Robert H.W. Welch Jr., founder of the John Birch Society, weaponized conspiracy theories to frame the 1952 Eisenhower-Taft election as a "dirtiest deal," echoing modern "stop the steal" rhetoric. Modeled after authoritarian communist cells with strict hierarchies, the society targeted Justice Earl Warren and mythologized missionary John Birch as a martyr against communism. Despite Welch's private admission that impeachment was unlikely, his public campaign to unite Americans against alleged left-wing infiltration grew the group to 95,000 members by 1965, establishing a template for modern far-right extremism that persists today. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Wherever You Get Your Podcasts00:02:03
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcohol.
I'm a guy.
Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, or it's really like a stone sculpture.
Identity Subsumed Into The Show00:03:26
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Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
I love podcasts.
I don't.
Shit.
You're so nerd.
Is that are we allowed to open a show that way?
I don't know.
Well, we did it.
I let you do it.
I didn't mean to know.
God damn it.
This is terrible.
Welcome to Behind the Malaise with Robert Evans and the Bastards.
I am so sorry to ask you to co-host now.
Yep.
Yep.
I have completely failed.
This is backing band.
Well, as everyone can hear now by listening to the tremendous failure that has just occurred in everyone's earballs, this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about bad people, namely me.
And my guests today are Dan and Jordan.
That's us.
So great to be here.
If I just said Dan or if I just said Jordan, I would have to be more specific.
But when I say Dan and Jordan, I think everyone knows that it's the knowledge fight, guys.
Your identity has become subsumed into your podcast.
So enjoy that.
It was inevitable.
Yeah.
It was going to happen.
I think a lot of people have taken to just calling us Jordan.
Yeah.
Jore Dan.
Capital J, capital D.
Yeah, sort of a combined noun.
I feel like they could do better.
Who could be better?
Could they?
Yeah.
Can you?
Dan Jordan, because it would have to be like Dan Ann or something like that.
But Jore Dan is like, I feel like it's really just like giving like clout to one name.
But you're stressing that D pretty hard right in the middle, and I can appreciate that.
Fair enough.
I think it's great we're really getting into the weeds of this since they're solving it once and for all.
You know, that's what people come here for.
You know what?
With explanation, I'll let you have it.
I'll let you have it, guys.
Thank you.
All right, Jordan, are you ready to hear about some shit?
You bet.
Oh, yeah.
Robert.
Yay.
Post your podcast.
So, you know, what sucks many, many, many things.
You know, I would say, broadly speaking, the right wing in America, the Republican Party, the looming fascist threat that has been slightly weed whacked back, but is still threatening to encroach and choke all of us to death forever.
That yeah.
Are you guys a fan of that?
It's a little bit like a Dungeons and Dragons monster when you put it like that.
It is basically a Dungeons and Dragons monster.
So this episode is about E. Gary Gygax.
Yeah.
This episode is about.
So Gary Gygax invented Dungeons and Dragons.
This episode is about the man who invented the modern Republican Party, by which I mean the party of Donald Trump, by which I mean, you know, the fascists.
And his name was Robert Welch.
I didn't know.
You guys know who Robert Welch is?
Candy Corn And Dark Secrets00:16:04
I don't know who Robert Welch is.
I'm going to feign ignorance for about three quarters of a second.
You definitely know who Robert Welch.
Look at me and say, did you know about Robert Welch?
The whole point of me is to not know about Robert Welch.
You know him by a different name.
No, that's.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You, Jordan, know him as the founder of the John Birch Society.
Oh, I do know him.
You know him as the candy man.
Yes.
Oh, I do know him as the candy man.
Oh, shit.
Oh, yeah.
He's also a candy guy.
Big into candy.
That's right.
So if you haven't heard of the John Birch Society, they're loosely speaking, why we got President Ronald Reagan, President Donald Trump, and the whole ecosystem of right-wing grifters who make money off of convincing their fans that everybody on the left is part of a Marxist conspiracy.
Like the idea that Joe Biden is a communist agent, which our good friend of the pod, Alex Jones, brings up repeatedly, is a descendant of a John Birch Society talking point, or at least a family of those talking points.
