Washington • “Some people say I’m extreme,” an Indiana tea party leader told The New York Times at the height of the movement’s rebellion in 2010, “but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too.”
Uh-huh. The society, which still exists, enjoyed its heyday in the early 1960s and saw Communists everywhere. Robert Welch, its founder, even cast President Dwight Eisenhower as a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” The group was so far-out that the founder of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., published a 5,000-word excoriation in the National Review that excommunicated the Birchers from the responsible right.