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

Episode Date: December 17, 2020

Robert is joined again by Jordan Holmes ·& Dan Friesen of Knowledge Fight to continue to discuss The John Birch Society. 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?

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast. That's it. I've done my job. We're introduced. It's a podcast. That's good work. Thank you. All right, we're taking the day. Everybody take five. All right, cool. See you back next week.

Okay, no. Talk about bad people. Worst ones all in history. They're actually filming He's All of That in our space right now, so we can't. Well, I guess we might as well talk about it. With me again, Ardan in Jordan, or Jan in Jordan, or Jordan, host of the Alex Jones Focus Podcast Knowledge Fight, which I will probably be listening to when I go on a run right after this.

Bragg. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Someone has an IP address. IPod Nano, motherfuckers. Somebody is ambulatory. Congratulations. So we're talking about the JBS. And there's a quote that opens the book on the John Birch society that I've been using as one of the sources for this episode,

the world of the John Birch society. And the quote that opens the book is by a guy named Don Delilo. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It was a good quote to open a book about the John Birch society with because I've been thinking about it a lot, not just while writing this episode about the JBS, but in general, while thinking about, you know, everything that the Birches wrought on American society, because what was actually happening during the period of the John Birch society's rise to prominence, was that a very fucked up world order was establishing itself in the wake of all of that post-war promise.

You know, people were, broadly speaking, kind of optimistic in sort of the wake of the Second World War, that like maybe mankind had turned to corner. Sure, that's why they fucked and had all those babies that we have to deal with now. Yeah, everyone decided to fucking raise the worst generation that ever existed. Yeah, right? Bunch of dicks. Bunch of assholes. If you were going to write a new John Birch society book, you could use a quote from me, which is like,

Bunch of dicks. Yeah, that's what I'll use to open my book about the John Birch society and about the Papa Sucker. So the era of the Birch society's chief period of relevance was also the area in which the new deal started being slowly picked apart, right? So like, you know, we have an economic collapse. We institute this very robust program of like a social safety net and protections for workers. And then in the post-war era, all these rich guys, many of whom were John Birch society donors and sympathizers, dedicate their lives to tearing it apart. Now, this period of time was also the period in which the Cold War was at its most frightening, you know?

The height of the Vietnam War happens during sort of the peak of the John Birch society's relevance. Everything's kind of going wrong in America in this period. And in this period, right after things had been going really well, at least by the perspective of white people. And a lot of white people were like, what the hell happened? Communism. Yeah, exactly. Bob Boat slides in and is like, communism. Yeah, you got it.

While he's causing all of the things that are bad to happen, he blames it on communism. Yeah, he's a fucking smart man. So because of all this... In a sense. Yeah, in a sense. Smart it. Yeah, I mean, being terrible is a skill, you know? Yeah, definitely.

It's true. Man knew his turn times tables when he was four years old. Prove it. He's clever. That's why, again, you got to slow down the smart kids, you know? I'm not going to say smart children deserve head injuries, but, you know... Then don't. Well, Sophie...

Stop just short of there. Yeah, stop just short of there. No helmets for the smart kids, right? Can I ask, are you saying that for periods of time you should deprive smart children of air? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. That's a nice, not legally actionable way of describing it. Make all children deep sea divers and have them deal with the bends every now and again. Yeah, don't forcibly restrict them from air, but make them do wreck diving and get nitrogen poisoning.

That's how we fix society. Yeah, if you think about it, back during this time, they only used to paddle the kids who weren't succeeding in school. Now, where are we? If we had reversed it around, what if they paddled kids for doing too well at school? I think anybody would be ashamed of succeeding. I don't know. And that's how we should live. Okay.

So, because of all this, I actually think that Bob Welch was actually a different sort of conspiracy theorist from most of his followers. You know, the bulk of rank and file birchers were conservative Americans who had been brainwashed into an irrational fear of communism, and were willing to believe that it was the cause of all of their problems when it, in general, was not. Bob Welch in his inner circle, the guys who got to read the politician, were the kind of rich and powerful men who saw any refusal of the people of the world to bow to their whims as communism. And when you think about it that way, Welch's hatred of Eisenhower makes sense because Ike wanted to live in a society, and Bob Welch did not. He wanted to be a feudal lord, right? Like a lot of criticisms about Eisenhower, but Eisenhower wanted to live in a society that provided benefits for the people living inside of it. And Bob Welch said, fuck that.

Yeah. And meanwhile, the followers of the John Birch society were more of the, why is our society sex so bad? It must be the communists, not the people deliberately tearing it apart brick by brick. Probably. Like our leader. Yeah, it's good. That would make sense. Yeah, it's the difference between the, like, consumer and the producer of the theory.

Like that disconnect that isn't clear to the followers necessarily of, like, what you're being, what path you're actually being led down. Yeah, I think that's why Bill Gates has a podcast now, so he can really clear things up for people. My co-worker Bill Gates in the podcast field. I am excited to have him on the episode about Peter Deal. That is going to be some spicy conversation. See, now if you could get him on the episode about him, that would be a huge get. It would be fun to get Bill Gates on the podcast and then just scream at him about, like, Windows XP for an hour and a half. Nothing about, like, any of the actual crimes he committed as the CEO of Migrant.

Just, like, really hammer him on XP. This was not intuitive software, god damn it. He's just crying by the end of it. In 1960, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected president of the United States. I shouldn't have said president was elected president. You know what I mean. JFK became the president in 1960. Never heard of him.

Yeah, he wasn't that famous. In the years before he was gunned down by Bernie Sanders, he enacted a broadly progressive agenda, except for all the saber rattling at communists and hard work, old warrior shit. Most reasonable people can look at JFK's legacy and acknowledge that he did some reckless, violent shit in the name of fighting communism. One of those reckless, violent things would be getting us into Vietnam, which didn't work out super well, some might say. You take the rough with the smooth as Dan likes to say, you know? Robert Welch looked at JFK, who, again, brought us to the brink of nuclear war and got us into Vietnam in order to fight communism. He looked at JFK and because JFK was like, I guess we'll give the civil rights movement some of what they want,

Bob Welch was like, that motherfucker's a communist. Big time. That motherfucker is a communist. So this is not to say, and in fairness to Bob Welch, he did not think that JFK's opponent, Richard Nixon, was any better. To Welch, JFK was a stooge of Walter Reuther, the leader of the United Auto Workers Association, while Nixon was a stooge of Nelson Rockefeller, then the governor of New York. Welch felt that the 1960 election was just a referendum on whether Reuther or Rockefeller would be the boss of the United States under a one-world international socialist government. Man, that guy did not see Soros coming at all.