So that's the guy we're talking about today.
Bob Welch, founder of the John Birch Society.
Bad dude.
Yeah, I think, first off, my initial sign that he's not a good guy is you're talking about him.
So that's a red flag right off the bat.
And then Bob Welch, that's just a right-wing name.
Babe.
That's just what it is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Bob Welch is, you'd guess that he founded some sort of society that did something terrible.
So Robert H.W. Welch Jr., which by God, the more thorough you are with the name, the worse it sounds, was born on a farm.
Why do all these jerks have the initials HW too?
Yeah, he does.
He does.
He's got a real George Bush vibe going on.
Yeah.
What the hell?
Well, I mean, that's how the word white starts, right?
In their world, white.
I think that's what it is.
Robert White Welch.
Roger Huelch.
That actually scans completely.
You might be right.
You might be on something.
So Whitey was born on a farm in Shoen County, North Carolina on December 1st, 1899.
He was a brilliant child.
Some might even say a genius.
He could read by age three and he knew his multiplication tables by age four.
By age seven, he was studying Latin.
And at age 12, he enrolled in the University of North Carolina.
He graduated at age 16.
And yeah, everything that happens in the story should be taken as evidence for why Child Prodigy should be dosed with paint chips.
I think that's, yeah.
I always feel like when I hear something like that, and I hear like someone new multiplication tables at four, I'd be like, who prove it?
Yeah, I would say prove it.
And if you can prove that a kid is that smart, you got to slow him down somehow.
I would love to be able to quiz that four-year-old.
Yeah.
Let's see how deep your knowledge of the table is.
Yeah.
And I think if you're a four-year-old with perfect knowledge of the multiplication tables, take him out of school for two years.
Don't let him read books.
Make him work on a farm.
Make him hunt.
Did you just write a Kurt Vonnegut short story at us?
What just happened?
Look, Vonnegut was right.
The problem is that people are too smart.
If he's too fast, give him braces.
Take him down a notch.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Slow him down somehow.
Just, you know, put blinders on the kid.
Feed him lead.
Whatever it takes.
And then in the universe is true.
If you're not good at something, give him steroids and shit.
Give him all the drugs to make them smarter.
I think everyone who can't do the multiplication tables by age four, mandatory steroids.
Everyone who can, illiterate farm in the Midwest.
I like it.
That's my ideal society.
The health ranger has informed me that I would be in charge of children.
Okay.
So, yeah, Bobby Welch, child prodigy, entered the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1917, a year when nothing else of particular interest occurred.
He resigned after just two years when he decided that a military career was not for him.
Instead, he wanted to be a lawyer.
So he enrolled in Harvard Law School.
But this didn't wind up working out much better for him.
Robert clashed regularly with his professors, particularly the hilariously named Felix Frankfurter, who would grow up.
It's a real guy.
It's a real guy's name.
He went on to become a Supreme Court justice.
Of course.
A lot of people have to overcome something in order to do something great.
And I think being born with Felix.
Exactly.
Explain what you were just talking about.
Exactly.
He had his handicap and it made him great.
Yeah.
Supreme Court justice, your honor hot dog.
Yeah.
Because that's the hardest.
If you want to be the hardest it can be to for other people to laugh at you, become a Supreme Court justice because then everybody's got to be scared.
One way or the other.
You're going to terrify half the population.
If it pleases the hot dog.
Oh, God.
Oh, God.
I'm so sorry.
Please don't take away my reproductive health care.
Footlong Coney.
In the case of Heinz versus the United States, he's going to have to recuse himself.
I was.
Yeah, he could not rule on anything to do with the John Kerry campaign for that reason.
Frank Furter was a liberal Supreme Court justice, which might explain why Robert Welch hated him so much.
Welch's biography, which is quite a text, says that the young Robert Welch hated Felix Frank Furter because, quote, the young man from North Carolina recognized hogwash when he heard it.
And a hogwash is spelled in all caps and also spelled out with like a dash in between each word.
That's good stuff.
It's a fascinating publication.
That's a Canterbury Tales level of bullshit right there.
Yeah, magnificent.
Did someone who was with the John Birch Society write this biography?
Oh, yes, absolutely.
