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Tag: john birch society
Destroying Conservatism Will Be Marjorie Taylor Greene's Only Achievement

Destroying Conservatism Will Be Marjorie Taylor Greene's Only Achievement

With their cowardly refusal to discipline Marjorie Taylor Greene, the retreat from integrity of the House Republicans is now complete. Only under the threat of sanctions against Greene by House Democrats did Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) even pretend to address the Georgia representative's many offenses against decency, comity, and sanity. And when the Republican caucus met behind closed doors, McCarthy's weak leadership allowed Greene to take over the meeting, which reportedly concluded in applause for her.

What were the Republicans applauding? The gun-toting Greene has not apologized for any of her endorsements of violence, including those spittle-flecked threats to assassinate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She hasn't withdrawn any of her racist slurs against Blacks and Muslims, or her gutter excursions into anti-Semitic fantasy. Only under duress has Greene admitted the reality of the 9/11 attack and the school shootings upon which she had cast paranoid doubt, after inflicting renewed grief on the families of the dead. She didn't apologize to them, either.

Behind closed doors, Greene reportedly told her Republican colleagues that she is sorry for embarrassing them. Her alibi was that she was drawn to QAnon only because she was suffering a "dark period" in her life. Yet that too was a lie. She praised the conspiracy cult on Twitter as recently as December 4.

So this wretched character deserves to be booted off the prestigious budget and education committee assignments that McCarthy had unaccountably awarded her. But with little intellectual aptitude and no interest in policy, she will hardly suffer from that sanction. Instead she now gloats that all the attention to her baneful idiocies is elevating her profile, a boast that is surely accurate. She will bask in attention – and rake in money – from the aggrieved bigots for whom she stands.

There can be no doubt that Greene and others like her pose a continuing threat to democracy, as they proved with bloody ferocity on January 6. In their psychotic fantasies -- as she hinted in her own social media posts -- they would exterminate every Democrat and liberal in America, because "freedom" is only for them and nobody else.

But what these violent extremists are much more likely to destroy is conservatism.

In one of her many defiant public rebukes to her critics, Greene wrote that Pelosi persecutes her because she is "a Christian" and "a conservative." Obviously her brutal style does no credit to Christianity, but it is conservatives who should worry more about her claim to being one of them.

At their best, conservatives are supposed to defend American institutions and values. They are supposed to believe in civility, protocol, manners, and traditional standards. The conservative instinct is to reject excess and uphold personal responsibility. They valued reason and logic over maddening emotion. Or at least those were the things they believed about themselves.

In recent decades, however, that venerable sort of conservatism has increasingly given way to a coarser and uglier version, which is now epitomized by Trump and his followers such as Greene. If she is a conservative, with her crazy theories about a Jewish space laser and her stupid prejudices, then conservatism is intellectually bankrupt and merely a political scrim for fascism.

This was the same danger perceived by William F. Buckley, the framer of modern conservatism, when he sought to isolate the authoritarian and conspiratorial John Birch Society from his movement. With its wild accusations against Dwight Eisenhower and its hatred of democracy, he knew that the society would poison conservatism in its cradle.

Some Republicans, notably including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and a handful of Senators and Representatives, seem to recognize this peril. The question is whether they have the courage and energy for a sustained fight against it.

Rick Perry And ‘Texanism’

Everybody who’s heard the classic live album Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison remembers the audience of convicts erupting in bloodthirsty whoops when the singer growled out the line “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.” According to Cash’s biographer Michael Streissguth, however, it never actually happened. A studio engineer created the chilling moment by dubbing in sound effects to enhance the Arkansas singer’s “outlaw” image.

Alas, the cheers that broke out among a well-heeled Republican audience at the mention of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s execution of 234 convicts at a recent GOP presidential debate were all too real. Such is their anger and alienation that they’d gladly drag us back to the 19th century, when public hangings competed with traveling Wild West shows as popular entertainment.

Granted, these “debates” are basically TV game shows, with celebrity hosts and contestants competing for audience approval. Repenting of his early career as a Democrat, Perry has reinvented himself as the embodiment of the perennially-embattled religio-political cult I call “Texanism.”

Texanism’s basically the John Birch Society in a cowboy hat. Oh, and don’t forget the six gun. Perry’s almost surely apocryphal tale (there were no witnesses) of shooting a coyote while jogging during an election campaign was calculated to enhance his image of manly self-reliance.

