Behind the Bastards - Part One: How The John Birch Society Invented The Modern Far Right

Episode Date: December 15, 2020

Robert is joined by Jordan Holmes ·& Dan Friesen of Knowledge Fight to discuss The John Birch Society.1.   https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/04/rise-fall-john-birch-society-50-years-ago/2.   https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.saturdayeveningpost.com/uploads/reprints/Mutiny_in_the_Birch_Society/index.html?X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAI3QGKNAHC7QBOIAA%2F20201124%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20201124T035411Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Signature=92cd53a347ae1447de3854390a1897837ddcb4d04ffe347af9c98f7f81453bc73.   https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/11/a-view-from-the-fringe4.   https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/growing-john-birch-society/5.   https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/16/the-john-birch-society-is-alive-and-well-in-the-lone-star-state-2153776.   https://www.history.com/news/barry-goldwater-1964-campaign-right-wing-republican7.   https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/07/18/hunter-s-thompson-origins-of-his-fear-and-loathing/8.   https://sites.google.com/site/ernie1241/9.   https://www.amazon.com/World-John-Birch-Society-Conservatism/dp/0826519814 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I love podcasts. I don't. You're such a nerd. Are we allowed to open a show that way? I don't know. Well, we did it. I let you do it. I didn't enjoy it though. God damn it. This is terrible.

Welcome to the Hummingham Malaise with Robert Evans and the Bass. I am so sorry to everybody. With the Bass, it's a co-host now? Yep. I have completely failed. I was sure that was his backing band. Well, as everyone can hear now by listening to the tremendous failure that has just occurred in everyone's ear balls, this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about bad people, namely me,

and my guests today are Dan and Jordan. Hey, that's us. So good to be here. If I just said Dan or if I just said Jordan, I would have to be more specific. But when I say Dan and Jordan, I think everyone knows that it's the knowledge fight guys. Your identity has become subsumed into your podcast, so enjoy that. It was inevitable. Yeah, it was going to happen.

I think a lot of people have taken to just calling us Jordan. Yeah. Jordan. Capital J, capital D. Yeah, sort of a combined noun. I feel like they could do better. Who could be better? Could they?

Yeah. Can you? Danger? No, because it would have to be like Dan Ann or something like that. But Jordan is like, I feel like it's really just like giving like clout to one name. But you're stressing that D pretty hard right in the middle and I can appreciate that. Fair enough. I think it's great we're really getting into the weeds of this

since they're solving it once and for all, you know? That's what people come here for. You know what? With that explanation, I'll let you have it. I'll let you have it, guys. Fair. All right, Jordan, are you ready to hear about some shit? You bet.

Oh, yeah. Robert. Yay. Post your podcast. So, you know, what sucks? Many, many, many things. I would say, broadly speaking, the right wing in America, the Republican Party, the looming fascist threat that has been slightly weed-whacked back,

but is still threatening to encroach and choke all of us to death forever. We're nodding. Yeah. Are you guys a fan of the far right? It sounds a little bit like a Dungeons & Dragons monster when you put it like that. It is basically a Dungeons & Dragons monster. So, this episode is about E. Gary Gygax. Yeah.

Yeah. This episode is about, so, Gary Gygax invented Dungeons & Dragons. This episode is about the man who invented the modern Republican Party, by which I mean the party of Donald Trump, by which I mean, you know, the fascists. And his name was Robert Welch. I didn't know that. You guys know who Robert Welch is? I don't know who Robert Welch is.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna feign ignorance for about three quarters of a second. You definitely know who Robert Welch is. Look at me and say, did you know about Robert Welch? The whole point of me is to not know about Robert Welch. You know him by a different name. Yeah. Yeah. You Jordan know him as the founder of the John Birch Society.

Oh, I do know him as the Candy Man. Yes. Oh, I do know him as the Candy Man. Oh, shit. Oh, yeah. He's also a candy guy. Big, big into candy. That's right.

So, if you haven't heard of the John Birch Society, they're loosely speaking, why we got President Ronald Reagan, President Donald Trump, and the whole ecosystem of right-wing grifters who make money off of convincing their fans that everybody on the left is part of a Marxist conspiracy. Like the idea that Joe Biden is a communist agent, which our good friend of the pod, Alex Jones, brings up repeatedly, is a descendant of a John Birch Society talking point, or at least a family of those talking points.

So that's, that's the guy we're talking about today. Bob Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. Woo. Bad dude. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't, I think first off, my initial sign that he's not a good guy is you're talking about him. So that's, that's a red flag right off the bat. And then Bob Welch, that's just a, that's just a right-wing name.

Bobby. That's just what it is. Yeah. Yeah, Bob Welch is, is, is, you'd guess that he founded some sort of society that did something terrible. So Robert H.W. Welch Jr., which by God, the more thorough you are with the name, the worse it sounds, was born on a farm. Why do all these jerks have the initials H.W. too? Yeah, he does, he does, he's got a real George Bush vibe going on.

Yeah. What the hell? Well, I mean, that's how the word white starts, right? In their world, white. White. White. I think that's what it is. I think it's white.

Robert White Welch. Roger Welch. That's actually scant completely. You might be right. You might be on something. So Whitey was born on a farm in Chowan County, North Carolina on December 1st, 1899. He was a brilliant child. Some might even say a genius.

He could read by age three and he knew his multiplication tables by age four. By age seven, he was studying Latin. And at age 12, he enrolled in the University of North Carolina. He graduated at age 16. And yeah, everything that happens in the story should be taken as evidence for why child prodigies should be dosed with paint chips. I think that's yeah. I always feel like when I hear something like that, I don't hear like someone new multiplication

tables at four. I'd be like, who prove it? Yeah. I would say prove it. And if you can prove that a kid is that smart, you got to slow him down somehow. I would love to be able to quiz that four year old. See how deep your knowledge of the table is. Yeah.

And I think if you're a four year old with perfect knowledge of the multiplication tables, take him out of school for two years. Don't let him read books, make him work on a farm. Make him hunt. Did you just write a Kurt Vonnegut short story at us? What just happened? Yeah. Look, Vonnegut was right.

The problem is that people are too smart. If he's too fast, give him braces. Take him down a notch. Yeah. Yeah. Slow him down somehow. Just, you know, put blinders on the kid, feed him lead, whatever it takes. And then in the universe is true.

If you're not good at something, give him steroids and shit. You know, the drugs to make him smarter. I think everyone who can't do the multiplication tables by age four, mandatory steroids. Everyone who can, a literate farm in the Midwest. I like it. That's my ideal society. This is why we don't let Robert be in charge of children.

Okay. So, yeah, Bobby Welch, child prodigy, entered the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1917, and nothing else of particular interest occurred. He resigned after just two years when he decided that a military career was not for him. Instead, he wanted to be a lawyer. So he enrolled in Harvard Law School. But this didn't wind up working out much better for him.

Robert clashed regularly with his professors, particularly the hilariously named Felix Frankfurter, who would grow up. It's a real guy. It's a real guy's name. He went on to become a Supreme Court justice. Of course. A lot of people have to overcome something in order to do something great.

And I think being born with Felix, that's exactly what you were just talking about. Exactly. He had his handicap and it made him great. Yeah. Supreme Court justice, your honor, hot dog. Yeah. Because that's the hardest.

If you want to be the hardest it can be for other people to laugh at you, become a Supreme Court justice, because then everybody's got to be scared one way or the other. You're going to terrify half the population. If it pleases the hot dog. Yeah. Oh God. Oh God. I'm so sorry. Please don't take away my reproductive health care.

Footlong Coney. In the case of Heinz versus the United States, he's going to have to recuse himself. Yeah. He could not rule on anything to do with the John Kerry campaign for that reason. Frankfurter was a liberal Supreme Court justice, which might explain why Robert Welch hated him so much. Welch's biography, which is quite a text says that the young Robert Welch

hated Felix Frankfurter because quote, the young man from North Carolina recognized hogwash when he heard it. And a hogwash is spelled in all caps and also spelled out with like a, with like a dash in between each word. Yeah. That's good stuff. It's a fascinating publication. Yeah.

That's a, that's a Canterbury tales level of bullshit right there. Yeah. Magnificent. Did someone who was with the John Birch society write this biography? Oh, yes. Absolutely. Yeah. No, 1,000%.

It smelled like their sort of editorial style. Yeah. It was written probably by Bob Welch. Yeah. I would assume. In 1922, Welch left Harvard just a year before he would have graduated. He decided that he'd learned enough and it was time to make a shitload of money. And this Wunderkind had a specific plan for how he was going to get rich.

The motherfucking candy business. Hell yeah. Candy man. Yeah. Candy's where the money is, man. You know, that's the thing about candy. You get older. It stays appealing to people of the same age.

I don't know why I tried to. I don't know why I tried to. Try to fast times that. Try to fast times that one. So Bob's brilliant idea was something called the Papa sucker. The Papa sucker. The Papa sucker. Yeah.

Speaking of fast times jokes because it is what it sounds like what would happen when your dad gets a blowjob. But it was actually a caramel lollipop designed to not melt in the summer heat. That sounds exactly like what would happen if your dad got a blowjob right there. Melt in the summer heat. Yeah. And like your dad's penis, it was filled with dangerous chemicals, which is why it didn't melt in the summer heat.

