They [Trump and the Republicans] tell us:
- The economy has been a disaster
- The military is crumbling
- Obamacare is a disaster
- Nothing in the government works
- Terrorists are pouring in
- Immigrants are taking our jobs
- Muslims are the enemy
- Undocumented immigrants must be deported
- Our leaders are losers and morons, except, of course, the great Donald Trump and his cabinet
- We’re one supreme court justice away from gun confiscation
- It’s almost the end of the nation that was once known as the United States of America.
Every day these talking points are repeated by Trump’s surrogates. Republicans parrot the same dribble and repeat it to their constituents.
As a child of the radical right, I heard the identical talking points from my father and his John Birch Society allies. It’s hard to say, but it’s true; my father preached the ideas that are poisoning American politics today. These radical right-wing ideas have polarized Americans and threaten our democracy.
Please don’t dismiss Trump and his GOP pals as “politics as usual.” Don’t laugh at his crazy tweets and pretend that somehow, someday he’ll start acting presidential. Don’t assume that a president like Donald Trump will be stopped by the same radical GOP that elected him.
I should point out that at least in the 1950s and 1960s, Muslims were not a particular target of Bircher fear-mongering.
Speaking of the Birchers, here's an interesting cultural relic from 1968 - John Denver singing a song critical of them, John Denver with The Mitchell Trio - The John Birch Society (Live 1968):
The John Birch Society still exists, though I won't include their website link here. John Savage wrote about them in 2017 in The John Birch Society Is Back Politico 07/16/2017:
This is what the 21st-century John Birch Society looks like. Gone is the organization’s past obsession with ending the supposed communist plot to achieve mind-control through water fluoridation. What remains is a hodgepodge of isolationist, religious and right-wing goals that vary from concrete to abstract, from legitimate to conspiracy minded—goals that don’t look so different from the ideology coming out of the [Trump] White House. It wants to pull the United States out of NAFTA (which it sees as the slippery slope that will lead us to a single-government North American Union), return America to what they call its Christian foundations, defund the UN, abolish the departments of education and energy, and slash the federal government drastically. The John Birch Society once fulminated on the idea of Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government; now, it wants to stop the investigation into Russia’s 2016 election meddling and possible collusion with the campaign of President Donald Trump.Rick Perlstein discussed the Birchers and Claire Conner's book in Growing Up in the John Birch Society The Nation 08/06/2013. That was during the Obama Administration, three years before Donald Trump was elected President. Rick wrote then:
The Society’s ideas, once on the fringe, are increasingly commonplace in today’s Republican Party. And where Birchers once looked upon national Republican leaders as mortal enemies, the ones I met in Texas see an ally in the president. “All of us here voted for Trump,” says Carter. “And we’re optimistic about what he will do."
... now we have thirty states with Republican majorities, many of them veto-proof.We can defend or idealize Obama all we want. But this was the state of American politics less than a year after Obama's re-election. And whatever the Democrats did, good or bad, during those eight years was not sufficient to avoid a Radical Republican takeover in 2016. This is something we all need to remember when people hold up the Obama Administration as a template for a Biden Administration. If we want a Biden Presidency to be more than a four-year reprieve from a Trumpist restoration, that Administration will have to achieve something different in both policy and in political organization and persuasion than what we had in 2009-2017 under Obama.
... in Chicago, Claire [Conner] concluded in thunder. “These people are at the point of changing our government. If you want to see how, look at Texas, look at Florida. Look at Ohio. Look at Wisconsin, for God’s sake - my state. Look at Michigan, for heaven’s sake: they think they elected a moderate, but they elected a right-wing radical. That’s how this game is played. They’re changing the policy. And the whole thing is so deep that when they vote them out of office, number one, half of them won’t be able to vote. And number two, we will have years of problems to fix…. We were so happy that we won the popular vote, but they’re buying the place….they’ve virtually stopped the government for five years.”
Claire Conner knows of what she speaks. She was there at the inception—as a sad-eyed, vulnerable adolescent—then watched as the machine was put together: a machine whose deceptively smooth surface has always only barely hid the corrosive ugliness and cunning anti-democratic cleverness underneath, convincing too many liberals, too many times, that the ugliness could not but fade away in the fulness of time—convincing them wrong. Read her, and listen well: there is nothing new under the wingnut sun. [italics in original; my emphasis in bold]
