The JBS is much more PR-savvy now than in the past. Their magazine (The New American) is sanitized so that it appeals to the widest possible audience. In this respect, the JBS operates in a manner comparable to the way the Communist Party operated during the 1940’s-1960’s, i.e. minimizing or euphemizing the underlying predicates of Communist ideology in order to attract as many supporters as possible into their web.
Significantly, the Birch Society has never retracted one word of anything it believed or published during its formative years. Below (for example) I copy the comments made by JBS founder, Robert Welch, to the first meeting of the JBS National Council in January 1960 — which the JBS has never retracted or modified:
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“Today, gentlemen, I can assure you, without the slightest doubt in my own mind that the takeover at the top is, for all practical purposes, virtually complete. Whether you like it or not, or whether you believe it or not, our Federal Government is already, literally in the hands of the Communists.”
“In our two states with the largest population, New York and California...already the two present Governors are almost certainly actual Communists...Our Congress now contains a number of men like Adam Clayton Powell of New York and Charles Porter of Oregon, who are certainly actual Communists, and plenty more who are sympathetic to Communist purposes for either ideological or opportunistic reasons.” [Note: the reference to Governors refers to Edmund G. Brown of California and Nelson Rockefeller of New York.]
“In the Senate, there are men like Stephen Young of Ohio, and Wayne Morse of Oregon, McNamara of Michigan, and Clifford Case of New Jersey and Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, whom it is utter folly to think of as just liberals. Every one of those men is either an actual Communist or so completely a Communist sympathizer or agent that it makes no practical difference...”
“Our Supreme Court, dominated by Earl Warren and Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black, is so visibly pro-Communist that no argument is even needed…And our federal courts below that level…are in many cases just as bad.”
“Our State Department is loaded with Communists from top to bottom, to the extent that our roll call of Ambassadors almost sounds like a list somebody has put together to start a Communist front.” ...
“It is estimated from many reliable sources that from 70% to 90% of the responsible personnel in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare are Communists. Our Central Intelligence Agency under Allen Dulles is nothing more or less than an agency to promote Communism throughout the world...Almost all the other Departments are loaded with Communists and Communist sympathizers. And this generalization most specifically does include our whole Defense Department.”
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In May 2008, the JBS told its membership that “the John Birch Society showed in the 1960’s that the communists basically ran both the civil rights movement and the KKK... You cannot get a really good conflict started unless you control both sides of the argument.”
I doubt that many Americans (and especially Tea Party Movement adherents) would accept such nonsense. No significant conservative believes this crap.
And the Birch Society believed that Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks were, at a minimum, Communist dupes and tools. By contrast, former Cong. Ron Paul declared that Parks and King are among his heroes. In fact, Cong. Paul voted in 1979 to make MLK’s birthday a national holiday — while JBS speakers and writers attempt to make American believe that MLK Jr was a subversive enemy of our country.
The Birch Society’s “Freedom Index” — scores the voting behavior of all members of Congress based upon what the JBS considered “their adherence to constitutional principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, national sovereignty, and a traditional foreign policy of avoiding foreign entanglements.”
The most recent cumulative JBS scores for Tea Party favorites reveals that the Birch Society thinks they are total failures. In the JBS scheme of things, a score of less than 60% is like an “F” (failure) in school, 60-69% is “D” (poor), 70-74% would be equivalent to a C- (below average and therefore highly suspect about genuine commitment to conservative/constitutionalist principles)’
Here, then, are some of their current cumulative scores:
ALABAMA
Sen. Richard Shelby = 63%
ARIZONA
Sen. John McCain = 64%
CALIFORNIA
Cong. Darryl Issa = 53%
GEORGIA
Sen. Saxby Chambliss = 58%
KENTUCKY
Sen. Mitch McConnell = 61%
MISSISSIPPI
Sen. Thad Cochran = 53%
OHIO
Sen. Rob Portman = 50%
SOUTH CAROLINA
Sen. Lindsey Graham = 63%
TENNESSEE
Sen. Bob Corker = 67%
Cong. Marsha Blackburn = 63%
TEXAS
Sen. John Cornyn = 68%
Cong. Louie Gohmert =74%
UTAH
Sen. Orrin Hatch = 59%
VIRGINIA
Cong. Eric Cantor = 57%
WISCONSIN
Cong. Paul Ryan = 58%
WYOMING
Sen. Mike Enzi = 70%
Medicare? Medicaid? food stamps for the poor, obamaphones, the ACA, any of those just having their funding reduced might seem like a victory, but it is a dismal failure. None of the programs are Constitutional. If you use original intent as a standard, the surprise is that anyone on the Hill gets a passing grade.
Aside from that, I'll go by what I have read the past 10+ years, rather than what someone said back in the '60s. Consider one thing, however: If Communists in our government are/were primarily Democrats, and the KKK has been (traditionally) primarily Democrats, it sure looks like the same Party is calling the shots.
“And the Birch Society believed that Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks were, at a minimum, Communist dupes and tools. By contrast, former Cong. Ron Paul declared that Parks and King are among his heroes. In fact, Cong. Paul voted in 1979 to make MLK’s birthday a national holiday — while JBS speakers and writers attempt to make American believe that MLK Jr was a subversive enemy of our country.”
Proving once again that Ron Paul can be a dope. And he’s old enough to know better. Evidently you are one of the young and foolish sort who thinks that MLK was some sort of conservative icon. The JBS made plenty of wild claims but this wasn’t one of them.
The fact that MLK had Communist Party ties was well known to both Jack and Bobby Kennedy, hardly JBS members. I take it that you’ve never heard of Hunter Pitts O’Dell or Stanley Levison. They were both close advisors of MLK and they both were members of the CPUSA. Their intimate association with MLK is what prompted the Kennedy brothers to wiretap MLK.
http://www.humanevents.com/2006/02/24/jfk-and-rfk-were-right-to-wiretap-mlk/