Probably. That's good stuff. Not a good line to keep. You have to take the rough with the smooth as they say, you know, dangerous chemicals. It's not melting. Especially when it comes to your dad's genitals. Sure. You have to take the rough with the smooth when it comes to a Papa sucker.

Oh, unfortunate, unfortunate. This is really gone on the rails, but they're not great rails. So despite the novelty of Bob Welch's Papa sucker, his first business named the Oxford Candy Company did not go well. The cause seems to have again been the fact that Bob Welch did not play well with others. He had an increasing series of tense disagreements with his board of directors in 1929. They had a fight over what he described as their desire to reduce the quality of their products to improve profits.

Welch quit and again walked away. So we're getting a bit of a theme like everything that happens. All I want to do is torture children for morality tales. Yeah. He just keeps getting into disagreements with people, be they his professors or his business partners and then piecing the fuck out. That's that's early life. Bob Welch, not an easy guy to get along with.

So he's also not an easy guy to dissuade from his sacred task of selling candy. He set up another candy company. This one in Berlin and money was tight because he had a couple of kids by this point. So he took a second job as a salesman for E.J. Brack and Sons, which was one of the largest candy companies in the world. They're the people who make candy corn among other, you know, Brack. Oh, so they're evil too. Yeah.

Yeah. They're just monsters. Gotcha. Candy corn. Yeah. Pumpkin. They make candy pumpkin. It's like, yeah, the candy corn substance is in a bunch of different shapes.

Oh yeah. Yeah. You mean the little pumpkins that are made out of candy corn? Yeah. I do like the very specific term substance, whatever it's made of, which you don't know and neither do I. It's just a substance. Man tried to convince me that like candy pumpkins are bad or like candy corn sucks,

but candy pumpkins are good. They can know it's just more. It's the same. It's a larger piece of the same terrible candy. It's just a ball. You know, it is great. I have this, there's this, so the person I've lived with for a while is a Chinese national and she introduced me to this wonderful restaurant in Portland that's like a Chinese street food

restaurant and they have this dish that I'd never had before. That's just corn and fried batter and green onions and cilantro and it's fucking awesome. Oh, it's so good. I don't know how it's. It does sound good. Incredible. But you know what? Bob Welch would really hate the idea of you living with a Chinese national.

Yes. He would hate everything. As soon as I said Chinese, he would have started screaming. He would have. Everything. Mao this. Mao that. Well, I don't know.

If I convinced him, my friend was descended from Chiang Kai-shek. He'd probably have been all right with that. He was a big Chiang head as they call it. That was the one way around. Yeah. That would be Mao Sejunation. Mao Sejunation. Dan, Dan, are you leaving?

Why are you running? Dan, I feel like you had that one in your head for years, Jordan. And then you horned it into a joke about Chiang Kai-shek because. Oh, if only I'm tortured by new versions of that same shitty joke all day. Jordan's made that joke 15 times on the podcast. I've just edited out every time. Yeah. No, you were wise to do that.

So this second candy company didn't work very well because it was the Great Depression and people didn't have disposable income for candy. Probably was a bad time to start a candy business in 1929. And his new company fell apart in 1933. Fortunately, Brax was still making money and he was doing well enough as a salesman that they took him on as a full-time employee, which kept him afloat for the next year or so. In 1934, he started his third candy company, the Midwest Candy Company of Attica, Indiana. Unfortunately, his candy was as bad as his company's name and Welch's third enterprise failed.

So he says three failed candy companies. What about the Papa Sucker? How was that doing? Was he still selling the Papa Suckers? No, he had to leave the Papa Sucker behind when he had a fight with his business partner. So all the Papa Suckers that are getting sold. They have to keep the Papa Sucker? Yeah, they're keeping the Papa Sucker. That's the worst loss right there.

He's not getting a dime from any of the Papas that are getting sucked these days, which is a real shame. So yeah, three failed candy companies and in 1935, Bob Welch files for bankruptcy, which is pretty on brand for him. It's the financial equivalent of running away when you get into an argument. So far everything scans. He returns to Boston and he gets a job working for his younger brother, who was also in the candy business and a lot more successful than his older brother. The James O. Welch Company was a success and this is what finally brought Robert Welch the wealth he desired. He was made VP in charge of sales and advertising and as the company grew,

this meant Robert spent years traveling across the country to offices in Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Seattle. Now a wealthy man, he began racking up positions on government boards, the Boston Chamber of Commerce, the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce, and eventually a role as a national counselor for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Is there anything that turns you into a right-wing lunatic more than getting rich off of somebody else's work? Yeah, especially your brother's work. Yeah, right? Isn't that a regular right-wing thing? Isn't that how they all get to where they are? Go ahead, sorry. He takes a lot of credit for the company's success, but judging by the fact that he had three failed candy companies

and only succeeded when he latched onto his brothers, I'm going to guess that James was the talent of the family. That might be the case, yeah. If I recall correctly, didn't they make some pretty memorable candies? Yeah, no, the James O. Welch company's made some of the all-time great candies. They all sound weird when you hear the describe today. Like sugar daddy's, I think, right? Isn't that one of those? Yeah, and they have some sort of weird sugary rope thing. I don't know. They made a bunch of candy. Cow tail? It was an old-timey candy, yeah. It's not like the God-fearing modern candy that we have today.

It was all strange and terrifying and involved bad makes. Four-hound little nibbles, those little... See, you can't even sell kids something with whore in the name now. It's just the social justice warriors. Yeah, cancel cultures, run them up, and now we can't have our whore-hound candy. Why can't I buy a fuck stick today? Why can't I go to any candy shop I want to and buy a fuck stick? I wanted a fuck stick and a papa sucker. Come on.

I just fact-checked it's sugar mamas. Oh, really? Jesus, way to be a misogynist, Dave. But isn't like sugar daddy and sugar baby aren't those also candies? Yes, they have juniors, sugar daddy, sugar babies, sugar mamas, welches fudge, welches frappe, and pom poms. Wow. I finally understand the popularity of incest porn on the internet.

I think it all comes from there. It's so creepy. It all starts there. From the papa suckers and the sugar mamas. It all starts there. I see it. It's all making sense now. And the pom poms. Yeah. You know, now that you say that, Jordan, it makes the Welch company motto suck on a mama.

Make a lot more sense. Yeah, that does sound right. That all is starting to scan now. So like all men who get rich through a mixture of blind luck and family ties, Robert Welch decided to write a book. The Road to Salesmanship was about exactly the book you guessed that it was. I found a copy of it on Amazon today for $3.99, and the product description text is wonderful.

I'm just going to read you the Amazon description text, which is a little bit off the beaten path, but it's quite funny. The Road to Salesmanship brackets pamphlet Robert Welch, Robert not capitalized Welch capitalized 1941, raring out of print collectors item, limited availability. The Road to Salesmanship pamphlet and brackets by Robert Welch, this time capitalized 1941. This is a document and then new sentence that was written by the founder

of the John Birch Society, but written decades before he founded the John Birch Society. Now they start calling it the John Birch Society. This is not about the John Birch Society, or any projects or principles of the John Birch Society. This is a unique look at the early thoughts of Robert Welch, long before he founded the John Birch Society. I enjoyed that.

So I looked through the book a bit. I found it online. There's also a free copy. Don't pay Amazon for this fucking book. So I don't read it also, it's not worth reading. But I skimmed a couple of chapters just to see if there was anything entertaining about it, because I was hoping that it was filled with, I don't know, a bunch of crypto-fascist nonsense.

And it's even too boring for that. It seemed to have been mostly folksy anecdotes about his sales experience and inoffensive advice on how to sell stuff. He does start the... I enjoyed that he starts the book by noting that unlike loser jobs, like bricklaying and lumberjacking, being a salesman is a true profession, like being a doctor. Like he specifically throws shit on bricklayers and lumberjacks.

Any idiot can do those jobs selling shit, that's hard. Salesmen do occupy the same rarified territory as doctors nowadays. You think about a used car salesman and you're like, that guy is a surgeon, the same level of quality. Well, yeah. Just a used body salesman. I mean, you think when the coronavirus first hit, our first responders were the doctors, the nurses, and the candy salesman.

Yeah, absolutely. Also, I really do think the candy sells itself. Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't take much. I'm not impressed by a candy salesman. I mean, as long as it's not a disastrously gross candy, or as long as it's not called the Papa Sucker, you're gonna be all right.

M&Ms have never needed an ad campaign. Yeah. Yes, they absolutely have. They had a long one every Christmas. They've actually had some great ad campaigns. Yeah, but they didn't need them. They would have sold their chocolate with or without them. Yeah, and meanwhile, I think the only job that Robert Welch did

was the Papa Sucker. Suck on your Papa. Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah, I didn't expect us to go down. Anyway, you should have. Jamie locked us on for this episode, apparently. He ends the book on a series of final don'ts for salesmen,

which include, and these are the actual text of all of these is more boring than you'd expect, but the don'ts are funny. A knife can have two edges. Everybody knows a drum is hollow. People rent offices to do business in. Remember the future and professors belong in classrooms. Wait, those are the don'ts? Those are the don'ts.

