Podcasts about birchers

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comSam is a biographer, historian, and journalist. He used to be the editor of the New York Times Book Review, a features writer for Vanity Fair, and a writer for Prospect magazine. He's currently a contributing writer for the Washington Post. His many books include The Death of Conservatism and Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, and his new one is Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.It's a huge tome — almost 1,000 pages! — but fascinating, with new and startling revelations, and a breeze to read. It's crack to me, of course, and we went long — a Rogan-worthy three hours. But I loved it, and hope you do too. It's not just about Buckley; it's about now, and how Buckleyism is more similar to Trumpism than I initially understood. It's about American conservatism as a whole.For three clips of our convo — Buckley as a humane segregationist, his isolationism even after Pearl Harbor, and getting gay-baited by Gore Vidal — head to our YouTube page.Other topics: me dragging Sam to a drag show in Ptown; the elite upbringing of Buckley during the Depression; his bigoted but charitable dad who struck rich with oil; his Southern mom who birthed a dozen kids; why the polyglot Buckley didn't learn English until age 7; aspiring to be a priest or a pianist; a middle child craving the approval of dad; a poor student at first; his pranks and recklessness; being the big man on campus at Yale; leading the Yale Daily News; skewering liberal profs; his deep Catholicism; God and Man at Yale; Skull and Bones; his stint in the Army; Charles Lindbergh and America First; defending Joe McCarthy until the bitter end and beyond; launching National Review; Joan Didion; Birchers; Brown v. Board; Albert Jay Nock; Evelyn Waugh; Whittaker Chambers; Brent Bozell; Willmoore Kendall; James Burnham; Orwell; Hitchens; Russell Kirk; not liking Ike; underestimating Goldwater; Nixon and the Southern Strategy; Buckley's ties to Watergate; getting snubbed by Reagan; Julian Bond and John Lewis on Firing Line; the epic debate with James Baldwin; George Will; Michael Lind; David Brooks and David Frum; Rick Hertzberg; Buckley's wife a fag hag who raised money for AIDS; Roy Cohn; Bill Rusher; Scott Bessent; how Buckley was a forerunner for Trump; and much more. It's a Rogan-length pod.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on the Biden cover-up, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, Robert Merry on President McKinley, Tara Zahra on the last revolt against globalization after WWI, N.S. Lyons on the Trump era, Arthur C. Brooks on the science of happiness, and Paul Elie on crypto-religion in ‘80s pop culture. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ At the height of the John Birch Society's activity in the 1960s, critics dismissed its members as a paranoid fringe. After all, “Birchers” believed that a vast communist conspiracy existed in America and posed an existential threat to Christianity, capitalism, and freedom. But as historian Matthew Dallek reveals, the Birch Society's extremism remade American conservatism. Most Birchers were white professionals who were radicalized as growing calls for racial and gender equality appeared to upend American life. Conservative leaders recognized that these affluent voters were needed to win elections, and for decades the GOP courted Birchers and their extremist successors. The far right steadily gained power, finally toppling the Republican establishment and electing Donald Trump. Buy Birchers here: https://bookshop.org/lists/swaj-books-for-2024 Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC Order Brad's book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Book tickets for our event: skeptic.com/event At the height of the John Birch Society's activity in the 1960s, critics dismissed its members as a paranoid fringe. After all, “Birchers” believed that a vast communist conspiracy existed in America and posed an existential threat to Christianity, capitalism, and freedom. But as historian Matthew Dallek reveals, the Birch Society's extremism remade American conservatism. Most Birchers were white professionals who were radicalized as growing calls for racial and gender equality appeared to upend American life. Conservative leaders recognized that these affluent voters were needed to win elections, and for decades the GOP courted Birchers and their extremist successors. Shermer and Dallek discuss: the origin of the John Birch Society • the “right,” “conservatism,” “liberalism” • “mainstream” vs. “fringe” • Cold War context for the rise of the radical right • the link between the John Birch Society and figures like Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and Donald Trump • America First nationalism, school board wars, QAnon plots, allegations of electoral cheating • and the future of the Republic (if we can keep it). Matthew Dallek is a political historian whose intellectual interests include the intersection of social crises and political transformation, the evolution of the modern conservative movement, and liberalism and its critics. Dallek has authored four books which appeared on the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune's annual best-of lists. His latest is Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.

We talk with Steven Monacelli from the Texas Observer about the rise of Christian Supremacists, astroturfed activist groups, "Feds", the fall and rise of the Birchers, and moreFind this episode on your favorite podcast player here: https://pod.link/1647010767/Here are some of the sources and references we used to create this episode:THESE CHRISTIANS THINK GOD NEEDS YOU RICH AND TO RULE THE WORLDhttps://www.texasobserver.org/these-christians-think-god-needs-you-rich-and-to-rule-the-world/GOD'S ARMY GATHERS IN FORT WORTHhttps://www.texasobserver.org/gods-army-gathers-in-fort-worth/Flyers Threatening White HP Parents Who Send Their Kids to the Ivy League Reek of Fakenesshttps://www.dallasobserver.com/news/whos-behind-dallas-justice-nows-dont-send-white-kids-to-ivy-league-controversy-12098228Conservative PR Firm Linked to Black Lives Matter Hoax That Fooled Right-Wing Presshttps://bylinetimes.com/2021/08/02/conservative-pr-firm-linked-to-black-lives-matter-hoax-fools-right-wing-press/Operator of 'Keep Dallas Safe' Campaign Linked to 'Astroturf' Scheme in New Orleanshttps://www.dallasobserver.com/news/anonymous-political-group-keep-dallas-safe-managed-by-former-astroturf-operator-11983637HOMEGROWN NEO-FASCIST MOVEMENT MARCHES IN AUSTINhttps://www.texasobserver.org/homegrown-neo-fascist-movement-marches-in-austin/THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY SEES A RENAISSANCE IN NORTH TEXAShttps://www.texasobserver.org/the-john-birch-society-sees-a-renaissance-in-north-texas/Thanks for listening,Jay and GriffEmail us: didnothingwrongpod@protonmail.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.didnothingwrongpod.com/subscribe

How did we get here politically? It's a question we've asked a lot lately. Author and professor Matthew Dallek has a theory on the origins of our current political moment. His new book, "Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right," traces how a group in the 1960s laid the foundation for 21st century conservatism and may have paved the way for Donald Trump's political ascension. We're at Ris in DC's West End...join us!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is not America's first manipulative fascist rodeo. Our grand experiment has been peppered with religious and MAGA type freaks throughout its 247 years. When a large group of independent thinkers, adventurers, natives, freedom seekers, religious zealots, and young, scrappy and hungry individuals come together in one pot and create a beautiful stew of a nation there are bound to be some interesting concoctions and even a few stinkers. The John Birch Society was a powerful machine fueled by hate, white privilege, manipulation, and good old fashioned religion as a weapon, along with a slew of “deep state” conspiracy theories like Jewish bankers were controlling the world and Dwight D. Eisenhower was a dedicated Communist agent LOL. Sound familiar? We see you Moms for “Liberty”.Author, GW professor and historian Matthew Dallek has written a new book called “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right” which expertly shows how the GOP allowed a small, but organized band of conspiracy theorists, racists, anti-semites and paranoiacs to lay the groundwork for the party of Lincoln to become the party of MAGA and Trump. In this wide ranging conversation, Matthew Dallek joins Dirty Moderate to spill the sad, but important hiThanks for helping us save democracy one episode at a time!Join the Dirty Moderate Nation on Substack! Tell us what you think on Twitter! Or, if you are fed up with Elon's bullshit, hit us up on Threads! There are always shenanigans over on TikTok too…Are you registered to VOTE?

