John Birch Society

Based on Wikipedia: John Birch Society

In December 1958, twelve men gathered in an Indianapolis hotel for two days of meetings that would reshape American conservatism for the next seven decades. Their leader was a retired candy manufacturer named Robert Welch, and he had a theory: the United States government had been infiltrated at its highest levels by communist agents. Not just sympathizers or fellow travelers, but actual agents taking orders from Moscow. His most explosive claim? President Dwight D. Eisenhower—the five-star general who had commanded Allied forces on D-Day, the man who defeated Nazi Germany—was himself a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy."

This was not a fringe gathering of anonymous cranks. Among the founding members sat Harry Lynde Bradley, whose foundation would become one of the most influential conservative philanthropies in America; Fred Koch, whose industrial empire would spawn the politically powerful Koch brothers; and a University of Illinois classics professor named Revilo Oliver, whose name, perhaps fittingly, reads the same forward and backward.

The organization they created—the John Birch Society—would become synonymous with conspiracy thinking in American politics. For decades, it served as a cautionary tale, the boundary marker for respectable conservatism. Cross that line, and you'd entered Bircher territory.

But here's what makes this story so strange: by the 2020s, multiple historians and political scientists were arguing that the John Birch Society had essentially won. Its ideas, once banished to the fringes, had become the dominant strain of American conservatism. As one professor put it, "Trump's second term has brought about the final victory of the John Birch Society."

The Man Behind the Name

Before we understand the society, we need to understand who John Birch actually was. He wasn't a politician or theorist. He was a Baptist missionary who arrived in China in 1940, just as the Japanese invasion was tearing the country apart.

Birch was twenty-two years old, spoke Chinese, and had an extraordinary talent for operating in chaos. When Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle and his crews bailed out over Japanese-held territory after the famous 1942 Tokyo bombing raid—America's first strike against the Japanese homeland—Birch helped guide some of them to safety. The military took notice.

By mid-1942, Birch had become an Army intelligence officer, operating alone or with small groups of Chinese Nationalist soldiers deep behind Japanese lines. He built intelligence networks, rescued downed American pilots, and even constructed emergency airstrips—all while suffering from recurring malaria and refusing furloughs. He was, by all accounts, fearless to the point of recklessness.

Nine days after Japan surrendered in August 1945, Birch was traveling by handcar through northern China with a small party, tasked with obtaining the surrender of Japanese commanders. They ran into a group of three hundred armed Chinese Communists—technically America's allies in the war against Japan. Birch refused to surrender his sidearm. After a heated argument, both he and his Chinese aide were beaten and shot. Birch's body was bayonetted. He was twenty-seven.

Robert Welch saw something profound in this obscure death. Here was a man killed by communists while his own government—embarrassed by the incident, worried about the fragile alliance with Mao's forces—buried the story. To Welch, Birch was "the first American casualty of the Cold War," and his death proved what Welch already believed: that communists had infiltrated the American government and were suppressing the truth.

The Candy Man's Theory of Everything

Robert Welch was sixty years old when he founded the John Birch Society, and he brought to it both a businessman's organizational skill and a convert's absolute certainty. His two-day founding presentation was published as "The Blue Book of the John Birch Society," and every prospective member received a copy.

The theory went like this: both the United States and Soviet governments were controlled by the same hidden group—"internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians." These "Insiders" were working to betray American sovereignty to the United Nations, creating what Welch called a "collectivist New World Order" run by a one-world socialist government.

Notice how this differs from standard anti-communism. Welch wasn't just worried about the Soviet Union as a foreign adversary. He believed the real enemy was already inside the gates, wearing suits and holding high office. Communism wasn't invading America; it was already running it.

"There are many stages of welfarism, socialism, and collectivism in general, but Communism is the ultimate state of them all, and they all lead inevitably in that direction."

This meant that any expansion of government—welfare programs, federal education initiatives, civil rights legislation—was part of the communist plan. The New Deal wasn't just bad policy; it was treason. Modern American liberals weren't misguided; they were "secret Communist traitors."

And that claim about Eisenhower? Welch eventually published it in a private letter that circulated among members. The backlash was immediate and severe. Even people sympathetic to anti-communism couldn't accept that the hero of World War II was a Soviet agent.

