Rachel Maddow and the John Birch Society have been engaged in a long distance tete a tete over the last few months, with Birchers being none too pleased with Maddow's coverage of them:
But just like her erroneous claim that the JBS had opposed fluoridation as a communist mind control plot (it actually opposed fluoridation as a precedent for the socialized medicine Maddow supports and, incidentally, was part of the Soviet communist state), the other claims were false as well.
my emphasis, link: http://www.jbs.org/...
Let's leave aside for a moment the side-splitting hairs between calling fluoridation a "communist mind control plot" and health care reform as "part of the Soviet communist state". Let's also put aside the convenient historical rewrites Birchers do when confronted with their own past, as experienced by another commentator here: http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/... . Let's also ignore, just for the moment, this bit on the JBS's own website:
Nazi & USSR used Fluoride to make their people docile, complacent and very manageable. Have you been asking yourself why we Americans are NOT taking action against the massive criminal misconduct of some of our top officials and their travesties? Why we only woke up for the first year after 911, then like some colossal giant that was awakened by a loud noise, yawned, rolled back over and promptly fell back asleep?
link: http://www.jbs.org/...
And let's focus instead on why it is that Maddow's coverage of the Birchers engenders such ire on the right. This latest iteration of right-wing, almost exclusively white, grass roots paranoid rage manifesting itself has its origins in movements like the Birchers, as this 2007 article illustrates:
"The JBS is non-political, we don’t endorse candidates, but look at Ron Paul," suggested Turner. "He has a similar message as the JBS, and the people that are joining with Ron Paul are much younger people. People my age like freedom. We don’t want to be stifled with regulation. We don’t want to be told what we can and can’t do with out own personal lives. As far as the government itself, sticking to the principles of freedom is something that’s important for us."
I asked him if the freedom he was talking about included freedom from the fluoridation of water, which was once a paranoid chestnut the Birchers were associated with, but Turner said he'd never heard of it. Then I wondered if the Birchers still subscribed to conspiracy theories, to which he replied:
"People say conspiracy theory. I would say we’re conspiracy factists. We don’t believe these things are happening by accident. The people that are pushing us in this direction towards collectivism, totalitarianism and even world government know what they’re doing and they’re doing it on purpose."
What then followed was a somewhat rambling discussion on the N.A.U, and how this was the main thrust behind the JBS these days.
If you follow the link, you'll even see folks dressed up in powered wigs and gaiters - and this is a couple of years before the official launch of the "Tea Party Movement": http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/...
The John Birch Society started as a small, grassroots group of conservative activists led by a few connected Washington insiders:
Long disturbed by what he perceived as a conspiratorial chain of events, Robert H.W. Welch, Jr., invited "eleven friends" to join him for a two-day meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana, where they founded the Birch Society. According to historian Robert Goldberg, "The men included President Eisenhower's first commissioner of internal revenue, a formal personal aide of General Douglas MacArthur, two past presidents of the National Association of Manufacturers, a banker, and a University of Illinois professor. Well-to-do businessmen filled out the rest of the group."1 In late September 1959, fewer than ten months after that initial meeting, sixty-year-old Robert Welch conducted a two-day seminar in the Olympic Hotel in Seattle, Washington, and enlisted the organization's first members from the Pacific Northwest. During succeeding decades, the JBS never grew beyond a few thousand members in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, but its relatively small size has not prevented the organization from exploiting the regional legacy of anti-radicalism and periodically stirring local political passions with its crusade against alleged subversives, its support of strict law enforcement, and its vociferous opposition to the United Nations, taxes, fluoride in drinking water, sex education in public schools, abortion, and other social and cultural issues.
link: http://www.historycooperative.org/...
Sound familiar?
The point is, the way to understand right-wing grassroots movements is through organizations like the John Birch Society. Their seeing-a-communist-under-every-bed schtick - including alliances with the KKK and railing against moderate Republicans like President Eisenhower - is a part of the right-wing activist standard playbook. That this go-around it has people wearing teabags on their heads, spinning conspiracy theories about President Obama's birth certificate and drumming up fear about FEMA camps and death panels is not innovative (although I admit the eighteenth century costumes are a nice dramatic touch for a media culture focused on visual metaphors).
In other words: expose the John Birch Society and you expose what exactly it is that's really fueling the modern conservative movement, because it is comprised of the same elements that have always fueled the conservative movement - that is, until they become so embarrassing that conservative intellectuals start smacking them down.
That's why when Rachel gets moments like this on-camera, they're priceless:
Softened water with your tea? Communist sacrilege!
Where's our generation's Stanley Kubricks when you need them?