on Tokyo, said in his autobiography that he was sure that Birch "would not have approved". His name is on the bronze plaque of a World War II monument at the top of Coleman Hill Park overlooking downtown Macon, along with the names of other Macon men who lost their lives while serving in the military. Birch has a plaque on the sanctuary of the First Southern Methodist Church of Macon, which was built on land given by his family, purchased with the money he sent home monthly. A building at the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, Texas, was named The John Birch Hall by Pastor J. Frank Norris.[3] A small street in a housing development outside Boston, John Birch Memorial Drive in Townsend, is also named for him.[4]
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 | Biography portal |
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- ^ a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch%28missionary%29#cite_ref-John_Birch_1980_1-0) b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch%28missionary%29#cite_ref-John_Birch_1980_1-1) c(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch%28missionary%29#cite_ref-John_Birch_1980_1-2) d(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch%28missionary%29#cite_ref-John_Birch_1980_1-3) e(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_%28missionary%29#cite_ref-John_Birch_1980_1-4) The Secret File on John Birch, James & Marti Hefley, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1980, ISBN 0-8423-5862-5
- ^ a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch%28missionary%29#cite_ref-WhoWasJB_2-0) b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch%28missionary%29#cite_ref-WhoWasJB_2-1) c(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_%28missionary%29#cite_ref-WhoWasJB_2-2) "Who Was John Birch?". Time. April 14, 1961.
- ^ Stokes, David R. (2011). The Shooting Salvationist: J. Frank Norris and the Murder Trial that Captivated America. Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press. p. 325. ISBN 978-1-58642-186-1
- ^ "Maps". Bing Maps. Microsoft Bing. Retrieved July 1, 2011.
References:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit source | edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;display:inline !important;background-image:none !important"):}::{]}:
- I Could Never Be So Lucky Again, autobiography by James "Jimmy" Doolittle, ISBN 0-553-58464-2
- Mission to Yenan: American Liaison with the Chinese Communists 1944–1947, Carolle J. Carter, ISBN 0-8131-2015-2
- The Secret File on John Birch, James Hefley, Hannibal Books, 1995 (updated version), ISBN 0-929292-80-4
- The Life of John Birch, Robert Welch, Western Islands, ISBN 0-88279-116-8
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- John Birch profile - Who2.com
- Short History of the life of John M. Birch from the JBS.org Website.
- Military Biography, part 1, from Trivia-Library.com ― see also part 2)
- "John Morrison Birch". Find a Grave. Retrieved 2008-07-27.
- NPR's "On the Media" on the John Birch Society's 50th Anniversary (audio)
Green groups, liberal Democrats and public health organizations have applauded the EPA’s efforts. They say the agency’s actions have helped clean up the air and water, in turn, slowing the effects of climate change and improving people’s health.
McCarthy fired back at critics in the video and exhorted her employees to buckle down for the fight.
“This agency has the courage to act. We can make it happen — but we need all hands on deck,” she said.
The agency figures to remain in the crosshairs of Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) is pushing legislation to handicap the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. And Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), who heads an Appropriations subcommittee, has promised to make the House EPA spending bill a "battleground" for the administration's climate agenda.
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Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/312561-new-epa-chief-to-staff-this-is-a-defining-time-for-epa#ixzz2a4lj5RRz
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Agenda 21 is a completely non-binding international framework for sustainability passed in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit. The framework, which sets out very loose aspirational goals for making communities more efficient and less carbon-intensive, was signed by then President George H.W. Bush and later upheld by Presidents Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush.
Since the framework was adopted, right-wing conspiracy theorists have pushed bizarre theories about Agenda 21 being a central tool for the United Nations to create a one-world government and take away the rights of local property owners. In recent years, elevated by the megaphone of extreme pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, these conspiracies made their way into mainstream politics. Today, Agenda 21ers — many affiliated with the Tea Party and the John Birch Society — are peddling fears about Agenda 21 in order to stop basic efficiency and renewable energy programs on the state level.
