The overly serious supporters of the John Birch Society were among the first to be jettisoned. Its founder was a quirky Massachusetts businessman who unaccountably persisted in the view that President Dwight Eisenhower, of all people, was a "conscious" agent of international communism. Bill Buckley spoke for most conservatives of his day in the famous rejoinder that Eisenhower was not a communist, but a golfer.
That's all I really know about them.