In a dishonest hit piece masquerading as journalism published by the far-left Daily Beast, a former Communist Party USA operative turned NeverTrump neoconservative Buckleyite tries to defame both conservative legend Phyllis Schlafly and the grassroots John Birch Society. But with major factual errors and outright deception starting literally in the very first sentence, the fringe fake-news outlet and neocon Ron Radosh — who writes for a publication with a well-documented history of promoting segregation, racism, and violence against blacks — fails miserably.
The main thrust of the article, which falsely claims to reveal something “new,” is that Phyllis Schlafly and her husband were members of The John Birch Society, an affiliate of this magazine and perhaps the most successful grassroots conservative organization in history. “The John Birch Society is doing wonderful work, and my husband and I both joined promptly after the Chicago meeting,” Schlafly wrote in a letter. That is hardly news, though, and has been widely reported for many years by news outlets and political organizations. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported on the exact same documents in 2016.
First of all, this was already well known by anyone who cared to read. Schlafly denied it, likely for political reasons, during the Goldwater campaign for president. Radosh concluded that she may have denied it to avoid hurting the Goldwater campaign amid the concerted communist and establishment campaign to demonize JBS — a campaign very similar to what was unleashed against Trump during the 2016 election, lies and smears that still make some Trump supporters hesitate before admitting publicly they support the president. But it was hardly a secret, Radosh’s false claims notwithstanding.
Secondly, so what? There is nothing wrong with belonging to a patriotic organization dedicated to — with God’s help — upholding the Constitution, protecting individual liberty, exposing the Deep State, and reducing the size of government. Numerous governors, congressmen, senators, sheriffs, lawmakers, mayors, activist leaders, state supreme court justices, Ivy League professors, judges, media personalities, top military leaders, billionaires, and more serve and have served as members of the organization over its 62 years leading the fight for faith, family, and freedom.
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The very first sentence of the Daily Beast hit piece contains a giant falsehood, and some smaller ones. “Phyllis Schlafly was a secret member of the John Birch Society, the far-right group infamous for its support of segregation and its belief that a communist conspiracy had taken over the United States,” wrote Radosh. Of course, in the real world, not only did the JBS never support segregation, many of its leading members and leaders — including top black activists such as George Schuyler, Manning Johnson, Julia Brown, and others — helped lead the fight against racism, racial collectivism, government-enforced segregation, discrimination, and so on.
Especially ironic is that Radosh’s main claim to fame is being a writer for the increasingly irrelevant neoconservative magazine National Review, which actually did openly support segregation for many years. Indeed, in a 1957 National Review piece headlined “Why the South Must Prevail,” founder William F. Buckley argued that whites, as the “more advanced race,” had a right and duty to prevent blacks from voting and achieving equality — even using violence if needed. This was supposedly in order to preserve “civilization” from what Buckley and National Review referred to as “Negro backwardness.” Seriously.
Of course, the Birch Society, which had many prominent black and white members at the time who were working against segregation in their states, never would have imagined saying something so grotesque. Instead, Robert Welch, the founder of JBS, wrote a widely disseminated article dubbed “A Letter to the South” in which he argued that segregation was on its way out, that this demise was a good thing, and that the communist exploitation of the “civil rights” cause had set back this progress by a generation.
Naturally, Welch admitted to being “impatient at times” with the rate of progress toward ending segregation. But he said he was glad that “the winds” were “blowing in the right direction” toward less segregation. He was actually frustrated that communist racialist agitators were impeding that progress by stirring up racial hatred among the races in the South and pushing anti-constitutional solutions, which he argued was retarding progress toward full equality. But his views were clear: Segregation was wrong and should be dismantled as quickly as circumstances would permit.
In the September 1963 bulletin of JBS, which was sent to all members of the recently formed Society, Welch boasted that the piece against segregation, then being distributed by members and supporters across the country, was already in its sixth printing. In short, Welch was extremely “progressive” on racial issues for the day — far more than the Democrat Party, which was sending members of the KKK to Congress, or National Review, which encouraged whites in the South to stomp on black efforts to achieve equality. Would an organization that supposedly supported segregation publish and distribute a powerful article arguing against segregation? You decide.
Add to that the fact that racism and segregation were bipartisan and mainstream in much of the United States at that time. Liberals and conservatives, especially in the South but even in the North, were often hostile to “race mixing.” JBS founder Robert Welch, a Southerner who grew up in a segregated world where that was the norm, was well ahead of his time. In his famous “Letter to the South” mentioned above, Welch openly promoted and supported an end to segregation knowing full well how controversial that would be in the region and among leading political figures in the South who would be crucial to the Society’s mission of exposing evildoers and reducing government. He did not exclude people based on support for segregation — that would have meant excluding virtually all of the South from his national movement — but he was openly hostile to segregation, and worked very hard to ensure that racists did not sneak in to the Society.
