Episode 15 - The John Birch Society

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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Would you agree that to of course much much much much much a lesser extent? We are currently seeing a uh a certain type of repositioning. I'm alluding obviously here to something we've covered in one of our previous episodes where the future of at least the digital right uh no longer identifies with the pitch that, for example, the likes of uh Daily Wire or Ben Shapiro are trying to introduce. Where again they're taking particular pieces from the Ben Shapiro Ite rhetoric, not scrapping him completely, but then putting him in the dustbin of history because he's no longer, again, in a similar way, like the Bird Society was, no longer palatable for the for the current moment, quote unquote.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

Well, I mean, I can absolutely give you, and maybe we'll see you guys can review how valuable you think this is, because I'm coming up with it right now off the top of my ass.

SPEAKER_04 0:55

But how are we all, brother? Ha!

SPEAKER_02 0:57

I know I do believe that what's happening now is that there was a kind of like Trumpian alliance where the the neoconservatives were subordinated but still part of the coalition. And the events of October 7th and the subsequent Israeli genocide, and now the expansion of wars throughout the Middle East, that's representing a final rupture point where the the paleo, what I'm gonna talk about later, which is the paleoconservative thought, which is fundamentally the core of Donald Trump's America first and why he was able to win, he was displacing that Bush neoconservative era. It was returning more back to the grassroots of what American conservatism, like their grassroots supporters, believe, which is represented by Birch Thought, right? And so I think Ben Shapiro represents the kind of like status quo neoconservative right, specifically Zionist. There was a term that we heard a lot on the on the conservative right, which is Judeo-Christian values, which was a a way of that was the like watchword of the fusionist right, the anti-Bircher right, which was an integration of Jewishness into the Western tradition. Right? It was rejecting Nazism, which was saying that Judy, the Jewish people were the other, they were the stranger, they were the enemy within, and saying, actually, Judaism is the root of Christianity. And we are all, you know, it was an ecumenical eclomenical, I can't say the word. Ecumenical, yeah. Yeah, it was a way of like expressing a certain type of liberalism, of uh, of tolerance, of diversity, and that was necessary to administer the empire, right? As well as alliance with Zionism. I don't know if I'm rambling here, but I'm but I'm trying to, I'm gonna bring it home, I swear. Which is now we have this rupture. October 7th, and even more importantly, opportunity. Right. Well, opportunity for the, you know, what we're seeing now, which is the American Empire is at a critical point where Israel, which had long served as a convenient cat's paw, is now causing significant damage. And the war on terror are causing significant damage to conservatism in America, and people are rejecting that element of empire. And so Israel's crimes are giving the birchers the ability to otherise Zionism and therefore as well as introduce anti-Semitism, right? They're pushing out the Ben Shapiro's, the neocon, the imperial right to reassert themselves as the ideology of the grassroots. And that's, you know, that's what I think when you look at someone like Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson as the more palatable mainstream version of the same kind of thing, obviously that is a continuity. And I think Donald Trump represented an attempt to keep everybody on the same team, but now that kind of like neocon right is finally being you know exposed as too much of a political detriment. And they are reasserting that kind of old right mentality of destroy the new deal, destroy racial segregation, destroy tolerance of Jewishness, and reassert anti-Semitism, hate, isolationism, bigotry, white Anglo-Saxon prodatism, as the uh, you know, maybe tolerate some trad caths, and that is how the right is evolving based on the material conditions that have changed.

SPEAKER_03 4:30

To quote uh Matthew Dallock, the historian we we've been quoting a little bit at this point, quote, the GOP establishment's effort to court this fringe and keep it in the coalition allowed it to gain a foothold and eventually cannibalize the entire party. Over time, this uneasy alliance came to seem commonplace, part of the Zeitgeist, more and more alarming, yet no longer shocking.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

What I'm going to discuss today is going to be very controversial. With so much focus being placed on the color of one's skin, people have become very ignorant as to what happened during the so-called civil rights movement. During the 60s and 70s, the John Burt Society had many black members who toured the country, exposing just what was going on. Unfortunately, much of this history has been lost over the years, along with the exposing of certain individuals. Julia Brown was an undercover agent for the FBI, and she related what she had learned while serving in that task. She attended communist schools and meetings where she was told that only Communist Party members were in attendance, and King was there. She also testified that the party members were always told to look to King for leadership in the civil rights movement.

