I saw this article in The New American Trump about running again:
It was a fairly straightforward article except for one sentence which got my attention. It was this gratuitous reference describing Rolling Stone Magazine (second sentence below, bold added):
Donald Trump is running for president in 2024, and his Save America PAC has banked almost $100 million to support a second shot at the White House.
Rolling Stone, the reputation of which was ruined when it published fake news about a fake gang rape at the University of Virginia seven years ago, broke the story on July 19.
Trump has told more than three people he plans to run, the story reported, and suggested as much to Fox talker Sean Hannity at a recent town hall.
The entire article is based on reporting by Rolling Stone. The author R. Cort Kirkwood whose most recent articles including these, one from yesterday and another from today Fauci Lies Again About Funding Wuhan Lab’s Dangerous Research. Paul: Criminal Referral Will Go to DOJ and Insider Video: Hasbro CRT Training Says Little Kids Are Racists are off-the wall far-right rants which you can see here.
My interest was piqued because I never heard of this website or magazine. This is what I found when I looked it up on Wikipedia:
The New American (TNA) is a far-right print and digital magazine published twice a month by American Opinion Publishing Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the John Birch Society (JBS), a far-right organization.[2][3][4][5][6] The magazine was created in 1985 from the merger of two JBS magazines: American Opinion and The Review of the News.
Ad Fontes Media which is one of the organizations that rates website bias says the following:
The New American is a magazine and website that presents news for “freedom-loving Americans.” Topics include politics, economics, culture and history. Twice a year, The New American publishes the Freedom Index, a scorecard that rates every member of the U.S. House and Senate on key issues. Founded in 1985, The New American is published by American Opinion Publishing, owned by The John Birch Society. It is based in Appleton, Wisconsin. The website records approximately 750,000 visits per month. Ad Fontes Media rates The New American in the hyper-partisan right category of bias and as somewhat unreliable in terms of reliability. Reference
The content of the unremarkable article didn’t surprise me. What I didn’t expect to find out was that The John Birch Society Still existed.
Below are the parts of the Wikipedia entry for The John Birch Society which interested me the most:
2009–present
Although JBS membership numbers are kept private, it has reported a resurgence of members during the Donald Trump presidency, specifically in Texas. The organization's goals in Texas include opposition to the UN's Agenda 21 based on a conspiracy theory that it will "establish control over all human activity", and opposition to a bill that would allow people who entered The United States illegally to pay in-state tuition for Texas state colleges.[97]
The JBS has increasingly been linked to the Trump presidency by political commentators such as Jeet Heer of The Nation magazine (He is a former staff writer for The New Republic), who argued while writing for The New Republic in June 2016, that "Trumpism" is essentially Bircherism.[12] Trump confidante and longtime advisor Roger Stone said that Trump's father Fred Trump was a financier of the JBS and a personal friend of founder Robert Welch.[98] Trump's former Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was the speaker at the John Birch Society's National Council dinner shortly before joining the Trump administration.[99] U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), widely reported to be one of Trump's top advisors on foreign policy, is also tied to the JBS.[100] The senator's father, former Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas), has had a long and very close relationship with the JBS, celebrating its work in his 2008 keynote speech at its 50th anniversary event and saying that the JBS was leading the fight to restore freedom.[101] The keynote speaker at the organization's 60th anniversary celebration was Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky.), who maintains a near-perfect score on the JBS's "Freedom Index" ranking of members of Congress.[102] Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who hosted Trump on his Infowars radio show and claims to have a personal relationship with the president, called Trump a "John Birch Society president"[103] and previously claimed Trump was "more John Birch Society than the John Birch Society."[104]
On January 15, 2021 The Washington Post published Long before QAnon, Ronald Reagan and the GOP purged John Birch extremists from the party in January.
The article begins as follows:
In 1962, some of America’s most influential conservatives met to talk about a growing threat: the rise of paranoid conspiracy theories on the right.
Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) was thinking about running for president. A mutual friend set up a meeting for Goldwater with William F. Buckley Jr., editor of the conservative National Review, and Russell Kirk, author of the 1953 book “The Conservative Mind.”
In a hotel suite in Palm Beach, Fla., Buckley and Kirk found themselves giving Goldwater advice about how to respond to the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society’s surge in popularity. The society, founded in 1958, was fiercely anti-communist — and fond of crackpot theories.
and it concludes:
But in September 1965, as buzz about him and the John Birch Society grew, Reagan realized that he’d have to distance himself from the group. “I am not a member,” Reagan declared at a Republican fundraiser. “I have no intention of becoming a member. I am not going to solicit their support.” Reagan added that a “lunatic fringe” had infiltrated the society and that he was in “great disagreement” with Welch. (Reagan went on to win the California governorship, despite Democratic incumbent Pat Brown’s attempts to tie him to the Birchers.)
A week after Reagan’s statement, Republican congressional leaders Everett Dirksen and Gerald Ford, the future president, jointly denounced the John Birch Society. Buckley kept up his attack, publishing a 14-page special section critical of the Birchers in the National Review in October 1965. Buckley’s editorial declared that the Birch Society had reached “a new level of virulence, a new level of panic.” He warned that the taint of Bircherism could sink Reagan and other conservative candidates in 1966. Goldwater joined in, going farther than he’d had before. In a new letter to the magazine, the former presidential candidate declared that if Welch didn’t resign from the Birch Society, conservatives should resign from it and work instead to support the GOP.
Although the Birch Society still exists today, the renunciations that Buckley led in fall 1965 marked the beginning of the end of its influence over conservative politics. “No fig leaf of respectability remained,” wrote Carl T. Bogus in his 2013 biography, “Buckley: William F. Buckley and the Rise of American Conservatism.” “The society went into steep decline. Recruiting new members was exceedingly difficult. … Even highly visible members quit.” The conservative movement had excommunicated the Birchers’ conspiratorial, unpatriotic hostility — for the next few decades, at le
From The John Birch Society to QAnon, who woulda thunk that Trump and his “ism” would be a dream come true for the purveyors of right wing conspiracies. The only fly in the ointment for Birchers, the fervent anti-communists, is the Trump’s obeisance to Putin’s will..
There’s an obvious lesson here for Republicans who are trying to indulge the members of their own party whose beliefs are even more fanatically phantasmagorical than those held by members of The John Birch Society in its heyday. They should dump these people the way William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan disavowed The John Birch Society. I hope I am not being too optimistic in thinking there’s a good chance they will pay a price in future elections for not doing this.