At the height of the John Birch Society's activity in the 1960s, critics dismissed its members as a paranoid fringe. “Birchers” believed that a vast communist conspiracy existed in America and posed an existential threat to Christianity, capitalism, and freedom. But as historian Matthew Dallek reveals, the Birch Society's extremism remade American conservatism. Most Birchers were white professionals who were radicalized as growing calls for racial and gender equality appeared to upend American life. Conservative leaders recognized that these affluent voters were needed to win elections, and for decades the GOP courted Birchers and their extremist successors. Join us when Matthew Dallek discuss how the far right steadily gained power, finally toppling the Republican establishment and electing Donald Trump, on this installment of Leonard Lopate at Large.

Decades before Moms for Liberty launched a crusade to liberate schools from “indoctrination,” the John Birch Society introduced similar rhetoric and tactics. Have You Heard is joined by historian Matthew Dallek, author of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. The ‘Birchers,' he argues, sought to impose their vision of morality, Christianity and patriotism on public schools. And while the group would fade into obscurity, the Birchers' vision and tactics inform the activism of today's school culture warriors. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HaveYouHeardPodcast or donate on PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/haveyouheardpodcast

It's another EmMajority Report Thursday! She talks to Matthew Dallek, historian and professor of political management at George Washington University, to discuss his recent book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. Then, she speaks to independent reporter Moira Lavelle to discuss her recent reporting in Jacobin on the Greek elections. First, Emma runs through updates on the House passing the debt ceiling deal, reported statements by Trump on his classified document debacle, DeSantis' continued kowtowing to Trump, fascism in Tennessee and Turkey, Florida's business strike, and Project Veritas turning against James O'Keefe, also parsing through Georgia's fascist crackdown on anti-Cop City activists, and the active lies coming out of Brian Kemp's office. Matthew Dallek then dives right into the history of the John Birch Society's shaping of the American Right, diving into their birth as a domestic Cold War anti-communist organization intent on following the blueprint of Senator McCarthy and exposing and expelling all communists from US politics. Next, Professor Dallek walks through their tactics that are deeply reflected in the GOP of today, including spreading conspiracy theories, establishing martyrs, and dabbling in anti-democratic and anti-Semitic messaging, before exploring the quintessential “Birchers” in US politics throughout the last half-century, from Pat Buchanan to Rand Paul, and looking at the importance of the Birch Society's emphasis on local organizing. Moira Lavelle then parses through the recent non-conclusive Greek elections, with no party establishing a majority via election or coalition, first taking on the myriad factors in Greece's current political disillusionment and desire for stability, before stepping back to analyze the floundering trust for Syriza, the left-wing party most recently elected in 2015, and why their right-wing opponents, New Democracy, are successfully capitalizing on this moment. Wrapping up, Lavelle discusses the likelihood of a New Democracy victory in the coming round of elections, and what that means for a future of continuing austerity and instability in the country. And in the Fun Half: Emma is joined by Matt Binder as they discuss the ongoing Daily Wire-Elon Musk beef over Twitter's decision to cancel their premier of Matt Walsh's transphobic documentary on the app, and the recent despicable backlash to a recent CUNY Law graduate from the NY political and legal establishment. Luke from Florida calls in to discuss why MR doesn't want to take his guns, Shane from Vancouver dives into the secret second shooter behind Kid Rock's Bud Light video, and Omar from Austin dives into Kirsten Gillibrand's recent work on exposing UFOs. The MR Crew also covers the Supreme Court's recent shocking decision to side with a company suing a union for striking, and the complete rhetorical domination of Ron DeSantis by Donald Trump, plus, your calls and IMs! Check out Matthew's book here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/matthew-dallek/birchers/9781668622339/?lens=basic-books Check out Moira's piece here: https://jacobin.com/2023/05/greece-general-election-austerity-new-democracy-syriza-mera25-voters/ Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Subscribe to the ESVN YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/esvnshow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: http://majority.fm/app Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattBinder @MattLech @BF1nn @BradKAlsop Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/ Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/

In the past few years, the Republican politics of crime and racial scapegoating have given way to the outright glorification of vigilante killers like Kyle Rittenhouse, Eddie Gallagher, and most recently, Daniel Penny. Last week, Penny choked a Black street artist to death for the crime of being mentally ill on a New York subway. In response, Ron DeSantis called him a “Good Samaritan” and said America has his back. Why has this trend taken hold? Is it new? And, most importantly, to what end? Host Brian Beutler welcomes Matthew Dallek, a professor at George Washington University and author of the new book Birchers, which details the founding of the far-right John Birch Society and its attempt to take over the GOP. Brian and Matt discuss the ever-shrinking line between violent right-wing extremists and mainstream Republican politicians, why the GOP is turning racist vigilantes into folk heroes, and how the groundwork for MAGA to take over the Republican Party was laid 50 years ago by a group of wealthy, extremist bigots.

Matthew Dallek says the John Birch Society, which was active from the late '50s through the early '70s, propelled today's extremist takeover of the American right. His new book is Birchers.John Powers reviews the award-winning French crime drama The Night of the 12th.

Matthew Dallek says the John Birch Society, which was active from the late '50s through the early '70s, propelled today's extremist takeover of the American right. His new book is Birchers.John Powers reviews the award-winning French crime drama The Night of the 12th.

Matthew Dallek, Professor at George Washington University joins The Great Battlefield podcast to discuss his book "Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right".

Matthew Dallek is a historian and professor of political management at George Washington University's College of Professional Studies. He is the author of: The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics; Defenseless Under the Night: The Franklin Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security; and, most recently, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. Dallek's writings frequently appear in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, and other publications.

In October 1958, Robert Welch, a wealthy retired businessman with extreme anti-communist beliefs, held a secret meeting in Indianapolis with eleven like-minded men to found the John Birch Society, named after a young American missionary and intelligence officer killed by Mao's Communist troops in 1945. Welch and his confederates detested not only liberals but also mainstream conservatives. They held particular animus toward President Dwight D. Eisenhower; although Ike was a moderate Republican, Welch believed him to be a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” At its peak in the 1960s, the Birch Society consisted of some 60,000 to 100,000 members organized in secret cells around the country.  Although much of the country dismissed the Birchers as a lunatic fringe, historian Matthew Dallek, in his new book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, argues that the group exercised an outsized influence on the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Blending violent and apocalyptic conspiracy theories with grassroots activism, business skills, and the power of alternative media, the Birch Society proved, in Dallek's words, “that the supercharged activism of thousands of diehards could outmatch the votes of millions of citizens and over time transform the GOP.” In this podcast discussion, Dallek describes the history of the Birch Society as well as dynamics that made it a significant political force and an enduring influence on the contemporary American right. He points out that much of the responsibility for the continuing vitality of Birch-style extremism lies with Republican leaders who thought they could harness the activism of the Birchers without allowing their paranoia and hatred to define the party.  Instead, according to Dallek, “The GOP establishment's efforts to court this fringe and keep it in the coalition allowed it to gain a foothold and eventually cannibalize the entire party.”