SPEAKER_04 6:00

Without the obsessive driving force of his conspiratorial imagination, the organization simply could not replicate itself. Membership and influence declined rapidly through the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties as the Cold War itself was evaporating. The communist threat that had given the JBS its entire reason for being, the great organizing fear that made everything else make sense, was dissolving in front of their eyes. So they pivoted. The language shifted from communist conspiracy to globalist conspiracy, from the Kremlin to the New World Order, from the Soviet infiltration of American institutions to what they now call the deep state. The JBS website today promises to prevent the deep state with its Marxist and globalist ideology from poisoning and ultimately destroying America. By the early 2000s, the organization was a shell. It had lost its cultural moment, its founder, its primary enemy, and most of its members. It retreated to Wisconsin, kept publishing its magazine, kept running the website, kept insisting that the globalists were winning, but nobody was really listening. Or were they? This is why this story is fascinating. The John Birch Society as an organization failed. But the John Birch Society as an intellectual tradition, as a set of political instincts, rhetorical strategies and frameworks did not fail at all. It mutated, migrated, and multiplied into forms that proved far more durable and politically effective than the original. Consider the transmission belts. Phyllis Schlefi, who built the Eagle Forum and almost single-handedly killed the Equal Rights Amendment, was a Birch member and close friend of Robert Welch. Jerry Falvel's moral majority at and Pat Robertson's Christian coalition drew heavily from the Birch movement's people, its ideas and its organizing techniques. These successor organizations were smarter politically, less nakedly conspiratorial and public, more willing to build coalitions better at the media. The JBS basically crawled before they and many other much more influential right wing institutions could walk and even run. The way the Tea Party ran. It emerged in 2008 with birch overtones that were almost impossible to miss for anyone who had studied the original movement. The same anti-government shit, the same obsession with the Constitution, some sort of sacred text being deliberately violated, the same conviction that Barack Obama was an agent of alien ideological forces working to destroy America from within. And then of course, Trump. To continue quoting Matthew Dalek, quote, more than most hard line gold more than the most hardline Goldwater, Nixon, or Reagan Republicans, the Birch Society bequeathed to subsequent generations an extreme anti-government zeal and rhetorically violent appeal that remains part and parcel of Donald Trump's MAGA movement. End quote. Alex Jones himself, who is in many ways the media figure who most completely embodies the Bercher tradition for the 21st century, called Trump literally the John Birch society president. Look at the policy positions, for fuck's sakes. The JBS spent decades demanding American withdrawal from the United Nations and other institutions from what they called the one world institutions of global governance. Those positions were laughed out of mainstream conservatism for 40 years. Today they are basically official Republican Party instincts, if not always official party policy. The attack on the Federal Reserve, JBS doctrine for decades, adopted wholesale by the Ron Paul movement, then absorbed into the broader populist right. Anti-vaccination rhetoric is direct genealogical links to the Bercher tradition of government as poison, and so on and so on and so on. More on that from Mike as he explores the foundation's heritage in the modern right ecosystem.

SPEAKER_02 10:45

I mean, they did withdraw from the World Health Organization as well, like the American government. Like this stuff is still actively happening.

SPEAKER_03 10:52

Yeah. Stop doing USAID, all those things, yeah. Yeah, USAID, the Imperial.

SPEAKER_02 10:56

Well, they focused not on the, you know, they didn't focus on destroy the imperial parts and the and the they moved that stuff to the CIA. Yeah, yeah. No, they defunded the AIDS medicine, the food aid, the you know, developmental programs, the soft power. Exactly. Yeah, the the the thing that's like the goods part.

SPEAKER_04 11:15

So I just wanted to leave you with this. When they say you can kill the man, not the idea, it doesn't only apply to freedom fighters, forward thinkers, and the enlightened of this or that form. It also applies to the fascist, to hate and to division. To talk about the decline of the John Byrd society is to miss the entirety of the fucking point. If they were just in it for the short-term financial gain and aesthetic power for the sake of it, then sure. Then sure, they ended up dying after being backshanked Caesar style by their fellow right-wing agitators of the era. But their vision of the world, that filthy modern reactionary darkness flowed into the sewer system, which is the modern right. And the rats gorged themselves on the corpse of the John Burch Society, spawning so much of the horror we talk about here regularly. So please, Mike, it is time to go to the zoo. Take it away.

