Free Among the Truthers by Jonathan Kay Page A

John Birch Society (which is still around today, albeit in diminished form), the communist menace was very real in the late 1950s—and the Soviets truly were seeking to conquer the world with their totalitarian ideology. But as with McCarthy, fear turned into paranoid hallucination. “This octopus is so large that its tentacles now reach into all of the legislative halls, all of the union labor meetings, a majority of the religious gatherings, and most of the schools of the whole world ,” Welch wrote in The Blue Book of The John Birch Society , a volume given to all new JBS members. “It has a central nervous system which can make its tentacles in the labor unions of Bolivia, in the farmers’ cooperatives of Saskatchewan, in the caucuses of the Social Democrats of West Germany, and in the class rooms of the Yale Law School, all retract or reach forward simultaneously. It can make all of these creeping tentacles turn either right or left, or a given percentage turn right while the others turn left at the same time, in accordance with the intentions of a central brain in Moscow or Ust’ Kamenogorsk.”
    More than two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, much of the material in Welch’s Blue Book reads like dated Cold War propaganda—a trip down memory lane to a time when groups like the Committee to Investigate Communist Influences at Vassar College, and Women Against Labor Union Hoodlumism were still going concerns. Yet great swathes of it easily could be copied and pasted into modern conspiracist tracts, or used word for word as Glenn Beck talking points, without seeming in any way out of place. Multilateralism, for instance, is denounced in Welch’s book as a plot “to induce the gradual surrender of American sovereignty, piece by piece and step by step, to various international organizations—of which the United Nations is the outstanding but far from the only example . . . until one day we shall gradually realize that we are already just a part of a world-wide government.”
    Over time, Welch’s views became increasingly bizarre. He accused Dwight Eisenhower’s brother Milton, for instance, of being the president’s secret communist overlord—and came to believe that communism itself was just a front group for an even more sinister Master Conspiracy involving the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Bilderbergers, and (of course) the Illuminati. But by that time, right-wing conspiracism already had attained a perch in respectable middle-class civil society—a significant achievement for the insurrectionists at a time before cable television and deregulated talk radio had opened up the airwaves to political radicals.
    D uring the 1950s, the paranoid style Hofstadter described was most evident on the right side of the American political spectrum—a combined manifestation of Cold War hysteria, Americans’ traditional fear of big government, and a lingering conservative backlash against the massive expansion of Washington’s powers that had begun with the income tax amendment of 1913 and then crested with FDR’s New Deal. The main focus of conspiracists was Soviet communism—though some right-wing groups, such as the John Birch Society, found innovative ways to graft on old crusades against freemasons, Illuminati, and “international bankers.”
    This would change in the space of seconds on November 22, 1963. The assassination of John F. Kennedy, in the succinct description of author Thomas Powers, was likely “the greatest single traumatic event” America had ever experienced. More than one million Americans were moved to write condolence letters to Jacqueline Kennedy in the months after the assassination. “Twenty-six years of escaping from Hitler—growing up in wartime China fleeing from communism—watching my father’s futile struggle against cancer—seeing my roommate killed in an automobile