Out with the old, in with the new. In this case, no more Birchers of fluoride--we've moved on to other Q-related topics. This time, we're taking a long windup to get to the Satanic Panic period of the 80s and early 90s in the US and Canada, which is the direct antecedent of the Q "democrats harvesting adrenochrome from abused sex trafficked youngsters" meme that has so obsessed lunatics in recent times. But on the way there, we need to consider how human sacrifice--and even moreso, the idea of others committing human sacrifice, has influenced conspiracy-minded plots over the past couple thousand years. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Subscribe to Reactionary Minds: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | YouTubeReactionary Minds is a project of The UnPopulist. Hosted by Aaron Ross Powell. Produced by Landry Ayres.The following is a transcript of Reactionary Minds’ interview with writer Damon Linker, founder of Eyes on the Right, a Substack newsletter. The transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity. Aaron Ross Powell: I'm Aaron Ross Powell, and this is Reactionary Minds, a project of The UnPopulist. The mainstream of the American right, as well as the Republican Party, looks quite a bit different today than it did 10 years ago. Trumpism's rise and its near-total take over the GOP has fundamentally changed our political landscape.To talk through what's going on and to explore the best ways to approach understanding the evolution of the liberal right, I'm joined today by Damon Linker, author of the Substack Eyes on the Right. He's also a senior fellow with the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center and a weekly participant on the Beg to Differ podcast at The Bulwark. Both of our projects, Eyes on the Right, and then this podcast Reactionary Minds, are about understanding the forces of illiberalism that appear to be more threatening today than they seem to have been in the recent past. What's your approach to getting at that deeper understanding?Damon Linker: First of all, thanks for having me on the podcast. I value quite a lot what you're trying to do and do think it's a shared project that we have here, and the more the merrier, the more the better for our politics. I guess what I try to bring to the discussion and analysis, it was something I talk about in my inaugural post for Eyes on the Right, which is a kind of empathy for what is driving people to embrace the populist right.Now, by that, I do not mean making the case for them. What I mean is trying to think our way into the minds of people who will find these messages appealing. What is it about the liberal order that has them feeling discontented? What has them receptive to these severe critiques of the liberal order? The method behind the madness, the goal of this approach is to construct a more effective response, to actually try to meet the populist right where it is and speak on the basis of its premises, rather than always begin from liberal premises where what you end up with is just talking past each other and rejecting each other's starting points without ever actually engaging with them directly.I guess the rationale would be, you have to move the two parties a little bit closer together before they can really duke it out over what's really at stake. That's, in abstract terms at least, what I'm trying to accomplish.Aaron: In that opening essay for Eyes on the Right, I had underlined that part about empathy because it sometimes feels hard for—I have a lot of friends who are deeply involved in gay rights and trans rights, for example, and to say to them, you should approach with empathy, understanding of people who are labeling you groomers and saying you can't have pictures of your same-sex spouse on your desk if you're a school teacher, or people who want to institute a Catholic theocracy over the country, these are really threatening things and really immediately dangerous things; Proud Boys showing up at pride events. It can be hard to say, if you're in that situation, just to think I should be trying to understand at an empathetic level, the people who are calling me groomers.Why Empathize With Extremists?Damon: Yes, I totally understand that, and it's a natural human response. In that respect, what I'm advocating is difficult. It's a challenge, and it works against the instincts that are provoked by our politics where both sides—I am guilty of often using the formulation "both sides", but I don't usually mean a kind of moral equivalency. It's a formal mirroring that tends to happen in partisan politics. What I mean is that both sides in our politics have an activist sensibility these days where the goal is not simply to really persuade the persuadable. It's also to provoke your enemy.You try to say the most outrageous, insulting thing, the most caricatured version of your opponent in the hopes that they will then lash out against what you are saying in an extreme way which will then help you in your own position. You see this a lot obviously in the entire right-wing media edifice that is out there constantly. Part of it involves something else I talked about in my inaugural post about the fallacy of composition, where the fallacy involves you take one part of a whole that is particularly provocative or outrageous or insulting, and you direct huge amounts of attention to that and treat it as if it is exemplary of the whole.Is it true that professors, especially in the humanities and social sciences on the whole lean to the left? Absolutely true, indisputably the case. Is it true that all professors or nearly all professors are left-wing activists who have contempt for conservatives and centrists and want to humiliate students who come from those ideological starting points in the classroom? No, not at all.Yet, we now have a whole infrastructure on the right where a series of websites are out there trolling, asking for young conservative students to send examples of particularly outrageous left-wing professorial, pedagogical transgressions, which then get promoted on those websites, that then get picked up by Tucker Carlson, who then runs a 15-minute segment on prime time for 4 million viewers on Fox News, the premise of which is, "Look at how terrible all these left-wing professors are. Don't send your kids to college because they're going to be brainwashed to be leftist authoritarians." That's the process in a nutshell.There is a way in which it also works in reverse where the left will fasten on to the most egregious, fascistic statement of someone on the right and then try to make it seem as if everyone from Liz Cheney on over to Trump and then past Trump to Proud Boy, neo-fascist like this guy Nick Fuentes. Everything between them is all equally terrible. Now, why would someone who's a Democrat or another kind of progressive want to say that? Well, because you want to win the election. You don't want anyone anywhere to vote for the other side. You try to collapse the distinctions and assimilate everyone who's your opponent in an election to the worst example of the other side. It's a temptation that I think does need to be resisted. Maybe not always at the level of political contestation where this can be a very effective tactic, but at the level of intellectual reflection. For understanding's sake, we need to try to not let ourselves be triggered in the way that our political opponents very much would like us to be for their own benefit.Trump’s Unique DangerousnessAaron: When we're approaching that task, should we be distinguishing—let's just stick to assessing the right, although I think this argument applies, as you said, to looking at ideologies more broadly, but should we be distinguishing, say, conservatism generally as a political ideology from the base of people who think of themselves or ordinary voters who think of themselves as conservatives, but may hold as we know from political science data, people's self-described labels often affixed to wildly diverse viewpoints that are often in direct conflict with other people affixing the same label to themselves, versus the people actually in power: the ones who are controlling or have access to the levers of the state and how it directs its coercive forces. Because it seems like one response to what you've just said is yes, of course, we shouldn't pick out the most extreme examples of bad stuff on the right and say that's representative of everyone, just like we shouldn't do that for the left or any other group, but it does seem like one thing that's happened in the last say six years is that the most extreme parts of the right have gained control of the levers of power. They're the ones who are setting the broader agenda for what happens when the right is in control, even if the base is much more moderate.Damon: Yes. I take the point and I'm glad you brought up the topic of distinction making because that's yet another thing that I’m impressing in the Substack and in my writing lately. I'd love to talk through that. I'm actually working right now on a relatively short post in response to an op-ed that the writer and columnist Max Boot published in the Washington Post today, which is Wednesday, July 6th, in which he says, in effect, looks like Trump might not be the nominee in 2024 after all. It could be Ron DeSantis, and actually, he's worse because he's more disciplined and smarter, and so forth. He's a bigger threat than Trump.I'm pushing back on that on the basis of distinction-making. Let's walk this through and it touches on a lot of what you raised in your question. I don't think there is anything written in stone that what conservatism or right of center politics in a liberal democracy, what its policy matrix has to be. From Ronald Reagan through, say, the Mitt Romney campaign in 2012 in the United States, what did conservatism mean?Well, it pretty much meant suspicion of big government, support for cutting taxes whenever possible, generally in favor of free trade, in favor of pretty much open immigration policy, a muscular foreign policy directed towards spreading democracy around the world, and opposing authoritarianism, and then finally, a principled moral traditionalism on social issues that ranged from appointing judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade, which has recently been a success after 49 years of trying, to opposition to the series of reforms that have come up on the progressive left from racial issues through to women's rights, gay rights, trans rights, and so forth.That's what it meant to be a conservative until pretty recently now with Trump—it became with Trump and is now becoming the broader consensus