The John Birchers’ Tea Party

[struggle4progress]

October 11, 2013
Posted by Adam Gopnik

... what I find startling, and even surprising, is how absolutely consistent and unchanged the ideology of the extreme American right has been over the past fifty years ... The real analogue to today’s unhinged right wing in America is yesterday’s unhinged right wing in America ...

Reading through the literature on the hysterias of 1963, the continuity of beliefs is plain: Now, as then, there is said to be a conspiracy in the highest places to end American Constitutional rule and replace it with a Marxist dictatorship, evidenced by a plan in which your family doctor will be replaced by a federal bureaucrat—mostly for unnamable purposes, but somehow involving the gleeful killing off of the aged ...

Medicare then, as Obamacare now, was the key evil. An editorial in the Morning News announced that “JFK’s support of Medicare sounds suspiciously similar to a pro-Medicare editorial that appeared in the Worker—the official publication of the U.S. Communist Party.” At the same time, Minutaglio and Davis write, “on the radio, H.L. Hunt (the Dallas millionaire) filled the airwaves with dozens of attacks on Medicare, claiming that it would create government death panels: The plan provides a near little package of sweeping dictatorial power over medicine and the healing arts—a package which would literally make the President of the United States a medical czar with potential life or death power over every man woman and child in the country.” Stanley Marcus, the owner of the department store Neiman Marcus, heard from angry customers who were cancelling their Neiman Marcus charge cards because of his public support for the United Nations ...

... The common core belief, then and now, is actually descended from “Huck Finn” ’s unforgettable Pappy and his views on the “guv’mint”: the federal government exists to take money from hard-working white people and give it to lazy black people, and the President is helping to make this happen ...

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/10/the-john-birchers-tea-party.html

[struggle4progress]

1. Bringing Back Birch (SPLC)

Intelligence Report
Spring 2013
Issue Number: 149
Don Terry

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — In a hotel near the outer limits of California’s capital, just down the hall from the pain management conference and the baseball card show, three banquet tables along the back wall of the Cherrywood Room are covered with dozens of books, magazines and DVDs expressing the rightist of right-wing views of the world.

There’s Call of Duty, a paperback about the “sterling nobility” of Robert E. Lee and his lost cause. There’s Exposing Terrorism, a treatise declaring that Islamic terrorists are actually old-school, Moscow-directed Marxists in Muslim masks. On the next table is a volume titled Just Say No to Big Brother’s Smart Meters: The Latest in Bio-Hazard Technology.

There’s a pamphlet on homeschooling, instructions for “saving freedom,” a DVD about the horrors of “ObamaCare,” and several pamphlets, DVDs and books detailing the evils of the United Nations and its sinister scheme to create a New World Order through Agenda 21, a nonbinding U.N. resolution designed to encourage nations to pursue “sustainable’’ green growth and land use development efforts.

After more than five decades of secret socialist plots and accusations of treason at the highest levels of American government — these are the people who once called President Dwight Eisenhower a communist — the arch-conservative John Birch Society is still waging its Cold War-era crusade against the Red menace and American “insiders” who, in the society’s view, are hell-bent on handing the country over to the socialists at the U.N. ...

http://www.splcenter.org/home/2012/spring/bringing-back-birch

[Zorro]

2. The Koch brothers' daddy was a founding member of the John Birch Society

What a coincidence.

[wilt the stilt]

4. the younger ones know that the name is toxic

so now they are libertarians. LOL

[BlueMTexpat]

3. Excellent article!

Thanks for posting!