Conspiracy theorists active in politics have called Agenda 21 “socialism on steroids” that would cause Americans to be “herded into centers like the UN wants.”
And in an April presentation on Agenda 21, activist Victoria Baer had this to say about John McCain’s support of ethanol, which she also claimed was part of a UN plot: “We should have left him in Hanoi with Jane Fonda…he is a traitor, a pure traitor.”
Yes, Baer called John McCain — a decorated Vietnam War veteran who spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war — a traitor who should be “left in Hanoi” because he supported minimal increases in domestic ethanol production.
Baer also claims that the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. National Parks Service, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture — agencies founded more than 100 years before Agenda 21 — are “all out of the UN to have these wonderful little furry animal organizations to cut our land away from us.”
In fact, the Agenda 21 language explicitly states that countries and local communities have “the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies.”
So what do these historically-challenged and completely inaccurate claims have to do with the Republican party? The Republican National Committee has officially adopted these conspiracy theories as its national platform. In January, the RNC adopted a resolution calling Agenda 21 “insidious” and “covert.”
The United Nations Agenda 21 is being covertly pushed into local communities throughout the United States of America through the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) through local “sustainable development” policies such as Smart Growth, Wildlands Project, Resilient Cities, Regional Visioning Projects, and other “Green” or “Alternative” projects
The Republican National Committee recognizes the destructive and insidious nature of United Nations Agenda 21 and hereby exposes to the public and public policy makers the dangerous intent of the plan.
Interestingly, Agenda 21 activist Victoria Baer is a big supporter of Florida Tea Partier Ted Yoho, a man who unseat Republican Representative Cliff Stearns in a major upset during a primary race yesterday. Along with supporting the Agenda 21 conspiracy, Yoho also believes we should abolish the Department of Energy — the agency tasked with protecting our nuclear waste and nuclear weapons arsenal.
This is where the mainstream Republican party is headed.
So what are the origins of this bizarre shift in policy? And why have Agenda 21 activists gained such prominence within mainstream politics?
To explore the issue, I spoke with Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Potok has been tracking the rise of the Agenda 21 movement, which is rooted in the John Birch Society — a radical right-wing group that opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because they said it infringed on states’ rights. But Potok says that the issue is much broader than one single conspiracy and one single group.
Stephen Lacey: Many folks within the Agenda 21 movement have come from or are loosely aligned with the John Birch Society. So give us some background, what is the John Birch Society, how did it get formed, and what does it represent today?
Mark Potok: Well, it’s no surprise that it’s the John Birch Society that seems to be the primary pusher of the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory. I say that because they are most infamous, really, for two things. One is accusing President Eisenhower of being a “Communist agent,” which was a surprise certainly to Eisenhower. And the other, which is perhaps more like Agenda 21, is for their promotion of the idea that putting fluoride in drinking water is a plot to convert our children and all the rest of us to Communism. In other words, this is an organization that from the very beginning has touted completely ludicrous and baseless conspiracy theories. And, in fact, the John Birch Society was essentially driven out [by wfb?] of the Conservative movement because it was such an embarrassment.
SL:But they’ve made a resurgence in recent years. What do they represent today? How are they becoming aligned with supposedly more mainstream Conservatives? And how have they regained a foothold in politics?
MP: It is hard to understand exactly how the John Birch Society has made itself more palatable to “mainstream” conservatives. The John Birch society began to reappear in a fairly significant way back in the 1990s when virtually every gun show in America, or every large gun show, had a booth with the organization. Back then, they were very heavily promoting themilitia movement, as well as various conspiracies they believed the federal government was involved in. Then they sort of went quiet with the rest of the militia movement, which more or less petered out at the end of the 1990s. And in the last few years they have suddenly reappeared with quite remarkable success.
