Frost blankets windshields and street signs in an affluent neighborhood of Sandy, Utah, as I walk up a driveway and knock on a massive oak door. A lean 80-something-year-old proprietor answers, peering at me from behind wire-framed glasses.
My host, Dave Jorgensen, is a longtime resident of the valley. He started a company in 1976, Bedrock Quartz Surfaces, which grew to operate in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Nevada, specializing in granite and quartz countertops. His wife, Laurel, ushers me past their flawless quartz hearth, downstairs to join the rest of the party.
In the basement den, members of the local John Birch Society chapter are gathered for their monthly rencontre. Ten are present, not counting our hosts. A sociologist might describe the group’s demographics as “between 65 and 85,” belonging to the categories of “married” or “widowed,” attending church “regularly.”
The cozy carpeted home amphitheater boasts an impressive array of DVDs and encyclopedias. A bust of Robert Welch (founding father of the John Birch Society) is nestled among copies of the organization’s “New American” magazine on a temporary folding table in the middle of the room. I thumb through a featured article by senior editor Alex Newman, entitled “The UN’s New World Religion,” in which Newman writes “The UN’s religion, on full display at the climate conference in Egypt, should alarm all people of faith.”
Jorgensen greets the group with a wry smile. The John Birch Society is a place where young, concerned citizens grew to become older, concerned citizens together, and here Jorgensen is indeed surrounded by some of his oldest friends. Many joined the organization in its early years (the 1960s) — only a decade or so removed from the height of McCarthyism, America’s second Red Scare.
To judge by the group’s demographics, one might assume that the John Birch Society is dying out, quite literally. But in the wake of heavy governmental interventions during COVID-19, the reemergence of China and Russia as geopolitical foes, and a global push on climate change, Birchers are slowly and quietly reimagining how to influence these and other debates.
The rhetoric of the night is not one of a dying organization, and while the old guard of Birchers may be fading, the organization may be poised to become more influential on the American right than it’s ever been.
Who was Robert Welch Jr.?
Robert Welch Jr. was born on a former plantation in Chowan County, North Carolina, to a Baptist family in 1899. By all accounts, he was extremely gifted.
According to biographer Edward Miller, he was learning multiplication tables by 4 years old. At 12 years old, Welch became the youngest student ever to enroll in the University of North Carolina, graduating at 16. He joined and left the Navy, wrote political columns for local papers, and started at Harvard Law School before dropping everything to pursue his fortune in the candy business (the man behind Junior Mints and the Sugar Daddy). He was passionate about politics, supporting Republican organizations and campaigns — among them presidential candidate Robert Taft and Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
According to historian John Earl Haynes, “by 1950 the shockingly high level of Soviet infiltration of U.S. government agencies that had existed during World War II was largely gone” leaving behind an “anti-communist consensus” among Republican and Democratic parties. But Haynes posits that McCarthy, entering into this post-war landscape, attempted to make anti-communism into a partisan weapon. Welch was influenced by and continued the work of McCarthy after the Wisconsin senator died in 1957. In fact, the current headquarters of the John Birch Society is in McCarthy’s hometown of Grand Chute, Wisconsin, though this may be purely coincidental.
In the winter of 1958, Welch gathered a group of 11 influential men, including industrialist Fred Koch, to outline his vision for the John Birch Society — named after a Christian missionary killed in China. The anti-communist organization’s stated purpose was “to promote less government, more responsibility, and a better world.” Few conservatives would take issue with this mission but, “The Blue Book of the John Birch Society,” published later, made much bolder claims.
In it, Welch wrote “Modern man is simply being played for a sucker by an immoral gang of sophisticated criminals. These cunning megalomaniacs seek to make themselves the absolute rulers of the human race. … They now occupy most of the positions of great prestige and influence in Washington, London, and Paris, as well as in the educational, financial, and publishing circles of the whole world.”
Welch organized the society in the same way he believed the communists were organizing. He prescribed “completely authoritative control at all levels” providing a steady flow of information down the ranks via the periodical, “American Opinion” (later “The New American”). Members were organized into small chapters, and set up numerous smaller organizations: “little fronts, big fronts, temporary fronts, permanent fronts, all kinds of fronts,” dictated the Blue Book. The most successful of these “fronts” would be ad hoc committees — headed by Birchers, but focused on hot-button issues. And letter writing campaigns would become a chapter staple.
Ironically, detractors of the organization believed the John Birch Society actually abetted communism. The public, hearing rumors of previous-unheard-of groups spreading across the country, sent stacks of letters to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, asking if the society was a “subversive organization.”
Some in the public grew skeptical of John Birch Society. Sen. Thomas J. Dodd, testifying before Congress, said that “despite the anti-Communist intention” the society was “an unwitting abettor of the Communist conspiracy” by providing critics “with a convenient caricature of anti-communism.” Defector from the Soviet Secret Police, Anatoli Granovsky, would similarly claim “the Soviet Communists would sacrifice a thousand American Communists to save the John Birch Society … by discrediting prominent Americans, it confuses the population about whom to trust.”