among conservatives, that actually what it means is, yes, cutting taxes in government, on the whole, is good, but if those things can be used to help working-class Americans, then maybe those things aren't so bad.For similar reasons, free trade is often not good because it hurts working-class people supposedly. Similarly, immigration isn't usually good because that's also not good for that economic consideration, but also for broader identity reasons. The ethnic and racial makeup of the country changes in ways a lot of Americans don't like, at least conservative Americans don't like, and then a much more—well, also suspicion on foreign policy using American power for moral goals is suspicious now.Finally, the moral traditionalist argument on social issues hasn't really changed, but it's more aggressive and it's metastasized, and touched more areas of policy. Is there anything illegitimate about that latter group of policies in and of itself? Should that not be permitted within liberal democratic politics to have the right side of the spectrum be defined that way?I actually don't think there is any principled reason to think that that should not be allowed to be the right-leaning contesting party's position. Now, the problem is that some of those positions brush up against moral commitments that put into question some of American principles, but those principles themselves evolve over time. So I would prefer that those policy questions get debated in the political arena as has always been the case. I do think it's okay for the right-leaning party to change what it cares about.Where things get really dicey is when those policy shifts get combined with what we see, actually, I think in the United States more acutely than any other country contending with this shift, is that the right-leaning party that has shifted in this way can barely win elections because those positions aren't that popular, and the way they are interacting with America's peculiar electoral system with multiple levers and all kinds of counter-majoritarian trip wires leads us to a situation in which we get January 6th and everything that led up to it.People talk about Viktor Orbán and Hungary a lot as an exemplar of how dangerous he's at the leading edge of where this is going. I don't like Orbán. I would never vote for him. I think he's pernicious, he's done all kinds of negative things, but I think Trump is actually much more dangerous than Orbán. Orbán actually, even if he puts his thumb on the scale a little bit in various ways to give him and his party, the Fidesz party, an edge in an electoral contest, he actually does, and his party does, win votes.His party won in 2010 before he became a full-on populist and made a lot of those reforms. His share of the vote and his party's share of the vote hasn't changed markedly between then and now. He doesn't win 90% of the vote like Saddam Hussein or another dictator or Soviet dictator would've in the old days or even Putin today. He wins a little more than half. Then there are all these jiggered things within the electoral system that then enhances that slight edge into a much stronger majority within the legislature, but that's common. It happens in the UK, where in the last election, the conservatives won a bit more than labor, but they won way more seats than labor because you get amplification.Whereas in this country, not only is the Trumpist populist impulse a little troubling because it does push the policy matrix a little bit away from the consensus liberalism that preceded it, but that is combined by the fact that Trump and the Republicans can barely win power given that their position isn't overwhelmingly popular and has a huge, very strong opposition. They then combine that marginal ability to win with contempt for the very institutions that would freeze them out of power if they lose.That institutional attack, I think, is more profound than what even someone like Victor Orbán is attempting in Hungary, and we need to distinguish between all of these things. The last point before I stop blathering, to go back to my original statement about the Max Boot column, I think Max is wrong on this, that actually as bad as DeSantis would be, and again, I would not vote for the guy, I would be a critic of his from beginning to end if he actually became president, but would he do what Trump did on January 6th? I doubt it. Maybe he would. I guess we don't have a huge track record on the guy, but in general, I don't fear that with him in the same way that I do with Trump.That means that Trump shows and displays a contempt for the rule of law and instinctual authoritarianism that is sui generis to him, and he's spreading it to his most devoted followers and supporters. But it is so far still relatively contained to that sub-segment of the right. If we could run various scenarios about 2024 in which the Democrats can't win again because of inflation and other problems, I would vastly prefer DeSantis, Tom Cotton, Nikki Haley, any number of the mini-Trumps that are out there on the right over Trump himself again. Trump himself again is a toxin to liberal democracy that makes him a unique threat. All of these distinctions, I think, are important to make between bad, worse, and worst of all.Aaron: Well, let me pick up on that then because it is the case that, at least as of right now, Trumpism is the dominant force on the right and within the GOP. There's this constant cycle of hopeful articles from centrist and left political commentators saying, "Ah, it looks like his hold on the party is slipping. This is a handful of candidates he picked out, didn't win, his hold is slipping," but they always seem more wishful thinking than reality.Going into 2024, it seems like Trumpism will be the dominant thing whether he's the candidate or not. Certainly, people like DeSantis continue to present themselves as Trumpists or inheritors of the Trumpist mantle, but there's long been this question of whether Trump discovered his audience or created it, discovered his base or created it.What I've wondered and I'm curious for your thoughts on is how much of Trumpism, however we define that, and it could be hard to pin down what the ideological characteristics of Trumpism are, but how much of Trumpism as a movement within the GOP is an ideological movement that can be inherited, say, by someone like DeSantis or that it is effectively a cult of personality, that it is just this fealty to this man, this investment in the Trumpists or whatever it is about Trump they really like, and it doesn't really matter what the ideas are behind it, it's more of just his personality such that if Trump disappears from the stage, so he chooses not to run again, he's indicted, whatever the case is, that this older style GOP, the Reaganite GOP that you talked about earlier, can reestablish itself. Does Trumpism disappear when Trump disappears or is this a fundamental ideological characteristic now of the right?Damon: Great, great question. There's so much in there, so much that could be said. It's obviously a very complicated [chuckles] situation. All right. At one level, clearly, if you know the history of the American right, you know that the general dispensation that Trump represents ideologically has been there for a long time. There's one story you can tell about the right that had been told for many decades by people in the National Review circle.I think an heir to that would be Matt Continetti's new book The Right which is a new history of the right in America. That version goes something like this, that the right prior to, say, World War II was paleocon. It was suspicious of alliances and trade and very knee-jerk traditionalists about morals and suspicious of Washington and government. It was a folk libertarianism to quote my former colleague Bonnie Kristian who is now writing as an independent author and had a Times op-ed about this recently. So that was the right.Then after the end of World War II with Buckley founding National Review, you have the attempt to found a more internationalist right. It ends up taking a side in the cold war very hawkishly in favor of the United States and democratic capitalism against Soviet communism.It sort of cosmopolitanized the right a little bit. Now, the original paleocon instinct remained there and it remained there all along. Buckley tried to police the margins of it, tried to excommunicate the Birchers and other small groups that were more rooted in that more conspiratorial folk libertarian attitude, the kind of people who thought that Eisenhower was a communist, the great general who won World War II in Europe, who was president and a Republican, he was a communist plant. This kind of an attitude.That Buckley-ite policing of the boundaries and then expanding what conservatism could appeal to and the electorate reached its greatest apotheosis in the victory of Ronald Reagan, and from Reagan, once again through, say, Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, you have—conservatism is that. The paleocon stuff's still there, still showing up usually on election day to vote for the head of the party and to vote for local offices for the Republicans, but yet a little disgruntled, not very happy, going along. You get moments of populist rebellion, like 1992, Pat Buchanan challenges George H. W. Bush in his reelection campaign and gives this blood-thirsty speech at the Republican Convention.That's the narrative that leads to a conclusion that Trump didn't make this. He saw that establishment Republicanism that had governed the party and the country often starting with Reagan had weakened and was ripe for being toppled. He tapped into the increasingly angry rest of paleocons who had been there all along for about the last 90 years, grumbling in the background, and became their champion, and what we've seen over the last six years is a revolution in which that base of paleocons over through the Reaganite elites, and they're now in charge. A lot of that is tied up with the policy matrix that I mentioned earlier, the shift on trade and immigration and foreign policy, and all those things.There's another argument too, another tendency, which you also mentioned and talked about, which is just Trump as a person embodying a populist impulse, which is not limited to the American scene, but is a perpetual threat to liberal democracies everywhere. Which is a demagogue who comes up and gains power through deploying very hostile rhetoric against the establishment, against those people in power, whether they're allied with my enemies politically or my allies, whether they're in politics or business or entertainment, it doesn't matter. It's