The decades fall away when you open the front doors.

It’s the late 1950s in the cramped offices, or perhaps the pre-hippie 1960s. It’s a place where

a

Army-style buzz cuts are still in fashion, communism remains the primary enemy, and the decor is dominated by American flags and portraits of once-famous Cold Warriors.

At the John Birch Society, they have been waging war against what they believe to be a vast, diabolical conspiracy for over 60 years. The way they tell it, it’s a conspiracy with tentacles reaching from the 19th

–

Century railroad magnates to the Biden White House, from the Federal Reserve to COVID vaccines.

Long before QAnon, Pizzagate, and the modern crop of politicians who love to repeat apocalyptic talking points, there was Birch. And beyond these cramped small city offices is a national political landscape that…

Society group

helped shape it.

We have a bad reputation. You know: you guys are crazy, says Wayne Morrow, a

Johannes Berk

Vice-chairman of the association. It sits in the group’s warehouse, amid ten-foot shelves of Birch literature, waiting to be distributed.

But,” he claims, “all the things we wrote about are going to happen.

::

As the Cold War loomed and television was still largely black and white, the John Birch Society mattered. There were dinners at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and meetings with powerful politicians. On each coast there was a headquarters, a chain of bookstores, hundreds of local chapters, radio shows, and summer camps for the members’ children.

Well-financed and well-organized, they sent out feverish warnings about a secret communist plot to take over America. It made them heroes to a large section of conservatives, even as they became punch lines for a generation of comedians.

They created this alternative political tradition, says Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University and author of “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.” mainstream Republican politics.

Conspiracy theories have a long history in the United States, dating back to at least the 1800s, when secret forces allegedly supported Thomas Jefferson’s presidential bid. It was a time when such conversations moved slowly, spreading through sermons, letters, and inn visits.

Not anymore. Fueled by social media and the rise of celebrity conspirators, more and more Americans have lost faith in everything from government institutions to journalism over the past two decades. And year after year, ideas that were once relegated to fringe newsletters, little-known websites and the occasional AM radio station found their way into the mainstream.

Today, bizarre conspiracy theories are being cited by more than a few U.S. Senators, and millions of Americans believe the COVID pandemic was orchestrated by powerful elites. Prominent cable news commentators speak gloomily of government agents taking citizens off the streets.

But the John Birch Society itself is largely forgotten, relegated to a few squats along a busy strip mall in small-town Wisconsin.

So why take note of it today? Because many of his ideas

of inclusive

anger at a mysterious, powerful elite

until and

Fears that America’s main enemy was hiding inside the country and biding their time have permeated parts of American culture over the past half century. Those who came later simply surpassed the Birchers. Says Dallek: Their successors were politically savvy and took Birch’s ideas and updated them for contemporary politics.

The result is a new political terrain. What was once on the edges has worked its way into the heart of the discourse.

For some, the fringe has reached all the way to the White House. In the Society’s offices they will tell you that Donald Trump would never have been elected if they had not paved the way.

Most of Trump’s campaign was Birch, said Art Thompson, a retired CEO of the Society who remains one of its most prominent voices. All he did was bring it out.

There is some truth in that, even if Thompson overstates things.

The Society had called for decades for a populist president who would preach patriotism, oppose immigration, withdraw from international treaties and root out the forces that sought to undermine America. Trump may not have realized it, but when he falsely warned about a Deep State, a so-called cabal of bureaucrats that secretly controls U.S. policy, he was repeating a long-standing Birch talking point.

Trump, a savvy reality TV star, capitalized on a conservative political landscape shaped by decades of right-wing talk shows, fear of America’s seismic cultural shifts and the explosive spread of disinformation online.

While the Birch Society echoes in that mix, it’s impossible to trace those echoes. It is difficult to draw clear historical lines in American politics. Was the Society a driving force or a minor player? In a country fragmented by social media and dozens of offshoot groups, there’s simply no way to be sure. What is certain is this:

The conspiratorial fringe is now the conspiratorial mainstream, says Paul Matzko, a historian and researcher at the libertarian-oriented Cato Institute. Right-wing conspiracyism has simply outgrown the John Birch Society.

::

Their beliefs skim the surface of truth, with facts, rumors and outright fantasy coming together in a complex mythology. The great conspiracy is what Birch Society founder Robert Welch mentioned in The Blue Book, the collection of his writings and speeches that are still treated as almost mystical writings in the corridors of society.

Welch, a wealthy candy company executive, founded the Society in the late 1950s and named it after an American missionary and U.S. Army intelligence officer who was killed by communist Chinese forces in 1945. Welch considered Birch the first casualty of the Cold War. Communist agents, he said, were everywhere in America.

Which rose to fame and infamy when he claimed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the hero general of World War II, was a committed, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy. Also under Kremlin control, Welch claimed: the secretary of

S

State, the head of the CIA, and Eisenhower’s younger brother Milton.

Subtlety has never been a strong birch tradition. Over the decades, the Birch conspiracy grew into the assassination of the president

John F.

Kennedy, public education, the United Nations, the civil rights movement,

T

the Rockefeller Foundation, the space program, the COVID pandemic, the 2020 presidential election, and climate change activism. In short, things the Birchers don’t like.

Conspiracy insiders in the Society lexicon range from railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt to former President George HW Bush and Bill Gates, whose advocacy for vaccines, they say, is part of a plan to control the world’s population. Although his main focus was always on communism, Welch eventually came to believe that the roots of the conspiracy went far back in history, to the Illuminati, an 18th-century Bavarian secret society.

In the 1980s society was in deep decline. Welch died in 1985 and the reins of the association passed to a series of successors. There were internal uprisings.

While although

its image has waned, it is still a force among some conservatives, its videos are popular in parts of right-wing America, and its offices include a state-of-the-art TV studio in the basement for Internet news reporting. Its members speak at right-wing conferences and occasionally work booths at a provincial fair.

Scholars say membership has become much smaller since the 1960s and early 1970s, when membership estimates ranged from 50,000 to 100,000. Membership is something that has been closely monitored ever since

D

Day

1 one,

says Bill Hahn, who became CEO in 2020. He just wants to say that the organization is still a growing company.

Today, society considers itself almost conventional. Almost.

We’ve been successful in attracting mainstream people, says Steve Bonta, a top editor of Societies New American magazine. The group has toned down the rhetoric and is more cautious these days in throwing around conspiracy accusations. But the members still firmly believe in it.

As Mr. Welch pointed out on Day

1 one:

There is a conspiracy, says Hahn. It is no different today than it was in December 1958.

That’s how it can feel. Ask about the purpose of the conspiracy and things veer into unexpected territory. The sharp rhetoric reappears and again the decades seem to disappear.

They really want to cut back on the Earth’s population. That’s their intention, Thompson says.

But why?

Well, that’s a good question, isn’t it? he answers. It does not make any sense. But that’s the way they think.