So don't professor. Yeah. Don't be a professor unless you're in a classroom. Don't teach people about candy when you're trying to sell to it. That's a good point. Don't be a professor. Oh, I get you now.

Especially don't be a liberal candy professor. Oh, you can't do that. They'll remake it. I like to imagine that the knife has two edges. Thing is, is a reference to the many knife fights that candy salesmen got into in the 1940s. Wouldn't surprise me. Brutal business is a dangerous work.

You saw what happened to the Augustus Gloop kid. Yeah. That Robin Williams movie, the Candy Man. So the impression that I got from my limited reading of this book is that young Bob Welch was something of a pompous know it all. But I got no hint that he was particularly unhinged or unreasonable.

Like it's not, there's nothing like, like there's no hints as to what he became in the book. He just seems like kind of a dick, which I guess is one hint, but not, not much of one compared to what happens next. So during World War II, Welch served on the war production board. If it seems odd to you that a Candy Man would be appointed to help manage national military production during a global

battle for the survival of democracy. Yes. Yes, it does. But that is what happened. What are bullets, but M&Ms. Yeah. A bullet's just another kind of pop a sucker. We have a long history of giving people jobs they're not

qualified for in this country. It's, it's our greatest strength. So as a result of his work in the war production board, Welch spent more and more time in Washington DC during the 40s. He also became chairman of the National Confectioners Association's Washington committee. In 1947, he received the Candy Industry's highest honor,

the Kettle Award from Candy Industry magazine. He's really, he's arrived. You can't top the Kettle Award if you're a Candy Man. For, for, for what did he receive this award? For getting all those kids to suck on their poppers. Yeah. But I mean, like high sales. Was he a good candy creator?

Was he just around long enough? Did he win World War II? Why did he get this award? Honestly, I think, and this is, this isn't written anywhere, but reading between the lines from everything I read about his, his earlier life. I think his real talent was that he was very good at getting other rich businessmen to like him.

Yeah. And I like, that's why you'll notice the thing that he really does best. He wasn't a particularly good business owner or candy salesman, but he was great at being on the board of big candy industry companies because rich guys liked him. It's like, I think that was his talent. It's that sort of the analog.

It'll take you a long way in America. Yeah. I mean, the analog is like people who get a lot of stuff through networking. Like maybe not their intrinsic skills. They might get more gigs or shows or stuff because of the ability to schmooze and stuff. And Robert Welsh's, from everything I could tell,

seems like he was pretty, pretty good at that. And that's how you get a kettle. Yeah. Yeah. That's how you get a kettle. You got to get a kettle. Look, nobody's trying to take the man's kettle award. Sure.

He, he, he fucking brought us closer to fascism than any other living or any other American who's ever lived, but he won that kettle. He earned the kettle. You know, did you know the weekend is freaking out because he didn't get the kettle? Do you know that Tom Hanks won a kettle two years in a row? Both of them for his forest gump.

Life is like a box of chocolates. All right. That was the best thing that ever happened to the candy. Exactly. You're right. We need rippled throughout the next year. Academy Award two years in a row, kettle two years in a row.

Very impressive. All right. All right. I thought it was because of Philadelphia, but never mind. There is a sea where he eats Reese's peanut butter cups in Philadelphia. I don't know if that's true.

Yeah, Tom Hanks is actually the only man to get the Egot K. Yeah. Okay. So Welch's real gift seems to have been in organizing people and businesses. He had a genius for managing teams and forgetting, again, rich people to like him. In 1950, he was appointed to the board of directors

for the National Association of Manufacturers. He held this job for a while and through it was in regular contact with wealthy and powerful people in a bunch of different industries. And it's at this point that I'm going to start quoting from The World of the John Birch Society by DJ Malloy, which is a real fun book about a bunch of terrible shit. Welch first became involved in politics in 1946 when he

volunteered to work on Republican Robert Bradford's successful campaign to become governor of Massachusetts. He was appointed vice chairman of the state's Republican Finance Committee two years later. In 1949, Welch went a major step further, however, when he announced his intention to become the next lieutenant governor of the Bay State. Like many other conservatives and businessmen of the time,

reducing government interference in the economy and turning back the creeping collectivism of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal were among Welch's principal concerns as he made clear in an interview with Courtney Sheldon of the Christian Science Monitor on the eve of the election. Our first and most important job, Welch explained, is to keep us from going any further than we have already gone in the extension of government ownership of

business, operation of business, interference with business, control of business, and control of the details of our daily living. He was also very strongly opposed, he said, to socialized medicine at the national or state level, to federal aid to education in any shape, manner, or form, and to federal housing plans. So 1940s, Bob Welch is like, not only fuck the New Deal,

fuck the concept of state-paid health care, fuck the concept of federal aid to education, and fuck federal housing. He was really ahead of the curve. This really doesn't know how to grow the candy business. You make dental care free for everyone. Candy goes out of the roof. Come on, man.

And if all of those... That's a long-term business strategy. That's actually a good plan. I think so. It is. And if all those poor families... I'm gonna give you a kettle. Don't have to pay rent.

I just earned a kettle. Jesus. You get a second kettle for that. You give poor families their rent for free. They're gonna buy a lot more candy for those kids. It's true. Hell, yeah. It's true.

Stimulate the candy. Stimulate is right about education being a real barrier to the candy industry, though. You want people as dumb as hell if you want to meet in enough candy. Oh, that's true. Any kind of nutritional information in schools is going to be a hindrance.

Yeah. So from the late 1940s, it was kind of clear the guy that Bob Welch was going to turn into. In a speech in May, 1949, he argued that it was no secret that there was a war going on in the United States between collectivism and individualism. He described this war as occurring on many fronts. In the field of commerce and industry, the battle is between

free enterprise and state socialism, he said. In politics, it is between the people's ownership of the government and the government's ownership of the people. In sociology, it is between self-reliance and dependence on a welfare state. In international relations, it is between a brutally aggressive tyranny and the remains of an independent civilization. So that's...

I wish rich people would just be like, oh, I want more money. I would at least be able to engage with that, but that's a whole long list of fake bullshit. Leave me alone. Just say you want more money. And what's impressive about it is that it's the exact same rhetoric that you hear out of the mainstream Republican Party today.

Totally. Like Welch really... The thing that he predicted more than anything was like the way to kind of frame this battle. Because like, yeah, there's a fight between... In this period, the late 1940s and 50s, when like the government has just finished a long stint of cracking down brutally on left-wing organizing, defining like this is a

battle between free enterprise and state socialism. Like that was the thing he was doing was not just attacking socialism, which Americans had done for a while, but defining like the mainstream Democratic Party as socialists and refusing to deviate from that line. And that was really kind of one of Welch's big innovations. Branding your enemies as opposed to yourself. Yeah.

And also the idea that no, we're not... This is not... Politics is not some sort of grand debate between two sides with different opinions on how things might work, trying to figure out the way to make a better society. It is a fight between tyranny and any hope of survival. And like the other side is nothing but pure tyranny. It's not an evil stuff.

Yeah. Like our head of the federal elections commission said. Yeah, it fucking rules. Yeah, that's great. Welch described the battle between liberals and conservatives in the United States as a war that would determine whether we are going to leave our children and our grandchildren a world at least as good as the one we have inherited or one

that has already plunged into the incipient shambles of a new dark ages. Well, he was right in the inverse, I suppose. Yeah, I mean, he did help bring us into a new dark ages. So, good on you, Bob. You know who else is going to bring us into a new dark age? CBS? Yeah, I mean, they're going to try.

But they're going to do it with the help of the products and services that support this podcast. I made no sense. That our products and services are going to plunge the world into a new dark age? No, they're going to help CBS do it. I think they might. Yeah.

Is it a mass singer on CBS? I have no idea. Who is the masked singer in point? Do they have the same masked singer every time? Absolutely not. The whole point is guessing who's behind the mask. Oh, OK. I've never seen it.

They have celebrities in costumes, and then they sing, and then a panel of judges gasps who's behind the mask. All right. Well, that's worse than Bill Gates and Rashida Jones, at least. Sarah Palin was on it. Of course she was. Never mind. It's the only second to Bill Gates and Rashida Jones.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23,

I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev,

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! And we're talking about the masked singer and how it's almost certainly evidence that the United States has in fact slid into a new dark age through which there is no escape. I think Dr. Drew was on it, too. Why not? See, that's the kind of thing.

If aliens came down and I had to defend the continued existence of human civilization, I think I could do a pretty good job until they brought up clips from that show. I think I could defend us from war crimes charges and stuff, but not that. Here's this guy who's on the radio giving medical advice to teens for 20 years. He's dressed like a hippopotamus singing a song poorly.

Yeah, you know what? What are you going to use? A virus, big lasers? Just do it. Just be quick about it. If the first question aliens ask is, was Sean Spicer a good dancer? We're going to be in real trouble there.

But you know who wasn't on the masked singer? Sean Spicer? Robert Welch. Yeah, Bob Welch was not. Although he would have hated that show and called it evidence of a communist conspiracy. So Bob Welch's appetite had been, you know, pretty sufficiently stirred by the 1950s.