How the Right Tried to Exile the Birchers

In the early 1960s, the John Birch Society was growing rapidly. Membership estimates approached 100,000. The organization had chapters across the country, its own publishing operation, and money flowing in from wealthy backers.

This growth alarmed William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review and arguably the most influential figure in building postwar American conservatism. Buckley saw the Birchers as a threat—not to liberals, but to the conservative movement he was trying to make respectable.

The problem wasn't just the Eisenhower accusation. It was the entire conspiratorial framework. If you believed that both major parties, the federal government, the media, and the universities were all controlled by secret communists, how could you ever win elections? How could you build coalitions? How could you govern?

Buckley launched a systematic campaign to push the Birchers to the fringes. National Review published critical articles. Buckley personally met with prominent conservatives to urge them to distance themselves from Welch. The goal was to draw a clear line: you could be conservative, even very conservative, but Bircher conspiracy theories were out of bounds.

For decades, this effort appeared successful. The John Birch Society remained active but marginalized. By the 1990s, observers noted it seemed "more mainstream conservative" than before—which really meant that mainstream conservatism had shifted, not that the Birchers had moderated.

What the Birchers Actually Believed

To understand why the Society's ideas proved so durable, we need to look beyond the conspiracy theories to the underlying worldview.

The JBS argued that the United States was a republic, not a democracy—a distinction they considered crucial. Democracy, in their view, meant majority rule without limits, which inevitably led to mob rule and tyranny. A republic meant constitutional limits on government power, with rights that couldn't be voted away.

They championed states' rights over federal authority, arguing that the Constitution created a limited federal government with enumerated powers. Everything else belonged to the states or the people. Federal programs that didn't fit neatly into those enumerated powers—education, welfare, environmental regulation—were unconstitutional overreach.

They opposed the United Nations as a step toward world government. They opposed trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as surrenders of American sovereignty. They wanted to audit and eventually abolish the Federal Reserve System, arguing that only Congress could coin money and that paper currency not backed by gold or silver was unconstitutional.

They saw moral decline everywhere: abortion, birth control, divorce, drugs, homosexuality, feminism, secular humanism, environmentalism. In their view, this wasn't just cultural change—it was a deliberate strategy to weaken America and make it vulnerable to communist takeover.

And they built an organizational machine to spread these ideas: local chapters, publications, front groups, campaigns to influence school boards and local elections. A 2024 JBS pamphlet showing a school on fire urged parents to withdraw their children from public education entirely: "Reforming the schools is no longer an option. We must get them out now!"

The Long Game

Here's what's fascinating about the John Birch Society: it influenced American politics far more than its membership numbers would suggest.

The JBS took an early and aggressive stance against abortion, helping create the infrastructure for what would become the pro-life movement. Its campaigns against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s contributed to that amendment's defeat. Its TRIM committees—"Tax Reform Immediately"—helped build the anti-tax sentiment that led to Reagan-era tax cuts.

More significantly, the Society trained activists who went on to shape the conservative movement. Phyllis Schlafly, who led the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment, was influenced by JBS ideas and tactics. Tim LaHaye, who would become a leading figure in the Religious Right and author of the wildly popular "Left Behind" novels, drew on JBS methods of cultural warfare.

One scholar argues that LaHaye specifically used the Society's approach—"fear, apocalyptic thought and conspiracy" combined with "fear, anger, and disgust as essential ingredients"—to help forge the Moral Majority, the organization that brought evangelical Christians into Republican politics in the 1980s.

The JBS pioneered the use of front groups—organizations with innocuous names that advanced Bircher goals without the baggage of the Bircher brand. This became, as one historian put it, "a template for conservative advocacy for decades to come."

The Bridge Across Time

Historian D.J. Mulloy describes the John Birch Society as "a kind of bridge" connecting different eras of American conservatism: the Old Right of the 1940s and 50s (including the McCarthyites who saw communist infiltration everywhere), the New Right of the 1970s and 80s (which brought social conservatives and free-market libertarians together), and the Tea Party movement of the 21st century.

