I don't remember the JBS doing anything, I was trying to learn about them in the 50s and 60s but in time I came to think of them as a bunch of weirdos that sold books to each other and did not participate in politics, it was like a closed little group of conspiracy nuts marketing their writings to each other.
Did they used to win elections, write legislation, endorse winning candidates? What did they do do that was significant to American elections.
I certainly hadn’t planned to spend an hour Sunday morning writing this, but you’ve really hacked me off!
They DID NOT ENDORSE CANDIDATES. They TRIED to educate the ELECTORATE so that THEY would recognize, endorse and ELECT decent candidates. Perhaps if you’d pitched in, the effort might have been more successful? The handles to the oars in a rowboat are INSIDE the boat. You and too many others stood in the water and WATCHED others take turns rowing. That certainly explains why your criticism of the JBS is ALL WET.
A major activity of EVERY JBS session I attended was a mass letter-writing to every member’s respective senators and congresscritters — HAND WRITTEN, hand addressed, 3 PARAGRAPHS MAX — on the critical issues of the day. The letters were collected by the chapter leader and mailed over the week between meetings so as to maintain a steady flow into their offices. That was long BEFORE email and faxes. And HOW MANY CONTACTS HAVE YOU MADE WITH Y0UR ALLEGED REPRESENTATIVES?
Groups of members promoted local speeches by folks who had fled communism. I MCd several speeches here by men like former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov who was attached to Novosti Press in Moscow who DEVASTATED Teddy Kennedy. He accompanied Kennedy during his visit to the USSR and said they kept him DRUNK and he simply absorbed all the Soviet PROPAGANDA and brought it back verbatim to the States where he blathered it to any idiot reporter who’d listen. Yuri also told the 300 folks there – gee, wonder where you were those evenings? — that the USSR was the most RACIST NATION on earth, requiring EVERY citizen to carry an ID card listing his RACE.
Men like Avraham Schifrin — a Russian Jew — who tracked the Soviet gulags and the atrocities committed there.
JBS members could always be found at congressional Town Hall Meetings asking the TOUGH QUESTIONS and NOT SITTING DOWN UNTIL THEY GOT SOME KIND OF MEANINGFUL ANSWER. I have HUNDREDS of published letters-to-the editors of our local liberal fishwrappers written by me and other members over the years doing what we could to wake you and your friends the hell up.
Many of us did local radio call-in talk shows for years for little or no compensation.
And stuff like THIS!
Around 6 am on dark morning in the early 80s, 4 of us piled into a car in Atlanta with a few hundred TRIM bulletins and other fact-packed flyers detailing how then Georgia Representative Ed Jenkins and Senator Sam Nunn were voting on issues important to all citizens. Our destination was Hartwell, Georgia and an “Eggs and Issues Breakfast” hosted by a large Hartwell church.
We arrived at the church about an hour early and deployed. As folks arrived for the buffet line, each was handed some of this highly informative literature. As they waited in line, they read and chatted as new information came to their attention. Just before the invited dignitaries were to make their 20 minute speeches (aka, pitches for re-election), we made certain a supply of these flyers made it to the head table. Ed and Sam ate precious little of the fine southern breakfast cuisine before them as they periodically glanced menacingly at the table we occupied. In unison, the 4 of us smiled sweetly and waved.
When Ed and Sam each rose to speak, each devoted 16 or 17 minutes of the allotted 20 minutes TRYING TO DEFEND their DOCUMENTED VOTING RECORDS to an increasingly hostile gathering as we returned Ed and Sam’s constant withering glares with more sweet smiles and waves. It was truly one of the highlights of my early years as a political bomb-thrower. YOU should try it!
After a bit more bomb-throwing in other parts of his district, Ed Jenkins was defeated in the next election. Because he ran state-wide and we lacked the resources and manpower to cover the entire state (and he did begin to clean up his act) Sam hung on for another term or two. (And those 2 year House terms — where the power to tax and spend repose — is where the effort must be concentrated.
Bottom line? The Birchers were — and are — some of the best informed citizens in the country and, if nothing else, they BOUGHT TIME for the rest of you to WAKE THE HELL UP!!!!!
There’s MUCH, MUCH more but I think that by now and with some luck you might get the idea here.
If you’re STILL reading this – those MTV and VHI induced short attention spans can be SUCH a problem – please know that I am positively giddy with anticipation as I look forward to your response. I’m certain it will contain a lengthy list of things YOU and your friends have done and are now doing along these lines to keep this place FREE of the tyranny born of citizen apathy and indolence.
Let me leave you with some wise and timeless words from two thousand years ago:
“We believe a man should be concerned about public as well as private affairs, for we regard the person who takes no part in politics not as merely uninterested but as useless.” –Pericles (Citizen of Athens)