Free Among the Truthers by Jonathan Kay

less an American hero than Charles Lindbergh publicly blamed American war fever on “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration,” and fretted about the Jews’ “large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” (When the United States did enter the war, many conspiracy theorists switched their focus to FDR himself, who, it was believed, had deliberately engineered or facilitated the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor. As described later in this book, this belief has become embedded in Truther mythology as a false-flag precursor to the 9/11 attacks.)
    To Americans’ great credit, wartime anti-Semitic propaganda never led their country to the same barbarism that afflicted Europeans following the publication of the Protocols . Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American populists groused noisily about the Jews and their imagined machinations, but for the most part, grousing is all they did: The United States has never once witnessed an anti-Semitic pogrom. 1
    Following World War II, anti-Semitism was fatally discredited as a mainstream middle-class creed in the United States. And it was the communist, not the Jew, who became the primary target of American conspiracists. “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?” thundered Senator Joseph McCarthy to the U.S. Senate in a famous June 14, 1951, speech. “This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.”
    McCarthy’s career was brief: He would flame out into political disgrace, alcoholism, and an early death in the space of just a few years. But his impact on American politics was immense. With his theatrics and accusations, he turned populist conspiracism into a major force within conservative politics, something no politician had managed to do in generations. “He was the conservatives’ first insurrectionist,” Sam Tanenhaus wrote in his 2009 book The Death of Conservatism . “His cry of ‘20 years of treason’ drew on the banked passions of the Right, America First isolationists, small-business men, Catholic organizations.” (Though one should not overlook the grain of truth in his assertions—despite the mendacity of his trumped-up charges, there were in fact Communist agents in the U.S. government, as later revelations would confirm.) This insurrectionist flame would dim during the latter part of the twentieth century. But like a pilot light in the gas oven of American politics, it never died out completely. Fifty years later, fed by the raw fuel of Barack Obama, the health care debate, a major recession, and the war on terror, conservative insurrectionists roared back to life in the form of Birthers, the Tea Party movement, and a rageaholic blogosphere.
    McCarthy had help, however. If he was the insurrectionists’ martyred Jesus, a retired candy manufacturer named Robert Welch was their Paul.
    In December of 1958, a year after McCarthy’s death, Welch invited eleven of his like-minded friends to a two-day meeting in Indianapolis, where he set out his vision for a new organization that would arrest the world’s slide into “darkness, slavery and terror.” Within two years, the group had a membership approaching one hundred thousand Americans, most of them the sort of suburban types who might otherwise spend their evenings at bridge clubs and bowling leagues. Welch named his group after John Birch, a Baptist missionary killed by Chinese communists in August 1945—a man widely claimed to be the first American victim of the Cold War.
    In fairness to Welch and his