No. Soros swinging in to steal both those slots. Yeah, he swiped in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Soros saw an opening and he just, whoa! Yeah, it's very funny. Very funny how scared people used to be of unions before they got destroyed. So Welch had organized his society into revolutionary cells in order to fight that international socialist government he believed was taking over the United States.

Their primary weapon was the force of perceived public outrage, which they wielded in a variety of ways from the world of the John Birch society. Welch had in mind for how the John Birch society might resist the depredations of the communist conspiracy while awakening the apathetic and brainwashed American people to what was actually going on around them, including the use of front organizations, little fronts, big fronts, temporary fronts, permanent fronts, all kinds of fronts, he wrote, as well as the deployment of petitions, massive letter writing campaigns, and other methods of exposure. It was time, Welch believed, for an organization which has the backbone and cohesiveness and strength and definiteness of direction to put its weight into the political scales of this country, just as fast and as far as we could, in order to reverse the gradual surrender of the United States to communism. But because Welch always saw the Birch society as an educational organization as much as a political one, he also wanted to establish a speaker's bureau and a national network of reading rooms where the best anti-communist books, including his own, could be purchased or consulted,

and to expand the reach of conservative periodicals such as American Opinion, The Dan Smoot Report, and William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review. Until later. Until later. Yeah, until later. Yeah, that stops. He was also one of the first backers of conservative radio broadcasters, which in that period was a pair of guys called, named Fulton Lewis and Clarence Mannion, but like, he's very much on the cutting edge of, like, you can, you can see what Welch is actually doing here as the first organized start of what became the right-wing media sphere. That's like now an entire galaxy unto itself.

Bob Birch is the first guy that says, number one, we need this and we need to be tying, like, radio broadcasters and conservative magazines and right-wing, like, books together. We need to be building places where right-wing thinkers can gather and people can go and find their work. Like, this is an important part of actually taking over society and turning it, he's described as turning it away from communism. But like, he, he foresaw what needed to be done and he was really the first guy to proceed with doing it. It's like you do all this stuff because you know that whatever you're doing wouldn't pass muster at, like, a regular place of publishing or whatever. You have to create your own industries because what you're doing is, is ludicrous and you want to pass off this ludicrous shit. Yeah. And the right-wing always has an inherent advantage there whenever it comes to media because the idea is they want to consolidate thought into a single thing. Whereas the left-wing media is ostensibly about, I guess, sharing ideas to see who can do well.

I don't know, but it's a way of creating a unified thought process for all of these right-wing people. It's cold shit. Yeah, yeah. It's good shit. And he's, you know, he's a real... It's good shit. It's either good shit or cold shit. One of the two. Yeah, I said cold shit. I said cold shit. Oh, you said cold shit.

Oh, okay. That's what I heard. That dude's a trailblazer. You got to give him that, you know? He blazes a trail, a bad trail. It's a trail to like, it's a trail to like one of those, like somebody's septic tank has like flooded into a depression in the earth and created like a little lake of feces. Like it's a trail to a shit lake, but it is a trail that he has blazed. He had a machete his way through some underbrush to get to that poop lake. One of the things I loved about that quote you just read was the idea that he's talking about how they have to create all these front groups. And, you know, like that in particular, because I've read a bunch of John Birch materials and people who are associated with them.

And one of the hallmarks of their accusations is that everything is a front group for communism. And they never prove any of it. It's always just everything as a front group. And I think a lot of that comes out of the awareness of, yeah, like this is the mentality that we have. We have to create front groups of people don't associate this with us. You've got great ideas whenever you're like, we can't let anybody know about these. It's simultaneously a tactic and something that I think happens just. It happens automatically when you're doing that.

Like number one, it's a tactic because if you accuse people of what you're doing, it distracts and justifies your actions. But also if you're doing that sort of shit, you assume everyone else's because you don't want to have your are we the baddies moment? No. And also you want to think it's a good idea. So your enemy has to use the good idea. They can't be doing something. I mean, it's objectively strategy. Exactly.

The thing is like part of why I didn't push back normally when I read about one of my, you know, bastards being a child prodigy. I push back because they're usually dumb as shit. This is a good idea. It works. Yeah. Like it took a long time. It didn't happen in Bob Welch's lifetime, but his plan worked very well. That's true. That's true.

Like you have to be. You also get the sense that you got to give it up to the Somali pirates every year. You just got to give it up to the Somali pirates. He didn't probably come up with a ton of all of this though. Like he's brother. Yeah. No. He's the figurehead of a lot of it, but like a lot of those early CEOs from the National Association of Manufacturers.

Probably I would suspect had a bit more to do with some of the crafting of these ideas. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to say because these are obviously secret conversations between men plotting in secret. None would dare call that a conspiracy. None would dare call that a conspiracy. Nice. Nicely done. But I do think like obviously like the fact that Welch, the fact that he got people together in a, he got right wing.

Moneyed interests together to inset in a concerted way. We have to forcibly tilt this culture right. And it's going to be a mix of tactics including creating a propaganda empire. That sounds oddly similar to some country I remember right around 1930. Yeah. A country that Bob Welch probably would have been pretty happy in. Pretty stoked if they had stayed the course. You know?

Yeah. I don't know. You know, it's hard to say how much because like obviously you get the, like you look at Fred Koch. Remember the John Burt society? Fred Koch's kids go on to do more effectively what Bob Welch tried to do his whole life. Yeah. Were they copying Bob Welch or were they copying their father who was the guy who gave Bob Welch the idea? We don't, I don't really know.

Sure. But also Fred Koch didn't stay around for all that long with the Bert. No. He made the best decision of his life and died. Oh. Yeah. I feel like he made the best decision of our lives. I feel like I remembered something of him like trying to distance himself at some point.

Yeah. I might be misremembering. A number of, yeah. I believe he did when like it became, we'll talk about that. Like the John Burt society, you know, reaches its sell by date, so to speak. The campaign against Justice Earl Warren convinced many pundits and politicos that the John Burt society was just as bad as the totalitarian communists they opposed. An editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times described the content of many letters sent by their followers as evidence of brainwashing, which it was, you know. They're flooding people with letters that all sound the same, that all include the same sound bites.

And it's not because they're being like, a lot of people think like, oh my God, they must have centralized a letter writing campaign. And I think it's more that all of these people are reading the same propaganda, you know. Yeah. Now, because the United States has always been the United States, there were those who were willing to stand up in public and defend the John Burt. Society. South Carolina Democrat Mindell Rivers said they were justified because the Supreme Court's decision in Brown versus the Board of Education was effectively the death knell of the Constitution. No, no, no. I'm just a simple Southern Democrat, but I think slavery is a great idea.

