Regarding the radicalization of the GOP: The John Birch Society

The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandists initiative. -- Joseph Goebbels

If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

CONTEXT

As some people here probably know I was banned from 9 right wing politics sites for speaking inconvenient truth in ~2015-2017 and one in Feb. 2023. Back in the days before the GOP radicalized, I used to have respectful, rational discussions with old-fashioned conservatives who still believed in democracy and that an inconvenient fact was still a fact, not a lie. I thought that ended in ~2005-2006. The old-fashioned conservatives seem to have just melted away. Maybe most were RINO hunted out and banned like me. Maybe some were scared into silence and/or radicalized somehow. I'm not sure what happened, but something did happen. The rise of the JBS makes a lot of sense. 

One observer commented that what I was referring to was the rise of the John Birch Society (JBS) in the GOP. The the JBS took over and hijacked Republican Party elites and leadership, with few Republicans having even a clue about what had happened. It's all the same agenda and talking points from a few very wealthy people. They took over the GOP to use as vehicle for their own authoritarian right wing extremism views. All the that the extremists had to do to pull it off was change their name to the Tea-party and start up a propaganda mill promoted as "think tank" to convince people they're right and a news channel to promote radical authoritarian JBS propaganda.

Joseph Coors and the Koch Brothers father were founders along with heir to Brach candy. Early financial supporters of JBS included Rupert Murdoch and Fred Trump.

The JBS scheme to take power is very clever and effective. Joseph Coors founds the Heritage Foundation to be propaganda mill for JBS agenda's under guise of being a "think tank." The intent was to influence public opinion to accept JBS agenda as truth. Murdoch's Faux News presented and promoted the propaganda as legit and praises Heritage Foundation as something people can trust. Republican politicians who says they supports JBS propaganda gets a campaign donation from the Koch brothers. Maybe the JBS/Tea Party figured they could influence a Presidential race and promote their own candidate. If so, there's the son of Fred Trump, Donald, the JBS could give a platform to and support. 

Eisenhower[1] and even Orwell warned of the dangers of the JBS fascist extremism. It's a political movement by the elites solely to serve the elites at the expense of democracy and the public interest generally. And here we are today with tens of millions of deceived people, arguably unreasonably gullible, helping them destroy democracy and civil liberties.

Vox wrote this in March, 2023:

The fringe group that broke the GOP’s brain — and helped the party win elections

As the historian Matthew Dallek documents in his new book, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the Far Right, the group would go on to grow from a small club of far-right businessmen into a sprawling, nationwide organization that claimed up to 100,000 members across hundreds of state and local chapters. Over time, the John Birch Society would leave its imprint on the Republican Party, pushing it to embrace more hardline positions on anti-communism, white supremacy, isolationism, and nativism.

But according to Dallek, who studies the history of American conservatism at George Washington University, the story of the Birchers’ role in the radicalization of the GOP is a bit more complicated.

“What I’ve tried to do is to draw not too straight a line from the 1950s to today, and to show — as historians try to do — that the radicalization of the GOP was contingent,” Dallek told me when I spoke with him recently. The Birchers’ ideas “were not really ripe in 1970 or [the] ’80s or ’90s, but they became ripe in the past 15 years. They were there for the taking, and as we know, people took them up and ran with them in very powerful ways.”

They didn’t like democracy, and they believed the only way to save the country was through a kind of shock education — through controlling the kinds of texts that kids and college students and other Americans were exposed to — and through direct action: setting up front groups and committees that could attack what they saw as the weak points in the communist line.  

On some issues, the fringe and the Republican establishment aligned, especially on culture war issues. But most of the time, the Birchers and their successors were very frustrated. They loathed Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and some Birchers even said that Ronald Reagan was never to be trusted. On immigration reform, on internationalism, on military interventions, on free trade agreements, on conspiracy theories, and on the degree of explicit racism versus more coded or implicit racism, there were significant fissures.

So even though the fringe was part of the Republican coalition — especially during campaigns — we don’t want to oversell their power historically. The MAGA phenomenon is a more recent development, and I try to explain how our contemporary far right essentially adopted the Birchers’ ideological legacy as an alternative political tradition and eventually took over the Republican Party.  

The Birchers had a slogan that said, “We’re a republic, not a democracy. Let’s keep it that way.” That meant different things to different people, but they were quite opposed to the idea of multiracial democracy. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent comments and tweets about getting a “national divorce” and eviscerating the federal government — that does hark back to this Bircher idea that, “Hey, we’re a republic.”  

So I think that liberals forgot about the far-right opponents of democracy and of civil rights and voting rights. They were a more powerful presence than a lot of people acknowledged for many, many years — but now they’re easier to see.

That puts the timeline for BJS influence taking hold in ~2008. That must have been the radicalization I experienced in what I thought happened in ~2005-2006. Maybe my recollection of the time is off and maybe it was more like 2008-2009. 

It now makes sense why Trump and the other radical right authoritarian elites constantly refer to Democrats and liberals as communist tyrants, and why they dislike and attack democracy. That rhetoric and belief reflects core JBS dogma. It is inherently anti-democracy and civil liberties and pro-plutocracy-autocracy-kleptocracy, probably also significantly pro-Christian theocracy.

Q: Is it a real conspiracy or a crackpot conspiracy theory to think that JBS dogma and its conspiratorial mindset has had, and still has, a significant influence in radicalizing the GOP and in attacking and damaging democracy and civil liberties?

Footnote: 

1. The Financial Times writes:

You do not have to agree with Dallek’s thesis to find his book worth reading. The John Birch Society was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, who having retired from his candy-making family business set about saving America from a red takeover. It was named after an American missionary, John Birch, who had been murdered by Chinese communists. Welch had the conspiratorial mindset of all such movement leaders. He thought Dwight Eisenhower, the then Republican president, was a communist agent, attributed the death of the alcoholic Joe McCarthy to foul play, and believed America was run by a cabal at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Intellectual consistency was never the Birchers’ hallmark. Their glue was belief in the hidden hand of plots, cabals and conspiracies against America. Birchers reviled John F Kennedy as another avatar of anti-American “one-worldism”. After JFK was killed in 1963, however, they saw the Warren-appointed inquiry as a cover-up for an alleged communist assassination. 

As is often the case, Welch combined an almost infinitely childish imagination with a ferocious organizing zeal. Bircher chapters were limited to 20 members apiece to ensure secrecy. Meetings were usually held in private homes. In that sense, Welch aped Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik methods. 

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Much of the Birchers’ story is instantly recognizable today. Welch urged members to build from the ground up by taking over school boards. One rallying cry was to give parents the right to veto immoral teaching, including sex education. Parents in Florida, whose governor, Ron DeSantis, has passed the “Don’t Say Gay” law that potentially criminalizes teachers, would find this familiar. Another goal was to abolish civilian oversight of police forces.