Posted on 07/07/2013 9:57:25 AM PDT by pinochet
Often, when a Freeper proposes an idea that seems too crazy to be true, we totally dismiss him, and describe him as one who wears tin foil hats. One year ago, nobody would have believed that the American government spies on everyone. If someone had suggested such a thing last year, he would have been dismissed as a tin foil hat conspiracy theorist.
What other theories have respectable American conservatives dismissed in the past, that may be true? I keep thinking back to Robert Welch of the John Birch Society of the 1960s, who suggested that there exists a communist conspiracy among elites in academia, to indoctrinate American youth in communist ideas. According to this theory, American communists realized that they could not take over the devoutly Bible-Believing American nation of the 1950s, with an armed revolt. America had too many Bible-Believers with guns, and they could not take over America with an army like they did in Russia in 1917. They also could not teach directly from the books of Marx, Engels, or Lenin. The American Commies are supposed to have developed a clever means of injecting communist ideas whenever they talked about American history or society.
According to this theory, college graduates would enter government institutions and implement communist ideas, without realizing that those ideas are communist. Mainstream conservatives such as William F. Buckley excommunicated Robert Welch from the "respectable" conservative movement, and dismissed him as a nut. When you think of Obama, Pelosi, Clinton, Schumer, Van Jones, Gore, Patty Murray, Ginsburg, and all those other leftists in public office, did they end up that way by accident? What about those college graduates doing the Occupy Wall Street stuff? Is that also a coincidence?
Were the Birchers wrong about everything?
Makes you kinda wonder with all the anti-human crap the government does these days if they have been co-opted by another power without our species best interests in mind...
Other true conspiracies:
LBJ had JFK murdered.
TWA 800 was shot down.
Mel Gibson would never have asked, “Which one?”... if they weren’t!
LLS
'You Americans are so gullible. No, you won't accept communism outright, but we'll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you'll finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won't have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you’ll fall like overripe fruit into our hands.' "
The Birchers were correct about absolutely everything, I learned to my surprise when I began to research communism - more than twenty years ago - as a result of a trip to a communist country. That first trip led to many more trips - but what was always more shocking than the horrors of communism, was learning about the degree of penetration communism had - and still has - in our government and media.
I despise WFB - pompous patrician sell out - for marginalizing the only group that was telling the truth about what was going on.
The last Indiana Jones movie had a very similar line, was the best part imo heh.
Are conspiracy theories real? Yeah, that’s what the early American Indian wondered.
Was I and millions more being mislead by the media?...Uhh, gee. I think we all have been from TET onward.
Post-Cold War revelations show that the Birchers were right about the extraordinary depth and extent of communist spying and subversion against the United States and her allies. The Birchers though missed the point that much of the potency of Communism was due to the broad appeal of the Left’s ideas, which in turn are based on the view that mankind is perfectible through science and the effective application of government power. By focusing so intensely on communism, the Birchers forfeited ground in that larger intellectual and moral contest.
Everyone thought I was wacko....including my family. I have had many since then....tell me how right I was. It took 50 years for it to sink in with some folks.....and that's the tragedy.
Today you could replace communists with muslims and the Soviet Union with Saudi Arabia or muslim brotherhood.
Your first paragraph premise is wrong. I have been very certain that the US Government spies on everyone they can and has done so for at least a decade. So, one year ago I would of said that they spy on everyone, since the NSA has been collecting all electronic data that goes out over the air for 30 years. Only recently have they really begun to have the capability to analyze it in real time.
>>About ten years ago, FR was up in arms over ECHELON. The spying capabilities of the US gov’t were widely known then. It was discussed that they were monitoring phone calls for ‘keywords’ such as bomb, assassinate, etc. Once the computer identified keywords, they’d pass the rest of the call on to a human for analysis.<<
I used to, heck I still do, call friends and say, “I just called to tell you about my new plans to assassinate the president of the local bird watching and comforter sewing groups. More than once we would hear the volume drop and a few extra clicks on the line as the electronics started recording the call. I figure if they have the money to spend recording our calls then have at it. Let me add to the work load.
I agree and remember how those libs were tripping over themselves talking about Jones. They sure changed tune when Dumbo got into office.
Echelon, I still remind my kids of that. Though they were barely adults back then and thought Dad was a nut case, they’ve slowly come around.
Here’s a link to an article that was linked through FR. “U.S. Echelon Snub Angers Europe
Steve Kettmann 05.18.01” http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2001/05/43921
Seems we’ve traveled a million miles since then, all in the wrong direction.
I’d prefer to still be considered a nut case by my kids.
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