And again, he had, you know, he'd kind of climbed as high as the candy industry would get him. So like what you see in the late 40s is he reaches the heights that a candy man can hit and he immediately starts screaming about how communists are going to have infiltrated the Democratic Party and are going to destroy democracy. Isn't that a normal career check?

Yeah. The problem is that Eminem Mars was run by Marxist collectivists. I assume it was because he didn't have a Wonka Vader. You know, he could only go as high. I'm going to make so many more fucking Willy Wonka references. I predict you will. Oh, it's not going to stop.

I do not have trouble seeing it. Bob Welch is a lot like Willy Wonka, to be honest, because I think they both believe business owners should be able to kill children. Yeah, I agree with that. And enslave people. Yes, he is. So, uh, Bob Welch, you know, in the 1950s

starts getting way more into politics. Now it's unclear precisely when his terror of the left began. Again, when you read this guy's background, the stuff that wasn't just written by the John Birch Society decades later, it kind of comes out a left field. Like he's just a candy man and then boom, he's screaming about the new Dark Ages.

Uh, but however it started, it was in full form by July of 1950, when he wrote this in a fundraising letter for a politician. Quote, The strategy of the socialists is to divide and conquer, call all businessmen crooks so that nobody will speak up for them and strangle them with controls and taxation, bribe all the farmers with their own money into a selfish pressure group for more bribes,

infiltrate the labor unions, and convert them into political tools, discredit the medical profession until the rest of the public clamors to demand government medicine. Attack every segment of our population with tactics which alienate the support of all other segments. The forces on the socialist side amount to a vast conspiracy to change our political and economic system.

Wow, your face changed while you were reading that. It was almost like you went deep into that college. Channel Bob. That was dark. There's a lot I love there, including the idea that socialists were going to discredit the medical profession in order to convince people to demand government medicine. It was like, no.

It's false flag, buddy. What discredited the medical profession was people going to the ER and getting a $40,000 bill for a three-hour visit. That'll do it. There are two ways to go on that thought process there. So this was the first time Bob Welch used the word conspiracy in a public statement,

and it would not be the last. Tragically, Welch's increasingly unhinged rants about socialism did not translate into success at the ballot box. Probably because a lot of Americans in 1950 had directly and recently benefited from massive social welfare projects. It really helps when you actually feel the effects of government working for you,

and you're like, oh, maybe this isn't an evil thing. But millions of us didn't starve because of the civilian conservation project. I don't think that's a bad conspiracy, to be honest. Is the conspiracy that we didn't starve to death during the Depression? Because I liked that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was a good one.

Yeah. So, yeah, he lost the race for lieutenant governor by a margin of more than 100,000 votes, which in 1950 was like most of the country. Yeah, with inflation. Yeah, with inflation, that's 10 million votes. Yeah. So it was not a close election.

Still, it is worth noting that nearly 60,000 Americans had cast their votes for Bob Welch and his giant left-wing conspiracy. After his defeat, he wrote about his hopes that this core of supporters would, in the next years, grow into, quote, a far stronger, more militant, and more effective force of political strength

than other campaigns to come. He insisted this crusade has just started because it's always a good thing when right-wing ideologues describe what they're doing as a crusade, that always. It really gets white men all hot and bothered whenever you give them the opportunity to go on a crusade against anybody who's not a white man.

I mean, you know my motto, Jordan. ABC, baby, always be a crusade. That's what you got to do. Does ABC have the mass singer? It's Fox, because of course it is. Yeah, it's scams that that would be Fox. Okay, so Welch tried his hand at politics again two years later when he attempted to be elected

as a delegate for Senator Robert Taft's run for president. You all remember when Bob Taft ran for president? He was great. Big ol' fella. You're thinking of William Howard Taft. You are thinking about the first Taft, although I assume they both would have had problems with the White House bathtubs.

No, this was Taft the sequel, or the attempted sequel to Taft. And like most sequels. Yeah, it was not as good as the original. Two teapot domes. Yeah, okay. So Taft was actually running to the right of Dwight D. Eisenhower,

who was also running for president at that time. And at that point, for understandable reasons, Dwight Eisenhower was probably one of the most beloved men on the entire planet. He had that whole highway thing that everyone enjoyed. He hadn't done the highways yet, but he had helped beat the Nazis. Well, there was that.

What did he do for me lately? That's what I'm asking. He was even Eisenhower at this point, was even actually pretty popular with a lot of Soviets, including Marshal Zhukov, the most prominent commander of Soviet forces during World War II. It's actually kind of a fun story that Marshal Zhukov, who again is like the main Soviet general who beat the Nazis.

He and Eisenhower were like real good buddies, and Eisenhower gave him a tackle box filled with a bunch of hand-carved fishing lures. And Zhukov kept it with him until the day he died. It was right next to him when he died. That's very cute. Isn't that adorable? I mean, admittedly, both guys are responsible

for the deaths of millions, so there is that. But it's very cute. That's fair. And other people. You're not wrong. It would be funny if Zhukov didn't fish. He just really loved them lures. That's good.

It's very thoughtful. The fact that Eisenhower was, despite being a pretty hardcore cold warrior himself, capable of seeing communists as human beings, enraged Bob Welch. And Bob Welch was further enraged by the fact that Eisenhower supported taxing people to spend money on things that would benefit the public.

Good. Like highways. That, to Bob Welch, was Marxism. I want more money! I don't need roads. Just say it. Yeah, you gotta think. All rich people are basically like Doc Brown. Like, we don't need roads.

Yeah, exactly. Where we're going. Just dirgibles for the rich and everyone else as a mud farmer. That's the glorious dream of Bob Welch. I do like any alternate universe where dirgibles factor heavily in the future. I love it.

I can't imagine Bob Welch getting his way and there not being thousands of dirgibles. And giant mechanical spiders. Yeah, you're gonna have some. So obviously Ike won that election. He's kind of hard to beat. Again, if you really want to win an election, beat the Nazis.

That'll do it. If Biden defeats the Nazis, I will vote for him a second time for sure. If Biden had sacked Hitler's Berlin, I think he would have had a more commanding lead. What, is Hitler's Berlin in South Carolina now? Is that where it's at? I mean aspects of it.

So the final delegate count in that convention between Eisenhower and Taft was a blowout, 845 to 280. So again, the final one, not particularly close, but the first count of delegates had been much narrower, with 595 for Eisenhower and 500 for Taft. It was a contentious and ugly contest between the two men. Eisenhower's people accused Taft's people of stealing delegates.

There were a number of different votes before they got to the final count, and there were ugly floor fights, and while Ike did prevail clearly in the end, a lot of Taft supporters were left feeling that they'd been cheated. There was kind of a stop the steal thing, and Bob Welch was like the main architect of it. Was Roger Stone like a baby at the time?

Yeah, I mean, I think he was a baby at the time. Rattfuck. Yeah, you can kind of, honestly, the best way to describe it might be, it seems sort of like what happened with Bernie Sanders in 2016, at least in terms of how his supporters felt. You had this candidate who had a strong base of fanatical supporters who were like, the party leadership has fucked us out of winning,

and that's probably the case. It seemed like the Republican party leadership tipped the scale for Eisenhower. At the same time, hard to imagine, Taft's doing better than Eisenhower. Yeah. At the time, Robert Welch, who was infuriated, called it the dirtiest deal in American political history.

Dirtier than the new one? Yeah. There was a famous deal that he was mad about. Nothing made him angrier than Taft getting screwed. That's a papa sucker for you. The Bernie Sanders of not wanting people to have health care. So Eisenhower went on to electorally pants his Democratic challenger in one of the most overwhelming landslides in U.S. political history.

Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, would go on to do absolutely nothing of note, but that is, that was Ike's VP. Most Americans were fine with more or less everything that went on, and really the whole fight over Taft being cheated out of the nomination did not become a major national story. The early 1950s were a time of broad political consensus among the nation's white supermajority.

So again, people were pretty happy. The Eisenhower years are generally referred to by, again, white folks as a golden era in America, because most white people were agreement. Hey, we get to eat alone, right, guys? We all get to eat alone. This is pretty great. I love this country.

We get to buy terrible houses in the suburbs. You look like me. You look like me. You look like me. This place is great. I just love this club. I just bought a house for $11. And I got a negative 4% loan.

They're really good. They're paying me to have this house. They owe me for buying this house. I accidentally fell and landed on a fucking... What's the thing that people don't get anymore that they used to get? Pension. Oh, okay.

I forgot what pensions were because they don't exist anymore for most of us. So did America. All right. Unless you're a cop. So, yeah. Again, most Americans, at least most of the Americans who, again, were white and thus the kind of people

who got asked about things at that time, were pretty happy with Eisenhower's victory, but not Bob Welch. Taft's defeat was something of a black pill for him, convincing him that party politics was hopeless and that party politics could never save the United States from the looming specter of communism. 1952 was also the year that Welch published

his first political book, May God Forgive Us, which is solid title. Give it to the man. Love it. Yeah. Sinners in the hands of an angry God was already taken at that point, I believe, so he couldn't use that one.

His first book is basically the title. It's too late. Yeah. You're fucked. Oh, shit, Sophie. Remind me to pitch you're fucked to, I don't know, Penguin or somebody. We'll figure out what it's about later.

