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Robert Welch & The John Birch Society

ramonmercado

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The John Birch Society was lacking it's own Thread, though it does crop up here and there on the Forums, so it now has one. The biography of it's founder and the broader conspiracy movement is discussed in this review/essay.

A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism
EDWARD H. MILLER


April 6, 2022 • Reviewed By Paul Matzko

IT IS TEMPTING to believe that we live in uniquely unhinged times, when it’s possible that the founder of a Japanese pornography website and his son can start a mass religiopolitical movement — QAnon — organized around the belief that global elites are trafficking children and drinking their blood. But historian Edward H. Miller’s new book, A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism, is a reminder that outlandish conspiracism has a long history on the right.

The mid-20th-century United States was a place where Robert W. Welch Jr., a bankrupted candy manufacturer and inventor of the Sugar Daddy lollipop, could found a national organization that would leave a conspiratorial imprint on modern conservatism — planting the seeds for today’s fever dreams.

The John Birch Society was named for an American missionary and intelligence officer who was murdered in China in 1945. For Welch, John Birch was the “first casualty of the Cold War,” a martyr whose life and death would inspire Americans to fight the spread of communism at home and abroad. And while Welch had rejected the Baptist religion of his youth, he would find Birch’s faith-based story useful when building support among white ethnic Catholics and evangelical Protestants.

In the early 1950s, Welch ran for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, which he lost. He backed Senators Robert A. Taft and Joseph McCarthy, only to watch both be sidelined in national politics and die before the decade was out. Instead, the Republican Party nominated General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom Welch believed did too little to repeal the New Deal at home while conceding too much to communists abroad.

Welch began traveling the country, giving policy-dense lectures to anybody who would listen, and started a newsletter that would become the American Opinion. In 1958, he founded the John Birch Society with the help of an assortment of Midwestern businessmen. Society membership peaked by 1966 at about 30,000, organized into chapters of no more than 24 members. Although small, the organization claimed influential conservative activists, including industrialist Fred C. Koch, antifeminist campaigner Phyllis Schlafly, broadcaster Clarence Manion, and Left Behind novelist Tim LaHaye.

Welch alienated many allies. He linked every item in the news to Kremlin-backed plots. Thus, it was the Eisenhower administration that had downed the U-2 spy plane in 1960 to provide pretext for a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union; communist sympathizers in the Kennedy administration who had designed the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion to fail, to help Fidel Castro root out the opposition; and the communists who had carried out false-flag assassinations of Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Welch’s conspiracism was tolerated in right-wing circles until he accused President Eisenhower of being not just a useful idiot but a willing agent of the Soviets. That was a bridge too far, and conservatives like William F. Buckley Jr. distanced themselves from Welch, thus saving the New Right from the taint of conspiratorial extremism — or at least, that is what they told themselves; it has become part of the mythology surrounding Buckley’s National Review that it saved conservatism from the toy department.

Miller debunks this “ostracization thesis,” arguing that the idea that Welch was partitioned off from “a ‘responsible right’ was a delusion itself.” This is too strong. The break caused a short-term rupture among subscribers and donors for both the John Birch Society and the National Review. Buckley’s action had real negative consequences for Welch, but Miller is correct to note that the ostracization thesis was also an act of wish fulfillment.

The first generation of historians of the New Right, like George H. Nash, mostly omitted the likes of Welch from their accounts; but, as Miller argues, the John Birch Society is not a “story of rise, fall, and impotence” but “survival, growth, and significance.” Welch’s ideas might no longer have been welcomed in the pages of National Review after 1959, but his organization continued to grow numerically and financially, exerting influence on the far-right flank of conservative politics for a quarter of a century after his falling out with Buckley.

And Welch’s paranoid style persisted after his death in 1985. After the breakup of the Soviet Union seemingly left the society in want of a reason to exist, it shifted focus from a “vast Communist conspiracy” to something more familiar today: the suspicion that a shadowy group of “globalists” or “internationalists” were tugging the strings of billionaires and political elites with the ultimate goal of creating a world government. ...

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/sugar-daddy-of-the-right/
 
An essay which discusses recent conspiracy Theory books including the one about Welch.

A crop of new books attempts to explain the allure of conspiracy theories and the power of belief.
By Trevor Quirk

For the millions who were enraged, disgusted, and shocked by the Capitol riots of January 6, the enduring object of skepticism has been not so much the lie that provoked the riots but the believers themselves. A year out, and book publishers confirmed this, releasing titles that addressed the question still addling public consciousness: How can people believe this shit? A minority of rioters at the Capitol had nefarious intentions rooted in authentic ideology, but most of them conveyed no purpose other than to announce to the world that they believed — specifically, that the 2020 election was hijacked through an international conspiracy — and that nothing could sway their confidence. This belief possessed them, not the other way around.

At first, I’d found the riots both terrifying and darkly hilarious, but those sentiments were soon overwon by a strange exasperation that has persisted ever since. It’s a feeling that has robbed me of my capacity to laugh at conspiracy theories — QAnon, chemtrails, lizardmen, whatever — and the people who espouse them. My exasperation is for lack of an explanation. I see Trump’s most devoted hellion, rampaging down the halls of power like a grade schooler after the bell, and I need to know the hidden causes of his dopey rebellion. To account for our new menagerie of conspiracy theories, I told myself, would be to reclaim the world from entropy, to snap experience neatly to the grid once again. I would use recent books as the basis for my account of conspiracy theories in the age of the internet. From their pages I would extract insights and errors like newspaper clippings, pin the marginal, bizarre, and seemingly irrelevant details to the corkboard of my mind, where I could spy eerie resonances, draw unseen connections. At last, I could reveal that our epistemic bedlam is as a Twombly canvas — messy but decipherable.

The punishment for my delusion was reading the entirety of The New Heretics by Andy Thomas. The latest project of one of the UK’s alleged “leading researchers into unexplained mysteries and conspiracies,” the book purports to “foster understanding of why questioners [conspiracy theorists] feel the way they do” while pandering to those whom Thomas also calls “truthers” or “heretics.” It is impossible to tell whether Thomas is aware of this duplicity, because The New Heretics is as coherent as a radio with a busted tuner, cycling between ungrammatical static, marbleless rambling, scientific illiteracy, and — if you listen closely — multiple references to Dictionary.com. ...
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https://www.guernicamag.com/out-there/
 
Thanks for this. My dad and grandpa argued all the time about the John Birch Society. My dad thought they were crazy and my grandpa had all the published materials. When my dad bought Grandpa's pickup he found 2 bushel baskets of John Birch materials behind the seat. My grandpa's last laugh. I think my dad kept the baskets and binned the pamphlets and newsletters. I had no idea what it was all about.
 
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