Matthew Dallek's new book "Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right," has become a favorite weapon of the anti-Republican left.
The New York Times' review, echoing liberal talking points, revels in the author's conclusion that the John Birch Society planned to take over the GOP since the Society's founding in 1958 by Robert Welch.
And now, more than ever, Welchism — with all its conspiracy theories — has supposedly emerged triumphant. Dallek's claim that the Birchers control the GOP is patently false but he's clearly intent on manipulating the historical record.
The Times doesn't invent any anti-conservative material of its own, but relies on Dallek to blacken the reputation of anyone on the right side of the political spectrum. It is Dallek, for instance, who impugns the founding members as "Rich, white and almost uniformly Christian," which is the cliche Democrats and progressives use to pretend that the GOP is comprised of small-minded men and women who don't welcome minorities.
Dallek writes that in the movie "Dr. Strangelove," Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper's rant about a Red plot to "sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluid" was standard Bircher fare. But while these "fulminations" were often dismissed as "ludicrous politics" of the right-wing fringe, Dallek instructs the reader to realize that the fringe — with traditional conservatives asleep or complicit at the switch — produced a stunning victory over "American conservatism and, as a consequence, the Republican Party."
But it's a crackpot theory, almost as loony as Welch's view that Milton Eisenhower, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's brother, was Ike's superior in the Communist Party. For Dallek, a Bircher or near Bircher or potential Bircher has been lurking under every conservative bed since the society's inception and finally won the day.
His thesis is not only baseless, but he concocts fables about Bircher influence on two Bush presidents, H.W. and W., Vice President Dan Quayle, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and former President Donald Trump. But Dallek picks on other Republicans as well.
Did you know, for instance, that Republican Ken Starr, whose criminal investigation led to Bill Clinton's impeachment for lying under oath, was, as Dallek informs us, a "Birch successor" and a "far-right strategist" who "ginned up" his case against Clinton and was part of what Hillary had labeled a "vast right-wing conspiracy"?
Dallek has no proof that Starr was connected with the John Birch Society, or ever said anything about the topic.The most potent insult he can hurl at Starr to push his own conspiracy theory that Birchers have been swarming Republican ranks is to call him, not a Bircher, but a "Birch successor," a phrase he never explains. (For the record, I knew Starr well enough to know that he was a moderate, establishment Republican who would have been highly amused at Dallek's comment.)
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was not quite a Bircher either, according to Dallek, but Newt "rose in Republican politics in Georgia shortly after Birch leader Larry McDonald won office in that state." Dallek's inference: The political climate was ripe for a Newt win in 1978, since Dallek says he had a "slash-and-burn style" strategy that "bore similarities to [a Bircher like] McDonald's."
Dallek says that Speaker Gingrich also ran the House through Birch-like "scorched earth tactics" and "his 1994 Republican Revolution drew on elements of the Birch movement," including a stance "that accused the establishment of selling out American principles, and a defense of Christian family values."
Birchism, of course, had zero to do with Newt's Republican Revolution when he took back the House for his party for the first time in 40 years. His guiding light was not Robert Welch but Ronald Reagan.
His Contract with America, the political platform Republican Party candidates ran on so successfully nationwide, included more than half the text of Reagan's 1985 State of the Union Address which stressed the major economic and military recovery on his watch along with traditional Republican values: "faith, freedom, family, work, and neighborhood."
Only Dallek, it would seem, could confuse Reaganism with Birchism.
Another sample of Dallekism. The Starr report, "unlike past conspiracies," caught on with the mainstream press, "not just with fresh, Birch toned voices like Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh and the hosts on Rupert Murdoch's new conservative cable network, Fox News." Dallek, the reader will note, repeats his belief that the Starr report was a "conspiracy" and alerts America to the heretofore unknown dangers of "Birch-toned" commentators.
Here's more of Dallek's off the wall charge that the Birchers are — at this very moment — in control of the Republican Party: "The GOP's pattern of accommodating or benignly neglecting the extreme right persisted, and during the Clinton years the conspiratorial thinking became harder and harder to distinguish from the outlook of the Republican Party."
(Does anybody recall that the Birchers and GOP policymakers during the Clinton era were in any way connected? Dallek's charge is so foolish he doesn't even try to make the case.)