So the real answer to your question is that I do not quite understand how the John Birch Society has gotten so many city councils and county commissions and even state legislatures to listen to their nonsense. But they have. I suspect that it is related less to them having a huge amount of money or enormous numbers of people, and more to do with the idea that we’ve become so polarized politically as a nation that this kind of tripe really sells today. You know, what is most astounding of all is that the Republican National Committee has adopted oppositions to Agenda 21 as a core part of its platform and has asked that Mitt Romney include it as a part of his convention platform when the GOP convention gathers later this month....
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/08/15/523931/republican-party-officially-embraces-garbage-agenda-21-conspiracy-theories-as-its-national-platform/
==
2008 agenda 21 conf:
"An anti-human document, which takes aim at Western culture, and the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions," is how Coffman referred to it. Coffman also alleged that Agenda 21 would lead to a kind of communist reallocation of property rights and redistribution of assets. Using a big word, Coffman labeled the proposed changes "usufructual," which he said means the government would own everything. Michael Chapman of Ed Watch, a group that opposes public education, reiterated Coffman's allegations that Agenda 21's real aim is to redistribute wealth. Coffman added that economic development is not being restricted in order to protect the environment, but rather to give power to the government.
"The new world theology is pantheism," Coffman said, "Nature is God." [gaia?]
The John Birch Society (JBS), a group that once insisted that President Eisenhower was a Communist Party member but now focuses on immigrant-bashing, agrees with Coffman. JBS was on hand to warn that environmentalists are really out to get your children. The JBS handed out cards featuring a strange depiction of a group of children holding hands under a large, glowing, balloon-like mockup of the earth that warned of "The New False Religion, Worshipping the Earth." "Advocates of a UN world government have drafted an Earth Charter, which they compare to the Ten Commandments and keep in an 'Ark of Hope,'" warns the JBS without any apparent reference to reality. "Will you let the United Nations or any other group undermine the faith of your family?" The JBS is so concerned with this that is has created a new website, www.getusout.org/earthworship, to battle "Earth Worship."
see also greening of hate:
http://www.splcenter.org/greenwash-nativists-environmentalism-and-the-hypocrisy-of-hate/the-greening-of-hate-an-essay
By Betsy Hartmann
I first encountered the greening of hate — the scapegoating of immigrants for environmental degradation — when I was invited to debate Virginia Abernethy of the Carrying Capacity Network at an environmental law conference in Oregon in 1994. Although the topic was population, I quickly realized I wasn’t debating a fellow environmentalist or family planning advocate, but rather an anti-immigrant activist for whom population and carrying capacity were euphemisms for circling our wagons and closing our borders. It turns out Abernethy is a member of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens. She opposes racial "mixing."...The argument that it’s better to keep poor people in poor countries so they consume less is just plain wrong on a number of counts. First, it diverts attention from the urgent need to address overconsumption: with only 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. presently consumes 20% of its resources. Whatever the rate of immigration, well-off Americans need to change their lifestyles for the future of the planet.
Second, the assumption that immigrating to the U.S. necessarily turns people into super-consumers is a spurious one. Many immigrant communities bring with them traditions of greater respect for the environment. In my hometown of Amherst, Mass., Cambodian immigrants helped spur a revival in community gardens. In nearby Holyoke, Puerto Rican immigrants are revitalizing the depressed city in one of the most successful urban renewal and agriculture projects in the country, Nuestras Raíces (Our Roots).