On the art of rat fucking, his second salesmanship book. Zinn in the art of rat fucking. Yeah. A guide for hard-nosed Buddhist political operators. I would read that book. That actually sounds great. That does sound fun. Yeah.

What is the sound of one-hand rat fucking? So May God Forgive Us was a full-throated condemnation of US foreign policy in Asia, which Welch saw as the government basically handing an entire continent over to the commies. He blamed it on the, quote, almost unbelievable combination of trickery, chicanery, and treason of the Harry Truman administration.

Truman, as far as Welch was concerned, was basically a communist. Now, the fact that Harry Truman had literally dropped two atom bombs in order to scare the Soviet Union didn't seem to change Welch's political calculus at all. To far left. He was a communist.

To far left for me. It was an act, man. Can't see through it. Can't see through the bullshit. It was actually the deep state who launched those nuclear bombs. So Truman was like, No, don't do it.

No, he was a hardcore Trotskyist. Yeah, Truman. Yeah. It was Peter Strock actually dropped the nukes, if I recall correctly. So Bobby was most distraught by what he saw as the abandonment of nationalist warlord Chiang Kai-shek

to communist warlord Mao Zetong. That's where we get our Chiang Kai-shek reference. I always love to have some good... I like to throw in some red meat for the Chiang gang, you know? Yeah. Universal basic income. Yeah, the whole thing.

Mouser C96s that fire 45 ACP slugs. All the good Chinese warlord stuff. So it was during the research for this book that Welch first came across a name that would come to define the rest of his life's work, John Birch. You'll know who the actual John Birch was? I do.

He does. He explained it to me, and I'm so good at remembering exactly who the original John Birch is. 100% forgotten. Yeah. I do know one thing about him, which you will almost certainly say here very shortly.

Wow. I actually don't think... I think he's bluffing. I think Jordan's bluffing. I will tell you this. What's the one thing you know? The one thing I know that I remember specifically from you is according to his friend,

John Birch would have hated the John Birch society. Yes, yeah. That is what I do know. That does seem fair. Although there's debate about that. God damn it. That is one account that you can find for sure. Okay, we'll talk about his life,

and you can tell me how you think after that. Okay, so there's one thing I've skimmed about John Birch. Skimmed is even generous. Yeah, there's one thing that you overheard about John Birch and happened to remember. I basically recall hearing this bit of information. And now you understand my knowledge base. Yes.

So the actual John Birch was born in India in 1918 to parents who were Christian missionaries on a three-year mission trip that ended in frustration and disappointment, presumably because most of the people they met were fine with the gods they already had. Atlantic writer Thomas Malin notes that quote, evangelical zeal conflicted with the more material progress

being pursued by the missionary Sam Higginbottom, their boss at the Allahabad Agricultural Institute. In other words, John Birch's parents wanted to be like, you know, super-Jesus-y with people, and their boss was more about improving people's material needs and hoping that inspired them to find Christ. So they got tired of that shit. We should give you food, and the other guy's like,

what if we told them they were going to hell? That would probably work too, right? What if food was contingent on them except in Christ? Yeah. So the guy who cared about helping people stayed in India helping people, and the Birch family moved back to Georgia. So that's where John was born in India,

but he grew up in Georgia, and it would be fair to describe him as growing up a religious fundamentalist. Like, he was not just a religious man, but by the standards of the time a fundamentalist. Gotcha. He went to Mercer University and was described by a biographer later in life

as obstinate, passionate, and headstrong. I'm going to quote from The Atlantic here. He hated his professor Felix Frankfurt. The most notable state-side episode of his brief life involved participating in a 13-member student group against five professors whose theological views they deemed heretical. The accusing students were a decided minority

on the Baptist campus, and charges against the faculty were dismissed after a 10-hour hearing. Birch went on to graduate at the top of his class, but found himself shunned by a portion of its members. He began to feel that he had been used, provoked into the fight by some of Macon's towny Baptist ministers.

So again, he's very hardcore religious and is like willing to accuse a bunch of professors of heresy. But then after the whole situation shakes out, he starts to feel as if he's been manipulated by like ministers in the area. And he kind of like, he kind of has an awakening. And after this point, most degree became less extreme religiously.

It seems to have realized he was being manipulated. Why do I feel like 60% of that debate was entirely about whether or not Jews were people? Yeah, you get it. That's totally the whole thing, right? There was a JQ in that discussion. So yeah, John was smart enough to realize he'd been manipulated and he left that school.

He went to a Bible Institute next, run by a popular evangelical radio preacher who suggested that Birch should travel to China as an evangelist. John arrived there in September of 1940 in the middle of a long and almost impossibly bloody war between China and Japan and a civil war in China. It was a rough fucking place to be in 1940. Not an easy time to be anywhere, really, in China.

So John actually traveled closer to the danger and moved almost 200 miles from where he had initially moved in China to the city of Shangrao, which was very close to the front line. Now, while he was a foreigner in China to sell people on Christianity, it does seem like he legitimately fell in love with the culture. He learned to speak fluent Mandarin in just a year,

which is not something he would do. Holy shit! Yeah, he's very gifted with languages. And yeah, that's probably not the kind of thing you do if you didn't have some appreciation for the culture. The Atlantic notes that this exceeded the norm for proselytisms. I learned their language just to tell them they're dirty commies. That's what I did.

I didn't tell them they're commies. Yeah, it's also noted by his biographer that he recognized his own racial prejudice, which was obviously a product of growing up white in Georgia. It was struggling to overcome it in the 1940s. So it seems like a guy who grew up in a pretty regressive background but was making significant strides to be a better person, open to new ideas and new people and new cultures.

Definitely not a villain, would be fair to say. By 1942, Burch had become discouraged by the bureaucracy of the missionary effort in China, feeling as if it distracted from the more important work of providing meaningful aid for a nation that was driven by war and starvation. He volunteered to serve in the U.S. military mission to China as a chaplain.

Before he got an answer, he wound up helping to rescue Jimmy Doolittle's Raiders, who had just bombed civilians in Tokyo, his revenge for Pearl Harbor and had landed in China. As Burch's biographer notes, quote, they saw a gaunt Western man with several days' growth of beard and one of the airmen exclaimed, well, Jesus Christ, the missionary replied,

that's an awfully good name, but I am not he. So, got a bit of wit to him. All right, you little clever bastard. Shut up, just say hi. Not a bad response. You gotta throw out something good there. I would have gone with, that's my dad's name. That's the way you do that.

That's the way you pull that one off. That would have been a funnier remark. If only John Burch had done more stand-up sets. If only Jordan was around back then to do punch-up. Yeah, I got to do punch-up. On social responses. One note, John, one note. Let's take it one more time.

Let's take it from the top one more time. You can't imagine if you were him giving that response that like what, 70 years later, some dicks would be arguing about whether or not it was funny on a podcast. I imagine I would like that. I would like 70 years from now, somebody to be like, that was pretty good. That's worth a life.

One time, Jordan responded to someone saying hi to him, was not funny enough. I'm excited for 70 years from now, behind the bastards, where they just go through old episodes of my podcast and punch it up, correct my mispronunciations. But you know what will be funny? Still, your outbreak transitions, Robert, which you need to do.

Oh, not to most people. Capitalism's not going to last that long. Nothing's going to last that long. I can't, but you do need to do another. Okay, here's a product. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23,

I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted

before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. That was the least funny one you've ever done. That was a good one. Hey, what are you?

What are you? I don't need this shit. I don't need this. 70 years from now, people are going to be like, Robert was really being bullied by Sophie that one time when he talked about the John Birch Society. That one time. That was the most noteworthy thing

that happened before World War III. Let's give them notes on it. Even though none of them survived the initial nuclear exchange. Anyway, I'll start the Robert Evans Society. Yeah, I'm going to wind up being the first victim of space communism. Birch would go on to play a minor role

in helping Doolittle's Raiders escape. He was commissioned in the military, and he worked in the military for a few years. At this point, U.S. military mission in China, broadly speaking, on the right side of things, because they're against Japan, who is killing millions and millions and millions of people. He's not a completely unproblematic guy,

but not a bad guy. His goal after leaving the service was to do more missionary work. He was going to move to Tibet, but he never got the chance to do that. By 1945, Birch was physically and mentally wrecked, both from a terrible war and from repeated bouts of malaria.

He got his final military assignment in August, which was just after the Japanese surrender was announced. When Japan surrendered, the Chinese nationalists and the Chinese communist forces started fighting again. Birch was with the U.S. military unit, and again, sick.

Everyone who was around at the time notes that he was showing increased signs of paranoia. He was going through PTSD. He was not in a good mental place. It's too bad he didn't have hydroxychloroquine. That actually would have helped, because it's an anti-malarial. Birch's party, the guys he was with,

like the U.S. military unit who was with, ran into a group of communist soldiers and they ordered the Americans to disarm. Birch got angry and insulted people and we don't exactly know what happened, but there was a fight and Birch was shot dead. So if he had never learned Chinese, he wouldn't have been able to piss him off as much.

Yeah, the lesson here is never learn another language. You will get murdered in a field in China by Red Army soldiers. I think that's what I'm going to take away from this. Yeah, quit your Spanish lessons today and save your own life. This podcast is not brought to you by Duolingo.