If black people go to school, do we really have a country? So Welch was definitely a trailblazer in how to weaponize far right rage and the moral majority and its successors like the Tea Party essentially used John Birch tactics in order to get off the ground. You can see variants of these tactics in the far rights use of social media today. The idea behind it all remains the same. You try to popularize a fringe idea by setting off a blizzard of generated outrage that has the effect of making your cause seem more popular than it is, you know. In the 1960s, it's get thousands of John Birchers to write letters to the same handful of politicians. Nowadays, it's flood comment sections and whatnot with hot takes and shit. It's swarm people on Twitter or whatever.

But it's the same idea. And if you just repeat something loud enough and often enough, enough people will believe it's true that you can move forward with it. Yeah, it's the reason that human society is destined to go increasingly better places. Yep. So Welch was also a trailblazer when it came to infecting the minds of children with his nonsense. In September of 1960, he started advising his followers to get elected to local PTA boards all around the country. That way, they'd have a say in how their children were taught about history and politics. And they give them candy.

Hey kids, you want to pop a sucker? Get on over here. You know who's trying to keep the pop a suckers away from you. Oh, Joe Stalin. In August of 1961, Welch announced a John Birch Society essay contest open to undergraduate students around the nation. The author of the best essay on why Earl Warren should be impeached would win $2,500 in prize money. Oh boy. And again, the fact that he hates Earl Warren more than he's hated anyone else in his life is just because of Brown versus the Board of Education. There's a there's a long chain and string and recurring theme that you'll always see throughout all this is like.

Severe opposition to civil rights just being created around is against communism. You can make an extremely strong case that the entire modern right wing was born out of a desire to stop black people from going to write white schools because the moral majority's primary founding goal was to stop Oral Roberts University from having to take black students like that was like the main reason that the moral majority started. Like it's all it all comes back to why can't we just have white people in our rich kids schools. Good stuff. So Bob Welch told the New York Times his goal was to quote, stir up a great deal of interest among conservatives on the campuses of the dangers that face this country. And you could see this as essentially a precursor to something like Turning Point USA, right? He he he felt that US colleges were filled with Marxists and he wanted to try and encourage conservative thinking among young college students.

So he started like giving people thousands of dollars to write essays about why Earl Warren is the devil. So it's a racist to the bottom if you only if only he hadn't got Frank Ferdinand. If I'd like everything could have been different if you just had a different professor that you didn't fight with. Oh man, another reason hot dogs make me feel sick. Yeah. Come on now. Come on now. Come on.

Here we go. So do you have a rimshot sound effect for Jordan's? She won't even give me air horns anymore. So yeah, the good news about Welch's plan to infect the minds of college students is that back in the 1960s at least a few things about America. Were actually better and he was met by stiff resistance from all sides for trying to infect the minds of impressionable children. So that's nice. Yeah. He actually pushed back on.

That's I presume whenever they were like, well, we should not send our kids to colleges at all anymore and we should homeschool them. Yeah, I think a lot of that has its genesis in this, to be honest. The president of the Bar Association condemned Robert Welch for the contest's personal vilification of one of the chief officers of our government. Roscoe Drummond, a nationally syndicated columnist called the society radical and reckless. The early 1960s were also a period in which the mainstream media increasingly turned its eyes towards the John Birch Society. Mably's investigation had sort of opened the floodgates. In early 1961, the Santa Barbara news press published an investigation. The reporter Hans Eng wrote that the group had started a cell in Santa Barbara the previous year operating in semi-secret existence and creating several chapters.

Because most reporters have always been somewhat derivative, Eng's piece mostly focused on the politician and Welch's wacky theories about Eisenhower, because that was the stuff that was easiest to mock. Meanwhile, the more insidious work the John Birch Society did drew little attention. To his credit, Eng did report that in September of 1960, Welch had advised his members to take over local PTAs. The Post News' editor, a guy named Thomas Stork, spent the next several months authoring a series of damning editorials about the society, stating that democracy suffers when fear of communism leads to irresponsible, unsubstantiated charges of treason or evil connivance against our political, religious, educational, or cultural leaders, and that traders should be dealt with by the courts, not by vigilante groups. That's good.

Did he end that with which we learned from 10 years ago when McCarthy did it? We just did this, guys. And we'll still be learning. Exactly. 2020. So in 2020, we'll go, let's talk to John Birch Society members and let them loudly and lengthily explain their beliefs without any pushback. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's pretend we haven't done this already.

Put them on Rogan. Yeah, at least at this point in time, journalists were like, you know, critical of fascists. So Mr. Welch, you like candy. That's all you're known for, right, candy? Candy, you like candy? Candy. Yeah. Yeah.

So, I offer you a junior mint. Time magazine wrote the most damning article about the society in the early 1960s, claiming that it operated under the hard-boiled dictatorial direction of one man and pointing out that due to the society's proven ability to organize its members and push them to concerted action, they could not simply be dismissed as some sort of comic opera joke. Time magazine dubbed the politician Welch's Mein Kampf and noted with fear that its militant words and thoughts are barely a goose step away from the formation of goon squads. Well, to be fair, Time magazine named Hitler man of the year, so would it come on, man? I mean, he was the man of a couple of years. Like, let's be fair here. He was on the cover.

Time is basically Nazis. Yeah. So, they should like the politician and they should like Welch. That's true. Maybe they were saying this in a positive way. Is the politician the man of the year back in this time? Maybe they're saying that it's his Mein Kampf. I'm sure I said how we're ahead of you.

In a complimentary way. Mein Kampf is a best-seller. Finally, the new Mein Kampf. While the campaign to impeach Earl Warren fizzled out without any sort of success around 1962, Führer over the John Birch Society sparked calls in Congress for an investigation into the group. Führer over the, all right. Come on. Come on now. Get that sound effect.

A little, little, little, little Führer joke there. So, this actually led several of, like, the fact that like all of this, you know, media comes out about the society forces several of its members who were highly placed in government to go public, basically to get ahead of news cycles revealing that their secret John Birch Society members. One of these guys is Representative Edgar Heistand, a Republican from California. He identifies himself as a member of the society in March 30th and he outs one of his fellow Californians, a Republican congressman named John Rusalo as a member as well. Both men say that they're, like, because there's also calls to investigate the society in this period because a lot of people are freaked out and rightfully so. Yeah, they're weird as hell. Yeah, they're weird as hell. And both of these guys are like, we would love to be investigated.

Please investigate us. I think one of them actually jumped out of a window whenever he was caught at a 24-person communist orgy. I'm pretty sure that's, isn't that how that one went? Topical. There was a Hungarian member of Parliament yesterday. Getting it in there, getting it in there, Dan. Like, I would love this. Yeah, hey, we're fine.