wiki
History
[edit] Origins
The society was established in Indianapolis, Indiana on December 9, 1958 by a group of 12 led by Robert Welch, Jr., a retired candy manufacturer from Belmont, Massachusetts. One founding member was Fred Koch, founder of Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in America. Another was Revilo P. Oliver, a University of Illinois professor who later severed his relationship with the society and helped found the National Alliance. A transcript of Welch's two-day presentation at the founding meeting was published as The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, and became a cornerstone of its beliefs, with each new member receiving a copy.[^^8]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-Larry_McDonald_on_the_New_World_Order-7)
According to Welch, "both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a 'one-world socialist government.'"[^^14]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-13)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-PublicEye-14)15]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-PublicEye-14) Welch saw collectivism as the main threat to Western Civilization, and liberals as "secret communist traitors" who provided cover for the gradual process of collectivism, with the ultimate goal of replacing the nations of western civilization with a one-world socialist government. "There are many stages of welfarism, socialism, and collectivism in general," he wrote, "but Communism is the ultimate state of them all, and they all lead inevitably in that direction."[^^15]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-PublicEye-14)
The society's activities include distribution of literature, pamphlets, magazines, videos and other educational material while sponsoring a Speaker's Bureau, which invites "speakers who are keenly aware of the motivations that drive political policy".[^^16]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-15) One of the first public activities of the society was a "Get US Out!" (of membership in the UN) campaign, which claimed in 1959 that the "Real nature of [the] UN is to build a One World Government."[^^17]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-16) In 1960, Welch advised JBS members to: "Join your local P.T.A. at the beginning of the school year, get your conservative friends to do likewise, and go to work to take it over."[^^18]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-17) One Man's Opinion, a magazine launched by Welch in 1956, was renamed American Opinion, and became the society's official publication. The society publishes the journal The New American on a biweekly basis.[^^7]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-newamerican-6)
[edit] 1960s
By March 1961 the society had 60,000 to 100,000 members and, according to Welch, "a staff of 28 people in the Home Office; about 30 Coordinators (or Major Coordinators) in the field, who are fully paid as to salary and expenses; and about 100 Coordinators (or Section Leaders as they are called in some areas), who work on a volunteer basis as to all or part of their salary, or expenses, or both." According to Political Research Associates, a "progressive think tank devoted to supporting movements that are building a more just and inclusive democratic society",[^^19]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-18) the society "pioneered grassroots lobbying, combining educational meetings, petition drives and letter-writing campaigns. One early campaign against the second summit between the United States and the Soviet Union generated over 600,000 postcards and letters, according to the society. A June 1964 society campaign to oppose Xerox corporate sponsorship of TV programs favorable to the UN produced 51,279 letters from 12,785 individuals."[^^15]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-PublicEye-14)
Antisemitic, racist, anti-Mormon, anti-Masonic, and religious groups criticized the group's acceptance of Jews, non-whites, Masons, and Mormons (Ezra Taft Benson, a leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, encouraged people to join it). These groups accused Welch of harboring feminist, ecumenical, and evolutionary ideas.[^^20]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-19)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-20)21]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-20)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-21)22]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-21) Ayn Rand said in a *Playboy* interview that "What is wrong with them is that they don't seem to have any specific, clearly defined political philosophy... I consider the Birch Society futile, because they are not for Capitalism but merely against Communism."[^^23]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-22)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-23)24]
Society influence on U.S. politics hit its high point in the years around the failed 1964 presidential campaign of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who lost to incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson. Welch had supported Goldwater over Richard Nixon for the Republican nomination, but the membership split, with two-thirds supporting Goldwater and one-third supporting Nixon. A number of Birch members and their allies were Goldwater supporters in 1964[^^25]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-24) and some were delegates at the 1964 Republican National Convention. The Goldwater campaign brought together the nucleus of what later became known as the New Right.
In April 1966, a *New York Times* article on New Jersey and the society stated, in part, a concern for "the increasing tempo of radical right attacks on local government, libraries, school boards, parent-teacher associations, mental health programs, the Republican Party and, most recently, the ecumenical movement."[^^26]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#cite_note-25) It then characterized the society as, "by far the most successful and 'respectable' radical right organization in the country. It operates alone or in support of other extremist organizations whose major preoccupation, like that of the Birchers, is the internal Communist conspiracy in the United States."
the immortl jbs
John Birch was a Baptist American missionary in China and U.S. intelligence agent who was killed in China in 1945. Excerpted from the New York Times, Nation: Who Was John Birch August 14, 1961:
“He was always an angry young man, always a zealot,” says a classmate. “He felt he was called to defend the faith, and he alone knew what it was.”
