Posted on 01/21/2024 10:47:02 AM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
APPLETON, Wis. (AP) — The decades fall away as you open the front doors.
It’s the late 1950s in the cramped little offices — or maybe the pre-hippie 1960s. It’s a place where army-style buzz cuts are still in fashion, communism remains the primary enemy and the decor is dominated by American flags and portraits of once-famous Cold Warriors.
At the John Birch Society, they’ve been waging war for more than 60 years against what they're sure is a vast, diabolical conspiracy. As they tell it, it’s a plot with tentacles that reach from 19th-century railroad magnates to the Biden White House, from the Federal Reserve to COVID vaccines.
Long before QAnon, Pizzagate and the modern crop of politicians who will happily repeat apocalyptic talking points, there was Birch. And outside these cramped small-town offices is a national political landscape that the Society helped shape.
“We have a bad reputation. You know: ‘You guys are insane,’” says Wayne Morrow, a Society vice president. He is standing in the group’s warehouse amid 10-foot (3-meter) shelves of Birch literature waiting to be distributed.
“But all the things that we wrote about are coming to pass.”
*SNIP*
To some, the fringe has gone all the way to the White House. In the Society's offices, they’ll tell you that Donald Trump would never have been elected if they hadn’t paved the way.
“The bulk of Trump’s campaign was Birch,” Art Thompson, a retired Society CEO who remains one of its most prominent voices, says proudly. “All he did was bring it out into the open.”
(Excerpt) Read more at channel3000.com ...
The plot’s leaders — “insiders,” in Society lexicon — range from railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt to former President George H.W. Bush and Bill Gates, whose vaccine advocacy is, they say, part of a plan to control the global population. While his main focus was always communism, Welch eventually came to believe that the conspiracy's roots twisted far back into history, to the Illuminati, an 18th-century Bavarian secret society.
Once upon a time there was a crazy conspiracy theory that the CIA had major influence over the mass media.
Only a few right wing nuts believed it.
But—it turned to be conspiracy fact.
It was called Project Mockingbird.
The assigns and successors live on today....
They have turned out to be right much more often than the mainstream press has been in the last 40 years.
Q: What’s the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth?
A: These days about 6 months.
Gee.
Back in ‘66, was at a Birch Society meeting with my father.
Guy in the audience asked a question about MLK. Said, is he a Communist?
The chapter leader said, “Well we just characterize him as being pink”. Cautiously said, cuz of course you don’t wanna sound likea...’spiracy theorist! A phrase that hadn’t been invented yet...by the CIA.
So fast forward 50 years and everyone admits now that MLK was a flaming pinko, full blown Commie.
Gee how bout that.
I’ve never considered myself a ‘Bircher’ but, By Golly! There’s not a single thing in their platform that I disagree with!
I was told
50 years ago
By a uniformed kkker
That civil rights
Was a communist conspiracy
Didn’t believe it
Till the antichrist obama showed up
35 yrs ago
I thought gay liberation
Was freedom for everyone
Ask kim davis - Russia about that one
Gog usa
Magog nato
Reb 13
Partly funded by the extremely rich H L Hunt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Hunt
Before Rush there was Lifeline, sponsored by HLH Products. It was on over 400 radio stations at its peak.
https://americanarchive.org/exhibits/conservatism/conservatism-media
One of his many sons, Lamar Hunt, founded the American Football League and created the Super Bowl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamar_Hunt
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