General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Exactly 40 years ago a wise man saw the future. People did not listen... [View all]bucolic_frolic
(43,128 posts)an assembed confluence by 1968. Once they lost with Goldwater, they combined with the newly emerging Religious Right. I'd be many trace to the 1950s John Birch Society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society
Values
The organization supports limited government and opposes wealth redistribution and economic interventionism. It opposes collectivism, totalitarianism, anarchism and communism. It opposes socialism as well, which it asserts is infiltrating U.S. governmental administration. In a 1983 edition of the political-debate television program Crossfire, Congressman Larry McDonald (a conservative Democrat from Georgia), then the society's newly appointed president, characterized it as belonging to the Old Right rather than the New Right.[17]
The society opposed the 1960s civil rights movement and claimed the movement had Communists in important positions. In the latter half of 1965, the JBS produced a flyer titled "What's Wrong With Civil Rights?" and used the flyer as a newspaper advertisement.[18][19] In the piece, one of the answers was: "For the civil rights movement in the United States, with all of its growing agitation and riots and bitterness, and insidious steps towards the appearance of a civil war, has not been infiltrated by the Communists, as you now frequently hear. It has been deliberately and almost wholly created by the Communists patiently building up to this present stage for more than forty years."[20] The society opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, claiming it violated the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and overstepped individual states' rights to enact laws regarding civil rights. The John Birch Society, along with other conservative groups such as the Eagle Forum and the Christian right, successfully opposed the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.[21][22] Like other extreme-right organizations, JBS accused the ERA's supporters of subversion, asserting that the ERA was part of a "Communist" plot "to reduce human beings to living at the same level as animals."[22] The society opposes "one world government", and it has an immigration reduction view on immigration reform. It opposes the United Nations, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and other free trade agreements. It argues the U.S. Constitution has been devalued in favor of political and economic globalization, and that this alleged trend is not accidental. It cited the existence of the former Security and Prosperity Partnership as evidence of a push towards a North American Union.[23]