In 2015, I warned a friend of mine that the newly minted “alt-right” should not be taken lightly. We disagree politically; she identifies as a conservative and would eventually be a Trump supporter. She was expressing amusement, via Facebook, over liberal worrywarts who were clutching their pearls because of the rhetoric of people such as Milo Yiannapolis, Mike Cernovich, Stephen Baldwin, Steve Bannon, etc. I tried to explain that they don’t anger me because I don’t agree with them or their bold style but because they were dangerous people who should not be given attention or power in any political sphere.
My knowledge of them came from the travesty known as “Gamergate.” About a year before this conversation, the online video game community was deeply divided. Gamergate is only complicated in that it is difficult to describe, but the events are relatively simple: a crowdfunding campaign was set up to fund a series of videos that were going to examine video games from a feminist perspective. This examination was met with a response that only looks predictable now in retrospect: extreme anger. I’m not going to go deeply into whether or not the video project’s goal was noble or correct. Instead, I’ll focus on the response.
Along with this original project, the victims of this “controversy” were a female game developer, who was initially the subject of a harassing screed on 4chan and Reddit by an ex-boyfriend, and then anyone who dared criticize Gamergate. Victims were doxed, harassed, hacked, and threatened—all under the guise of “protecting ethics in game journalism” or “free speech.” On January 6, 2021, one of the original victims tweeted that (I’m paraphrasing), Gamergate didn’t cause the January 6 anti-democracy riot at the Capitol. It was the symptom of the same problem that has now grown larger.1
I agree with the person’s sentiment. To find the origins of where this comes from, we have to delve back a few decades. The first inkling should have been the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The bombing was undoubtedly a fruit of the same seed, only it was more public and with an evident loss of life. It should have been a wake-up call. The bombing by Timothy McVeigh was rooted in the anger of the “Patriot Movement” of the 1990s where we saw a springing up of state “militias” paranoid over an impending takeover of the United States by the United Nations (or the New World Order, Illuminati, etc.). This fear of a takeover was broadcast on AM radio shows, such as Milton Cooper’s Hour of the Time (the prototype of the Alex Jones mold we have today). Cooper repeatedly called for action against the government, which he felt had betrayed American citizens to another purpose. This purpose was originally some kind of UFO conspiracy and is reflected in Cooper’s seminal conspiracy theory work Behold a Pale Horse. McVeigh was a fan; Cooper claims to have met him shortly before the bombing, but this claim cannot be substantiated (Jacobson 2018). McVeigh was also a fan of the book The Turner Diaries, a notoriously racist and anti-Semitic book describing the takeover of the United States by a group of communist liberals aligned with various races and ethnic groups. All the rhetoric we saw on January 6 with some differences in proper nouns.
The seed of January 6—pro-Trump fascists violently assaulting the Capitol building in a vain, futile, and ignorant attempt to stop something that was merely a formality—is in the influence of the 1958 political group The John Birch Society (JBS). If you are unfamiliar with the JBS, it was the incubator for the right-wing mess we have today (Towler 2018). The society is named after a man who died at the hands of Chinese forces shortly after World War II. To be clear, he was not killed fighting Communists, which is what the JBS claims. Instead, it was likely a misunderstanding that led to his death. John Birch is a myth to the John Birch Society.
The JBS’s professed goal was to stop a Communist takeover of the United States. It was a fear much more real then than it is today, but they were a group that didn’t think J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, and the House Un-American Activities Commission was going far enough to root out Communists. In 1958, the JBS internally published a book, The Politician, which claimed that President Eisenhower was secretly Communist. The claim is telling because, though we never hear it spoken aloud today, Eisenhower is arguably the first modern Republican president. However, he would be loudly derided as a leftist and progressive by mainstream Republicans for his policies today. The Society, according to its website, says the book is the first to expose the “deep state” (jbs.org). If you look at JBS literature from the 1960s, it looks like a list of today’s right-wing talking points. This is not a coincidence. The current CEO of the society agreed that the modern GOP is finally embracing the JBS (Gomez 2017).
The John Birch Society’s most prominent effect was framing political debates not as competing ways forward from different perspectives but as wars for survival. The JBS wasn’t merely saying we can do this better; they were saying if you don’t align with us, you are going to die, and the country is turning Communist. This rhetoric hopes that you agree or you will have to tell your kids about the time when America was free. Couple this with a growing conspiracy-theory fueled paranoia (Brack 2015), and the result is Timothy McVeigh parking a rental truck in front of the federal building in Oklahoma City. In McVeigh’s mind, he wasn’t committing mass murder; he was striking a self-defensive blow against the perceived tyrannical government.