This bridging function matters because ideas need institutional homes to survive. When Robert Welch and the JBS articulated their worldview in the 1950s and 60s, they also built the organizational infrastructure to keep those ideas alive through decades when they seemed politically toxic.

The Society's publications kept circulating. Its local chapters kept meeting. Its activists kept working in Republican politics, often without advertising their Bircher connections. And slowly, ideas that William F. Buckley had worked so hard to exile began creeping back toward the center of conservative thought.

By the 2010s, observers noted something had changed. Opposition to "globalism"—essentially the Bircher opposition to international institutions and trade agreements—had become a mainstream Republican position. Conspiracy theories about hidden elites controlling events had moved from the fringes to Fox News. The Tea Party movement echoed Bircher themes about constitutional limits on federal power.

From Fringe to Mainstream

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 marked a turning point. As one analysis put it, the election "saw many of its core instincts finally reflected in the White House."

Consider the parallels. The Birchers believed American elites had betrayed the country to international interests. Trump campaigned against "globalists" and promised "America First." The Birchers saw immigration as a threat to American identity and security. Trump launched his campaign with inflammatory rhetoric about Mexican immigrants and promised to build a wall. The Birchers distrusted international institutions and trade agreements. Trump attacked NATO, withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, and renegotiated NAFTA.

The style matched too. The Birchers dealt in conspiracy theories about hidden enemies manipulating events. Trump amplified conspiracy theories about Barack Obama's birth certificate, claimed without evidence that millions of illegal votes had been cast, and suggested that "deep state" operatives were working against him.

By the 2020s, the transformation seemed complete. When Senator Mike Lee introduced legislation to withdraw the United States from the United Nations, he used "some of the same arguments to support the bill" that the JBS had employed decades earlier. National Republican figures began openly associating with the Society. Moms for Liberty, a group using school board elections and book bans to influence public education, drew comparisons to JBS efforts in the 1960s.

Professor Matthew Dallek argues that "the GOP has largely replaced the ideological tenets of Reaganism with a worldview inherited from the John Birch Society." Reagan, remember, represented the respectable conservatism that Buckley had tried to build—free markets, strong defense, social traditionalism, but within the bounds of mainstream political discourse. What's replaced it, Dallek suggests, is something closer to Welch's vision: conspiratorial, suspicious of institutions, convinced that hidden enemies are destroying America from within.

The Irony of Victory

There's a deep irony in the John Birch Society's apparent triumph. The organization itself never grew back to its 1960s peak. Its magazine, "The New American," doesn't have the reach of major conservative media. The Society's headquarters moved from Massachusetts to Wisconsin, hardly a sign of expanding influence.

What spread wasn't the organization but the ideas—or perhaps more accurately, the style of thinking. The specific conspiracy theories evolved: the UN taking over America gave way to QAnon's baroque fantasies about satanic pedophile rings. But the underlying structure remained: America is controlled by hidden enemies, mainstream institutions are corrupt or compromised, true patriots must resist the establishment in both parties.

Buckley's effort to exile this worldview ultimately failed not because he lost the argument but because the argument never really ended. The Bircher ideas went underground, traveled through evangelical churches and talk radio and eventually the internet, and emerged transformed but recognizable.

The Southern Poverty Law Center still lists the John Birch Society as a "Patriot" group, meaning an organization that "advocates or adheres to extreme antigovernment doctrines." But that designation feels almost quaint now. If believing that a conspiracy of elites is destroying America qualifies as extreme antigovernment doctrine, a significant portion of the Republican electorate holds those views.

What the Birchers Got Wrong—and Right

It's worth separating the analytical question from the political one. Did the Birchers have valid concerns, or were they simply paranoid?

On the specific claims, they were wildly wrong. Eisenhower was not a communist agent. The fluoridation of water was not a Soviet plot. The civil rights movement was not a communist front operation (though communists did support it, which is not the same thing). These conspiracy theories caused real harm, smearing honorable people and distorting legitimate political debate.

But some of their concerns look different in retrospect. They worried about American manufacturing moving overseas—and it did. They feared that trade agreements would empower foreign interests at the expense of American workers—and many workers experienced exactly that. They predicted that expanded federal programs would create dependency and expand government power—and federal spending and regulation did grow dramatically.