In his senior year. Birch organized a secret “Fellowship Group” and set out to suppress a mildly liberal trend at Mercer. He and twelve colleagues collected examples of “heresy” uttered by faculty members…
“Birch is a good officer, but I’m afraid is too brash and may run into trouble.”
Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society chose Birch as the emblem of his organization because of his reckoning that Birch was the first casualty of the Cold War. Basically he identified Birch as one of the first cold warriors. The veracity of that claim is worth questioning and so too is examining the symbolism embodied by choosing John Birch.
The New York Times article on Birch is brief, more of a thumbnail sketch really, a glimpse of a man who seemed a born fanatic. Perhaps more telling though are John Birch’s own words written 4 months before his death. These are excerpts from his writing, published on the Birch Society website:
I should like to find the existence of what my father called “Plain living and high thinking.”
I want some fields and hills, woodlands and streams I can call my own. I want to spend my strength in making fields green, and the cattle fat, so that I may give sustenance to my loved ones, and aid to those neighbors who suffer misfortune
I want of government only protection against the violence and injustices of evil or selfish men.
Where can I find this world? Would its anachronism doom it to ridicule or loneliness? Is there yet a place for such simple ways in my own America or must I seek a vale in [Chinese] Turkestan where peaceful flocks still graze the quiet hills?
Judging by his last writing, it seems likely John Birch was a thoughtful, if unambitious, man. Maybe he mellowed in his latter twenties, but the writing above doesn’t square with the depictions of him as a zealot, although the circumstance of his death does. It also doesn’t really square with the political agenda of the society that bears his name.
The writing’s not about governments except for the simple plea that government should protect him, and presumably others, from injustices, evil and selfishness. What constitutes injustice, evil and selfishness though? According to Bircher’s actions if not their claims, the only source of injustice, evil and selfishness from which you need protection is socialism. Then what do we make of his passage “aid to those neighbors who suffer from misfortune”?
In 1968, at the tender age of 17, I was recruited by the John Birch Society. They enrolled me for a recruiting presentation in a store front in Tulsa, OK. I was ushered into a back room, alone. The lights went down and an old 16mm sound projector started up. A black and white 50’s newsreel style film began showing a compendium of actual newsreel footage of human atrocities in various places around the globe. A narrator expounded on how communists had been responsible, how the savagery on display showed that godless communism led men to commit godless acts of atrocity towards men who resisted communism.
In the middle of a scene showing a long row of severed heads on the side of the road in Iraq in 1950 something, it stuck me that these were not acts requisite of a socioeconomic theory, these were the acts of men. I got up and walked out, never to enter that fold again. Those are not my exact thoughts at the time, but rather fit the mind set I had at the time.
Savagery is just savagery, a property of men that we are just now, a minute or so ago in the frame of history, beginning to put behind us. Ideology condones savagery to any degree that its human advocates of that ideology condone it. True, the doctrinaire brutality of Soviet and Chinese communism is well documented, but the brutality of authoritarian governments at the opposite end of the political spectrum are well known too. Lost, in the epic battle between socialism and capitalism, was the merit of the socioeconomic arguments for or against either.
A full scale global conflict, WWII and Cold War, arose from what is simply a question of organizing principles of society and economics. This fact was lost because of indulgences of violence and fear mongering by both sides. The Birchers played a major part in promoting fear and misunderstanding in this country that stoked the Cold War with just the kind of propaganda they presented to me. Yes, we might need to have feared expansionist Stalinism, but there was never a need to fear socialism the socioeconomic theory, not unless you think that the apparently successful European Democratic Socialisms are actually well concealed hells on earth.
In the early sixties, William F. Buckley is said to have driven the Birchers from the temple of the GOP mainstream because of Bircher militancy, conspiracy mongering and bigotry. His final words on the subject are here. From his 5,000 word “excoriation of Welch”:
How can the John Birch Society be an effective political instrument while it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points . . . so far removed from common sense? That dilemma weighs on conservatives across America. . . . The underlying problem is whether conservatives can continue to acquiesce quietly in a rendition of the causes of the decline of the Republic and the entire Western world which is false, and, besides that, crucially different in practical emphasis from their own.