Now where I come from, bragging about something like that — as Perry’s taken to doing on the campaign trail — would be an embarrassment. But then that ain’t the metaphysical realm Perry calls “the state uh Texas,” which has little to do with the actual state he governs, but everything to do with Texanism.

Maybe the best definition appeared in a 1954 letter from President Dwight Eisenhower to his ultra-conservative brother Edgar.

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs,” Ike wrote “you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

H.L. Hunt got rich essentially for the same reason Saudi Arabia did. He won a massive East Texas oil field in a poker game. By the time Ike wrote his brother, Hunt was one of the richest men on earth, a world-class skinflint, and a far right crackpot who reviled the New Deal and saw communists behind every tree.

By the time John F. Kennedy made his fateful visit to Dallas in November 1963, Texanists were circulating handbills accusing the president of giving “support and encouragement to…Communist-inspired racial riots,” and consistently appointing “anti-Christians to public office.”

Sounds familiar, no? It’s always race and religion with these jokers; tycoon economics and Deep South authoritarianism.

Alas, Ike was mistaken about Texanism’s staying power. That’s partly because latter-day savants like Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers — not all Texanists are Texans — have bankrolled “think tanks” and propaganda networks to spread the doctrine, and also because it’s merged with a strain of fear-based evangelical religion that’s seized upon hard times to identify Barack Obama as the anti-Christ.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The real Texas became prosperous basically because, led by politicians like Lyndon Johnson and John Connally, it put oil money to work building an unparalleled highway system and world class universities. The multi-billion dollar, petroleum-based Permanent University Fund underwriting the UT and Texas A&M systems serves as one of the world’s largest university endowments as well as a perennial playground for crony capitalists allied to politicians like George W. Bush and Rick Perry.

Texanist myth, however, holds that all government is wasteful and wicked. Orwell called it “doublethink,” defined as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Thus we had the spectacle of Rick Perry denouncing wasteful federal spending while simultaneously demanding thousands of new Border Patrol agents and the construction of a 2000-mile fence to keep Mexicans out.

Keeping cows out, I can tell you, would cost $2 a foot; the expense of building and maintaining the Great Wall of Texas, I can’t imagine. But you can bet your grandma’s unconstitutional Social Security check that some big Perry supporter would get the cement contract. Houston-based Halliburton could man the watchtowers.

Meanwhile, half of Texas is aflame while its governor’s on TV denying climate change. Having slashed state forest management and firefighting budgets in the face of historic heat and drought, Perry now demands that the accursed Federal government turn over heavy equipment already engaged in fighting wildfires for the state’s largest employer: the U.S. Army at Ft. Hood.

But hey, there are a couple more executions coming up soon.

Yee haw!

Birchers, Not Birthers: Top Tea Party Organization Buddies Up With Old-School Conspiracy Theorists

Tea Party members like to argue that the movement is fiscally conservative but not socially conservative. They want to cut taxes, they say, but don’t care about gay marriage or affirmative action. But this is a tough argument to make when the Tea Party group long considered the least conservative turns out to be in bed with a group that thinks Eisenhower is a Communist for letting black and white kids go to school together.

FreedomWorks, the politically influential Tea Party organization led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, has tried to distance itself from social conservatism. A report from the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (IREHR) found last year that it was the only major Tea Party faction that did not have a “birther” on its national staff. And Armey has denied that his organization includes any members of the John Birch Society, a group of rightwing extremists known for bigotry and paranoid conspiracy theories. He has even disparaged the Society, telling CBS News that “John Birch Society historically has had a good deal of people that have regretted them.”

But a new report from IREHR reveals that FreedomWorks is in bed with John Birch. It wasn’t always this way. For a while, Armey kept radical social conservatives out of his organization, which is why FreedomWorks had the second-smallest online following of all Tea Party groups last year. In January, it launched a new Tea Party social-networking site and gained over 70,000 new followers. Many of those new followers, of course, came from the John Birch Society.

And FreedomWorks didn’t merely turn a blind eye as their rolls swelled with Birchers. Staff members and website administrators actively recruited members of the Society, in many cases promoting Bircher events on the site’s front page. “In total,” the IREHR investigation found, “80 different JBS events were advertised on the FreedomWorks FreedomConnector site between the site launch and June 1, 2011.” [Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights]