St. Pete Times Op-Ed Unfairly Maligns Tea Party of Today, John Birch Society of Yesterday

I have been smoldering for some time at Robyn Blumner’s November 24 op-ed piece in the Tampa Bay Times. In it she equates today’s Tea Party with the Eisenhower-era John Birch Society, drawing on Claire Connor’s memoir in order to do so (Claire was the young daughter of one of the Birchers’ key operatives). I believe she misapprehends the sophistication of many of the people who today she sees as bumpkins ready to believe modern equivalents of the notions that Eisenhower was a communist and entitlements provided by the government are inherently evil.

First, it’s important to establish who John Birch was. He did not found the society that bears his name. Rather he was an American missionary and intelligence operative shot by communist Chinese in August of 1945. If the society founded in his name by Robert Welch had a fatal flaw, it was that it was monomaniacally focused on anticommunism. Although it is viewed through the lens of history as anti-civil rights, militaristic and backward, Wikipedia states that “Antisemitic, racist, anti-Mormon, anti-Masonic, and various religious groups criticized the group's acceptance of Jews, non-whites, Masons, and Mormons,” and quotes Welch as saying "All we are interested in here is opposing the advance of the Communists, and eventually destroying the whole Communist conspiracy, so that Jews and Christians alike, and Mohammedans and Buddhists, can again have a decent world in which to live." For the record, the group opposed the Vietnam War.

Today communism is regarded as no longer a threat, and it is fairly easy to see that Karl Marx was a superb diagnostician of society, but that his prescription couldn’t begin to cure the world’s ills—and without practical superiority it could not take over. Likewise, the members of the Tea Party can diagnose many of society’s ills, and it’s clear that the U.S. government is not dealing with them in a meaningful way, and has in most cases become an impediment to any solution. Many also recognize that the left/right paradigm is a false one, and that what we’re really looking at is a choice between liberty and fascism, the latter term defined as Mussolini did—the merger of corporate and governmental interests. If some like the Koch brothers see movements like Occupy not as kindred spirits but as a modern reincarnation of the old communist threat, they should be aware that many of the people they claim to represent do not.

Tea Partiers are aware that the government’s plan to revamp health care for old people comes with significant strings, including the elimination of what remains of what was once a free market that would in turn disallow the elderly patient to continue to receive certain treatments past an arbitrary age cutoff—and the intent is to finance even that by overcharging the young for more coverage than they want or need. They are also aware that Social Security, though still provided today, will become unsustainable in the near future, having been plundered and turned into a Ponzi scheme. The problem is not that government could not have provided these things honestly—it is that the human beings in and out of government are incapable of assuring that properly-conceived systems continue on a sustainable basis. Scoundrels will have their way, one way or another.

If that is viewed as “distaste for government-run entitlement programs” we’ll cop to it. But the so-called “paranoid distrust of government” is shared with the founding fathers—who had not just seen its boot heel, but been under it. If we indeed “want to protect the rich,” we want to protect them from the über-rich who somehow seem to want to impose equality on all those beneath them in order to defend their own perches (centuries ago that was done using royalty and knighthoods—today it is done by imposing thickets of crushing regulations from which they either exempt themselves or shift their operations away from toward more favorable jurisdictions—even the communist ones). If you are reading this piece the chances that you will be one of the winners in the illusory game of wealth redistribution is vanishingly small.

As for distorted views, today many tea party Americans are against globalism. To get an idea whose views are truly the distorted ones, one need only study the history and writings of men like Cecil Rhodes, Julian Huxley, Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller to get a flavor of what the globalists have in store for the rest of us. Had Robert Welch been more perceptive, his organization might well have made as much noise about the Bilderberg Group, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as they did about the United Nations. They might also have noticed that far from being a communist, JFK was quietly challenging the authority of the Federal Reserve, lowering taxes, imposing a system to prevent rogue use of our nuclear arsenal (which the Pentagon secretly undermined by setting all launch codes to “00000000”) and plotting to dismantle the CIA. And had the society’s second president, Larry McDonald not perished aboard Korean Airlines flight 007, shot down by the Soviets in 1983 we might have seen such a shift. But to pillory the John Birch Society on those grounds is to allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.

Speaking of distortions, most of the canards slung against Mr. Welch and the John Birch Society came from E. Howard Hunt protegé William F. Buckley, including one that they were “far removed from common sense.” Well, removed from what the establishment viewed as common sense anyway. We now know that the Dulles brothers were certainly bad guys if not communist agents, and as a CIA man Buckley was keen to protect them and their legacy. Hunt later confessed to having played a role in JFK’s assassination. So much for Welch’s main detractor. Given the character assassination practiced against Welch, one might question whether he might also have been the victim of disinformation designed to make him keep his distance from another enemy of the agency.

Returning our attention to present-day, freshman Florida congressman Allen West, a retired Army lieutenant colonel recently summed up the Tea Party’s philosophy as follows: “The tea party is a constitutional, conservative grassroots movement – and that’s it. The tea party stands for three things: They want to see effective, efficient constitutional government, they stand for national security, and they stand for free market, free enterprise solutions. That’s it.” To me that seems like common sense, not its antithesis.

Of the three pillars of tea party thought, perhaps the one least understood is national security. But a Pew study recently cleared that up. 53% of Americans now believe, as Ron Paul has been espousing for decades, that the U.S. should mind its own business in international affairs. George Washington said the same thing. Tea partiers would like to see the U.S. more in control of its own borders, and less in control of opium production in Afghanistan (which the Taliban had almost eliminated prior to our renewed involvement in the area). An effective defensive capability is certainly nowhere near as expensive as an offensive capability used wherever the United Nations’ corrupt satraps (or their globalist puppetmasters) see an opportunity for profit.

There are numerous videos on YouTube that overlay Robert Welch’s 1958 speech predicting what “communism” had in store for America with graphics quoting specifics about what has happened recently to fulfill those predictions. The more fitting term for what he was railing against is “globalism” because communism was no more than one of the former’s many masks, allowing its operatives to play good cop and bad cop to manufacture public consent (or in many cases crush dissent) in countries throughout the world.

Government itself is not the enemy, however bitter experience has revealed again and again that government provides a convenient framework for business interests and ambitious individuals to accrete and wield unwarranted power over other businesspeople and individuals who have not successfully availed themselves of the levers of power (for instance the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act—a key New Deal reform gutted by corrupt Democrats and Republicans alike at the behest of the bankers long before the tea party existed). Judiciously reducing the number and effectiveness of those levers is a superior approach to merely trying to assure that each and every person grasping them is a saint (for instance, Glass-Steagall was only vital because our deposit insurance scheme could not account for proprietary trading on the part of banks—if deposit insurance was absent, or priced to account for prop trading, the Act would not have been needed—one New Deal reform created the need for another to counter its side effect). A carbon taxation scheme will be more of same, amplified and enmeshing the whole world. Although the tea party is viewed as right wing, in reality it is not (a fact that drives mainstream Republicans even crazier than it drives mainstream Democrats). And should its ideas win the day, the U.S. will once again become a Mecca—for innovation, liberty and prosperity.