“In 1838, concerned that mob violence imperiled the nation’s fledgling democratic institutions, Lincoln predicted that the gravest “danger” to democracy was never going to originate overseas but “must spring up amongst us.… If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”
Birchers
Matthew Dallek
“[The John Birch Society], then, bestowed to subsequent generations a fraught legacy—a politics of the street, where armed militias, QAnon adherents, white supremacists, and their leaders lived in the spirit of what Abraham Lincoln once warned against. ”
Birchers
Matthew Dallek
#birchers #dallek #rightwing #extremism
Presidential election 1972: “When [John Birch Society candidate John] Schmitz lost, a telling message surfaced among his allies, a note of defiance rooted in their contempt for democracy: if voters refused to return the nation to its rightful owners, then Birchers and their allies would take it back by force… #Birchers #dallek #bookstodon #extremism #rightwing #history
“Constitutionalists were entitled to rule, and either they were going to work within the system to achieve their vision of “constitutional government,” or, if the ballot failed them, they were going to take up arms. By 1974, some members identified violence as the only solution to the ills plaguing the United States.
Birchers
Matthew Dallek
“One American Party official, an insurance salesman from Arizona, described the party under Schmitz as “a distillation of the John Birch Society, the Christian Crusade and the Minutemen. We’re revolutionaries. We’re getting together to try to work through the system. But I’ll say this. We’ll have constitutional government in this country and if we don’t get it through the ballot box, we’ll get it in the streets.” ..
@joescarborough @morningjoe kinda romanticizes the not so distant past & America’s dalliance with conspiracy & extremism. I point you and your producers to historian Matthew Dallek’s book on the John Birch Society, “Birchers”
“The Birchers were breeding a sprawling movement, opening a Pandora’s box to a more militant, disruptive far right….
#birchers #dallek #extremism #rightwing #morningjoe #bookstodon
“If liberals were to build the world they wanted—a world where pluralism trumped hate, science trounced unreason, and democracy conquered fascism—they had to fight harder.”
“The center had held firm. Yet they were hardly content to drop their vigilance. Birchers had gained power within the Republican Party. They had come within striking distance of the Oval Office. Even if the far right was ultimately doomed, Birchers still posed a grave threat. They had eroded the capacity of the nation’s democracy to tolerate dissent and find common solutions based on a set of widely accepted facts. ..
#Birchers #dallek #americanHistory #extremism #rightwing #Bookstodon
“The fact is clear, you can’t talk with a Bircher,” [..] The typical Bircher “is so aggressive in defense of the card he carries that he seems to lose sight of country and human dignity. So the best way to beat him is at the polls. Every time he raises his paranoid head, we will be there after him. Sometimes we will win, sometimes we will lose. But, he will know that we are watching.” #birchers #dallek #bookstodon #rightwing #extremism #Republicans #history #pastisprologue
@knowattitude Dallek addresses your sentiment: “the Kennedy White House’s strategy of tying the far right around the neck of the GOP turned out to be extremely effective. The Birch Society became an exquisite foil. Its visibility in electoral politics made it easy to stick the extremist label on the Republican presidential nominee, who made missteps and couldn’t evade his own fiery record and past statements.”
#Birchers
Matthew Dallek
“Birchers’ use of conspiracy theories to tar their foes as anti-American was native to the United States, too, as was their contempt for multiracial democracy.”
#pastisprologue #birchers #Bookstodon
“[The John Birch Society was] neither an export from Nazi Germany nor out of step with America’s political traditions. The sentiments that undergirded the movement—a defense of white rights, the use of government to enforce Christian tenets and morality in public spaces, the veneration of inviolate freedom for the individual to do as he wished economically, free from government intervention—had deep roots in the nation’s historical development.…
#birchers #dallek #extremism #rightwing
“A Goldwater television spot opened with gangs of hooligans punching each other as a voice-over narrated, “Immorality surrounds us as never before.” Most Birchers agreed with that premise. “
#Birchers #dallek #rightwing #phonies #extremism #propaganda #conservatism
Wow, whack jobs: “In response to a query from a member in North Carolina, for example, the [John Birch Society] research department in Belmont explained that Franklin Roosevelt, rather than Japan, had “triggered the attack upon Pearl Harbor.”
Birchers
Matthew Dallek
#birchers #dallek #bookstodon #history #extremism #rightwing #americanHistory #conservatism #pastisprologue
“… By welcoming them into the fold both before and after National Review’s supposed break with the society, Buckley and his magazine continued to benefit from Birchers’ political activism, funding, and engagement.”
Birchers
Matthew Dallek
#Birchers #Dallek @nationalreview #rightwing
Where have we heard this before, “very fine people”:
“In January 1962 Buckley and Goldwater agreed during a meeting at the Breakers in Palm Beach to visibly divorce themselves and the conservative movement from the Birch Society’s wildest conspiracy theories by casting Welch as the crackpot his critics had alleged while at the same time defending Birch members, whom Goldwater called “nice people.”
Birchers
Matthew Dallek
#birchers #dallek #extremism #rightwing #pastisprologue
The society had “harass[ed] local school boards, local libraries, and local government bodies,” and now was the time for the White House to return fire. Feldman recommended federal investigations into whether right-wing nonprofit groups were “using tax-exempt funds for political purposes.”
Excerpt From
Birchers
Matthew Dallek
#birchers #dallek #bookstodon #history #rightwing
“To stop the GOP in 1964, Feldman urged the president to turn the far right into the Republican Party’s albatross. In 1961 Kennedy had successfully framed the debate as a fight between unhinged extremists and pragmatic, hardheaded liberals, and now Feldman wanted him to take the next step and use the levers of federal power to investigate, hound, and discredit the Birchers…
#Birchers #rightwing #extremism #dallek
“Since the nation’s founding, politicians of all stripes have demeaned and denounced their rivals as unpatriotic and a peril to the people’s livelihoods and personal safety. And yet in the early 1960s the Birchers injected politics with a level of rancor toward liberal opponents that further coarsened the atmosphere in the public square and set the stage for more.”
Birchers
Matthew Dallek
#Birchers #MatthewDallek #extremism #rightwing #johnBirchSociety
Of all the skills mastered by Welch & the other Birch leaders, perhaps most impressive was their ability to weaponize defeat. There were benefits to nationwide notoriety, and no one was more adept at harnessing them. Birchers discovered that tangling with the mainstream press was balm for their spirits. Attacks on their movement raised members’ defenses & infused them with energy and purpose. They thrived when they had an enemy to battle, and this particular enemy—the mainstream press
#birchers