Buckley, by contrast, kept beating the drum for segregation and white supremacy for many years after his 1957 screed. In 1963, for instance, he lamented a bombing of a black church that killed four children not because innocent young ones were killed, but because it “set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically.” In 1965, he warned that there would be “chaos” if blacks were allowed to vote. And in 1969, long after his attacks on JBS began, Buckley wrote a column, “On Negro Inferiority,” in which he celebrated pseudo-scientific findings claiming blacks were inferior. This is the magazine Radosh writes for regularly — and the magazine that declared war on The John Birch Society as well as Donald Trump, and failed miserably.
Shortly before he died, perhaps realizing how horrifying such comments would sound today and how they would likely destroy his establishment-crafted “legacy,” still celebrated in the liberal media today, of maligning true conservatives while promoting Big Government and globalism, Buckley recanted and acknowledged that he was “wrong” on his racist and segregationist views. Today, though, prominent critics on the Left and the Right still refer to Buckley’s “vile” and “abhorrent” views as those of a “promoter of white supremacy.” Buckley was also a member of Deep State institutions such as the globalist Council on Foreign Relations, the secret society Skull and Bones, and a CIA operative who worked in Mexico.
In his Daily Beast hit piece on the Society and Schlafly, Radosh never admits that he writes for the National Review. Despite quoting National Review founder Buckley’s attacks on Welch, Radosh fails to mention Buckley’s long and sordid history of advocating for segregation and keeping black Americans down. Radosh also serves as a fellow at the Hudson Institute, an organization funded by multiple donors who have also contributed to The John Birch Society. Radosh and Daily Beast editors did not respond to request for comment about the lies, the vetting involved, evidence to support the charges, refusal to mention Buckley’s support for segregation or Radosh’s ties to National Review, the fact checking process that went into the piece, why the JBS was not contacted for comment in keeping with standard journalistic ethics, and other important questions.
JBS President Emeritus John F. McManus, who initially had been deceived by the establishment media’s smears of the Society before doing his own research and joining, has been with the organization since the 1960s. In a statement to The New American magazine, he ridiculed the false claim by Radosh and the Daily Beast that the JBS somehow supported segregation. “Over the years, there were at least nine Black Americans who were speakers on our JBS Speakers Bureau. All became members. And all were happy to tell anyone that they never found segregation in JBS,” McManus said.
He listed a number of examples: Leonard Patterson, a highly trained communist who broke from the Party and testified before a Senate Committee in 1960; Julia Brown, who served for nine years as a member of the Communist Party while reporting to the FBI; Evans-Raymond Pierre, who was employed by JBS as a research assistant for a dozen years in the 1970s-1980s; Rev. E. Freeman Yearling, a minster in Harlem; George Schuyler, the nation’s premier Black journalist; Anthony Bryant, who hijacked a U.S. commercial airliner, took it to Cuba, spent 12 years in a Cuban prison, then returned to the United States and went on tour as a speaker for JBS; Solomon Belete, a high-ranking military official in Ethiopia who fled tyranny and corruption and came to America to help JBS in the 1970s; Charles Smith, a liberal activist in Pittsburgh who woke up, joined JBS, and became one of the Society’s most popular speakers; Lola Belle Holmes, who worked undercover for the FBI in the Communist Party in the St. Louis area and who gave powerful speeches helping slow down Communist revolutionary plans.
“All of these people would gladly tell anyone that JBS was not segregationist in any way,” noted McManus. “But we shouldn’t have to prove JBS was not segregationist. Those who make the charge should offer some proof. They never do because there’s none — now or ever.”
Even honest scholars who are extremely critical of the Birch Society have revealed the truth on these matters. Professor Darren Mulloy, who has a doctorate in American Studies and now serves as chair of the History Department at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University, wrote a whole book on the Society that was even recommended by the Washington Post. “Welch made strenuous efforts to keep overt racists (and anti-Semites) out of the organization,” Dr. Mulloy explained on page 109. “Importantly … the Birch Society was not formed in opposition to the desegregation process. Its driving motivations came from its anticommunist, anti-liberal conservatism and its understanding of the civil rights movement was, until the mid-1960’s, largely contained by and subsumed within this foundational framework.”
While many JBS members and leaders opposed segregation, it is also true that some supported it. But the same could be said for virtually any other group that existed in America at that time — especially one with tens of thousands of diverse members from all walks of life. That very much includes the Democratic Party, most of whom supported segregation and Jim Crow, and even much of the Republican Party. And yet the left-wing Daily Beast would never dream of publishing an article purporting to “expose” somebody for being a “secret” member of either party — or a “secret” writer for the longtime segregationist publication National Review — by arguing that the party or group were “infamous” for supporting segregation.
