Chris Christie’s Shot at John Birch Society Reflects Establishment’s Struggle With Losing Relevance
Paul Dragu
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Internationalism, as it is conceived today, is an attempt to impose more government and a more centralized one-world government on all of us everywhere. For that reason it is automatically contrary to everything we stand for, and one of the movements we shall oppose with all the strength we can. — JBS founder Robert Welch, 1974

Good riddance, 2022.

It has been a year in which the national debt continued its stratospheric ascendency to unimaginable heights; a year during which record numbers of migrants continued waltzing into the United States as if a banquet awaited them on the other side; a year Americans paid nearly double for milk and eggs and almost triple for gas; and a year in which average citizens were bullied by an inescapable, coordinated campaign espousing the insane idea that boys who want to be girls need only to click their heels and believe it.

But 2022 didn’t suddenly happen. The debt has been climbing for decades. Our porous border and self-destructive immigration policies have been inviting illegal aliens for decades. The collaboration between the Federal Reserve Bank and the U.S. government has been perpetuating a corrupt and immoral inflationary money system for more than a century. Powerful internationalists have been using their influence to cripple the U.S. economy through a propaganda campaign demonizing cheap and reliable energy for decades. And the Judeo-Christian values and morals responsible for creating a nation that became the envy of the world have been under assault for at least six decades.

What we experienced in 2022 was a tipping over of destructive ideas and policies that have been building up for quite some time.  

But what set these destructive, asinine policies and ideas into motion?

For a long time, the prevailing narrative among conservatism has been that America’s premature decline is the result of nuanced yet organic collective choices, specifically liberalism. And if we can just unchoose liberalism, we can save the Republic.

That’s former New Jersey governor and probable 2024 presidential candidate Chris Christie’s message. And anyone who believes there is more to the story is a John Birch Society conspiracy theorist.

On November 19, during a speech at the 2022 Republican Jewish Coalition leadership meeting in Las Vegas, Christie used the JBS to make his point. In the 1960s, the Republican Party had nearly been taken over by extremists, he said. “We also had conflict inside the party … driven by The John Birch Society.” The Birchers were conspiracy extremists with major sway over the party, he added. But, fortunately, the venerable William F. Buckley, Jr. — Mr. Respectable Conservative — and his National Review magazine cohorts came to the rescue and banished the Birchers to political Siberia, after which the Republican Party reached the GOP golden age, the Ronald Reagan Era.

Christie has been telling this story for at least a year. It’s the premise of his latest book, Republican Rescue: Saving the Party From Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden. And it’s the vehicle his strategists have fueled to take him all the way to the 2024 presidential primaries, where it will surely stall and die on the side of the road.

Not only is this poor strategy, but it’s based on fiction.

Mr. Bill Buckley is long gone and National Review has been dwindling in relevance for years, but The John Birch Society not only never left, but has continued to grow in relevance. The New Republic magazine, for all the drivel it has published over a century, managed to understand this truth with a March 8, 2021 article aptly titled “The John Birch Society Never Left.” Moreover, apparently we’ve “won the long game,” according to Salon nearly a year later, which managed to squeeze in a seed of truth in its usual mound of claptrap. A couple months after Salon’s momentary lapse of unreason, professional pundit Travis Gettys announced in Raw Story that “the Birchers have won.” And between then and now, there have been numerous media rumblings that, like the broken clock that’s right twice a day, managed in rare moments of sobriety to correctly analyze that the JBS message has prevailed.

For years, in the ’60s, Buckley and his team at National Review tried to destroy the JBS — as did nearly every influential major media voice in the industry. They lobbed smear after smear, painting founder Robert Welch and JBS members as unhinged crackpots who saw a communist behind every bush. (Decades later, the declassification of the Venona files proved there were indeed Soviet assets in “virtually all major U.S. government agencies.” Who’s the crackpot now?) They dedicated entire issues to discrediting the JBS. Why? Because instead of attributing America’s decline to bumbling liberalism and gross stupidity, as they did, we insisted it was largely by design. It was a conspiracy.

Mr. Christie acknowledges no such thing. His message is that we need a return to spineless sellout establishment Republicans, many of whom are globalists themselves. William Buckley, the hero in Christie’s story, ironically used to say, “A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” During the last 60 years, America has had an even split of Republican and Democratic presidential terms, yet in all that time we have conserved nearly nothing — not our sovereignty, not our currency, not our national identity. The country has marched in the same destructive direction: bigger government, more unrestrained immigration, larger and larger debt, more involvement with international organizations, and further moral corrosion.

Even Reagan, Mr. Conservative himself, stayed the path.  Reagan’s presidency was marred by federal spending and revenue increases, large deficits, and amnesty for illegal aliens. The 40th president’s proposed federal budget for fiscal year 1989 constituted the largest proposed budget for the federal government in the history of the United States at the time. Reagan also didn’t eliminate even one of any number of unconstitutional federal programs or departments, despite his famous rhetoric that government is the problem and not the solution. Only during the Trump years was there a slight deviation, specifically with regard to immigration policies and international entanglements like the Paris Agreement and UNESCO.

JBS never left because more people are learning the tragic truth about what really is happening in America and the world. Conspiracies are flourishing because they keep succeeding. It’s becoming commonly accepted in America that a small and elite international group of people of diverse ethnicities who wield immense power through a network of private, nonprofit, and public institutions have been orchestrating America’s destruction. In many other countries, the majority of people already know there exists an international oligarchic class orchestrating events. The goal of the conspiracists is to impose a one-world totalitarian government, one in which a powerful and sovereign United States does not exist. What the world experienced in the form of Covid tyranny was a dress rehearsal of the type of control and oppression they wish to level on us.

What has happened is that decades of JBS education have converged with reality. As a result, people now believe “conspiracy theories.”

During his templated speeches, Christie likes to bring up Reagan’s famous “A Time for Choosing” speech to segue into the call-to-action portion. America is indeed at a time for choosing. Will we choose globalism or freedom?

Here is The John Birch Society, from the man who dedicated his golden years to working toward a free America for all its citizens:

We are not beginning any revolution or even a counter-revolution in any technical sense, because while we are opposing a conspiracy we are not ourselves making use of conspiratorial methods. Yet our determination to overthrow an entrenched tyranny is the very stuff out of which revolutions are made. The net result of these reflections is that we are not a copy of any movement of the past. We are unique. We are ourselves. We are something new, as befits a moving force for a new age. — Robert Welch, 1974

If you’d like to learn more about the JBS, you can download the free e-booklet, BiRCH’N: How the John Birch Society Keeps America Free. If you’d like to join the JBS in our epic undertaking, connect with your local coordinator here.