Buckley meant to clean up the growing image of the GOP as hysterical Red Baiters. Buckley’s thinking was that conservatives could actually make the case for capitalism vs. socialism with dispassionate logic. Through his efforts, what we knew as the mainstream of the GOP, until this last midterm election, were the moderate figures perhaps best personified in G.H.W. Bush and Bob Dole. It seems ironic that with Buckley’s passing three years ago, the entrée back into the mainstream for the Birchers was beginning to open. In 2010, the John Birch Society was a co-sponsor of CPAC, for the first time.
How, after 40 years in the wilderness, did the Birchers suddenly regain political traction? The answer lies in the desperation of the GOP post the 2006-08 losses of both Houses and the Presidency. The hardest of hard cores of the GOP has been the Birchers and sympathizers for all those 40 years that their conspiracy theory political diatribe was locked in the basement, out of sight of the GOP electioneering effort. As if by decree and because it would excite the base of bases, the Birchers were welcomed back into the fold.
The Bircher platform has morphed over the years to resemble something quite like what you hear from the ostensibly unconnected Tea Party. Evaluating the Bircher political playbook, then and now:
- Mad dog anti-communism has become the peril of large government.
- Inflammatory racial bigotry has become inflammatory anti-immigration bigotry.
- The perils of large government (communism) are now to be defeated with tax cuts to shrink government.
- Birchers now oppose free trade, not because of economics, but because of fears it might lead to one world government.
- The dreaded one word government under the U.N. has been supplanted by the one world government under the WTO or Islam or the Fed (take your pick).
- The communist infiltration of our government (50-70% according to Robert Welch) has now been softened to a challenge of government representative’s Americanism (Michele Bachman).
- Liberals are no longer communists, they’re now just liberals (now identical in the vernacular of the right).
- Libertarian thought has been appropriated to fight (communist) regulation.
- Constitutional strict constructionist views are just something that both the Birchers and the Tea Party have in common.
It’s like an immortal army that is struck down and keeps rising, their old paranoias refitted for a different political climate. Had Buckley life left in his body, he would call this what it is, a resurrection of a movement likely to destroy the GOP because of it’s strong identification as the real base of the GOP, a base that revolts the public when let out of the basement and allowed to be seen.
Both the Birchers and the Tea Party are minority movements. Both are funded by infamous conservative businessmen in addition to private contributions and, in the case of the Birchers, membership. Together you see their approximate numbers in the reliable polling base of 13-17% that back the most conservative opinion on issues. The question is, if there is no philosophical difference between the Birchers and the Tea Party and they share the same sources of business funding, then what’s the use in differentiating them by name? The only plausible reason is that the Birchers still have a reputation as whacked out bumper sticker loons while a new astroturf branding has yet to meet it’s William F. Buckley.
Fred Koch, founder and builder of Koch Industries, was a founder of the John Birch Society. His sons, David and Charles, can be traced to the founding of the Tea Party along with other funders of the John Birch Society like the Coors brothers and Coors Foundation. I grew up with these men, their kind, at their country clubs and dated their daughters and befriended their sons. But when I saw the storied film with which they recruited a hundred thousand of my schoolmates and contemporaries, it just didn’t ring true.
What rings true and always will is inclusive democracy. Whether democracy, in the voyage on which it has embarked, leads to communism or capitalism as a socioeconomic system is immaterial. Whether one or the other or some blend is in ascendency is immaterial. What’s important is that we all go their together in truths unassailed in that process by veiled agendas of rich men who fear the journey. Those rich cowards should have heeded the blunt reckoning of Thomas Jefferson, one that would likely have been upheld by Buckley, that being;
“I know of no safe depository for the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.”
Impossible? I think not and neither did Buckley. The irony for Bircher/Tea Party/GOP is that by ever resisting the natural evolution of democracy, they assure that the tension to fight them will always exist, immortal too.