them, the elites, and I am the champion of the “true people” and want to overthrow them.Trump was, it turned out to be, one of the greatest demagogues in American history and maybe world history. We can't judge that yet, let's see how all of this works out, and I say greatest in the sense of incredibly talented, but execrable. The guy is a genius at fastening on to the thing that will make the crowds cheer and mixing in a kind of humor with it at the same time, that makes it sound like he's not taking himself too seriously, winking about how it's all an act at the very moment that he's doing the most vicious things possible with language, attacking the press, journalists, seeming like he's stirring up violence against them, while joking that like, "Well, of course, we're not going to let you attack the journalist, let her go." He's just very, very good at that.Now, your question to set this up was which is it? What is it that has infected the Republican party? The truth is it is a blend, I think, of the two. One of the problems I'd say that Tom Cotton has, Tom Cotton also would love to run for president in 2024. He has given speeches, including at the Reagan Library several months ago that I wrote about, that are very clearly Trumpian speeches on the side of the first category that I just ran through. Very conservatism inflected with paleocon themes on the "new correct side" on all of these issues of foreign policy and trade and immigration and social issues, very rabidly engaged in the culture war in a way that is redolent of Trump.In all those ways, he sounds like a Trumpist, but he's boring as hell and has no charisma. He sounds like a wet noodle standing up there and looks like a geek who tried to make the basketball team and was cut in the first round of cuts. That makes me very skeptical that he could succeed in this environment. DeSantis on the other hand has been shrewd enough and talented enough to combine or tried to combine both in a way that I haven't seen in another candidate. I think it's one reason why so many on the right like him.He stands abstractly in favor of a lot of the policy changes that Trump brought in, but as the governor of a state, he has more power than one of a hundred senators like Cotton to actually do certain things to show, "See? I'll use power to achieve these things." Then he also combines that with a really swaggering obnoxious populist demagogic rhetoric that includes him getting up on a stage in front of some high school kids wearing masks during the worst pandemic in a century and berating them in front of the cameras to "Take off your damn masks. Freedom."I don't know what your language rating is for this podcast, but I'll at least stoop to say, you can bleep me out if you need to, he's performatively an a*****e. That is part of his schtick. That I think makes him a more plausible successor to Trump because you do need both. You need that kind of anti-cosmopolitan issue conglomeration that Trump has now put at the center of the right, combined with a pure populist and demagogic attack on the people who would police us morally in positions of power, to basically stick a middle finger up at them and say, "I'm going to say anything I want. F you. I don't care."You need both, and Trump has both, and DeSantis among all the options out there I think comes closest to matching that. He might not have Trump's instinctual genius at it, but he clearly I think—he at least understands that he needs to include that in his message, not just the what, but the how in the message, and has enough talent at the latter that he can at least be a potential rival as the leader of that faction.The Global Rise of the Populist RightAaron: I want to pick up on another thing in your inaugural essay for Eyes on the Right because I liked it quite a lot as a statement of purpose for the broader project. One of the things you mentioned is a pushing back on what we might call American provincialism, which is to analyze all of this in the context of what is happening in America. You mentioned Orbán, who's an example of this populism in Europe, but this rise of far-right reactionary populism is not limited to the United States. It's not limited to Donald Trump.We have seen it happen in other countries in forms that look—they're distinguishable from Trumpism, but they share a lot of common features. What has happened in the last decade or so to lead to this renewed movement of right-wing reactionary populism on a more global scale?Damon: Well, another great question, and another big answer, which I will try to keep within reasonable limits. I mean, it's obviously very complicated because now, we're not only talking about a continent-wide liberal democracy of 330-odd [million] people, but now we're talking about the broader world with all the differences across countries and regions and histories and so forth.I do think there are certain commonalities that we can point to. Clearly, after the end of the cold war, there was kind of a consensus in countries across the free world that, if not full Francis Fukuyamaism, which I've also written about on the podcast, as an exemplification of a certain form of this, but at least that consensus that, well, obviously, far-right politics including fascism and totalitarianism on the far right, that is off-limits.Most countries, say, 30 years ago, thought that was like not even open for debate, but now with the fall of the Soviet Union, it appears that the leftward side of the spectrum has now been cut off as also legitimate. What we're dealing with is that politics going forward in free societies will take place within the 40-yard lines. There will be contestation, there will be elections, and they will be between a center-right party or parties and a center-left party or parties.They will be about whether to cut taxes or raise taxes a little bit, expand government, or cut government a little, whether to choose this or that battle with a revanchist authoritarian state somewhere, maybe in the Middle East or elsewhere, whether to get involved in this war or that war, whether we'll all get together in a coalition of the willing to do battle with them and show them they have to join the club, start taking loans from the World Bank and the IMF and so forth, and whether immigration should be completely open and free or somewhat limited, whether it's going to be for like Canada does for the sake of meeting certain demands for labor within a country for a certain period of time, or it's just going to be open to all comers.These will be our debates. Yes or no, little more, little less, again, within the 40-yard lines of the field, and that's about it. Now, this worked pretty well through the '90s and even into the 2000s, though in the United States because of 9/11 and then eventually Europe, when they had terrorist attacks, this was jolted, it was pushed, but it was pretty resilient, at least until after the financial crisis of 2008, which began in the United States, and then rippled throughout the global economy, caused loss of a lot of wealth.Of course, one of the big economic changes in the post-Cold War world has been the opening up of the finance sector to small-time investors in the form of retirement accounts, and then the companies that handle pensions abroad, investing in the stock market around the world, global markets, and all of that took a big hit in 2008. That bred resentment, then added to resentment about immigration in a lot of countries.It's a little different in Europe than it is in the United States. Here, there always has been more openness to a harder right-wing critique of some of these neoliberal trends. I'll use the term "neoliberal", which no one can seem to define to describe the Fukuyaman tendency of the 40-yard lines defining politics. In this country, there always have been people on the right, they were allowed to make a critique and say, "Maybe we should cut back on immigration. Maybe we should care more about rising crime rates. Maybe we should make certain other changes," but in Europe, Muslim immigration, for instance, in France has been much, much higher, much higher percentage of the population there than here, partly because of the colonial history of the country and allowing immigrants from, say, Algeria in over other countries and then some of it is a result of guilt over the legacy of this.For various reasons in different countries, Germany has a lot of Turkish immigrants for historic reasons because of labor. In the post-war decades, they brought in a lot of Turks to, again, like Canada to fill holes in the labor economy in the country. Because of the history of fascism on the continent and shame about colonialism and its moral legacy, there was more of a sense in Europe that you can't really object to having, say, high Muslim immigration because then you're evil, you're a racist, and that's not allowed.Maybe in Europe, it became not between the 40-yard lines. Even on the right, it became like the 45-yard line. You combine that kind of limiting of the margins with resentment over in this country about how the war on terror was waged and our inability to actually decisively win these battles around the world and wondering why we even did them in the first place and why the intelligence about weapons in Iraq was so terribly flawed, and then add in terrorist attacks in Europe after 9/11 in Spain and France and other places, and feeling like the elites here who are in charge defending those margins, the 40- or 45-yard lines, are inept. They won't actually allow us to debate these things. The anger about the lack of a justice-driven response to the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008.You get the sense, looking back, it's clear there was a boiling pressure building up from the lower classes, from people who are not members of this neoliberal elite consensus of the government is not responding to our anger about these things. You have to listen to us and you have to listen to us and you have to listen to us, saying it over and over again.I do think that whether it's the rise of what Orbán has done in Hungary or the perpetual return of the same Le Pen challenge to the French center, the Brexit vote in the UK, the rise of Trump, the rise of the League in Italy, you go around the world, Bolsonaro in Brazil, what's ended up happening in Turkey with Erdogan where he's ended up versus where he started, Modi in India.In all of these contexts, you have variations on this same story of, "We let you neoliberals run the show for a couple of decades and we're not happy with the results, that you are illegitimately marginalizing the boundaries of political debate." I