"While the relationship wasn't alway harmonious," Dallek adds, "the Birch successors found an uneasy but expanding home inside the organizations of the American Right and the Republican Party."
"The funding that had animated the Birch Society," he continues, "was now being used to fund theories about Clinton. Conservative Billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife sent investigators to Arkansas to dig up dirt on the president's past and when they failed they settled for salacious fabrications that Bill Clinton was part of a drug-smuggling ring."
(Scaife, if he had any theories about Clinton, abandoned them when they didn't pan out. That's more than you can say for Dallek. And, unsurprisingly, Dallek offers no evidence that Scaife charged the president with being a drug smuggler.)
Dallek's fantasies, one has to keep reminding readers, are complete nonsense, without so much as a speck of truth. Really. The author, for instance, offers not a single quote, direct or indirect, from any Republican president or his advisers or appointees or papers that reveals that any of their policies were guided by Welch or Birch Society ruminations.
Sort of embarrassing for a man who poses as a "scholar" on Birchers, but Dallek reveals, on almost every page, that he's incapable of being embarrassed.
Dallek is even more bizarre when he attacks Trump. In recent years, "especially with the ascent of Donald Trump to the presi-dency and to leadership of the American right, what it means to be a conservative or a member of the Republican Party has changed."
How has it changed? It's quite obvious to Dallek if no one else: "[T]he newly dominant political ideas and attitudes bear the imprint of the John Birch Society." Dallek also notes that some historians have depicted the Birch Society as "the mainstream right's vanguard. Trump's election as President revealed the surprising (and, to many, disturbing) resonance of certain ideas and tendencies, from outlandish conspiracies to naked racism, that most analysts had assumed would always remain confined to the fringes."
"But in the rush to explain Trump," Dallek expounds, "these accounts [of conspiracies and racism] understated how much he directly took on the movement conservatism that had held sway, more or less, through the George W. Bush presidency."
Another absurd observation. Does anyone, seriously, think that any prominent politician in the Bush family — H.W., George W., or Jeb — was consulting Welch (who died in 1985) or Bircher archives in planning and carrying out their political agenda? It's preposterous on its face. Neither, of course, did Ronald Reagan, or, for that matter, Donald Trump.
Yet Dallek can't help himself in attempting to yoke Bush 41 and his vice presidential nominee, Quayle, with Birchers. An important reason H.W. chose Indiana Sen. Quayle for his running mate, he contends, was for "his far-right bloodlines."
His parents, James and Corinne, had been proud members of the John Birch Society. But Dan Quayle himself had "befriended another Birch offspring, Clarence Manion's son Daniel." And Dan was so in bed with the Birchers, "in 1986 he urged the Reagan White House to tap the younger son [who was not a Bircher] as a federal judge."
What is the John Birch Society famous for? Robert Welch was the founder, controlled the content of the various Bircher outlets, insisted in a book, "The Politician," that Milton Eisenhower was Ike's superior in the Communist Party.
When he made his views public, it led prominent conservative William F. Buckley to thoroughly discredit the man he had once befriended. Conservative Republicans left the organization in droves as a result and Welch and the Birch Society never recovered.
My dad, Morrie Ryskind, a well-known stage and screenwriter, was a hero in Republican circles. He became a member of the Birch Society and tells what it was like in his autobiography. It was nothing like the portrait painted by Dallek.
The gathering met in Los Angeles and was comprised of sane, moderate people who were alarmed by the growing spread of communism around the world, especially with China and Russia having aligned against the West.
None of them had been infected by Welch's conspiratorial views and were informed by experts at their meetings on what the Communists were up to. When Welch went public with his paranoid beliefs, my dad assailed him in his syndicated column, believing his position was both "dumb" and "dangerous" and would be used to discredit the anti-Communist cause.
Dallek's book makes a sweeping claim that neither this reporter nor any student of Republican politics can accept about the Society's control of the GOP and conservatives generally. Why he wrote a book so devoid of facts is difficult to understand, though it's easy to believe he knew that his take would be fully exploited by the left to savage conservatives and damage the Republican Party.
If that was his goal, he certainly succeeded.
Allan H. Ryskind is a former editor and co-owner of Human Events, Ronald Reagan's favorite political publication. He is the author of "Hollywood Traitors" (Regnery 2015), a book which reveals how the Communist Party came close to capturing the American movie industry.
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