SPEAKER_02 12:21

When Buckley excommunicated the Birchers, he pushed their views to the margins, but they continued to fester deep within American conservatism, especially in the southern reaches, where segregationist politics had long held sway. During the 1980s and 90s, the now dormant form of Bercher politics began to re-emerge. Paul Gottfried, a former professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College, coined the term paleoconservative in 1986. Gottfried defined paleoconservatives as conservatives who had opposed the Vietnam War. He considered that the true fault line that had induced Buckley to excommunicate the Birchers in the neoconservative, pro-interventionist national review. Overall, paleoconservatism emphasized nationalism, immigration restriction, economic protectionism, skepticism toward foreign intervention, and defense of a traditional Christian social order. As we discussed earlier, all of these elements were in conflict with one uh pillar of the conservative fusionism of the Buckleyite conservative Republican Party. You know, they they were opposed to libertarians in the form of immigration restriction. They were opposed to the anti-communists because they were against foreign interventionism. And of course, traditionalism that was very strictly defined and exclusionary of even other forms of Christianity or Judaism, and so therefore was unacceptable to the Republican mainstream. The movement drew inspiration from the old right that had existed before the Cold War and before the New Deal. That old right had fought tooth and nail against the implementation of FDR's programs that had existed before the Cold War. Hap Buchanan became the most important political representative of this tendency. One of his most controversial remarks came in 1990 when he referred to Capitol Hill as Israeli occupied territory during debates over US Middle East policy. He was kind of the mainstream provocative political uh purveyor of those kind that kind of rhetoric that we now know of like populist right stuff or yeah, exactly. Populist right and and you know stu you know, specifically, and this is where he diverged strictly from the Republican Party, he was anti-Israel. And that position is what kind of I think was a key hit, you know, pain point for the integration of Pat Buchanan into the Republican Party during the you know very height of the end of the Cold War. You can see why there's been so much growth in the world view espoused by the birchers. What used to generate controversy is now heard in every single comment section discussing Israel's lobby organizations and its influence over American politics. I think if a right winger said Israeli occupied government, while it may cause some complaints, it certainly wouldn't cause a national news cycle like it would have back in the 90s.

SPEAKER_03 15:37

Yeah. To be fair though, like nowadays, of course, it's a little bit more confused because uh you have legitimate concerns, of course, with Israel uh being fronted by actual major like politicians and major figures in the media. Whereas, you know, back then when the birchers were saying this shit, they meant like, no, actually it's like controlled by like the Jewish people who descend from the Frankists and the Freemasons, you know?

SPEAKER_02 15:58

And and well, exactly. And I think this is why I think there is such an important like opportunity for the Burgers, right? They have this historical event while Israel's popular support is cratering, especially among young people, so it can represent a generational opportunity to reassert themselves as the political mainstream. And, you know, Buchanan, when he first emerged on the scene, he had two presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996 that challenged the Republican establishment of George H.W. Bush from the right. He built that political identity around the argument that post-war American elites had betrayed the country's historic character. He was attacking free trade agreements, mass immigration, multiculturalism, and as I said before, interventionist foreign policy. And he frequently framed that political conflict in the terms of struggle between ordinary Americans and a ruling class composed of corporate executives, media institutions, academics, and political elites. Now it's very important that he is almost one of the original purveyors of the concept of the coastal elites, and that is the way in which he framed his arguments. At the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, Buchanan delivered what became known as the culture war speech. He declared there is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. He argued that the political conflict surrounding abortion, feminism, gay rights, and cultural values was as important as the Cold War had been. He praised President George H. W. Bush and framed the election in 1992 as a struggle between traditional America and a liberal cultural revolution.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

Like many of you, last month I watched that giant masquerade ball up at Madison Square Garden. Where 20,000 liberals and radicals came dressed up as moderates and centrists in the greatest single exhibition of promise dressing in American political history. Where do they find these leaders? No way, my friends. The American people are not gonna go back to the discredited liberalism of the nineteen sixties and the failed liberalism of the nineteen seventies, no matter how slick the package in nineteen ninety-two. They were great years. You know it, and I know it, and everyone knows it except for the carping critics who sat on the sidelines of history jeering at one of the great statesmen of modern time, Ronald Reagan.