Anybody can investigate us, but I should tell you that anybody who does is probably going to be called a communist. Yeah, and it's fun because, like, a lot of people are like, we should investigate these people and the John Birch Society is like, yes, please investigate us. And then, like, the rabbinical council of America is like, they should be investigated, but not publicly because all you're going to do is give them a big court platform to, like, let them rant to the country. Well done, rabbinical council. Nicely done. They were pretty, they remembered, let's say they remembered some shit that had happened, like, 15 years ago. It wasn't long ago, guys. Hey, you know that thing that just finished happening?

Yeah. Maybe not, maybe we shouldn't let that happen immediately again. And thankfully, you know, there's not massive, like, they don't get their gigantic national platform in the way that they'd kind of hope there. So at that point, again, people were smarter about some things back then. Now, throughout this whole period of time, the John Birch Society grew and grew, signing up thousands of new members each year. All the sunlight of attention did not eradicate it, interestingly enough. Not the best disinfectant after all. I thought it was going to do that to Scientology, and here they still are, huh?

Turns out, sunlight's actually not a very effective disinfectant. You know, it's a good disinfectant. Yeah. 409. Machetes? Oh, okay. Yeah, machetes too. Is this podcast brought to you by 409?

I mean, you know, at the end of the day, right, hard day, long day, you're working hard, kind of stressed out. You pour yourself a nice hot glass of 409, squeeze a little bit of lemon in there, and we just clean you out. Anyway, we accept all legal responsibility for this advice. Yeah, no. I think Sophie's fine with this. So, as the society... You've been employed. That's why I'm...

I think we're going to get that big 409 endorsement, Sophie. They're going to give us the big bucks, because that's the thing I noticed the other day when I was in the grocery store. Like four different aisles of beverages, like one different aisle of solvents. So... Interesting. Why don't you drink solvents and increase their profitability at least fourfold? First of all, Brad, that your grocery store is actually stocked. Oh yeah, nobody lives up here.

And a lot less people live out here since they all started dying. I haven't seen 409 since 2019. Oh, I got quite a stockpile. I'll mail you some, but you got to drink some of it. No. It's good for you. Cleans out your insides. No, you're getting Trumpy on me right now. Oh, no, that's bleach. Bleach is totally different from 409.

It doesn't stain your clothes when you vomit it up. Is gaslighting a regular segment on your show? So much, you guys. Is the 409 gaslighting a winner? Is that one going to stick around? Is that a recurring bit that's going to... It's not a bit. That's just life advice. People enjoy lifestyle advice from podcasters.

Like look, if a lot of people are willing to take a podcasters advice on what pill you can take for your brains, why not what sort of solvents you should drink? You're already, you know, like it's interesting that we've evolved from macheteson on to... Solvents, cocktails. The key with a nice cup of 409 is you want a hot glass and you pour room temp 409 into a hot glass, squeeze a little bit of lemon in. We call that a 20-20 highball. Also Cures Ebola.

Yeah. I will tell you, Ebola will not be on your mind as a concern. Once you drink your first 20-20 highball. Robert Evans never found a hole that didn't need to be dug deeper. Can we just go to an ad break while we solve a podcast? Yeah, let's see what the fine people at Johnson & Johnson have to say about what kind of solvents you can drink. HAHAHAHA 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. This 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 gun badass 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 heaven. 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 I just took a nice lukewarm sip of 409. So back to the John Birch Society. So yeah, they blow up in the media in the early 1960s.

They start getting all sorts of attention and congressmen come out saying they're with the John Birch Society and suddenly they're kind of like on the verge of breaking into the mainstream. And this is very exciting to the worst people on the right who suddenly have a feel like they have an excuse to be even shittier. And it's very frightening for people on the left. One of those people is a little guy you might have heard of named Bob Dylan. In May of 1963, he wrote a song about the John Birch Society titled, Talking About John Birch Society Blues. He planned to play the song on the Ed Sullivan show, which was going to be his first televised appearance anywhere. He was going for it. Yeah, he was going to be on.

He decides I'm going to play a song about how bad the John Birch Society is for my first moment on TV. He's doing his Nirvana rape me on SNL moment. Yeah, but CBS standards and practices worried that the song was controversial and they told Bob Dylan he couldn't play it. We don't want to offend the fascists. Yeah, we don't want to offend the fascist guys who are basically Nazis. And I will say this for Bob Dylan in an act of actual courage. He refused to go on the Ed Sullivan show at all rather than be censored. So he. Oh, that's fun.

Yeah, he turns down his first TV appearance because to be fair. They're probably worried about insulting or offending the fascists as much as they're aware that these people are also the heads of industry. Sure. Yeah, their boss is a member of the JBS defending the fascists. In a way, in a way. So for years after this point, Bob Dylan would play the song every time he did a concert just as like a now that's less. I don't think he does it anymore because most people be like, who the hell are you talking about Bob? And he's like the people who are running things now, you morons.

Yeah, I never liked the title of that song. I thought it was a little clunky, but it is. It's not a great song. Like look, Bob Dylan has had an arc to his career and he was not his, you know, yeah. I'm not a giant Bob Dylan fan to be honest, but I would prefer a Gordon Lightfoot cover of the John Birx society. John Birx society. I appreciate that one. Legend lives on.

Legend lives on. Legend lives on. Legend lives on. Legend lives on. That'd be a fun 11 minute interlude. Just sing the entire, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. A lot of instrumental breaks. Well, the story begins in China, ladies and gentlemen.

As money and members flowed into the John Birx society, Bob Welch continued to experiment with new ways to make use of the instrument he had so successfully built. The letter writing campaign hadn't achieved its goal, but it had proven to him that he could effectively mobilize his followers to real world action. Following in that vein, he decided to embark on his most ambitious project yet, a massive crowdsource list of every communist agent in the country. He told readers of the bulletin making lists of names is a great idea. Crowdsourcing it too is a really good idea. It's totally. Real democracy shit right there. You really don't want to vet any one of those names.

Well, I mean, it's how you create the best list. Yeah. It is also echoes of Bill Cooper in this, you know, echoes of his like a caddy river. He called it the citizens. The citizens intelligence echoes of Alex Jones in this. Yeah. Welch told readers in the bulletin, we wish to build up and have available for all future research needs the most complete and accurate files in America of the leading comm simps. Communists sympathizers, socialists and liberals on those who are trying to change the economic and political structure of this country so that it could be comfortably merged with Soviet Russia in a one world socialist government.

And since we do not yet see any chance of putting a sufficiently sizable staff to work on this job, we have decided to make use of the energy, knowledge, libraries, pamphlet collections, determination and dedication of our members instead. So that's so smart. That's so smart with these right wing conspiracies. Like you turn it into that augmented reality game. Yeah. You make it a game. Yeah. Before they had any idea.

