1,514 words
Josh Neal
Intolerant Interpretations
Green Lane, Pennsylvania: Antelope Hill Publications, 2025
It is not a secret that Americans have come to believe in conspiracy theories. The mistrust in the official narrative has grown tremendously since the early 1960s. Why this is the case is examined by Josh Neal in his 2025 book, Intolerant Interpretations. (more…)
2,144 words
Matthew Dallek
Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right
New York: Basic Books, 2023
A couple of months back I reviewed a biography of Robert Welch (A Conspiratorial Life) that I regarded as superficial and facile.[1] The author, Edward H. Miller, seemed to have no real feel for the issues that motivated Welch and his followers in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. In fact, Miller displayed little sense of that time at all — as a political era, I mean. (more…)
2,681 words
Edward H. Miller
A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021
A writer friend of mine, now long ensconced in the Condé Nast glossies, used to regale us with his mother’s nutty ideas on matters of politics and society. For example, when the kids were young and at the Safeway in Palo Alto, mom would loudly refuse to buy Welch’s grape juice or jelly — even the grape jelly that came in Flintstones glasses — because that would be giving money to the John Birch Society. (more…)
1,456 words
The following is a commemoration for Willis A. Carto, who was born 97 years ago today.
For me, one of the great takeaways from the Willis Allison Carto Online Presidential Library is watching the conservative mainstream drift off into the distance while Mr. Carto basically stayed in the same place. Beginning in the mid-1950s and rolling through later correspondence is like standing in the middle of “Pangea” — the theoretical original single continent that all of Earth’s present continents were once part of — and watching plate tectonics gradually pull the various pieces away from the center. (more…)
3,944 words
Edward H. Miller
A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, & the Revolution of American Conservatism
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021
Professor Edward H. Miller has written a solid biography of Robert Welch, Jr., the founder of the anti-Communist John Birch Society. The book’s only flaw is that it is written from the perspective of a nice white liberal believer in the mainstream media and the reigning “civil rights” narrative. For example, Miller actually mentions Welch’s “white privilege.” (more…)
1,995 words
Edward H. Miller
Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy
Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2015
Edward H. Miller’s book Nut Country, about the rising Republican Party in Dallas in the late 1950s and early 1960s, is another academic book pointing to a certain place and point in time where the American far Right and mainstream Right first launched. Other books point to the Right’s rise in Saint Louis or Detroit at roughly the same time. (more…)
Phil Eiger Newmann, Schumer, 2020.
Phil Eiger Newmann, Schumer, 2020.
1,853 words
I gathered from the conversation that the owner of the name had once been a regular contributor to much more widely read conservative publications, the kind that have salaried congressional correspondents and full-service LexisNexis accounts, but that he was welcome at those august portals no longer. In all innocence, I asked why this was so. “Oh,” explained one of my companions, “he got the Jew thing.” (more…)
3,431 words
Professor Revilo Pendleton Oliver died in 1994, full of years and honors, as they say; and also notoriety. Long a Classics professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana, he gained his PhD in 1938 with a translation and commentary on a 1500-year-old Sanskrit drama. At age 80 was capable of holding lengthy telephone conversions with a young fellow linguist, in which (just to show off) they would switch back and forth between German and Attic Greek.
2,432 words
Part 1 of 2. Part 2 here.
Ben Klassen
Against the Evil Tide: An Autobiography
Creativity Book Publisher, 1991
Ben Klassen
Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs: A History of the Church of the Creator During Its 10 Year Domicile in the State of North Carolina, Coordinated with Biographical Details During the Same Period
Church of the Creator, 1993
3,434 words
Professor Revilo Pendleton Oliver died in 1994, full of years and honors, as they say; and also notoriety. Long a Classics professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana, he gained his PhD in 1938 with a translation and commentary on a 1500-year-old Sanskrit drama. (more…)
3,443 words
Professor Revilo Pendleton Oliver died in 1994, full of years and honors, as they say; and also notoriety. Long a Classics professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana, he gained his PhD in 1938 with a translation and commentary on a 1500-year-old Sanskrit drama. At age 80 was capable of holding lengthy telephone conversions with a young fellow linguist, in which (just to show off) they would switch back and forth between German and Attic Greek.