Yeah. So Mao Zedong actually apologized for the killing of John Birch to an American general who was in charge of the U.S. mission in the country at the time. But Mao kind of walked away from that meeting really angry because the American general seemed to be insistent

that he should be able to send American troops anywhere inside of China without informing the Chinese ahead of time. So it was a whole big deal and it just kind of seems like a tragedy. Birch probably was being a dick but also was sick and struggling with PTSD

and doesn't seem to have been a bad guy. It's just a bummer. War sucks. Yeah. It would be fair to call him a complicated man but yeah, definitely not a villain. In death though, his legacy was really, really simplified

thanks in large part to Robert Welch. He turned John Birch into a symbol because to Robert Welch John Birch was the first American to die fighting communism. Even though he hadn't really been fighting communism, they'd actually been like broadly speaking trying to help China

and they just got into an argument with some communist soldiers and everyone was probably drinking. I feel like you're trying to apply nuance to a situation where there's only good guys and bad guys and how dare you ever consider the bad guys human beings. That's crazy.

Yeah, Welch does not see any nuance in this. To him, John Birch is a martyr who gave his life to destroy communism and yeah, he starts turning him into basically like the John the Baptist of capitalism. That's Bob Welch's goal here.

Which yeah, I never knew John Birch obviously because he died decades before my birth but reading about the guy, you kind of get the feeling he'd be a little bit bummed. You know who else didn't know him. Fucking Robert Welch. Fucking Robert Welch did not know him, no.

Not even a little bit. That's fair. In 1954, Welch started work on what would become one of his most consequential books, The Politician. He's basically a friend. He's in a car with a buddy of his and he starts ranting about Dwight Eisenhower

and talking about how he's a communist agent and after hours of this one has to assume his friend is like, hey, why don't you like shut the fuck up and just write a book about this? That's every time I've been on the road as a comic. You know, you should write a book

which is a classy way of saying please stop talking. Welch does not take this as a classy way of saying please stop talking and he actually writes a book. I don't think please stop talking is something he respected very much as a way of life.

Not a real please guy. Nor a stop guy. If he decision to write this book too. Yeah, not a great call. A lot of bad decisions. I guess the Leviathan was taken so he had to go with the politician. May God forgive us was already

I've already been taken. May God forgive us again. May God forgive us too. May God forgive us. May God forgive us five. She's all being forgiven by God. May we be forgiven?

Tokyo drift. It's fun. So Welch started, so he has this conversation with a friend who's like just write a fucking book about Eisenhower the communist. So Welch starts by writing a letter which outlines his feelings on Eisenhower

and he revises it over the years in 1956 and again in 1958 and basically every year he sends out a new draft of this letter to anyone who would listen to him and he calls it a letter but by the third revision it was 80,000 words long which you might notice is not a letter.

Did he just write I want more money to sign? Manifesting. I feel like some of my relatives like holiday letters might end up being about that long. I feel like I don't have word counts on it but if they feel

80,000 words. I assume there was at least one recipe in there, right? There had to be one recipe. Papa suckers. Gotta make the good old fashioned Papa suckers. I would be really angry if any of my friends or loved ones sent me an 80,000 word letter.

Really? I would happily get that one other than a letter that I was supposed to actually read. If you give me an 80,000 that goes in the garbage. Thanks for sending me that letter. That's great. Dear uncle, I have thrown your letter in the trash. Thank you for sending me such a heavy package.

Since by the third revision it was more than 80,000 words long, Welch decided to start calling it a book. The politician as he titled it became the underground secret text of what became a small cult-like following of friends and admirers who increasingly believed that Bob Welch

was something of a profit. In February of 1956, Welch launched his first magazine, One Man's Opinion. He later renamed it American Opinion which really like actually reveals a lot about his thought process. Like I think this

no, America thinks this. It's that idea of the subjective actually being the objective. That's how the artist thinks. It is pretty telling. He left the Welch company at the start of 1957 and began

preparations to turn his circle of followers into a formal political advocacy group. By this point, Welch was convinced not just that Eisenhower was a crooked politician but that he was a secret communist agent in the White House. That Eisenhower was actually a communist and was

attempting to manipulate the United States into socialism from the White House. That's so crazy that that stuff used to happen in the past. That's so wild. It's just like how could you be in that headspace where something like that happens? It's crazy.

Imagine looking at Dwight Eisenhower and being so far right that you're like that fucking Marxist. Imagine looking at Biden. Yeah. He's the kind of person

who everyone is a Marxist if they don't think he should be able to skeet-shoot with poor people. That's Bob Welch's politics in a nutshell. Welch wasn't just convinced that Ike was a communist. He believed that the majority of both the Republican and Democratic

parties, most of their elected leaders at least, were communists and communist sympathizers. So, Bob Welch, in order to kind of spread this warning about encroaching communism, turned to the massive rolodex of wealthy industrial magnates that he built up over years in the

candy world. He invited all of these guys to a hotel in suburban Indianapolis in December of 1958 and he asked them to stay for two days. He didn't tell them what it was about or why he was inviting them to a hotel for two days. Gentlemen, it is a murder mystery.

Kind of. He just said it was a matter of utmost importance. So, he's very cloak and dagger, very secretive. And of like the 17 guys that Bob Welch invites, 11 of them show up to see what he has to say. And I'm going to quote from politically. Some real cool characters among those

11, too. Yeah. At least one Bastards Pot alumni. Yeah. After exchanging firm handshakes in the breakfast room of a sprawling two-door style house in the Tony Meridian Park neighborhood, Welch explained why he had brought this group together.

The United States faced an existential threat from an international communist conspiracy hatched by an amoral gang of sophisticated criminals. The power hungry, God-hating government worshipers had infiltrated newsrooms, public schools, legislative chambers and houses of worship. They were frighteningly close to

total victory. Welch felt it in his gut. These cunning megalomaniacs seek to make themselves the absolute rulers of a human race of enslaved robots in which every civilized trait has been destroyed. Welch wrote in the blue book of the John Birch Society, the organization's founding history.

That would really sound unhinged to me if he weren't proven 100% correct on every point there, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think you got it. I think you nailed it. There's definitely a group of cunning megalomaniacs who seek to make themselves the absolute rulers of a human race reduced to robotic servitude.

But, you know, it's Jeff Bezos. Yeah. It's Peter Teal and Bezos. Yeah. Yeah. What are we doing? It's guys who would have been in the John Birch Society. Exactly. Yes. So, the chosen few gathered here would form the vanguard of a new political movement, an army

of brave American patriots dedicated at preserving the country's Christian and constitutional foundations. Welch christened the group the John Birch Society, named in memory of a U.S. soldier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know the guy. Yeah. And their goal at the beginning was destroying the, quote, communist conspiracy

or at least breaking its grip on our government and showering its power within the United States. So, I love, I love guys who are like, oh, there's a conspiracy to kill everybody and then they create what is essentially the Knights Templar. Yeah. Like, what do we do it? There's a conspiracy.

We have to create a conspiracy to fight it. We're going to be a secretive group of crusaders fighting against communism. What's what's weird and conspiratorial about that? Well, I mean, it's the same thing you hear now. Like, you know, there's a, there's a coup going on in our government. So, we have to form a counter coup. Of course. And then

they're going to form a counter counter coup against our counter coup. Yep. Yeah, it's just like, what do we even do? And this is just like one of those dolls inside a doll or an onion. Well, it's just, it's one of the most effective ways. If you're trying to convince people to do something that's blatantly evil and horrible, the best way to do it is to convince them

that the people you're going to be harming are doing the same thing to you. Exactly. Yeah. Like we should have martial law because Biden's going to put in martial law. Yeah. Or like that trailer park was going to gear up in their forerunners and drive through my neighborhood firing out the window. So, I

have to get in my forerunner and drive through their trailer park shooting into trailers. Yeah. There's no other option. Yeah. They forced me into it. Mm-hmm. False flag also, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, all 11 of the rich dudes that Welch invited to his meeting became founding members

of the John Burt society. Are we going to talk about these guys? Oh, yeah. We're going to talk about these guys a little bit. One of them was T. Coleman Andrews, former commissioner of the IRS. Another was the personal aid, former personal aid for General Douglas MacArthur, who attempted to nuke both China and North Korea.

He's a good guy. And another of them was Fred Koch, founder, father, well, and founder of the infamous Koch brothers. Yay. Yeah. Yeah. So, those are the three that I found worth naming. There's... What about Velo P. Oliver? Wasn't he there too? I think so. Who's Velo P.

Oliver? You know these people. Yeah. He was a guy who ended up inspiring William Luther Pierce writing his works. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. He became a big fascist guy. I think he was there

at that first meeting. Yeah. He was one of the founding members. Yep. You're right. You're right. You're right. He's a real thinker of the crypto early fascist types. Oh, yeah. Classics professor from the University of Illinois. Found it. Yeah. And one of the Holocaust denial movements. Yeah. Leading lights.

