[F]or many years Robert Welch warned his readers about the conspiracy that was plotting to merge the United States and Soviet Russia. His big idea was that repeated exposure could ultimately stop the “socialist nightmare with its perpetual shortages of everything and with its regimentation of individual human lives like that of barnyard animals.”
As editor of The John Birch Society Bulletin, Welch was a resilient, if also repetitious advocate for racism and sexism decades before Donald Trump’s digitally fueled Reality TV reboot. Welch opened each issue with his personal “reflections on the news” — usually an essay on how U.S. leaders and people like Ralph Nader were destroying the family and civilization. The rest of the austere publication was devoted to reports like “United Nations – Get US Out,” priorities like a windfall profits tax and stopping the Equal Rights Amendment, along with turgid notes from Birch Society meetings.
Welch couldn’t decide who he disliked more, anti-nuclear activists or Rockefeller trilateralists. As a result, he made them partners in a massive plot. It was a highly paranoid theory, but by no means the only one polluting the political bloodstream well before Ronald Reagan’s rise. It has radically metastasized in the decades since.
By 1980 the claims of Birchers were not even the most sensational. Take the New Christian Crusade Church, which promoted unbridled racism in a tabloid newspaper, Christian Vanguard, or the U.S. Labor Party, which served up doomsday scenarios about “controlled disintegration,” orchestrated by agents of the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. Today they are called globalists and operatives of an Illuminati-like “deep state.”
And let’s not forget Moral Majority, an adept user and cynical critic of mass media, which saw the forces of evil everywhere, but masked its extremism by bemoaning the decline of the family and stoking resentment about its right to free speech. Anti-abortion, anti-ERA and pro-tax cut hallelujahs were artfully inserted into Moral Majority news releases that read like compassion-free sermons.
All this might be a topic of mere historical curiosity had these groups and others like them not basically succeeded, their ideas and agendas gradually mainstreamed into the Reagan agenda and subsequent campaigns. Moral Majority Report did everything it could short of outright political endorsement. “If turning back the clock means the restoration of some of the freedoms that Americans traditionally enjoyed,” announced a typical writer, “I’m all for it.” He was referring to the Republican platform.
Like Donald Trump, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his Christian fundamentalist movement had an intense love/hate relationship with mass media. After all, it had flourished on TV with Falwell’s “Old Time Gospel Hour.” By 1980, the movement’s tabloid paper was turning Falwell’s radio and TV pronouncements into syndicated columns, while its reporters gloated about the growing influence. At the same time, however, they also despised the “immoral” television networks. It took a while to get one of their own.
For these pioneers of political fundamentalism, the real “insiders” were purveyors of “smut” and degenerate lifestyles, a vast group that included most “non-Christian” media and members of the press. Their basic message, which read like a newsy catechism, was that the “moral” can clean up the media by exerting control over it. That meant boycotting specific outlets, while supporting and consuming mainly Christian media.
Through insistent propaganda, Moral Majority turned ignorance into strength and sexism into a virtue. This sounds all too contemporary in the post-truth era of bully boy politics.
Still, the electronic fundamentalism of Falwell’s empire was almost moderate in contrast with the outright Aryan arrogance of Christian Vanguard. “Specifically compiled for the Elect,” this religious house organ was obsessed with one big enemy, the Jews. It was a more bullish racism, punctuated with articles like “Sadistic Jewish Slaughter of Animals.”
Pretending to intellectual rigor, one article attempted to prove that the enemy was plagued by a “devastating sense of inferiority.” In another report, covering an Aryan Nations Movement conference, the publisher of a sister publication, Zion’s Watchman, came out strong against humanism, marxism and “the seed of the serpent.”
Yet the Aryans remained hopeful, according to another contributor, because “the various right wing movements will come together, and unite as never before once we understand the importance of rallying under the Law of God, making what we call Germany’s WWII ‘Nazism’ seem tiny in comparison.” It was scary stuff, yet its echoes have begun to creep back into public discourse.
Like many movement house organs of the pre-Internet 1980s, Christian Vanguard had a mail order clearinghouse for books, with listings under headings like “secret societies,” “the money question,” and “the Jewish world conspiracy.” Another heading covered “self defense and survival,” and included books on explosives, combat and surveillance. This was an early warning of the armed and dangerous nativism and survivalism to come. Clearly, the “Elect” were prepping for future action. Reading their paper also offered solid proof that Nazism was alive in Louisiana and other places in the ’80s. Last August it re-emerged publicly and violently in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Many far right groups continue to believe in some sort of conspiracy aimed at destroying their “way of life.” Specifically, they are enthralled by a fanatical fortress mentality and the belief that their rights are under attack. Before Reagan’s election, the U.S. Labor Party, led by perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, was already predicting that economic “disintegration” was just around the corner. Meanwhile, Christian Vanguard warned about “race mixing” and Moral Majority emphasized a war on family values. Taken together, these threads provided a template for Trumpism, a paranoid worldview that can be mobilized and exploited.
At the same time, previous groups had their own crusades and specific enemies. Their modern equivalents are much the same. But what most of them lack is hope and vision for a better future. Instead, the paranoid style draws its power from alienation and resentment, using prejudices and frustrations as catalysts for blind loyalty and mob-like reaction.
Almost 40 years ago, this view was exemplified in a pamphlet from Americans for Nuclear Energy, a so-called “citizens group.” Their pitch, in the main text and a fundraising appeal, concentrated on identifying the enemy. In this case, it was “coercive utopians,” led by easy targets like Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, a power couple exploited and demonized much like Bill and Hillary Clinton. Their goal, warned the group, is raw power “to control each of our lives.”
Each day, “the coercive utopians march closer to their repressive goals. The battle is for freedom in America.” And what was freedom? In that version, rather than a border wall it was abundant energy through nuclear power. Without it, America faced a “second stone age.”
Obviously, that hasn’t happened yet. But if the paranoid style festers and spreads for too much longer, we could end up in an equally dark time, whether we use nukes or not.