The Radosh article continues with numerous additional factual errors. For instance, the piece falsely claims JBS is “limping along.” In reality, JBS membership and influence have been surging in recent years, as acknowledged publicly even by left-wing publications highly critical of JBS such as Politico in its 2017 article “The John Birch Society Is Back.” In fact, commentators from across the political spectrum have argued that in the age of Trump, the JBS actually represents mainstream conservatism. “Far from being drummed out of conservatism, [Bircherism] has become the dominant strain,” wrote Jeet Heer in the far-left Mother Jones.
From his social-media profiles, it is clear that aside from JBS and Schlafly, Radosh viciously hates Trump, too — making him an apparent victim of the infamous “Trump Derangement Syndrome” that has driven much of the establishment absolutely bonkers. With her book endorsing Trump sending shock waves through the conservative movement, Schlafly played a major role in helping the president win the 2016 election. The JBS, meanwhile, with its decades of activism against the Deep State and globalism at the grassroots level, played a key role in making his presidency possible, too, as many commentators have argued. It appears that this is what motivated Radosh’s shockingly dishonest attacks.
Another minor line of attack by Radosh is JBS founder Welch’s letter, which eventually became the book The Politician, arguing that President Eisenhower was either a useful idiot or a deliberate supporter of the communist movement. The evidence compiled in the letter is staggering. What Radosh does not mention is that the only man to serve two terms in Eisenhower’s cabinet, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, strongly supported Welch’s conclusions. Benson even urged people to join The John Birch Society, saying it was the “most effective non-church group in America against creeping socialism and godless communism.”
In essence, the entire Daily Beast piece is regurgitated propaganda from an elderly California man named Ernie Lazar, who displays a bizarre obsession with the Society and has dedicated much of his life to endlessly arguing with both critics and supporters of JBS about basically anything and everything. Apparently a JBS member once suggested he was a communist, sparking his life-long fanaticism about the Society that more than a few critics have suggested is unhealthy. He was also just ridiculed in LewRockwell.com, reportedly the most popular libertarian website in the world, for his role in sparking the dishonest hit piece by the Daily Beast.
“I want to share this early morning chuckle via Yahoo and The Daily Beast,” wrote Charles Burris in response to the article on Schlafly and JBS. “There were so many factual errors in this sloppy screed I don’t know where to begin. The author, former red diaper Commie, now neocon propagandist, Ronald Radosh couldn’t even get the title of Schlafly’s book right. It is A Choice, Not An Echo, and is still a legend in the publishing industry for creating the niche for million+ mass marketed self published books. Her book is also a pioneering work in power elite analysis.”
“Equally laughable is his reliance upon the work of ‘ernie1241’ aka Ernie Lazar,” continued Burris. “Lazar is a retired, evidently well-meaning fringe character who has made his life’s work ‘exposing’ the John Birch Society and any other deviation from ‘respectable conservatives’ such as Buckley, Goldwater, Kirk, etc. He has been at it for decades. Any and every time the JBS, Cleon Skousen, etc. is mentioned in the known universe, ernie1241 is on it like fleas to a dog. He got onto me with my numerous LewRockwell.com blogs about ‘phony conservatism,’ Buckley, and the CIA.”
“Ernie has a very simplistic view of all this, and doesn’t seem to entertain or imagine the possibility of disinformation agents, black propaganda, or synthetic or false fronts working for intelligence agencies,” concluded Burris, adding that many leading Americans have been members of JBS over the decades. “When I first dealt with ‘ernie1241’ I emailed the late Will Grigg, formerly a big-wig with the JBS, who filled me on ernie1241’s obsession.” Burris ends his post with a simple statement about the phony “news” pushed by Radosh and the Daily Beast: “Big deal.”
There are numerous other errors in the Daily Beast screed — far too many to mention and debunk in one article. Apparently the Daily Beast does not even have spell check, with Schlafly’s name and the title of her book mispelled multiple times in the article. And the hatchet job against Schlafly and her legacy on Hulu, Mrs. America, is worse than a disgrace. Check out the website RealMrsAmerica.com for the truth about one of the greatest and most influential women in American history.
This writer had the pleasure of getting to know Schlafly before her death, including doing interviews on her radio program and receiving her powerful endorsement for the book Crimes of the Educators. In addition to being an American hero and one of the most admired women of the 20th century, she was kind, gentle, smart, sharp, honest, and humble. Shame on dishonest fake-news websites such as the Daily Beast and dishonest hatchet-men such as Radosh for trying to smear the memory of the dead with lies.
May Schlafly rest in peace, and may the truth ultimately win out.
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