think one way of understanding what we've been living through is to see that those boundaries have to be fluid. They have to be permitted by the institutions of liberal democracy to shift leftward and rightward, even if they threaten to begin to touch up against something that looks a little like illiberal communism on the left or illiberal fascism on the right, because the attempt to forestall that, to prevent it, to say, "You can't have that opinion, it's illegitimate, it's racist, it's immoral," doesn't make it go away. All it does is increase resentment toward the very institutions that are preventing it. We need a more supple understanding of the fringes if it will, that if you don't let some of it in, you risk a more turbulent reaction against the rules that prevent it from getting in.The last thing I'll say is that an interesting case study, the German situation is a little sui generis both because of Germany's incredible power economically and politically within the EU structure and also because of their distinctive shame over national socialism, which is almost in its own category of awfulness, but it is interesting that the Alternative for Germany, the AfD party, cropped up in the same period, middle of the 2010s, really scared a lot of people, rightly so.It surged to around 15% nationally in Germany which was enough again to scare a lot of people and to throw the coalition government there into a little bit of unsettledness because 15% is enough to mess with coalition formation if all the parties refuse to make a deal with and govern with that party because it means that now your total set of potential coalition mates is a lot smaller because 15% of the votes are now off the table for negotiation.The interesting thing is that Germany did not ban the AfD party, they didn't allow it to sit in a government, but they did allow it to be the main opposition party to the Christian Democrat-led Merkel government at the end of her very long reign. The result is that the support for the AfD has come down. It's now getting 9%, 10%. Can a liberal democracy survive with a far-right party that gets around 10%? I think, yes. Maybe it's better to just allow it to be there, make its case, and then lose by the normal rules of democracy.Germany also has a 5% electoral threshold. If it sinks a lot more, it could even wink out of existence at the level of the Bundestag, which would be a very good thing. Because it could come back if it got more support, but it shows that the system is open to those who are angry on the margins. Again, that can be scary for those of us who would like the—we don't want the 40-yard lines to be enforced from the top. We would prefer, at least I speak for myself, I would prefer it to be roughly within the 40-yard lines but by free choice. [chuckles] I want the electorate to want politics to take place in those somewhat narrow terms. If there starts to be rebellion on those margins, you can't keep it within the 40-yard lines by imposing it from the top down.Aaron: Then bringing this back to the context of the US, our final question, I'll ask another that I fear might be a big one, as far as combating illliberalism in the US, one disadvantage that we have is we don't have a multiparty democracy, so we can't relegate it to a 10% or 15%. We have two parties, and that 10% or 15% can take over one of them and then effectively—and then achieve White House, achieve dominance in the legislature, and so on, be able to exercise power well beyond their 15% support within the electorate.The real worry, I think, is—one of the perennial questions about Trumpism is, does Trumpism represent a genuinely fascist movement? Fascism is another thing that it's awfully hard to come up with a single definition of it, but it does seem to have a lot of legitimately fascist characteristics, and there's a real concern that, say, if Trump wins again and has the control and is able to exercise more control, that he'll push things even in…I Trump would be an authoritarian if he were able to get away with it. Within the US context, how do we take those lessons that you just articulated on the international scene and apply them looking forward two years, 10 years, to try to make sure we don't slip into something that we can't easily recover from?Damon: Yes, again, another great question, and you're completely right that the US situation—I began in one of my first responses and talking about how we have to make distinctions and Trump is worse than DeSantis. There's a way in which the American situation is uniquely alarming in the international context precisely because of what you're saying. We are not a parliamentary system in which the executive sits in the legislature and really has no independent power apart from the multi-coalition government that is in charge at any given moment.That makes our president much more of a potential dictator if he can get away with it. Then we also have a two-party system where it's either one side or the other. If one side, namely the Republicans, becomes devoted to a fascistic leader, then it could potentially control the whole ballgame. Especially with the way upcoming Senate elections are looking, it is at least within the realm of possibility that in 2025, we could have a reelected Donald Trump as president with 61 Republicans in the Senate, which is a true horror show scenario, and it really does scare me.I don't have any great magic bullet response to this. My response is to give a version of the popularism argument that is often made about the Democrats because we haven't talked much about the Democrats in our conversation, but they are the other party. As commentator David Frum said in a very pithy tweet the other day, I won't be able to quote it from memory, but to paraphrase the point he was making in the single tweet, that because of the shape of the different electoral coalition, if the two parties in the US, and the way that those coalitions at the present moment are interacting with our uniquely, distinctively weird American systems, which are really not built for ideologically sorted parties in the way that we have them now. We're in a situation where the Republicans are able to run a politics that is geared toward placating its most radical, committed elements in a way that the Democrats cannot do and win.The Republicans can win by becoming ever more extreme, and that parenthetically, just so your listeners grasp why this might be, it has to do with the fact that both the Senate and the electoral college involve winning states, and Republicans are spread around many more states than the Democrats tend to with a majority. There are more people living in blue states, in states that vote for the Democrats, but there are fewer states that vote, so they get more electoral votes, but not enough to compensate for the fact that the Dakotas and Nebraska and Kansas and all these largely empty states vote for the Republicans, giving them an edge in both of those institutions.That's one-half of the equation that Frum talks about. The other half is that the Democrats, although they cannot placate their left-wing agitating base as much and win, their potential winning coalition is much larger. It's very unlikely that the Republican, say, presidential candidate in 2024 is going to win, say, 55% of the popular vote. That's almost impossible to imagine.It is possible to imagine that a Democratic candidate could do that. Now, I don't know if it would be Biden or Harris or who it could be, but in terms of potential, the Democratic message appeals to more Americans. To see how this interacts with their institutions, all you have to do is look at the results of the 2020 election. Biden won seven million more votes than Donald Trump, but if 50,000 of those votes flipped to Trump in three states, Trump would have won anyway.That is a horrifying prospect for the legitimacy and stability of American democracy because it means that—George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 while losing the popular vote in one state by a very small number, like a few thousand votes. Trump won in 2016, winning the electoral college while losing the popular vote by almost three million. If Trump had managed to flip those 50,000 or 60,000 votes in three states, he would've been reelected president while losing seven million.These tendencies are increasing over time. It's conceivable that in 2024, you could have a Trump or DeSantis win the presidency while losing the popular vote by 8 million, 9 million, 10 million people, which is going to be very dangerous for American democracy because I do think there are limits to how much losing the Democrats are going to be willing to take if they're actually getting that many more votes in the aggregate.My medium answer to your very complex and important question is the Democrats need to do whatever it takes to prevail. If that means moderating on some social issues, that will alienate some of their more agitated activist base, they should do it for the promise of winning more votes away from the Republicans in the center. Because, really, that's the only thing that the Republicans are going to understand and that could moderate them over the future, which is to realize you can't actually win power saying and doing the things that you're doing.They need to learn that lesson. If they keep being able to squeak out victories doing this, they're going to keep doing it out of simple self-interest. Anyway, that's my unsatisfying answer. I'm never entirely satisfied with how I answer those kinds of questions, including in the post that went up today I made a version of this argument, and after I do it, I think, "Oh, no wonder nobody likes me." [chuckles] It's not very satisfying to say that we have to be the reasonable ones. We have to be the ones to say, "Sorry, you passionate supporters on my own side, you got to sit on it so that we can win later." I get why that pisses some people off.[music]Aaron: Thank you for listening to Reactionary Minds, a project of The UnPopulist. If you want to learn more about the rise of illiberalism and the need to defend a free society, check out theunpopulist.substack.com.Accompanying Reading:Damon Linker, Eyes on the Right’s inaugural post From The UnPopulist: Shikha Dalmia, Populism Sans the Popular Vote: A Dangerous Formula H. David Baer, CPAC Is Going to Hungary, Never Mind Viktor Orban’s Attacks on ChurchesGarvan Walshe, Angela Merkel Helped Defeat Germany’s Populist Far Right Without AppeasementAndy Craig, Trump’s Next Presidential Run Could End the Peaceful Transfer of Power This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunpopulist.substack.com

