Birchers like Welch might have been right in general, but calling Eisenhower “a dedicated... agent of the communist conspiracy” or anyone who supported flouridated water a communist was nutzo. And it helped the left portray all conservatives as nutzo. Even W.F. Buckley and other big-name conservatives considered Welch a lunatic.
I agree on the Eisenhower part. That’s a silly way to argue against people in general. The flouridation thing is way overblown, though. Mass medication is socialistic, as is state control of the ware supply. Also, there aren’t really any benefits to it, so it’s pointless socialism.
Even if pretending it’s a communist plot, if that’s what they did, is bad politics, I do so hate it when one side steamrolls a debate by painting all opposition as nuts. Sometimes, very seldom, all opposition is nuts. But forced dozing through the water supply is not so common sense as it now seems.
The very fact that we remember the Bircher position on flouridation, seems to me, is evidence that there was an opposition to discredit. Otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered discrediting them.
I visited a JBS bookstore as a kid, and I was familiar with their message. They were absolutely over the top, the Lyndon Larouche of their day. Everyone was a communist, especially Eisenhower, and they had a map showing the old south had been promised to the blacks as a separate country called the “Union of Soviet Socialist Negro Republics” or USSNR.
I swear the guy working the store looked and sounded like Lee Harvey Oswald. (It wasn’t).
Even W.F. Buckley and other big-name conservatives considered Welch a lunatic.
History has proven Buckley to be wrong in general and helped the left succeed. Big government types like Eisenhower are what brought us to the place we are today.
Well, as someone who grew up in an ultra, ultra liberal home in an ultra liberal community with a parent who worked for the U.N.- and was taught to mock and deride the JBS - guess what - when I began to read history closely, I discovered to my great surprise that Robert Welch was right about communism and right about Eisenhower.
It was under Eisenhower’s watch that both Tibet and Cuba were taken over by communism. When the U.S. ambassador to Cuba went to D.C. in 1957 to warn Eisenhower that Castro was a Red, Eisenhower responded by firing the ambassador.
Buckley was a pretentious patrician fool who dumped on the JBS for reasons of class, not politics.
That’s only because he was.