SPEAKER_03 20:18

Imagine if like the American liberals were doing like Chinese cultural revolution type shit. Like what would that look like?

SPEAKER_02 20:27

He basically calls Democrats trans. He's like, they're they're dressing, they're they're radicals that are track cross-dressing as moderates. It's in the middle of a convention speech.

SPEAKER_03 20:39

It's it's actually like politically trans? Like that's crazy. Yeah, that's wild. Politically trans, yeah. Oh yeah. Okay, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:47

Which which obviously it's a fucked up thing to say, yeah. Like his speeches are nutty. I mean, they're now now they're they would be considered almost normal because we're so used to Donald Trump, but back then it was Trumpian. Like, if you go back and look, you can see the the tradition of Trump emerge organically from Buchanan, as I will continue to explain, because the framework of his failed campaigns were America first, ultranationalism, immigration restriction, economic protectionism, strong opposition to foreign military commitments, and that cultural degradation was due to the political and cultural elites of the coasts, and he especially focused on anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. After his campaigns, Buchanan remained a respected political commentator on mainstream media for decades. During the 90s, he brought arguments that had largely existed on the margins of Republican politics into presidential campaigns watched by millions of Americans. His rhetoric about immigration, natural identity, national identity, and cultural decline helped create a political vocabulary that later influenced the populist right of Donald Trump. Most historians and pol political analysis have noted that many of themes associated with Donald Trump's rise were already present in Buchanan's campaigns decades earlier. Later he would become far more controversial. In 1990, when discussing alleged Nazi war criminal John Okay, you're gonna have to help me, guys. Damon John Juk.

SPEAKER_04 22:23

Sounds pounds polluck as fuck. John John Demianyuk. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 22:29

Yeah. In in 1990, while discussing alleged Nazi war criminal John Dum John Juk. Demyanyuk. Demian yuk. Demianuk Demianyuk. Demyanyuk. Why would you sound Vietnamese when you say Demianyuk? Demianyuk and Demianyuk. Demanyuk. While discussing alleged Nazi war war criminal. Dum Janyuk. I keep adding Jew to it for some reason. Oh my god, he's not Japanese.

SPEAKER_04 22:55

Dem Yan Dem Yanyuuk. An and J is nyu.

SPEAKER_02 23:00

Anyway, Buchanan wrote that it would have been difficult for prisoners at Treblinka to survive long enough to serve as eyewitnesses because of the camp's conditions. Historians and Jewish organizations sharply criticized his statements, arguing that it cast doubt on established historical evidence surrounding the Holocaust. In 2008, he released his massive revisionist home, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. As you can tell from the title, the book's thesis was that the Western Allies' entry into the war against Germany was a fatal mistake that had led to the downfall of European hegemony over the rest of the world. As you can expect, more and more suspicions surrounding his sympathies grew.

SPEAKER_03 23:44

Dude, the Nazis that I like confront on YouTube and shit like that, they they love this book.

SPEAKER_02 23:49

Well, no, absolutely. Like, like this, and by the way, he was still not put out yet. That's how much tolerance there is on the right. You know, like he all this stuff is very clearly hinting at, like, hey, we should we fought the wrong side in World War II.

SPEAKER_03 24:05

Yeah. But he finally got called out. To be fair, they were saying that shit in like like Churchill was saying that shit in like 1945. To be fair, I think it was.

SPEAKER_02 24:13

Operation Unthinkable. Yeah. Yep. Pat Buchanan was effectively pushed out of and MSNBC, which if you are were not following politics in 2011-2012, MSNBC had Pat Buchanan on it. That's fucking crazy. Yeah, and he would oftentimes invite Sam Cedar on of the Majority Report and frequent guest of our podcast.

SPEAKER_03 24:37

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