Did the Birchers win after all? by Niskanen Center

There's a secret cabal that's trying to control us — they're lying to you, and they're communists. Sound familiar? No, it's not QAnon. It's the John Birch Society. Our culture wars aren't new — they just get recycled. Robert Tracinski joins Charlie Sykes on this weekend's podcast. Want to listen without ads? Bulwark+ members get exclusive access to an ad-free version of the podcast. Learn more here: https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/how-do-i-add-a-bulwark-member-only?s=w Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's a secret cabal that's trying to control us — they're lying to you, and they're communists. Sound familiar? No, it's not QAnon. It's the John Birch Society. Our culture wars aren't new — they just get recycled. Robert Tracinski joins Charlie Sykes on this weekend's podcast. Want to listen without ads? Bulwark+ members get exclusive access to an ad-free version of the podcast. Learn more here: https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/how-do-i-add-a-bulwark-member-only?s=w

Remember the Birchers? Get US out of the UN, and NATO. And the President lied. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

It's December 9th. This day in 1958, a group of twelve men met in Indianapolis to found the “John Birch Society,” a virulently anti-communist, conspiracy-minded group that would come to be influential and controversial in 20th century conservatism. Jody, Niki, and Kellie are joined by John S Huntington to discuss what the Birchers were hoping to accomplish, how they've floated in and out of conservative movement, and why a John Birch style of thinking is alive and well today. John's book is “Far-Right Vanguard” — find out more about his work on his website. This Day In Esoteric Political History is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Your support helps foster independent, artist-owned podcasts and award-winning stories. If you want to support the show directly, you can do so on our website: ThisDayPod.com Get in touch if you have any ideas for future topics, or just want to say hello. Our website is thisdaypod.com Follow us on social @thisdaypod Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Brittani Brown, Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Julie Shapiro, Executive Producer at Radiotopia

Longtime member of The John Birch Society, Brad Colovich, tells of his journey from being a "Liberal" to a "Bircher" or educational activist in The John Birch Society (JBS). He notes how Ezra Taft Benson (prominent religious leader with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and former Secretary of Agriculture under President Eisenhower) influenced him to believe that a conspiracy does exist to destroy liberty of all mankind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxBcodF8Y7Q He also mentions that reading "None Dare Call it Conspiracy" by Gary Allen in the early '70s helped change his worldview on how the world works and how people scheme against liberty. https://www.amazon.com/None-Dare-Call-Conspiracy-Allen/dp/1939438004/ref=sr_1_1?crid=LBXSC832JR7&dchild=1&keywords=none+dare+call+it+conspiracy+book&qid=1611620742&sprefix=none+dare+call%2Caps%2C214&sr=8-1 Brad tells of principles to follow in influencing others, be they "liberal," "conservative," or anywhere in between. He notes that patience and avoiding name calling are good habits to develop. Also, treating others with respect and realizing that not everyone is interested in what "Birchers" may want to share with them are good things to remember. Lastly, Brad tells all to never give up in the fight for freedom. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/birchingthewest/message

Ezra Taft Benson wanted to run for U.S. President. Dr. Matt Harris describes a few attempts by Benson to run for POTUS, and how Church leaders finally put an end to Benson's political aspirations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-oIv27fYmA Matt: The Birchers will create this secret organization called the Committee of 1776. It's run by Birchers. It's got Birch footprints all over it, but "we can't reveal ourselves as Birchers because it's too controversial." And they say this in their board meeting. "If we say it's us, then people will be turned off by it. So do not mention that Robert Welch or anybody is behind this. But it's really mostly Birchers doing this. So they draft Benson as their presidential candidate and they draft a man named Strom Thurmond, who was a Dixiecrat in the 1940's, and split off from the Democratic Party because he was so pro-segregation and didn't like the civil rights tack that President Harry Truman was taking. ... And, without going into the details, the ticket fizzles. It doesn't raise enough money. Thurman never had the buy-in, to be honest, that Benson had. Benson was alarmed by it and just giddy about it. President McKay gives the green light for him to do this, by the way, which is interesting, over the protest, of Hugh Brown and some other leaders. ... Elder Benson and his son Reed fly out to Birmingham and they have a three hour meeting with George Wallace and Benson tells Robert Welch, "He's a great guy. We have a lot in common." So, Benson tells Governor Wallace, "I need to get the support of President McKay. I can't do this unilaterally." President McKay knew that there was some pushback when he gave the green light to run with Strom Thurmond. Some of the Apostles told him, including Hugh Brown, "This is stupid. Don't do this." McKay is an old Scottish man. He had a little temper. "Don't tell me what to do." The brethren were sensitive to that, including Hugh B. Brown. So he goes back to Salt Lake and tells President McKay in a highly confidential meeting, "They want me to be the presidential candidate with Wallace." This is on the Independent ticket because there's a Republican Mormon who might wrap up the Republican nomination. So we've got two high profile Mormons running for the same office. GT: This is George Romney, right? Matt: George Romney, right. What really muddies the water is there are a number of brethren who support George Romney and not Benson. That's another challenging issue. GT: And Marion G. Romney is in the quorum. How is he related to George? Matt: They're cousins. So, we've got that dynamic going on, too. Romney has gotten priesthood blessings from President McKay, from other people about running and they tell him, "You're going to run and we support you." President McKay supports George Romney and tells him this. If you were't aware, George Romney is the father of Mitt Romney.  Harris tells how LDS leaders ended Benson's political ambitions. Byt the way, Harris' book on Benson is now available for purchase on Amazon!  See https://amzn.to/2EHTklK Check out our conversation…. Dr. Matt Harris describes Ezra Taft Benson's attempts to run for POTUS and how his political career ended. Our other interviews about Benson. 252: Benson on Civil Rights & Communism (Harris) 251: Benson and John Birch Society (Harris) 250: How Ezra Taft Benson Joined Eisenhower (Harris)

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 250. This is the audio of my presentation to the 2018 PFS meeting on Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018. Powerpoint slides embedded below. Youtube embedded below. Also podcast at PFP195. Related material: see material linked in the above slides, including: Kinsella, On the UN, the Birchers, and International Law International Law, Libertarian Principles, and the Russia-Ukraine War Rubins, Papanastasiou & Kinsella's International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner's Guide, Second Edition (Oxford, 2020) KOL001 | “The (State's) Corruption of (Private) Law” (PFS 2012) International Law MOOC (Youtube) Sovereignty, International Law, and the Triumph of Anglo-American Cunning | Joseph R. Stromberg Rosalyn Higgins, Problems and Process: International Law and How We Use It (Clarendon, 1994) Mark Janis, International Law (7th Ed. 2018) Restatement (Third) of the Law, The Foreign Relations Law of the United States (1987), HeinOnline, Westlaw (not online) American Society of International Law (ASIL), Electronic Information System for International Law (EISIL) https://www.asil.org/resources/electronic-resource-guide-erg and http://www.eisil.org/ M.N. Shaw, International Law (7th Ed. 2017) Ian Brownlie (Crawford), Principles of Public International Law (1966) (8th ed., 2012) See also Neocons Hate International Law The UN, International Law, and Nuclear Weapons Nukes and International Law Update: See my International Law, Libertarian Principles, and the Russia-Ukraine War; see also Murray Rothbard, "Just War," in John Denson, ed., The Costs of War: Much of "classical international law" theory, developed by the Catholic Scholastics, notably the 16th-century Spanish Scholastics such as Vitoria and Suarez, and then the Dutch Protestant Scholastic Grotius and by 18th- and 19th-century jurists, was an explanation of the criteria for a just war. For war, as a grave act of killing, needs to be justified. ... Classical international law ... should be brought back as quickly as possible.

This episode explores the weird history and legacy of the John Birch Society. The conservative organization organized itself around a fervent anti-communisim and took its name from a missionary it saw as a martyr. The story of the real John Birch is told, and the show discusses how the Society that bears his name worships a false image of the man himself, who would have not agreed with the Society's politics. How did the Birchers get kicked out of mainstream conservatism by William F. Buckley? Why did they hate Eisenhower? The episode also explores the conspiratorial nature of fringe politics in general and reflects on what the Birchers can teach us about Q anon, the Tea Party, and more paranoid styles of politics. Starring Jay Eldred and Jordan Poss!

