The John Birch Society

The John Birch Society, a society so radically anti- communist and outlandishly fringe that it was attacked by both conservatives and liberals. The John Birch Society was founded in 1958 by a man named Robert Welch, who was a candy maker from Massachusetts. The goal of this organization, to stop the spread of the “Red Menace” bringing America to brink of collapse because it, “had been pushed down the demagogic road to disaster by conspirators hands.”(1) This sounds like typical McCarthy like anti-communist jargon, so what kept the John Birch Society from becoming a mainstream commodity? The answer lies in several key beliefs of the founder, and how that disconnected with society to the point where it was pushed to fringes of society. The John Birch Society believed in the 50’s that President Eisenhower with the help of the Illuminati and communist forces was working together to create a new world order, one without borders and an enormous and powerful central government.(2) The John Birch Society was immediately attacked because of this stretch of a belief statement, with both sides of the political spectrum distancing themselves in order to save face and to seek from alienating voting bases.The John Birch Society also founded itself towards the end of McCarthyism when intellectual and societal forces were switching away from the hysteria as conspiracy was being deemed as more illegitimate knowledge.(1) The John Birch Society was the culmination of a decade of anti-communist mass hysteria, where politicians, regular workers of society, and the intellectual class started drawing the line on conspiracy. There was just too much cascading logic and hidden power connections, from the Illuminati being connected with Eisenhower and the Soviet Union, coupled with copious connections in popular culture to ever have mainstream audiences take it seriously. The society itself only gained about 80,000 members and is still around today with the same mission statement of limited government in fear of a new world order.


1. https://copas.uni-regensburg.de/article/viewFile/182/250
2. https://www.jbs.org/jbs-news/news/item/19177-new-world-order-reality-approaching-fast