“In 1838, concerned that mob violence imperiled the nation’s fledgling democratic institutions, Lincoln predicted that the gravest “danger” to democracy was never going to originate overseas but “must spring up amongst us.… If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

Birchers
Matthew Dallek

#birchers #dallek #rightwing #extremism #pastisprologue

“[The John Birch Society], then, bestowed to subsequent generations a fraught legacy—a politics of the street, where armed militias, QAnon adherents, white supremacists, and their leaders lived in the spirit of what Abraham Lincoln once warned against. ”

Birchers
Matthew Dallek
#birchers #dallek #rightwing #extremism

“One American Party official, an insurance salesman from Arizona, described the party under Schmitz as “a distillation of the John Birch Society, the Christian Crusade and the Minutemen. We’re revolutionaries. We’re getting together to try to work through the system. But I’ll say this. We’ll have constitutional government in this country and if we don’t get it through the ballot box, we’ll get it in the streets.” ..

#Birchers #dallek #bookstodon #extremism #rightwing #history

Presidential election 1972: “When [John Birch Society candidate John] Schmitz lost, a telling message surfaced among his allies, a note of defiance rooted in their contempt for democracy: if voters refused to return the nation to its rightful owners, then Birchers and their allies would take it back by force… #Birchers #dallek #bookstodon #extremism #rightwing #history

“Constitutionalists were entitled to rule, and either they were going to work within the system to achieve their vision of “constitutional government,” or, if the ballot failed them, they were going to take up arms. By 1974, some members identified violence as the only solution to the ills plaguing the United States.

Birchers
Matthew Dallek

#Birchers #dallek #bookstodon #extremism #rightwing #history #pastisprologue

@joescarborough @morningjoe kinda romanticizes the not so distant past & America’s dalliance with conspiracy & extremism. I point you and your producers to historian Matthew Dallek’s book on the John Birch Society, “Birchers”
“The Birchers were breeding a sprawling movement, opening a Pandora’s box to a more militant, disruptive far right….
#birchers #dallek #extremism #rightwing #morningjoe #bookstodon

“If liberals were to build the world they wanted—a world where pluralism trumped hate, science trounced unreason, and democracy conquered fascism—they had to fight harder.”

#Birchers #Dallek #rightwing #rightWingExtremism #History #bookstodon #pastisprologue

“The center had held firm. Yet they were hardly content to drop their vigilance. Birchers had gained power within the Republican Party. They had come within striking distance of the Oval Office. Even if the far right was ultimately doomed, Birchers still posed a grave threat. They had eroded the capacity of the nation’s democracy to tolerate dissent and find common solutions based on a set of widely accepted facts. ..
#Birchers #dallek #americanHistory #extremism #rightwing #Bookstodon
“The fact is clear, you can’t talk with a Bircher,” [..] The typical Bircher “is so aggressive in defense of the card he carries that he seems to lose sight of country and human dignity. So the best way to beat him is at the polls. Every time he raises his paranoid head, we will be there after him. Sometimes we will win, sometimes we will lose. But, he will know that we are watching.” #birchers #dallek #bookstodon #rightwing #extremism #Republicans #history #pastisprologue
“[The John Birch Society was] neither an export from Nazi Germany nor out of step with America’s political traditions. The sentiments that undergirded the movement—a defense of white rights, the use of government to enforce Christian tenets and morality in public spaces, the veneration of inviolate freedom for the individual to do as he wished economically, free from government intervention—had deep roots in the nation’s historical development.…
#birchers #dallek #extremism #rightwing