A similar theme emerged when Edgar Welch drove from Salisbury, North Carolina, to a pizza joint in Washington, D.C., to free the kids kidnapped and held for sex-trafficking and murder by liberal politicians. On January 6, those who stormed the Capitol Building were trying to save democracy by ironically fighting against the election results. They were doing so because they were told by people of such importance—no less than the president himself—that the election was stolen by “them.” It’s not just because they couldn’t deal with the fact that their guy lost. Trump’s loss pushed people already on the fringes of conspiracism to full belief based primarily on their political belief that the soul of the country and its very existence was now imperilled (Miller et. al 2016).2
The JBS planted the idea that if conservatism lost, it was because democracy itself had been stolen. They were hugely influential on Senator Barry Goldwater’s campaign as he railed against the country’s subversion by the Tri-Lateral Commission—an innocuous nongovernmental think tank that most Americans were barely aware existed (Goldwater and Shadegg1980). Replace today’s fear of “the deep state” or “the Illuminati,” and you have Goldwater’s rhetoric. Every time they talk about their opposition as “elites,” “the media hates us,” or loudly and ironically professing their love for the Constitution, it’s the JBS speaking through them. The primary difference is that the JBS coupled their polemics with accusations of Communism—although we still have that today too.
This brings us to the present. If the struggle for survival is real, we can debate what we can and cannot do to survive. However, the struggle is not real. The voters spoke, and once again, the Democratic party won the popular vote. This time, they won the electoral vote as well. Instead of resigning to the loss, the now former president dredged up the language of the JBS, of the militia movement of the 1990s, and his rhetoric of the past four years. He framed the pro forma counting of the electoral college votes as the nail in their coffin, and all they had to do was fight back. They—having been primed for nearly seventy years as being the scrappy underdogs fighting a Manichean war against not political opponents but pure evil itself—had to act.
In May 2019, the FBI issued a bulletin warning that this kind of conspiratorial thinking was becoming a real-world threat (FBI 2019). The bulletin received little traction, and within William Barr’s Department of Justice no action, as they were reluctant to act against their support. We know that the riot was not a spontaneous action but had been motivated by this type of thinking for weeks. Skeptics had been warning of this for years, but we were dismissed as hyperbolic Chicken Littles who were mistaking rhetoric for action. As private citizens, there was very little we could do to stem the religious-like zeal that these people seemed to have. The failure to stop what happened lies in the very chamber that it ended in. Instead of worrying about poll numbers or angering the rabid base that was already feeling cornered in, they could have thrown water on the fire instead of stoking it.
Notes
1. Zoe Quinn (@unburnt Witch): “Hey, if you wanna say GamerGate led to this without acknowledging that GG was a symptom that has always existed, an extension of DV, and the failure of online platform holder to act right, I really don’t appreciate being used like that!!” 18:53 06 Jan 21.
2. Miller argues that belief in conspiracy theories serves an ideological and psychological need. In this case, it is both because it fulfills the ideological position of the JBS’s rhetoric and comfort for supporters in the wake of Trump’s defeat.
References
Brack, C.E. 2015. Master’s Thesis: The Conspiracist Style in American Extremism: An Education Based Approach to Combating Conspiracism. National Defense University.
FBI. 2019. Anti-Government, Identity Based, and Fringe Political Conspiracy Theories Very Likely Motivate Some Domestic Extremists to Commit Criminal, Sometimes Violent Activity. Washington DC: FBI.
Goldwater, B., and S. Shadegg. 1980. With No Apologies. Berkely, CA: Berkely Books.
Gomez, C. 2017. Exclusive interview with John Birch Society CEO. The New American 33(1) (January 9). Available online at https://thenewamerican.com/exclusive-interview-with-john-birch-society-ceo/.
Jacobson, M. 2018. Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America. New York, NY: Blue Rider Press.
Miller, J.M., K.L. Saunders, and C.E. Farhart. 2016. Conspiracy endorsement as motivated reasoning: The moderating roles of political knowledge and trust. American Journal of Political Science 60(4) (October): 824–844.
Towler, C. 2018. The John Birch Society is still influencing American politics, 60 years after its founding. The Conversation (December 6). Available online at https://theconversation.com/the-john-birch-society-is-still-influencing-american-politics-60-years-after-its-founding-107925.