Now we've got citizen sleuths dealing with the true crime podcast, but it's fucking anti-communist liars. Yeah. It's fucking awesome. And he estimated there are about 300 to 500,000 actual communists in the country and another million dupes allies and sympathizers. All right. Those numbers were not at all made up. He did not just pull them completely out of his asshole. Since 1964 came the John Birch Society was at the apex of its power and influence.

It was still widely reviled and condemned by most mainstream Democrats and Republicans, as well as basically all of the media. But its first six years of life had proved that there was a strong hunger for the outright fascist politics and violent anti-left rhetoric of Bob Welch. And in the 1964 elections, the nascent far right was about to get its first viable presidential candidate in a fella named Barry Goldwater. Hey, he's good. Hey, he's good, dude. Dude. He is a good dude. Yeah.

Well, I mean, what's wild is that he's basically a Democrat today, but we'll talk about that at the end. Yeah. I know, right? Barry Goldwater. Could never be elected. No. Barry Goldwater was an arch-conservative senator from Arizona. He was elected for the first time in 1952 and for an idea of the kind of spot he occupies in the conservative canon, Goldwater was directly succeeded in his job by John McCain, who praised Goldwater as the man who transformed the Republican Party from an eastern elitist organization to the breeding ground for the elite.

The breeding ground for the election of Ronald Reagan. I like that he uses credit to John McCain calling it a breeding ground, makes it sound as creepy and terrible as it is. I don't think he meant to use the right word there, but he did convey the right feelings. I want to congratulate this man on creating a cesspool of the best people. He really made like a bacterial tide pool of filth that Ronald Reagan congealed out of and vomited his way into the national consciousness. And I think that's great. I'm John McCain. I've crashed so many more planes than most people ever fly on.

And cheated on more wives. All right. So one thing that's important to keep in mind when we talk about the Republicans of the 1950s and 60s is that the deep south used to be a Democratic stronghold. It started to switch during LBJ's time in office and one of the reasons why it switched was old Barry G. When he announced his campaign in January of 1964, Goldwater was literally in crutches from a recent bone spur operation. He made headlines for being one of the first, if not the very first, modern presidential candidates to launch a campaign from his house. The New York Times spent most of the page page of its article of this discussing how his wife had prepped for the big day. To give you an idea of where Barry stood on the issues, on October 16th of that year, he gave a speech in the Midwest where he stated in his first major talk on civil rights,

forced integration is just as wrong as forced segregation. Hey, there we go. All right. What's really great is kind of lightly ignored segregation. That's the sweet spot in the middle right there. We have segregation and removing it would be as bad as having it. So let's just keep having it. Yeah.

Throw the baby out with the racist bathwater. Come on. It's like showing up at the site of like a shooting while a paramedic is putting on a tourniquet and being like, hey, man, putting that tourniquet on is the same as shooting a man. So from the New York Times, quote, he called the bussing of school children and other measures to end de facto segregation morally wrong and said that bussing was an example of doctrinaire and misguided equalitarianism. I love the misguided, you know, misguided, equalitarianism. These people think that they want a quality and they're just crazy about it. They're just all those misguided fools. They're hearts are in the right place.

They mean well their hearts are in the right place. I swear. Yeah. Do you know how Barry Goldwater made a bunch of his money? No, he invented underpants that had ants on them called the answer in my pants and I believe you are fucking me. No, I do know that. I actually do know that. I read that. No, you did, but how can you think that that's true?

Yeah, he invented novelty underpants in his younger days and made a whole bunch of money on him. And now we can't just say Trump is a psychopath because he's got a whole rule named after him. That's amazing. Yeah, the Goldwater because you can't psychoanalyze someone because they all called him crazy, which he was not. No, he was just a piece of shit. It's just all the things he believed were. No, like, yeah, they're not though. If you're the kind of guy who got rich selling ants in your pants, the things like Barry Goldwater's country is going to make things better for you.

That's fair. It's just worse for everyone who didn't get rich selling ants pants. God, that's so fucking. I know. Some of the people who like are the most gung-ho about the free market are also the ones who have contributed the least impressive things to it, right? But I mean you gotta think it was a it was a different time novelty underpants back then might have been revolutionary. That's possible. That's actually why 1969 had so many protests and revolutions.

It was ants pants. Mao never would have come to power without those underpants. I'm sorry. I just had to look this up just to be sure. It was antsy pants. Jesus fucking Christ. Are they cute? As cute as Barry Goldwater, Sophie.

I want visual. I hate all these people. I immediately regretted it. Immediately. I want to see novelty underwear. Wait, no, I don't think that's a good idea. So I'm going to quote now from Politico. Even though Welch understood racism and bigotry would hurt his cause, the John Birch societies of opposition to the civil rights movement attracted Americans sympathetic to racist paranoia.

For example, it consistently published reports accusing civil rights leaders of communist subversion and alleging that people of color were plotting to divide the country and control the world. So, yeah, that Goldwater, he has to like thread a little bit of a needle here because the John Birch society is too controversial even among Republicans for him to embrace them. But they have created an incredibly organized and effective like way of terrifying people on the right about communism and about civil rights. And so he can't ignore them either. You don't want to become their enemy and then be called a communist. But at the same time, you don't want people to think you're their champion. Yeah, you don't want to be Steve King. Yeah, you don't want to go full Steve King even at this point.

Yeah, so Goldwater wrote a bestselling book called The Conscience of a Conservative and it can be seen as basically the blueprint for Reagan style conservatism, even Trumpism. That would be a great novelty book if it was just empty. Yeah. That'd be a great thing to give for a Christmas gift. Yeah, I mean, it is it is very vacant, the actual morale, like for an example of the conscience that Barry Goldwater, like says, one of the reasons how Barry Goldwater, like one of the reasons why he explains that like civil rights laws are immoral is because the government shouldn't infringe on the right of free association, which is the right to discriminate, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Now, yeah, so Goldwater publishes this book, it's like a surprise bestseller mainstream Republicans like start falling in love with this guy's rhetoric, which is basically just 10% calmed down John Birch Society rhetoric. Globalists, we don't say the. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you know, Goldwater is really kind of like the, he's kind of like the typhoid Mary of John Birch Society philosophy brings it into the mainstream cloaked in, you know, ethical conservatism or whatever the fuck, you know? Sure, sure, sure. It's great. And there were in fairness to some of the Republicans at this time, there were Republicans in the period of time who like recognize what Goldwater was doing and condemned it openly.

The Republican governor of Pennsylvania described him as having a crazy quilt of dangerous positions, including the use of tactical nuclear weapons for basically any reason. Why would anybody think that was crazy? Yeah, he was, he was a big like, like Goldwater's big thing was that generals should be allowed to deploy nuclear weapons in the field. Oh, because if they can't, then everyone knows they can't make that decision. Exactly. And then where are you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like we should, like Goldwater, like one of the things he would say about nukes is that they're just another weapon.