Yeah. What a great meeting. Yeah. To have been a fly on that wall. Yeah. Cool, cool people. A lot of real casual anti-Semitism. It's a collection of actual demons. Yeah. Not in the way that you

demonize. Not in the way you demonize your enemies and all that stuff. Those guys, even if you're like broadly in agreement with what they believe, you should look at that meeting and go, get the fuck away from me. You guys are terrible. The ripples are almost astounding, even just thinking about like

the idea that Fred Koch, the father of the Koch brothers is in the same room with Ravilo P. Oliver, who inspired and helped facilitate the writing of the Turner Diaries. Yeah. Yeah. It's just insane. It's insane. The tendrils. It makes

sense though, because one of the fun things to do with the far right and with the normal right is to play like the Kevin Bacon game with the Turner Diaries. Sure, sure. Like how can you tie back a Republican politician to the Turner Diaries? Generally less than four steps.

Yeah. 100% yeah. Thanks to the Koch brothers. Hey, good guys. Good guys. At least one of them apologized later on. Yeah. They admitted. God, I want to, I want to fuck up the world badly enough, but also

be in a position where I can just be like oopsie toodles. Hey guys, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be honest. This one's on me. My bad. My bad. You know what? I'm big enough a man to admit when I've destroyed the entire world and this is that time for me. I fumbled. Yeah. Yeah. Hey,

we all make mistakes. We all make mistakes. Best baseball players only go one for three. One for three is the best baseball players. In order to make this right, I have purchased a po-buddies nerfict shirt and I will wear it for the next four days. Anyway, sorry

to everyone who's lost loved ones. So from the beginning, Welch patterned the John Burt society off of the revolutionary communist movements he so despised, which is again another like so you're saying these people are like the epitome of all evil and you're also deliberately

framing your group out of after them. You're scared because they're good at it. They are good at it, like obviously. Alex on Alex Jones. I don't know if you know this. We do a little bit about him. He he just put out like, hey,

what we need to do is get all the truck drivers together and have them strike in a unified front and you're like, do you not hate unionization? Now you want to use withholding of labor as a means of political action. Yep. Interesting.

There's nothing wrong with that. Not well, for us. For him, there is something wrong. You shouldn't be. It's the same thing with like police unions. It's like you people use fire hoses on striking workers. You don't get to unionize

like yourself. So from the beginning Welch patterned the John Burt. He patterned them off of revolutionary communist movements. In his initial like founding documents, Welch wrote that he wanted the John Burt society to be a monolithic body operating under completely

authoritative control at all levels. In other words, he would be the Mao or the Stalin of his own counter communist movement. The society would be organized into cells of 10 to 20 members formed after the revolutionary cadres that were common in underground communist movements. Like you read about the

Khmer Rouge and like the founding of that and it's like the same basic organizational strategy because you're trying to avoid like infiltration. Yeah. And it works. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is. It works pretty well. There's a reason he patterns off of this, even though it is ironic. Welch informed his followers that he had

considered a republican form of organization for their society, but that while it had certain attractions and advantages under certain favorable conditions, it failed under quote less happy circumstances. The United States Welch insisted was beset by less happy circumstances

and the extent of socialist infiltration in American society made any republican system open to infiltration, distortion and disruption. Robert Welch was in short creating an underground fascist political party. His disdain for anything that even smacked of democracy was quite clear. Welch told

his followers that democracy was quote, merely a deceptive phrase, a weapon of demagoguery and a perennial fraud. So I want more money. And I don't want people to be able to vote that I should give more money. Yeah. I do not want people to be able to vote for anything, really.

Yeah. Because they will vote for socialism. Yeah. I mean, it's the same shit that you see today. There's nothing new here. Well, it was new here, though, like that's what's interesting about this is that he was like, like now we have, it's

shocking to a lot of people that we have all these mainstream elected republicans saying openly, like, we're not a democracy. Democracy is bad. We don't want democracy when there's this much socialism going around. If you let people choose things, they'll choose dangerous socialism. And Bob Welch was the guy

fucking 60 years before that who was being like, this is exactly the way we should be framing things. I have a quick question. Do you think is he a believer? Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. He's not the same kind of right wing grifter we're used to seeing all over the place.

I don't think he's a grifter. I don't think he's a grifter. He's already rich for one thing. He's a grifter. Yeah. Like rich people don't continue the grift. I think there's an element of a grift in what he's doing, but he's not. He's not seems to be like there's a grift isn't

the focus. There's people who serve the scam and then there are people who are like, now this idea ideological. I think he's more on that side. All right. I think he's an ideologue. I think he believes in what he's doing. Okay. He's making a lot of reasons. Well, of course.

Don't worry about that. He's making it for the money, right? He wouldn't be doing this if it was just to sell like pills. Yeah. He's not a pill guy. So I'm going to quote now from the world of the John Burt society by DJ Malloy. Quote, all in all, it was a hierarchical

structure derived not just from the many years Welch had spent in the world of business, but also from his openly, if perhaps surprisingly expressed, admiration for the organizational tactics of his communist foes. Acknowledging the similarity between Lenin's notion of the dedicated few and his own plans for the John Burt society

in the blue book, for example. The always capitalized founder explained that he was willing to draw on all successful human experience in organizational matters, so long as it does not involve any sacrifice of morality in the means used to achieve an end. If I'm in that room, I'm like,

he's going to be removing people from pictures pretty soon. Yeah. He's going to be erasing us from history once he gets to be dictated. I don't trust that guy. No one's wife to send letters to people while the men get drunk and yell about

commies. So, membership is one of the dedicated few was not free. Monthly dues were $24 for men and $12 for women, which probably says something unfortunate. Life memberships cost $1,000. There were monthly chapter meetings. For the first

two years of the John Burt society, things went along smoothly enough. Word of the society was passed mouth to mouth and cells were spread all around the nation. Welch addressed them all monthly in the society's bulletin, which he wrote every word of. It was not always easy to get freedom-loving Americans to sign up

for an organization that was fundamentally undemocratic, monolithic, and authoritarian in structure. Welch spent a lot of his time explaining to members why such a strict and unbending hierarchy was necessary. He told them that the U.S. was a shoreline of beautiful houses threatened by a rising flood.

You can assume the flood's non-white people. Merch is in their ilk where lonesome boys with brooms trying to sweep it back. What they needed, Welch insisted, was a dynamic boss to get them organized by barking this. This is again from one of his writings. This is like he's describing like the U.S. is a bunch of

beautiful houses and there's this flood threatening it and we're lonesome boys with brooms beating it back. And all those boys need is a boss who's willing to shout this. Hey, you guys, all of you, drop those pretty brooms. You fellows down there on the end, start running for empty bags. You fellows in those next two groups, start filling

those bags with sand. You men here, all of you, start lugging those bags of sand to put on this wall. The communists have busted up so badly. You fellows over there, all of you, get the heaviest clubs you can find, spread yourselves out along the whole length of this wall, and don't hesitate to break the heads of any saboteurs you find monkeying with it.

Don't even hesitate to break the heads of those you find creeping towards the wall if you are sure of their evil intentions. America is set up perfectly and it's the best country that has ever existed but there are circumstances that are happening right now that really we need a dictator. Yeah.

I'm afraid so. There's just nothing. It's just it's impossible to avoid. Look, it's circumstantial. What are you going to do? We need a dictator. Otherwise, people are going to spend all their time swinging brooms and not beating people in the head making sandbags. I find it fun that this starts as like a metaphor for trying to organize people to deal

with what is presumably like a tsunami or a flood condition and instead turns into beating communists with sticks. There's a flood coming. Punch the water. Don't do anything to help it. Just punch it. I mean, every year or so I go out to the coast and get into a fight with the ocean

and I think that's why we have not had a major tsunami on the west coast of the United States in years. I just get drunk and scream. You think you're bigger than me? Yeah, because of me. I beat the shit out of the ocean every couple of years. You should have seen me, Sophie. She does taunt Lake Michigan often.

If you don't stand up to bodies of water, they're going to walk all over you. Literally. We're all nodding like, sure. Very stoic nod. Very stoic nod. Fight the ocean. That could go in the don'ts of the art

of salesmanship right there, I think. I want to start a John Birch society that's just themed at getting people to fight the ocean. Fight various forms of nature. Yeah. Mostly oceans. Punch trees, yell at the water. All of what

John Birch was preaching was good enough to earn his society the membership of one of my favorite bastards pod characters, Phyllis Schlafly. She and her husband, some guy, joined in 1959. So yeah, that's good. Phyllis Schlafly.

I thought Jordan was going to bark at that. Phyllis Schlafly. Not a schlaffer as we used to call ourselves. Not on the Schlaff Squad. So that same year, same year Schlafly and her husband joined the John Birch society, Robert Welch launched a crusade to recall

newly installed Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren. Justice Warren was a liberal who had written the majority opinion for a decision that overruled state and local segregation laws. We're talking Brown versus the Board of Education here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not like Brown versus the Board of Education.

Oh yeah, why not? Not wild about the fact that black people got to go to the same schools as white people now. In Welch's eyes, Earl Warren's opinion on this case meant that he was a communist. Welch insisted in letters that Warren had violated his oath and he harangued his most gifted followers

to turn the effort to recall the justice into a movement. Privately, Welch wrote that, frankly, with the left wing control now so strong insidious and ubiquitous in Washington, I am not deceiving myself that we have very much chance of really bringing about the impeachment of Earl Warren, although we might.

