As I said, I used to be a Bircher, and I thought they hung the moon. Boy, was I wrong!
All you need to know is that they supported the draft in the Sixties when we were fighting North Vietnam but say it was a mistake during WWII and that it's wrong today. Now what do WWII and the WOT have in common that would make a draft any worse during those wars than during the Sixties?
The Birch Society was also all for not minding our own business when it came to Central America in the Eighties. But now all of a sudden when it comes to Iraq and Iran all that has been forgotten and they're pacifists.
The Birch Society is basically a political cult of the "Reconstructionist" movement (Rushdoony, Gary North, etc.). They have also abandoned whatever Hamiltonianism they ever had for full fledged Jeffersonianism. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't believe the US Constitution were Divinely inspired.
One of their big COUNCIL members, Chuck Carlson (not to be confused with Chuck Colson) has a nasty little site called "We Hold These Truths" which contains a section called "Pharisee Watch." I'll give you one guess whom they're watching.
When there was a temporary schism a while back and some old time members started a "Robert Welch Foundation" (Robert Welch was the JBS's founder) and I wrote a couple times to protest anti-Israel positions the second reply was a screed about the "Zionist Bolsheviks" that ended up with a threat of violence toward me.
You want to know what the Birch Society believes? It's no big secret. Just go to their web sites or the web sites of big Birchers (like Carlson, G. Edward Griffin, and Alan Stang--the man who influenced me to join the JBS and who is today a full-throttle lunatic). Or just take a look at the Paulites or the "US Constitution Party" or any Cartoite organization.
The Holocaust museum shooter's first link on his site was to a collection of writings of one of the JBS eleven founders, Revilo P. Oliver, who thought religion was a cancer destroying "aryans."
From wikipedia, with loads of linked references at site...
In the 1960s, [Revilo Pendleton] Oliver supposedly broke with conventional American conservatism and, having become convinced that Welch had either cozened him from the start or sold out later, he even severed his connections with what he called "the Birch hoax." He thus came to openly embrace an essentially far-right worldview, and eventually to assist William Luther Pierce in forming the National Alliance, a White Nationalist organization, a significant portion of whose supporters and members would re-form under the name National Vanguard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revilo_Pendleton_Oliver#Biography
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Origins:
The John Birch Society was established in Indianapolis, Indiana on December 9, 1958 by a group of twelve men led by Robert Welch, Jr., a retired candy manufacturer from Belmont, Massachusetts. One founding member was Fred Koch, founder of Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in America. Another was Revilo Pendleton Oliver, a University of Illinois professor who later co-founded the "white nationalist" National Alliance. A transcript of Welch's two-day presentation at the founding meeting was published as The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, and became a cornerstone of its beliefs, with each new member receiving a copy.[9]
According to Welch, "both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a 'one-world socialist government.'"[11][12]
Welch saw "collectivism" as the main threat to Western Civilization, and liberals as "secret communist traitors" who provide cover for the gradual process of collectivism, with the ultimate goal of replacing the nations of western civilization with one-world socialist government. "There are many stages of welfarism, socialism, and collectivism in general," he wrote, "but Communism is the ultimate state of them all, and they all lead inevitably in that direction."[12]
The society's activities include distribution of literature, pamphlets, magazines, videos and other educational material while sponsoring a Speaker's Bureau, which invites "speakers who are keenly aware of the motivations that drive political policy"[13].
One of the first public activities of the JBS was a "Get US Out!" (of membership in the UN) campaign, which claimed in 1959 that the "Real nature of [the] UN is to build a One World Government."[14] In 1960, Welch advised JBS members to: "Join your local P.T.A. at the beginning of the school year, get your conservative friends to do likewise, and go to work to take it over."[15]
One Man's Opinion, a magazine launched by Welch in 1956, was renamed American Opinion, and became the John Birch Society's official publication. The society's current publication is called The New American. [16]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#Values
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Values:
The John Birch Society says it is anti-totalitarian, particularly anti-socialist and anti-communist, and leans to libertarian. It seeks to limit the powers of government and defends what it sees as the original intention of the U.S. Constitution, based on Judeo-Christian principles. It opposes collectivism, including wealth redistribution, economic interventionism, socialism, communism, and it also opposes non-Collectivist ideas, like fascism. In a 1983 edition of Crossfire, Congressman Larry McDonald (D-Georgia), then its newly appointed chairman, characterized the Society as belonging to the Old Right, rather than the new right.[9]
The John Birch Society opposed aspects of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s because of its concerns that the movement had communists in important positions. At this time, however, there were more reports that Hollywood was harboring "Communists in high positions" than the Civil Rights Movement. The Society opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, saying it was in violation of the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and overstepped the rights of individual states to enact laws regarding civil rights.
The Society is against a unified "one world government", and has an immigration reduction view on immigration reform. It opposes the United Nations, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and other free trade agreements.
The Society argues that there is a devaluing of the US Constitution in favor of international government, and that this is not an accident. It cites David Rockefeller's 2002 autobiography Memoirs in which Rockefeller writes, "Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."[10]