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New Bottles Old Wine.
I was so glad to see Claire Conner start posting here today. She has the passion we all should have when facing such extremists and their heartless views.
From a great article at the SPLC in 2013.
Bringing Back Birch
There are several sections. The part about Claire's book is called New Bottles Old Wine.
Back from the Birchers: Claire Conner grew up among leading lights of the society, but completely rejected its views later in life. COURTESY CLAIRE CONNER
At 67, Claire Conner has been watching the John Birch Society up close and very personal for most of her life. Conner was once right-wing royalty, a princess in the court of Welch. Her father was a member of the 25-person national council of the society for 32 years. He was the first official Bircher in Chicago. Her mother was the second. They signed their daughter up when she was 13. Welch often stayed at their home when visiting the city on Birch business. “He was kind of off-putting when you first met him,” Conner said. “You expected this giant of a man. He had sinus problems and was forever coughing into a handkerchief. When he gave a speech, he just read it. But he was brilliant, and, at the dinner table, he was very animated.’’
Conner long ago turned her back on the society. Today, she is an unabashed, proud, Obama-loving liberal. She has written a funny and sometimes sad book about growing up Birch called Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America’s Radical Right that is due to be released by Beacon Press in early July. She worries that her fellow liberals are making an old mistake, underestimating the John Birch Society and its ability to “create havoc.”
“I always say to my liberal friends you better stop laughing at these people and pay attention,” she says. “The ideas that you hear today coming from the right were generated in the ’60s by the John Birch Society. It’s new language, but the same ideas. In terms of the intellectual framework of the GOP, it’s the Birch Society every single day.”
She says liberals are still celebrating Obama’s re-election while the Birchers and the rest of the right are back at work. One lost election or 20 years of lost elections, she says, won’t discourage them. “If anything,” she says, “they’re going to be energized. They really believe President Obama is part of the socialist revolution that began with FDR. So, they’re going to dig in their heels. They’re going to get busy and stay busy. As the kids say, that’s how they roll.”
Welcome to the DU fray. Hope you post freely.
6 replies
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Bringing Back Birch
Communing with the enemy: John Birch Society CEO Arthur Thompson consented to an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which his organization has long branded as a “Marxist” group. PHOTO CREDIT: DON TERRY
Communing with the enemy: John Birch Society CEO Arthur Thompson consented to an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which his organization has long branded as a “Marxist” group. PHOTO CREDIT: DON TERRY
Once Again, the Commies
In a bit of political symmetry, the John Birch Society headquarters is located in Appleton, Wis., about two miles from where the remains of Sen. Joseph McCarthy are buried on a serene bluff overlooking the Fox River. The great American commie hunter died in 1957, cut down by a conspiracy of acute hepatitis and alcoholism.
Across town at the Birch Society, the senator’s spiritual kin soldier on from two single-story buildings connected by a subterranean passageway on a bland commercial strip. There, the society publishes its magazine, The New American, and runs a website that lists the group’s various “action projects,” including its campaign to stop Agenda 21. The website also includes weekly video updates presented by the society’s CEO, Arthur R. Thompson, who, sitting in the group’s underground TV studio made up to look like a book-lined study, has covered in recent weeks such topics as “ObamaCare Supports Euthanasia,” “Zombie Attack” and “Russia Rising.”
In an interview with the Intelligence Report in his Appleton office, Thompson, an affable, white-haired man from Seattle who constantly fidgets with his glasses, twirling them in his fingers as he talks, said that two of the hardest “sells” the society has to the American people are that “communism is alive and flourishing” and “what is behind terrorism.”
The answer, Thompson said, is Russia, and it “is so obvious, it’s incredible.”
I remember how we just shook our heads at Birchers in the 70's. We thought they were too crazy to be taken seriously. Now their ideas are in DC. 