The group’s political efforts drew scrutiny and made it the subject of various controversies. They were haunted, for example, by the pre-Bircher statement from Welch alleging President Dwight Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Many conservatives viewed this as an anti-American attack against a war hero. Additionally, Welch and Birchers campaigned to impeach Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, but according to the JBS this was because, “civil rights legislation should have come from the states.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative political commentator George F. Will has written that the John Birch Society’s “membership probably never numbered more than 100,000 — but its power to taint all of conservatism was huge, particularly given the media’s eagerness to abet the tainting.” Others saw its utility. Historian Darren Mulloy notes the John Birch Society “trained a generation of conservative activists. They showed them how to pursue their causes.”
After the death of Welch, membership in the society dwindled. Debts began to grow, totaling $9.1 million in 1984, according to the Massachusetts attorney general’s office. Welch’s widow cut ties with the group, telling The New York Times “I have nothing to do with the society. The people who are running it are not standing on what it started out to be at all.” Society president John McManus was accused of antisemetic rhetoric in the early 2000s, and infighting continued to upset the leadership. It seemed the society was at last, falling apart.
The Birch Society today
Quietly, a dedicated group of Birchers began to regroup around new issues and were successful, for example, in introducing resolutions to stop the North American Union. The 2008 recession, and the rise of the tea party bolstered some interest in the group, and Birchers caused quite a stir inside the GOP by co-sponsoring the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference.
Public support was sparse, however, with the exception of Sen. Ron Paul. During the Trump administration, conservatism became more open to ideas from the fringes of the movement. Viewpoints long promoted by Birchers entered the mainstream, even if the organization itself remained outcast.
The society seeks to distance itself from other outsider groups like QAnon. Paul Dragu, communications director, told me the biggest difference between the two is that “QAnon predictions have not come true. JBS predictions have.” While both organizations seek to expose conspiracy, Dragu speculates QAnon will fade into obscurity long before the Birch Society.
The Birch Society’s president, Martin Ohlson, recently pointed to polling data that showed 70% of Republicans don’t believe the 2020 election was free and fair. He called it “The Great Awakening,” despite no evidence of systemic fraud. He referred to the growing momentum of frustrated small government activists, spurred by COVID-19 pandemic mandates and ambitious federal spending packages.
Today, the organization continues to operate out of Welch’s playbook (fronts everywhere) participating in single issue campaigns (“Get US out! of the UN” or “Counter COVID-19 Overreach” or “Save our Children”) and affiliates. But new strategies are being employed.
The Birch Society now owns and operates numerous media companies, disseminating videos produced by “The New American” and others. Their online school pitched at conservative home-schoolers, Freedom Project Academy, has been growing by the year. With endorsements and marketing efforts by popular conservative voices including Ben Shapiro, Phil Robertson, Charlie Kirk, Glenn Beck, Matt Walsh and Kirk Cameron, Freedom Project Academy’s enrollment grew from 22 students in 2011 to more than 1,000 students in 2020.
When asked about the school’s goals, director Duke Pesta (who hosts a political talk show through Freedom Project Media) told me via email, “For the next five years, we hope to continue our dynamic growth, offering a first-rate classical education — based on Judeo-Christian values — for children currently languishing in the failed American public school system.”
Those I encountered seem weighed down by the moral burden of warning those they love that the country is in peril of losing its foundation, its identity and its principles. Their framework of belief places fellow members at the center of an international and even cosmic fight for the soul of the world.
Dragu describes the members as blue-collar Ph.D.s — “always researching and writing.” They possess a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of dates, names, places, organizations. The Rockefellers, Davos, Liu Zhenmin, Cleon Skousen, Dan Smoot, the Rothschilds.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Hofstadter, regarding the paranoid style of American politics which pervades today’s political discourse, wrote “we are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”
Among the Birchers, this suffering is offset by what appear to be the genuine comforts of camaraderie. Miller says the Birch Society provides “an opportunity for people to develop friendships with people of like minds.” But, by the same token, it was not uncommon for members at this particular December chapter meeting to mention an estranged loved one. One man remarked that it would make him so happy if, this year, his two sons would simply “return to the church and the Constitution.”
But what if there is no globalist agenda? What if these international governing bodies are more incompetent and powerless than nefarious?
“I would be so happy if there were no conspiratorial forces propelling us into some sort of hellish one world bureaucracy,” Dragu told me, though the society does not have an official stance on that question. “The reason I’m here is because I have done the research. And it’s so tragically clear that that’s the case.”
Still, Dragu imagines that maybe one day, there will no longer be a need for the John Birch Society. But he can’t say when that would be. And while it seems that the influence of the society has far outpaced the strictures of the Blue Book and the hospitality of society chapter leaders, Americans may be due for an uptick in interest, whether true or not, in what the Birchers are selling.
“We are on the verge of this majority knowledge as far as the conspiratorial forces,” Dragu told me. This “generational effort” by members of the society is “a great accomplishment.”
Welch biographer Edward Miller, who views the increased popularity of the John Birch Society and its affiliate organizations as a product of populist resurgence, has a different take on the situation: “These things are dangerous,” he told me. “If you believe in lies, as history has shown, it can wind up hurting a lot of people.”
After a passionate discussion on the state of the nation, members shuffle out of the basement, helping each other up the stairs. Some linger, gathering around the large granite island in the kitchen. They snack on cookies and remember old friends. It’s hard to imagine this aging organization making a major comeback, but Jorgensen says he’s starting a new chapter down in Lehi this month. “Lots of fires to be put out” he said, and with a wink — “lots of work to be done.”