Long before QAnon, Ronald Reagan and the GOP purged John Birch extremists from the party
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Devlin Barrett
@DevlinBarrett
Please read this: Long before QAnon conspiracies, there was the John Birch Society. Such BS has always been with us, what's different now is serious people with serious jobs embrace, amplify, and condone it.
Long before QAnon, Ronald Reagan and the GOP purged John Birch extremists from the party
Six decades ago, Reagan, Sen. Barry Goldwater, conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. and others in the GOP backed away from the conspiracy theories peddled by the leader of the increasingly...
washingtonpost.com
12:46 PM · Jan 15, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/01/15/john-birch-society-qanon-reagan-republicans-goldwater/
In 1962, some of America’s most influential conservatives met to talk about a growing threat: the rise of paranoid conspiracy theories on the right.
Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) was thinking about running for president. A mutual friend set up a meeting for Goldwater with William F. Buckley Jr., editor of the conservative National Review, and Russell Kirk, author of the 1953 book “The Conservative Mind.”
In a hotel suite in Palm Beach, Fla., Buckley and Kirk found themselves giving Goldwater advice about how to respond to the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society’s surge in popularity. The society, founded in 1958, was fiercely anti-communist — and fond of crackpot theories. Its founder, candy manufacturer Robert Welch, had accused most of the U.S. government — including former Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower — of being under secret communist control.
Although Welch had been an early donor to Buckley’s National Review in the 1950s, Buckley had come to believe that Welch’s feverish rants threatened the conservative movement’s credibility and its future.
“Buckley was beginning to worry that with the John Birch Society growing so rapidly, the right-wing upsurge in the country would take an ugly, even Fascist turn,” John B. Judis wrote in his 1988 biography, “William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives.” Buckley told Goldwater, according to Judis, that the John Birch Society was a “menace” to the conservative movement.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
wrote the book "Wrapped In The Flag," about the secret society and the radical right 8 years ago.
- "Author Sees Parallels Between Tea Party, John Birch Society," Conserv. Group Active 1960s, Minn. Public Radio. 2013.
Before the Tea Party movement took center stage in U.S. politics, there was another conservative-leaning group who in the mid-20th Century championed shrinking the size of federal government, end social programs like Social Security and other causes.
The John Birch Society was an ultra-conservative group that worked in the 1960s to advance their goals, which also included privatizing public utilities and safeguarding against a perceived Communist invasion. An author of new book, who has a unique personal perspective on the movement, said she sees clear parallels between both groups and their agendas -- now and then.
Claire Conner is the daughter of two of the society’s founding members and author of “Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America’s Radical Right,” and said she thinks today’s Tea Party shares many similarities to the group that she eventually came to reject. As an example, she points to the legislative gridlock going on between the Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives and the Democratic-controlled Senate...
https://www.wpr.org/author-sees-parallels-between-tea-party-john-birch-society
