“[The John Birch Society], then, bestowed to subsequent generations a fraught legacy—a politics of the street, where armed militias, QAnon adherents, white supremacists, and their leaders lived in the spirit of what Abraham Lincoln once warned against. ”

Birchers
Matthew Dallek
#birchers #dallek #rightwing #extremism

“Constitutionalists were entitled to rule, and either they were going to work within the system to achieve their vision of “constitutional government,” or, if the ballot failed them, they were going to take up arms. By 1974, some members identified violence as the only solution to the ills plaguing the United States.

Birchers
Matthew Dallek

#Birchers #dallek #bookstodon #extremism #rightwing #history #pastisprologue

“One American Party official, an insurance salesman from Arizona, described the party under Schmitz as “a distillation of the John Birch Society, the Christian Crusade and the Minutemen. We’re revolutionaries. We’re getting together to try to work through the system. But I’ll say this. We’ll have constitutional government in this country and if we don’t get it through the ballot box, we’ll get it in the streets.” ..

#Birchers #dallek #bookstodon #extremism #rightwing #history

Presidential election 1972: “When [John Birch Society candidate John] Schmitz lost, a telling message surfaced among his allies, a note of defiance rooted in their contempt for democracy: if voters refused to return the nation to its rightful owners, then Birchers and their allies would take it back by force… #Birchers #dallek #bookstodon #extremism #rightwing #history

@joescarborough @morningjoe kinda romanticizes the not so distant past & America’s dalliance with conspiracy & extremism. I point you and your producers to historian Matthew Dallek’s book on the John Birch Society, “Birchers”
“The Birchers were breeding a sprawling movement, opening a Pandora’s box to a more militant, disruptive far right….
#birchers #dallek #extremism #rightwing #morningjoe #bookstodon

“If liberals were to build the world they wanted—a world where pluralism trumped hate, science trounced unreason, and democracy conquered fascism—they had to fight harder.”

#Birchers #Dallek #rightwing #rightWingExtremism #History #bookstodon #pastisprologue

“The center had held firm. Yet they were hardly content to drop their vigilance. Birchers had gained power within the Republican Party. They had come within striking distance of the Oval Office. Even if the far right was ultimately doomed, Birchers still posed a grave threat. They had eroded the capacity of the nation’s democracy to tolerate dissent and find common solutions based on a set of widely accepted facts. ..
#Birchers #dallek #americanHistory #extremism #rightwing #Bookstodon

“The fact is clear, you can’t talk with a Bircher,” [..] The typical Bircher “is so aggressive in defense of the card he carries that he seems to lose sight of country and human dignity. So the best way to beat him is at the polls. Every time he raises his paranoid head, we will be there after him. Sometimes we will win, sometimes we will lose. But, he will know that we are watching.” #birchers #dallek #bookstodon #rightwing #extremism #Republicans #history #pastisprologue

“[The John Birch Society was] neither an export from Nazi Germany nor out of step with America’s political traditions. The sentiments that undergirded the movement—a defense of white rights, the use of government to enforce Christian tenets and morality in public spaces, the veneration of inviolate freedom for the individual to do as he wished economically, free from government intervention—had deep roots in the nation’s historical development.…
#birchers #dallek #extremism #rightwing

“A Goldwater television spot opened with gangs of hooligans punching each other as a voice-over narrated, “Immorality surrounds us as never before.” Most Birchers agreed with that premise. “
#Birchers #dallek #rightwing #phonies #extremism #propaganda #conservatism

https://danratherjournalist.org/political-analyst/election-coverage/1964-election/compilation-1964-general-election-materials/video

Wow, whack jobs: “In response to a query from a member in North Carolina, for example, the [John Birch Society] research department in Belmont explained that Franklin Roosevelt, rather than Japan, had “triggered the attack upon Pearl Harbor.”

Birchers
Matthew Dallek
#birchers #dallek #bookstodon #history #extremism #rightwing #americanHistory #conservatism #pastisprologue

“… By welcoming them into the fold both before and after National Review’s supposed break with the society, Buckley and his magazine continued to benefit from Birchers’ political activism, funding, and engagement.”

Birchers
Matthew Dallek
#Birchers #Dallek @nationalreview #rightwing

Where have we heard this before, “very fine people”:
“In January 1962 Buckley and Goldwater agreed during a meeting at the Breakers in Palm Beach to visibly divorce themselves and the conservative movement from the Birch Society’s wildest conspiracy theories by casting Welch as the crackpot his critics had alleged while at the same time defending Birch members, whom Goldwater called “nice people.”

Birchers
Matthew Dallek
#birchers #dallek #extremism #rightwing #pastisprologue

The society had “harass[ed] local school boards, local libraries, and local government bodies,” and now was the time for the White House to return fire. Feldman recommended federal investigations into whether right-wing nonprofit groups were “using tax-exempt funds for political purposes.”

Excerpt From
Birchers
Matthew Dallek
#birchers #dallek #bookstodon #history #rightwing

“To stop the GOP in 1964, Feldman urged the president to turn the far right into the Republican Party’s albatross. In 1961 Kennedy had successfully framed the debate as a fight between unhinged extremists and pragmatic, hardheaded liberals, and now Feldman wanted him to take the next step and use the levers of federal power to investigate, hound, and discredit the Birchers…
#Birchers #rightwing #extremism #dallek

President Kennedy on John Birch Society—right wing extremism 1961, “the basic good sense and stability of the great American consensus has always prevailed” over “the discordant voices of extremism.”

Birchers
Matthew Dallek
#Birchers #Dallek #bookstodon #extremism #jfk #rightwing

Did not know this—and we think we know everything about JFK / Oswald .

John Bircher, extremist, General John Walker :

Seven months before John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, according to the Warren Commission, Lee Harvey Oswald tried to assassinate Walker, firing a single shot into his Dallas home that came within about an inch of Walker’s head.

See https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-man-oswald-first-tried-to-kill-before-jfk
#Birchers #Dallek #bookstodon

‘Political scientist Alan Westin warned in Commentary that Birchers represented “the most appealing, activist, and efficient movement to appear on the extreme right since the fertile decade of the 1930’s.” He wrote that they threatened opponents, used baseless conspiracy theories to weaken faith in the country’s leadership and major government and educational institutions, and sought to return to a nonexistent halcyon past.’

#Birchers #dallek

Sounds like today’s Republican Party.

Instead, the goal was to gin up conservatives who disliked Warren’s rulings and to mobilize the far right in opposition to a hated liberal foe. Welch gloated that although Birch campaigns often failed, “none of them have left the enemy laughing by the time we finished.”

Birchers
Matthew Dallek
#birchers #dallek #bookstodon #rightwing #extremism

"“Based on [Robert] Welch’s remarks, [..] the [Bircher] movement was probably going to “take action outside of the law” and attract “extreme radicals.” Welch’s demonization of opponents and intimations of violence echoed “the appeal made by Adolph [sic] Hitler to the German people” in the 1930s. .."

Birchers
Matthew Dallek

#Birchers #dallek #extremism #rightwing

** wait. this feels so ~ familiar ~ I know these people.. think. think.. hmmm.