But I don't think that is really as important as dramatizing to the whole country where he stands, where the Supreme Court now constituted under him stands, and how important it is to face the facts about the road we are now traveling on so fast. So that's really interesting to me because in all of his public, like,

publications, he makes it clear that this is a real effort to recall Earl Warren and I think we have a real shot and we're going to get this guy out of the Supreme Court and his private letters, he's like, we're never going to do this. It's all about making people angry. It's about the rhetoric. It's about pushing the idea of the fight.

Which is not like anything else that's happened since. No. A lot of size on this episode when I passed in the future compared. He's a real trailblazer. So you get a feel for Bob Welch by reading his letters.

I'm going to read you now an excerpt from one he sent to Coleman Andrews, who's the former commissioner of the IRS. Does it start with... I mean, kind of. It begins with... That's kind of what I hear out of all of his writings. The letter begins with Welch's

regret that Andrews turned down an opportunity to spearhead the effort against what Welch refers to in all caps as the movement to impeach Earl Warren. He calls it that in all caps every time he types about it. He's a caps guy. Is Frankfurter not on the Supreme Court

anymore or is he gone? I think he's dead at this point. You've got to go for him first. He's your guy. He starts the letter by being like, it's a bummer that you don't want to help me impeach Earl Warren. He goes on to discuss gathering storms in the south,

which is a reference to the civil rights movement. Which Bob Welch stated he thought was directly caused by the Communist Party. If blood does flow there, which I agree is entirely likely, the Communists planned it that way. They have schemed for so long to be in position to fan little fires of civil disorder

into a huge conflagration of civil war. If and when they need such a horror in their moves to take us over. And John Birch, though a minister devoted to peace, was entirely ready to fight for a cause which he considered worthy of sacrifice. So... Devoted to peace.

Devoted to peace this guy. He's referring to John Birch, who he did not know. We have to be like John Birch, who was devoted to peace but was willing to get into a drunken argument with Communist soldiers and get shot to death. That sounds like most right-wing heroes.

Like Colonel Travis, he was a drunk. I don't know that he was drunk. He may just have been drunk on malaria. I'm just assuming everyone in the 40s was wasted. At all times. That's a good idea. John Birch, he did Earl Warren. That is actually a little known fact.

That is true. Nonsense. Yeah. So, Welch portrayed the John Birch Society's work not as partisan activism, but as an attempt to unite all Americans under an anti-communist banner. In a 1960 issue of the bulletin, he wrote,

it is of vital importance to the Communists to split Americans into all kinds of groups, snarling at each other. And so, he said, the society would not seek to split up Americans. We are fighting Communists, period. Nobody else. They put people into all these groups. And I don't think that we should have

black people, Jewish people, Chinese people, liberals, the LGBTQ community. I don't think we should have any of those people, those specific groups that I have chosen to deny as people. See? Left is evil.

Yeah, they're dividing us by allowing people who aren't like me to exist. Yeah, exactly. So, Welch, by the mid-1950s, had grown increasingly convinced that the entire U.S. government was basically Communists all the way down. And one of the main triggers for this

was when Congress voted to censure Senator Joe McCarthy in 1954. Right on time, by the way. Right on time. They got to him quick. So, yeah, and because Eisenhower was a big part

of finally censuring Joe McCarthy after letting Joe McCarthy be Joe McCarthy for years, Welch had more evidence that Ike was a secret Communist. The writing's kind of on the wall. Yeah. I mean, all the signs are there if you're looking. After just two whole red scares,

he stepped in. Yeah. So, the politician Welch's book about Ike remained largely a secret work. He circulated it among his most loyal inner circle. He handed it out to like leaders in the movement, but regular members didn't get to know.

It was kind of like their zinu. So, when you put stuff up in the Birch society, you learned that Eisenhower's a Communist. Yeah. Welch noted about his book in one private letter, quote, are rather extreme precautions with regards to this document are not due to any worry on my part

as to what might happen to myself. But many of my best informed friends feel that having the manuscript get into the wrong hands at the present time might do far more damage than good to the whole anti-communist cause. Yeah, it's Alex Jones. I mean, and Alex Jones as a little bit of a spoiler material. So,

not a kawinky dink. So, for the Bircher rank and file, Eisenhower was just a crooked politician who was much too friendly with foreign leaders. At one point in 1960, Ike agreed to attend a summit with Nikita Khrushchev, British Prime Minister Harold McMillan, and French President Charles de Gaulle.

Welch considered all three of these men to be card-carrying communists. De Gaulle! Yeah, yeah. Which is fair with Khrushchev. I'll say that. Khrushchev is fair, but de Gaulle? Communist Charles de Gaulle. Charles de Gaulle! Didn't he do rituals

and dance? I don't know. I can't remember if that was de Gaulle. I mean, he was pretty problematic in a lot of ways himself, but communist is not an accurate description of it. Oh, de Gaulle was very problematic. Yeah. So was McMillan for that matter. Yeah, so Welch considered again

all these guys to be communists, and he had the John Birch Society send a heavily publicized message to President Eisenhower, go, don't come back. The slogan was sent out in a blizzard of... What the hell? You will be exiled. Yeah.

For hanging out with famous communist Charles de Gaulle! Yeah. If you go, what a great threat. If you go to that meeting, the conference room will be your elbow. So the slogan was sent out in a blizzard of postcards, letters, and telegrams. And within the society

it was actually quite controversial, because the people of Chicago were not as irrational as the group's founder. Nationwide, it sparked curiosity for this strange, semi-underground organization. One curious individual was Jack Mably, an investigative reporter and columnist for the Chicago Daily News.

So hey, hometown hero! Hey! Yeah. Well, technically, Candyman is a hometown hero for Chicago too, but that's a different... Both hometown heroes, two Chicagoans. Two Chicagoans! Chicagoan.

So, yeah. Mably starts looking into the John Birch Society. He kind of fin angles his way into attending a meeting, and he talks with a number of its members. And by hook and by crook, he comes into possession of a copy of The Politician. Dot dot dot!

Yeah, so it's made its way out of the society's inner circle and into the hands of a journalist. Now, unfortunately, Robert Welch's prophecies are going to come true. Yeah. No, they're crazy. I'm going to quote now from DJ Malloy's book on the John Birch Society,

writing about Mably's, you know, the article he writes about The Politician. Quote, This fantastic document Mably reported accuses President Eisenhower of treason. It flatly calls him a communist, and for 302 pages attempts to document the charge. And he provided an exact quote

from the book to prove his claim, one that would haunt Welch and the Birch Society for years to come, but which was mysteriously, when the book was officially published in 1963. It was, Well, I too think that Milton Eisenhower, the president's brother, is a communist, and has been for 30 years.

This opinion is based largely on general circumstances of his conduct. But my firm belief that Dwight Eisenhower is a dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy is based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to me to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt. Through some violation of confidence,

someone who had been sent the letter to the United States had passed it on to Mably, and the journalist had naturally selected for quotation the most extreme statements he could find without the benefit of any explanation or modifying import of the context around them. By some violation? He's like, hey, could I take a look

at your copy of that? Yeah, sure. Violation, the end. And I love the idea that that's out of context. Yeah, that's the thing people say about like Jordan Peterson and Alex Jones, like the defenses they always make is taking us out of context.

And that's what fucking Welch in the John Birch Society do with this document. They claim that he was like, well, I said, I didn't say that Eisenhower was a communist agent. I said that I thought he was based on evidence that I'd seen. That's different from saying he's a communist. Yeah.

Yeah. The rest of those 80,000 words are the stone cold dead to rights evidence. That's not right. But this journalist quote unquote and that is really malpractice. Fake news. Exactly.

So most people did not buy Welch's defense. In fact, a Saturday evening postreporter who wrote about the John Birch Society in 1967 stated that its members spent most of their time talking to outsiders answering questions about Welch's communist Eisenhower conspiracy. So like this kind of dominates the public perception.

They become a bit of a joke to a lot of Americans because, you know, it's ridiculous. Yeah. They sure fooled us. They got their revenge. Didn't they? This did not stop the John Birch Society, although it did draw attention to the group for the first time.

This may have helped as much as it harmed. Tens of thousands of Americans continued to flock to the John Birch Society, eventually growing to 95,000 members in 1965. Welch's stated goal was a million American Birchers and as the 1960s got rolling, it looked like he might actually

achieve it. He was one of the John Birch Society. What a dick. An erotic novel. I don't think he's a good guy. No, no. I think he sucks and I think my throat is sore and I need a papa sucker

to really soothe me. Gonna go suck on a papa while we take a quick break. You guys want to plug your plugables before we roll out? We got a podcast. I think people can find that. I did write a book. You always have to remind me to actually tell people that.

It's The Quiet Part Loud. You can get it at thequietpartloud.com. That's where. For free. Check out Knowledge Fight. Check out The Quiet Part Loud. And check out Nothing Else. If you do anything else on the internet, you have offended and harmed me personally.

And I will take my vengeance. Oh. God doesn't need to forgive us. God. In high podcast. Out. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series

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or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and make sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science

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Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

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