“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
“[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
“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
“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
jackhutton 🇺🇸