They are not Barry. I'm sorry, did you miss everything that happened the last 20 years? No, I've got this button that sets off every volcano in the world at the same time. And that's just a normal everyday weapon. It's like a handgun. Yeah, you just have it right there if you need it. It's like a stick. Yeah.

Look, if the caveman could have exploded all the volcanoes on the planet at the same time, they would have done it. Okay. So like Trump, Goldwater, you know, comes in like, like swings onto the political stage saying very, very fringe and extreme things and gets condemned by a bunch of Republicans and everybody who's not a Republican. And also like Trump, none of this stops his political, him from succeeding politically and he defeats all of his more traditional conservative rivals, including Nelson Rockefeller and becomes the nominee in that year's Republican convention. I put him on the like sort of the scale of like more successful than Ron Paul, but not as successful as Trump. Yeah, not as successful as Trump.

Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. And he's critical. He's the key to both Trump and Reagan having space. I think Bush, both Bushes probably would have been able to win an election either way because they're kind of more traditional conservatives, which isn't a compliment, but just kind of a fact about them both. Goldwater is really a Reagan slash fucking Trump style politician. And you know, the reason he beat all of his more traditional conservative rivals is that he was able to build a coalition of working class people. Most of his voters were Southerners, Midwesterners and Libertarians who felt left behind by the GOP.

He railed against Eastern elites saying at one point, sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the eastern seaboard and let it float out to sea. Which, you know, is the same thing here today. Yeah. Yeah, they also add the West Coast, too, though. Yeah, they do add the West Coast. And I would only say do that to Florida. And like Bugs Bunny. Yeah, with a little saw.

Just start on the east side and move west. And one of the Carolinas, but we can let them fight it out. One of you can stay. I just feel like we only need one Carolina. Oh, Raleigh is great. Yeah. Yeah, so well, I know which side you're backing in. No, I am not.

So very Goldwater. Yeah. Yeah, so Goldwater succeeds, you know, more than any other extreme right politician ever had up to that point in American political history. And he was only able to succeed because the John Burt society had paved the way. He owed a lot of his early success in the fact that he won the party nomination to the machinery that the society had put in place. Yeah, Rick Perlstein in a 2001 book on the Goldwater campaign explained that Goldwater would take the line that Robert Welch was a crazy extremist, but that the society itself was full of fine, upstanding citizens working hard and well for the cause of Americanism. The Goldwater campaign made liberal use of the society's large pool of dedicated and disciplined manpower, which now numbered more than 90,000.

Robert Welch had spent years creating a nationwide grassroots movement for Barry Goldwater. The society spent millions of dollars buttressing Goldwater's support and spreading his and their ideas to whole new segments of American society. It worked to win Barry the nomination over men like Nelson Rockefeller, the Jeb Bush of his age. From Politico, quote, In 1964, backing from the John Burt society and Republican primaries such as California secured the right wing backed candidate Barry Goldwater's Republican presidential nomination. Goldwater's organizational head reportedly told him about the campaign volunteers who appeared to be Burt sympathizers. They're the best political organization that's ever been put together. So for a few years, I think Rockefeller actually lost it immediately whenever he came out with his new slogan, which was just rock with an exclamation point.

That was the one that got him, Nelson. So Goldwater was a sensation on the right. His rallies drew unprecedented numbers of people. His followers were more like fans than political supporters. At one point, a supporter in Georgia famously created a soft drink based on the candidate. Goldwater, the right drink for the conservative tastes. Barry, a very blunt man, drank it in front of a crowd at a rally and spit it out saying, This tastes like piss.

All right. Now there's one thing that I like about him. Yeah, that is pretty great. That's pretty great. That's pretty great. Goldwater. I don't know. That's impolite.

This guy made a soft drink for you, Barry. Just have the grace to be like, it's good. Yeah. It doesn't take like piss at all. That's why they like him. He tells it how it is, Dan. Do you know how much work goes into making a soft drink? Apparently not that much.

He should have tried sugar. Goldwater regularly packed in a dozen rallies per day, flying around the country in his Boeing 727. He framed himself as a law and order candidate telling supporters something must be done and done immediately to swing away from this obsessive concern for the rights of the criminal defendant. He told another audience that in order to defeat lawlessness, he would redress constitutional interpretation in favor of the public, presumably by appointing judges who didn't believe defendants had rights. Sure. One of Goldwater's more famous quotes can be seen as a precursor to both the kind of sociopathic libertarianism practiced by Charles Koch and the ideology of Ronald Reagan. Quote, I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient for I mean to reduce its size.

I do not undertake to promote welfare for I wish to extend freedom. Oh, I was assuming that your quote was going to be something along the lines of like, the 13th Amendment didn't allow all slavery guys. Come on now. Hell yeah. You know what that means. You know what I'm saying. Come on guys. Slavery is really just an arrangement between an employer and an employee when you think about it.

And when the government doesn't allow that. Yeah. That's the real slavery. Yeah. That's what it is. Yeah. Because that makes the would be slave and the would be person who's enslaving both slaves. Now they're both slaves.

Yeah. Exactly. So really just think about it. So, you know, Goldwater didn't give Welch everything he wanted because he didn't like endorse that Eisenhower was a dirty communist, but he was basically the best candidate that the John Birch society could have possibly had. He even offered qualified support of their campaign to impeach Earl Warren. And best of all, he was willing to nuke communists. So, you know, really like a great, great dude. Now, doesn't it seem like you should only need one policy if your entire philosophy is just anti-communism?

Shouldn't your one philosophy just be like nuke communists and then we'll then we'll sort everything out. Well, I mean, literally and then metaphorically. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of what his policies were. That's fair. Yeah. It's good stuff.

Yeah. So Goldwater energizes a new Republican base that had never particularly felt like it had a voice in politics before, which was not really a good thing. And it terrified a lot of, you know, the more intelligent observers at the time. One of the people who was fucking horrified watching the rise of Barry Goldwater was a young Hunter S. Thompson. Hunter was there at the 1964 RNC on assignment as a stringer to gather quotes from Republican politicians. It wasn't even like writing articles at this point. It was like that early in his career. He was just gathering quotes for his editors to use.

But Hunter had an old friend who'd gotten a temp job as a Pinkerton, who was, that were doing security for the convention. And Hunter's buddy gave him security credentials. So he was basically like hanging out in VIP rooms, drinking Barry Goldwater's liquor. Just hanging out with a warm glass of 409. Listen to me on the cover. No, he was, he was pounding dexadrin at that point. Hunter was terrified of Goldwater, who we saw as a fascist with a real chance of winning election and, you know, killing a lot of people. Thompson was well versed in the John Burt society's talking points.

