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“I’m always seeing ‘the Birchers’ catching flak, why? What is it with the Birch Society that has everyone up in arms? I’ve seen this so many times but never asked.”

I’m no expert on the JBS. I can read Marx anytime and be considered an “intellectual”. If I read the JBS, it might come back to haunt me. Still, I think I’ve seen some of their literature. My take is that they rightly saw that some things were wrong. An example would be our liberal MSM misleading people before the advent of alternative voices like Rush and FreeRepublic. Give them credit, some things are wrong. Other people had no clue.

But then they would try to make sense out of it and take some wrong turns. It’s not all about communism, or about the Federal Reserve system, or about Jews in control.

Here’s an an alternative approach. There are intellectual ideas (forces) that swirl around the world even as individual nations, and individual people address particular issues at particular times and places. One intellectual idea is embodied in the American revolution. This was actually an Evolution. Much of the best was retained and improved as we moved civilization forward. A competing idea is embodied in the French revolution. This was truly a revolution as all of the old order was rejected. They rejected monarchism, rejected religion, rejected tradition. All was swept away in favor of superficial, ad hoc “reason” acceptable to the mob.

Today’s American conservatives are intellectual heirs to the American revolution. Today’s American liberals have been Europeanized and are intellectual heirs to Marx and Engels who greatly admired the French revolution.

You are right.

Required reading...

Reflections on the Revolution in France
by Edmund Burke 1790

Anecdotal story here:

About 15 years ago, i read a paperback called Inside the John Birch Society written by a CBS camerman named Gene Grove.

The book was highly critical of the organisation and it's founder Robert Welch It was critical to the point of ridicule in it's tone. i ran into a section where Grove describes with sarcasm and ridicule what the John Birch Society had predicted would happen as a result of the communist conspiracy in America.

Ironically, every single one of them had come to pass.

The book was published in 1961

While i'm not a John Birch Society member, indeed John Birch was never a John Birch society member, and would not have agreed with all of their political views, it was interesting to see failure of the politcal wisdom of that time.

i see much of Gene Grove's attitude here today. Take this little story with as many 'grains of salt' as you wish.