The problem was never that they asked questions about American foreign policy or economic arrangements. The problem was that they answered those questions with conspiracy theories that attributed complex outcomes to deliberate evil.

Why did American elites support free trade? Because they'd been bought off by globalists? Or because they genuinely believed (perhaps incorrectly) that trade benefited everyone in the long run? The Bircher framework couldn't allow for the second possibility. Everything had to be explained by betrayal.

The Religious Connection

From its founding, the John Birch Society had a complicated relationship with religion. Welch himself wasn't notably devout, and he insisted the organization was not religious. But he understood something important: the fight against communism resonated deeply with religious believers, especially fundamentalist Christians.

Communism was explicitly atheist. Marx had called religion "the opium of the people." Soviet authorities persecuted churches and imprisoned believers. For American Christians, opposition to communism wasn't just political—it was spiritual warfare against an ideology that wanted to eliminate God from human life.

Welch cultivated this connection. JBS publications described the fight against communism as "a spiritual war against the devil." Welch believed that "devout, fundamentalist religious believers" were essential to resisting atheistic communism because their faith would "instill values of individual responsibility and morality" that collectivism couldn't corrupt.

This alliance between anti-communist politics and evangelical Christianity would prove enormously consequential. When the Religious Right emerged as a major political force in the late 1970s and 1980s, it drew on networks, tactics, and ideas that the Birchers had helped develop.

The connection also helps explain why Bircher-style thinking proved so durable in conservative Christian communities. If politics is spiritual warfare, then political opponents aren't just people with different ideas—they're servants of evil. Compromise isn't pragmatism; it's collaboration with darkness. This framework makes conspiracy theories almost inevitable: ordinary political disagreements can't explain what's happening, so there must be hidden forces at work.

John Birch's Actual Legacy

John Birch himself—the Baptist missionary who died in China in 1945—would likely be bewildered by the organization bearing his name. He was a man of action, not ideology. He risked his life repeatedly to fight America's enemies in World War II. He died in a confused encounter with communist soldiers who were supposedly allies.

His death was genuinely troubling. American soldiers shouldn't be killed by nominal allies, and the government's quiet handling of the incident was, at minimum, politically awkward. But there's a vast distance between acknowledging that Birch's death was mishandled and concluding that communist agents controlled the American government.

Robert Welch needed a martyr, and John Birch fit the role. But the real John Birch—brave, stubborn, a true believer in his missionary calling—has been largely forgotten, replaced by a symbol of something he never represented.

Where We Are Now

As of the mid-2020s, the John Birch Society still exists. It still publishes "The New American." It still holds conferences and maintains local chapters. But its historical significance far outweighs its current organizational strength.

The Society matters not because it commands armies of activists but because its ideas escaped containment. The worldview that Buckley and other establishment conservatives tried to quarantine didn't die—it evolved and spread through new media channels they couldn't control.

Some observers find this alarming. They see a major political party captured by conspiracy thinking, unable to accept election results or acknowledge scientific consensus, convinced that dark forces manipulate events. They worry about democratic institutions' ability to survive when a substantial portion of the electorate believes those institutions are fundamentally illegitimate.

Others see it differently. They argue that the "Bircher" label is just a way to dismiss legitimate concerns about elite betrayal, economic dislocation, and cultural change. From this view, ordinary Americans who feel left behind by globalization and condescended to by credentialed experts are being pathologized rather than heard.

Both perspectives contain some truth. The specific conspiracy theories are false and harmful. But the underlying anxiety—that the country is changing in ways that benefit some Americans at the expense of others, that elites care more about abstract principles than concrete communities, that ordinary people have lost control over forces shaping their lives—reflects real experiences that mainstream politics failed to address.

Robert Welch was wrong about almost everything specific. Eisenhower wasn't a communist. The UN wasn't going to conquer America. Fluoride wasn't a Soviet plot. But he was right about something important: there was a large audience for politics that rejected the establishment consensus of both parties, that saw hidden forces at work, that demanded simple explanations for complex problems.

That audience waited sixty years for a candidate who spoke their language. When that candidate arrived, the John Birch Society's long exile finally ended.