And he was one of a few people in the country to foresee the dark rightward lurch that the Republican Party was beginning to take. He was also mainlining huge doses of speed every day. And so he was pretty paranoid, which is why he writes the next thing that he writes about this. Yeah. So Thompson, you know, is there when Barry Goldwater gives his speech and his speech in the 1964 RNC includes the quote, I would remind you that extremism and defensive liberty is no vice. That's like the most famous Barry Goldwater quote. And he just has this like pounding, unreal effect on the audience. Thompson writes later, quote, that he was actually feeling afraid because I was the only person not clapping and shouting.

And I was thinking, God damn you, Nazi bastards. I really hope you win it because letting your kind of human garbage flood the system is about the only real way to clean it out. Another four years of Ike would have brought on national collapse, but one year of Goldwater would have produced a revolution. Well, we've seen that that might not be the case. No, I think he was optimistic. Yeah, that might not do it. That might not do it. It might just turn out a lot of people are fine with fascism.

I remember a lot of people saying that in 2016 and the lead up to that election. Yep. Nope. I think the sad story about all this is that Thompson was right about the danger of Barry Goldwater, but optimistic about Americans. Yeah. Yeah. That's not something you usually hear about on RS Thompson. No. Optimistic to a fault.

Yeah. You know who isn't optimistic to a fault? Do tell. Well, the good people who make 409 my new favorite happy time beverage 409. Grab a glass of relaxation. Oh, boy. 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 Aaronson 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. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. 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 offending 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 in 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. Hunter S. Thompson was not accurate about Americans getting horrified at a glimpse of fascism, but he was right about the fact that Goldwater was not an outlier. Richard Nixon, the next Republican president, would turn out to be the most liberal Republican of the modern era.

Every other Republican president who followed him was cut out of Barry Goldwater's mold, which means they were in fact cut from the same mold as the John Birch Society. Ronald Reagan, of course, gave a massively popular speech at the 1964 convention, providing a full-throated endorsement of Goldwater's foreign policy and his promise to shrink government. During his own run for president in 1980, Reagan directly aped Goldwater by stating that the most terrifying words in the English language were, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. As a write-up in history.com, notes, quote, by the dawn of the new century, Tea Party members drew heavily on Goldwater's libertarian policies in shaping the GOP's platform, disparaging not only liberal elites, but any fellow Republicans who still believed in the kind of compassionate conservatism preached by George H.W. Bush. The list of companies and industries that the government is crowding out and bailing out and taking over, it continues to grow. The former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin told a 2010 gathering of Tea Party Republicans, his story and Alan Nevins of Columbia University,

a student of American politics and history, and a two-time Pulitzer winner for his political biographies, saw the writing on the wall, if Goldwater and his supporters stuck to their guns, there will be in effect a new conservative party. And that's what happened. Nailed it. It's good stuff. Right on, buddy. I think you can take some smallest and getting a good, I told you so, in there before you're hung for being a leftist. Yeah.

That's all right. That's the one upside you get to being a leftist. Yeah. Yeah, that's what we get. A little bit of smugness before you're shot down by the Gestapo. We don't get any power, but we get a nice exit line at a firing line. Yeah. Oh, man.

The best exit lines. The only people who really have good responses to getting shot by a line of fascists are, yeah. You know, you know what I'm thinking about that's really interesting is that like in the earlier days, you know, like the John Birch society was all going and stuff. You'd have these, you'd have those elected representatives who would have to come out as members after they'd already been elected. Whereas like during the Tea Party, they actually got people elected full with full knowledge of like they are part of this. Yeah. Those people may not have gotten elected. People know they were John Birch people.

Yeah. And now everyone's fighting over themselves to announce that they're a member of whatever the new most extreme sect of the Republican Party is. Yep. Yeah. That doesn't indicate progress to me. Why not? Tragic. Tragic optimist Hunter S. Thompson really, really got that one wrong.

So yeah, the John Birch society gave birth to Barry Goldwater, who gave birth to a new Republican Party, the party of Reagan, of George W. Bush, and eventually of Donald J. Trump. But in 1964, the John Birch society's politics were still a tad too fringe for mainstream success. LBJ successfully painted Goldwater as something of a lunatic who would bring about nuclear apocalypse, which is part of why LBJ won that election. It's a very famous Daisy ad, you look it up that's about like Goldwater's going to kill your children in nuclear hellfire. He wasn't wrong though. He wasn't. He was not wrong. He wasn't wrong.

And LBJ did win that election and went on to do nothing problematic or violent himself. So LBJ. Yeah. Yeah. Come on. The president of peace. Civil Rights Act. We forget everything else he did.

Come on. He named his dick. He nicknamed his dick Jumbo though. He did. And his famed slogan was no child ever had their skin burned off because of LBJ. You know, you know what he'd put when he'd wake up in the morning, he'd put jumbo in his antsy pants. Nice. Wrap it in there.

The John Birch society began to fade in influence and bleed members after the 1964 elections. In 1967, the Saturday evening post published an article entirely focused around the society's decline. Its numbers, they said, had peaked in 1965 at 95,000. And by 67, it was down to 80,000 or so. Several high-profile congressional members stepped back from their duties and resigned entirely. The post noted, The society has also been plagued with an internal crisis over anti-Semitism, and it has been shelled from other sectors on the political right as an embarrassment to the conservative cause.

Asked if the Birch society weren't better than nothing as an anti-communist rallying point, National Review Editor William Buckley said, No, it's worse than nothing. See, William Buckley. He turned. Buckley was also like, Man, I hope they never invent something called the internet because that shit will come right back. Yeah, well, and it's the kind of, it's funny because like Buckley is the good guy in this story

because he realizes fairly early on that the John Birch society are dangerous people and excommunicates them to the best of his ability. Also, big backer of Rhodesia. Hey, John Birch people, they're very, very, very insane people, but I do believe in white nations. Yes, of course. I think they're entirely white nations. The Birchers and him had common cause on that because they believe that the Rhodesia, you know, fighting for the apartheid state there was defending the country against communism.

Yeah. You know, that's those there. In the way it was. Yeah, yeah. Thank God for that. Otherwise, we would never have gotten Elon Musk here. So, yeah. Some of the society's earlier backers started to abandon it after the unsuccessful Goldwater campaign.

One supporter complained, Welch has turned what claimed to be a militant anti-communist movement into a book-selling operation. His notion that the Birch society is going to save America by getting people to read books is absurd. So they read all the books. What then? There's no program with crises erupting all around the world. Welch talks on and on about the difference between a Republican and a democracy. I saw no future whatsoever for the Birch society and so I quit.