On this episode of The Critical Hour, Dr. Wilmer Leon is joined by Caleb Maupin, a journalist and political analyst who focuses on US foreign policy and the global system of monopoly capitalism and imperialism. He discusses his latest pieces, "Fear of Russia and the Rise of 'Left Birchers'" and "Talk of Socialism Stirs Controversy in the US."In Caleb's recent article, “Fear of Russia and the Rise of 'Left Birchers,'" he opens with the following: “In being defined merely by its opponents and fixating on a fear of Russia, a large chunk of the far-left has usurped the role held by the far-right during the Cold War.” Who on the far-left is this referring to and how so? He further writes, “In the 1960s, anti-communist fanatics could not really explain the ideology of Marxism, simply seeing it as 'dictatorship,' 'redistribution of wealth' or 'taking my money away.' Likewise, the new Birchers often cannot tell you what a 'fascist' is, or offer a comprehensible definition. However, these folks are happy to draw complex charts and graphs, in attempts to convince you that someone is a fascist, utilizing classic 'guilt by association.' Furthermore, much like the Birchers of Cold War era, due to some strange leaps in logic, all the 'transphobia,' 'slut-shaming,' 'mansplaining”,' 'white supremacy' and 'fascism' they are opposed to is somehow being imported from Russia, directed as part of a Kremlin conspiracy to hurt the US status quo.” In his second piece, "Talk of Socialism Stirs Controversy in the US," Caleb writes, “After Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's victory, all across US media a debate about 'socialism' has taken place. Among Republicans and conservatives, alarm-bells have sounded. Ocasio-Cortez is accused of wanting to 'turn the USA into Venezuela.' Because Ocasio-Cortez has criticized capitalism, her critics equate her to Marxist-Leninists, and invoke Cold War rhetoric against her.” What's wrong or problematic with these labels?It's Friday, so it's time for my panel. We'll get into all the latest news from Sen. John McCain's announcement that he will stop treatment for the brain cancer he has been battling for over a year; Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg being granted immunity in the Cohen probe; and Fox News host Tucker Carlson discussing the alleged plight of white South African farmers on his program, prompting President Trump to tweet calls for further study. We've got that and much more!

EPISODESHOW NOTESThis song first appeared in Broadside, his first. Famously, he was scheduled to perform on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1962 — which had just broke Elvis and would later break the Beatles. He auditioned the song, people loved it, but when it came down to the show, he was told he couldn’t perform because it could be a “libel” against the John Birch Society. He refused to change the song and walked off the set. National attention followed. Sullivan supported him saying the John Birchers shouldn’t be above criticism.Stodgy Columbia, learning this was scheduled for Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, pulled the song off the record (less than 300 copies of the album went out). Dylan relented and also pulled “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie”and “Rocks and Gravel.” He replaced them with “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” “Talkin’ World War III Blues,” “Girl From the North Country” and “Masters of War.” John Hammond said, quoted in Shelton’s No Direction Home:The CBS lawyers, not Columbia Records, decided that the reference to Hitler involved every single member of the John Birch Society, therefore it was libelous, or some crap like that. I get away with much worse material with Seeger than was ever on a Dylan album.I couldn’t find the Freewheelin’ version of the song for this recording but we did listen to the 1963 demo (released officially on TBLS Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos) and the Halloween 1964 performance at the Philharmonic Hall (released on TBLS Vol. 6) in addition to the de facto version off TBLS Vol. 1-3.Song itselfThe song is a classic and still finds resonance today. “Reds,” of course were one in a long line of boogeymen the United States has sought to make the Other. The Birchers are the real threats to freedom of speech when everything uttered is “communist.”The song is our first rendition of the “talking blues,” which he’d use often in this period with “Talkin’ New York,” “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,” Talkin’ World War III Blues” and “I Shall Be Free” to name a few (to say nothing of less-talky “T.V. Talkin' Song” off Under the Red Sky.To Dave GloverBefore going into the history of the John Birch Society, Daniel read Dylan’s 1963 open letter to his friend Dave Glover:I keep rememberin the songs we used t sing an play The songs written thirty fifty years ago The dirt farm songs – the dust bowl songs The depression songs – the down and out songs The ol blues and ballads I think a Woody’s songs I think a Woody’s day “This land I’ll defend with my life if it be” An I say t myself “Yeah that’s right” “Hitler’s on the march” “I don’t wan”m takin my ground” “I don’t wan”m livin on my land” An I see two side man I see two roads to pick yer route The American way or the Fascist way When there was a strike there’s only two kind of views An two kinds of tales t tell the news Thru the unions eyes or thru the bosses eyes An yuh could stand on a line an look at yer friends An stand on that same line an see yer foes It was that easy “Which Side’re You On” ain’t phony words An they ain’t from a phony song An that was Woody’s day man Two sides I don know what happened cause I wasn’t aroun but somewhere along the line a that used t be day things got messed up More kinds a sides come int’ the story Folks I guess started switchin sides an makin up their own sides There got t be so many sides that no eyes could could see the eyes facin’m There got t be so many sides that all of’m started lookin’ like each other I don pretend to know what happened man, but somehow all sides lost their purpose an folks forgot about other folks I mean they must a all started goin against each other not for the good a their side but for the good a jes their own selves An them two simple sides that was so easy t tell apart bashed an boomed an exploded so hard an heavy that t’day all’ts left and made for us is the one big rockin rollin COMPLICATED CIRCLE Nowadays folk’s brains’re bamboozled an bowled over by categories labels an slogans an advertisements that could send anybody’s head in a spin It’s hard t believe anybody’s tellin the truth for what that is I swear it’s true that in some parts a the country folks believe the finger-pointers more’n the President It’s the time a the flag wavin shotgun carryin John Birchers It’s the time a the killer dogs an killer sprays It’s the time a the billbord sign super flyin highways It’s the time a the pushbutton foods an five minute fads It’s the time a the white collar shirt an the white sheeted hood and the white man’s sun tan lotion It’s time a guns and grenades an bombs bigger’n any time’s ever seen It’s the time a Liz Taylor fans – sports fans and electric fans It’s the time when a twenty year ol colored boy with his head bloody don get too much thought from the seventy year ol senator who wants t bomb Cuba I don’t know who the people were man that let it get this way but they got what they wanted out a their lives an left me an you facin a scared raped worldJohn Birch Society todayJBS, somehow, still lives on today. It’s main activity in the 1960s, according to Rick Perlstein, “comprised monthly meetings to watch a film by Welch, followed by writing postcards or letters to government officials linking specific policies to the Communist menace” (kind of like watching cable news and then tweeting at perceived menaces!)It’s stances are incredible, mainly for being on the wrong side of history on nearly every issue across decades: Against Civil Rights Act of 1964. Against Equal Rights Amendment. Obsessed with the 10th Amendment. Against all free-trade agreements/globalization. Anti-interventionist. Believes fluoride is a communist conspiracy – which they deny but, come on. Thought Eisenhower was a communist. Against OSHA. Against diplomatic ties to China. Against transferring Panama Canal over to Panamanians because, you know, communists.But it’s interesting: Antisemitic, racist, anti-Mormon, anti-Masonic groups criticized the organization’s acceptance of Jews, non-whites, Masons, and Mormons as members. And in a bitterly ironic twist, given today’s world where the Right still worships Ayn Rand, in a 1964 Playboy interview, she said,I consider the Birch Society futile, because they are not for capitalism but merely against communism … I gather they believe that the disastrous state of today’s world is caused by a communist conspiracy. This is childishly naïve and superficial. No country can be destroyed by a mere conspiracy, it can be destroyed only by ideas.Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center lists the society as a “‘Patriot’ Group. It believes a “one world government” is coming so it pushes the US to get out of the United Nations. They still want to dismantle the Federal Reserve. It’s currently led by Ray Clark, who has a fake degree from Donsbaugh University School of Nutrition in Huntington Beach, California – and he puts nutrional supplements in every photo of JBS literature. And, if you want a trip, go to their Twitter to see how hard they’re trying to #hashtag their way into the hearts of the youth.THE EPISODE’S BOOKLET & PLAYLISTRECOMMENDATIONSRecommendations. Kelly recommended Nick Drake and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 while Daniel listened to Chris Stapleton From A Room: Volume 1.ENDINGSOnly 653 songs left.Kelly guessed #319, which would have been “Bourbon Street” off The Basement Tapes.It was #642, "God Knows," off 1990's Under the Red Sky.Follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. See our real-time playlist See That My Playlist is Kept Clean on Spotify. Follow us intermittently on Twitter and Instagram.Tell your friends about the show, rate and review wherever they let you, and consider supporting us by subscribing or at Patreon. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit signonthewindow.substack.com/subscribe

This is an archived copy of The Daily Standard podcast. Please note that advertisements, links and other specific references within the content may be out of date.