2 WelchвЂ™s first anti-Communist tract was published by Henry Regnery, the founder of the Regnery Press, which still specializes in books by conservative authors such as Ann Coulter and Josh Hawley. There are even some blood ties between the Birchers and the modern far right: one of the business leaders Welch assembled to create the Birch Society was Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David, who became longtime donors to conservative causes. Much like Donald Trump and his base today, the Birchers refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of political opposition, suggesting that those who disagreed with them were acting in bad faith, if not as part of a sinister conspiracy. The Birch Society called for defending the police against charges of brutality, opposed putting fluoride in the water supply with the fervor of todayвЂ™s anti-vaxxers, and fought efforts at gun control, which they depicted as the preliminary step for confiscation and a Communist takeover of the United States. In an essay titled вЂњThere Goes Christmas,вЂќ Welch complained that department stores were, in MillerвЂ™s words, вЂњstocking subversively secular UN holiday propagandaвЂќ because the stores did not have enough вЂњMerry ChristmasвЂќ decorations, Welch complained, they were trying to take Christ out of the holiday. Many of the issues, themes, and causes the Birchers seized upon six decades ago can still be found on the political right today. MillerвЂ™s new biography of Welch, A Conspiratorial Life, traces the origins and history of the John Birch Society and, in the process, provides historical perspective on the far-right populism of the Trump era. While McCarthy was infamous for his attacks on specific officials involved in foreign policy, the Birch Society focused on broader, more amorphous targets and plots.Д®dward H. Welch took Joseph McCarthyвЂ™s anticommunism to heights beyond even his imagination. The John Birch Society had the same interest in domestic economic conflicts but portrayed them as the result of foreign conspiracies. But WelchвЂ™s new group-named after a Baptist missionary and longtime military intelligence officer who had been killed by Chinese Communist forces just after the end of World War II, and whom Welch considered the first American killed in the cold war-took a different tack than earlier antiвЂ“New Deal business leaders. The businessmen (they were all men) had for years complained that America was moving toward socialism and that Dwight Eisenhower, the first Republican president in a quarter-century, was doing little to reverse the drift. Robert Welch, a successful candy manufacturer, founded the organization on December 8, 1958, by convening a group of eleven conservatives, almost all of them prominent business leaders, for a two-day gathering at a private home in Indianapolis. In 1962 Bob Dylan wrote a folk song about them, вЂњTalkinвЂ™ John Birch Paranoid BluesвЂќ: вЂњI was looking everywhere for them gol-darned Reds/I got up in the morninвЂ™ вЂ™nвЂ™ looked under my bedвЂ¦вЂќ

The conspiratorial thinking of the Birchers became part of popular culture. The John Birch Society may be little remembered today, but in its time it had a dues-paying membership of at least 30,000, a staff of 240 people, and more than 400 bookstores across the United States. He thanked God вЂњfor allowing us to get rid of the Communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.вЂќ 1 With those words he paid homage, however unintentionally, to the John Birch Society, the conspiracy-obsessed anti-Communist organization that became a fixture in American life and, especially, Republican politics in the 1960s.

During the insurrection at the US Capitol last year, the so-called QAnon Shaman, sporting a painted face and horned cap, sat on the Senate dais and offered a prayer.

Class shaman followers