This take was, however, short-sighted. Robert Welch was right to dedicate the majority of his efforts to writing fascist propaganda and he was dedicated. Welch wrote every word of the society's bulletin for years, which by 1967 meant more than a million published words. The society spent tens of millions of dollars over the years putting out books and magazines filled with propaganda and, of course, one young boy who grew up on those books was Alexander Emerick Jones. Glenn Beck, the most influential ideological founder of the Tea Party, was also raised on John Birch books.

In addition to speaking fondly of the society, he urged his millions of viewers to read the work of Cleon Scousen, an anti-communist ideologue who was a Bircher himself. For a time. Yeah, for a time. He was not fully Birch because I think as I recall, W. Cleon Scousen was too extreme for them at a certain point. Yeah, he did. Yeah, you get the feeling that they, you know, they had to walk so that he could leap off of a cliff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Scousen like Jones and like Beck preached of a secret alliance between capitalists and communists to install a one-world government under the guidance of David Rockefeller, which is not that far off from what fucking Robert Welch was saying. It's a bit of a step forward, but not a wild leap. It ain't broke, don't fix it, right? The John Birch Society is still alive today, and according to some reports, it has grown in the Trump era. One of their modern propaganda videos is called the dangers of democracy,

and defines democracy as mob rule, emphasizing that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. The video ends on a quote attributed to Mao Zedong. Democracy inevitably lead to collectivism, which leads to socialism, which leads to communism, which leads to totalitarianism, which proves that both Mao Zedong and Hunter S. Thompson are way too optimistic. Yeah, no good. Good work. Geez. Wild-eyed optimists, Chairman Mao and Hunter Thompson.

Oh boy. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting how right he was. Welch never lived to know it, but like, you can see, like, even the, like, every little one of his, like, reoccurring lines about, like, fucking, we're a republic, not a democracy. Now that shit gets, like, Senator Mike Lee of Utah repeated that line this year, like, arguing why, you know, we shouldn't accept the results of the election.

He's right, in a sense. We are a republic, and not a democracy. No, no, no. I meant Goldwater with his strategies or I'm sorry, Welch with his strategies. Like he's, I don't think that it's like, I don't think you could look at what happened and say he's right in terms of like, this is a good way to make stable, competent, political movement, but he accidentally created like and stumbled on to a really good idea about how to break people's brains and really make

grifts. Yeah, right. Really successful. Like, yeah, he made that pattern really well. It is, it is weird to think that there's a progenitor that's so recent. It's like with Elron Hubbard, where you're like, you can't start a religion if you're, if I know you, if you're like a hundred years old, that's too close. That's too close.

It's the same way with this horrifying Republican party. It should have been like thousands of years ago that we learned how evil these idiots are. And here we are. That's not the way it, you know, the one of the most, one of the biggest bummers to me is that Andrew Breitbart was right about something important, which was his famous quote that politics flows downstream of culture. And Bob Welch is absolutely evidence of that because like, like at the time,

a bunch of his initial back was like, this is a failure. All you're doing is putting out books in propaganda. And then we, like our present Republican party is so far beyond what Bob Welch could have ever hoped for because of that, you know. And so deeply inspired, whether they know it or not by those works of propaganda that were put out by Welch and his, his dickhole friends. Yeah. The assholes.

Yeah. It sucks. And we're not even going to get into like the, like the Bert Johnbridge site. He talked about the Illuminati a bunch. Robert Welch was a big believer in the Illuminati, which is, there is a great speech that he gave sort of later in his career at Berkeley that you can find on YouTube that I would really suggest people look up

because it's so funny. These kids are just laughing at him. Oh yeah. It's amazing. He's, he's trying to be very serious and they are just clowning on him. Well, it's, it's satisfying. And there, there's, there's still, so like I found a fun political article about the modern John Berge society and it talks about like a worksheet for

one of the week's video lessons. And so there's a multiple choice question on it that asks you to identify the Illuminati. Is it A, a myth, B, an alien race of shapeshifters or C, a group founded in the late 1700s seeking world government? One of those seems very specific. Almost as though they want you to choose one of those, you know. Also, all of those are right depending on who you're reading.

Nope. Depending on who's judging the test. Yeah. Bob Welch died in 1985, but in the decade since his death, his ideology has conquered the Republican Party. The statements he was mocked for making in the 1950s and 60s are now so popular that elected Republicans dare not push back against them. So that's good.

One of the great ironies of this is that the man who was most responsible for acting as a vector of Birchian ideology to the mainstream, Barry Goldwater, probably would have been horrified by what he helped bring into the world because near the end of his life in 1998, Barry Goldwater lobbied to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military. He was a loud and full-throated supporter of abortion rights, and he demanded legalization of medical marijuana. By the standards of Republicans now, Barry Goldwater was a fucking Democrat.

Barry Goldwater is to the left of Biden on some things. Shit, we're fucked. Yeah, it's really bad. Like when you read that like, oh, Barry Goldwater died in American terms, a liberal. That's not a super inspiring thing. Either you either die a fascist or you live long enough to finally realize how this is bad ideas.

Yeah, fuck it. Let's smoke some weed. Yeah, I'm Barry Goldwater. Yeah, much like a coke brother. Eventually you just say, hey, whoops, my bad guys. Yeah, thanks for that coke. Yeah. Well, anybody got plugables to this.

I'd like to podcast. I would like to. That does not sound accurate. I'd like to plug my non endorsement of drinking solvents. Thank you. Oh, what do you drink? Windex. Are you?

Are you pounding decks? We have a podcast, Knowledge Fight. We do. It's Knowledge Fight. You can find it if you search Knowledge Fight somewhere. Yep. And also you have a book. I have a book.

It's called The Quiet Part Loud. You can't find it if you search The Quiet Part Loud. It turns out somebody else wrote a little novella with a similar title. It's on Amazon. I'm screwed. And by the way, The Quiet Part is just juice. Yeah, I know.

Yes. It would be a very different name if I was a right wing psychopath. But yeah, you can find it at TheQuietPartLot.com. It is free to download. You can donate or whatever if you want to or just read it. And don't scream juice like I did. Don't do that. I avoid that.

I avoid that at all costs. Also, listen to my podcasts. Yeah. Yeah. Are we supposed to plug for you? Is that part of this show? Did I forget? No.

No, the episode's finished. He can't plug. I know. I have. I was. Yeah. I have Plugman's Disease. I know the feeling.

We're done. No. Goodbye, America. Go away. Don't drink 409. Get off the internet. No, no. Pound some 409.

Don't drink 409. This seems like it's going to be an interesting editing challenge. Well, what's really fun is when you get a half pint of 409 and a half pint of Windex and you do a 40dex, that's really, if you really want to get tight, you know, really burn off some of that into the workday steam. We'll call that a glass ball. All right, we'll be hosting the show from now on, I think. Drink and solvents, the unproblematic beverage.

Oh, boy. Okay. 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

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