Yeah, no, a thousand percent.
Like their sort of editorial style.
Yeah.
It was written probably by Bob Welch.
Yeah.
I would assume.
In 1922, Welch left Harvard just a year before he would have graduated.
He decided that he'd learned enough and it was time to make a shitload of money.
And this Wunderkind had a specific plan for how he was going to get rich.
The motherfucking candy business.
Hell yeah.
Hell yeah.
Candyman.
Candy's where the money is, man.
You know, that's the thing about candy.
You get older.
It stays appealing to people of the same age.
I don't know why I tried to.
I don't know why I tried to.
Tried to fast times that.
Tried to fast times that one.
So, Bob's brilliant idea was something called the Papa Sucker.
The Papa Sucker.
The Papa Sucker, yeah.
Speaking of fast times jokes, because it is what it sounds like what would happen when your dad gets a blowjob.
But it was actually a caramel lollipop designed to not melt in the summer heat.
That sounds exactly like what would happen if your dad got a blowjob right there.
I'm pretty sure it's a summer heat.
Yeah.
And like your dad's penis, it was filled with dangerous chemicals, which is why it didn't melt in the summer heat.
Probably that's good stuff.
Not a good line to keep.
You gotta take the rough with the smooth, as they say.
You know, dangerous chemicals.
It's not melting.
Especially when it comes to your dad's genitals.
Sure.
You gotta take the rough with the smooth when it comes to a papa sucker.
Oh, unfortunate, unfortunate.
This is really gone on the rails, but they're not great rails.
So despite the novelty of Bob Welch's papa sucker, his first business, named the Oxford Candy Company, did not go well.
The cause seems to have, again, been the fact that Bob Welch did not play well with others.
He had an increasing series of tense disagreements with his board of directors.
In 1929, they had a fight over what he described as their desire to reduce the quality of their products to improve profits.
Welch quit and again walked away.
So we're getting a bit of a theme.
Like everything.
Damn it, gentlemen.
All I want to do is torture children for morality tales.
He just keeps getting into disagreements with people, be they his professors or his business partners, and then piecing the fuck out.
That's that's early life, Bob Welch.
Not an easy guy to get along with.
So he's also not an easy guy to dissuade from his sacred task of selling candy.
He set up another candy company, this one in Berlin, and money was tight because he had a couple of kids by this point.
So he took a second job as a salesman for E.J. Brack and Sons, which was one of the largest candy companies in the world.
They're the people who make candy corn, among other, you know, brack.
Oh, so they're evil too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, they're history's greatest monsters.
Gotcha.
Candy corn, candy pumpkin.
They make candy pumpkin.
It's that, yeah, the candy corn substance is in a bunch of different shapes.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You mean the little pumpkins that are made out of candy corn?
I do like the very specific term substance.
Whatever it's made of, which you don't know, and neither do I.
It's just a substance.
Somebody tried to convince me that like candy pumpkins are better.
Like candy corn sucks, but candy pumpkins are good.
No, it's just more.
It's the same.
It's a larger piece of the same terrible candy.
It's just a ball.
You know, it is great.
I have this.
There's this.
So the person I lived with for a while is a Chinese national, and she introduced me to this wonderful restaurant in Portland that's like a Chinese street food restaurant.
And they have this dish that I'd never had before that's just corn and fried batter and green onions and cilantro.
And it's fucking awesome.
Oh, it's so good.
Like, I don't know how it's incredible.
But you know what?
Bob Welch would really hate the idea of you living with a Chinese national.
He would hate everything.
As soon as I said Chinese, he would have started screaming.
He would have.
Mao, this, Mao.
Well, I don't know.
If I convinced him my friend was descended from Chiang Kai-shek, he'd probably have been all right with that.
He was a big Chang head, as that was, as they call it.
Long way around.
Yeah.
That would be Mao segenation.
Mao segenation.
Dan, Dan, are you leaving?
Why are you running?
Dan, it's just a bit of a damn.
I feel like you had that one in your head for years, Jordan.
And then you shoehorned it into a joke about Chiang Kai-shek because no one.
Oh, if only.
I'm tortured by new versions of that same shitty joke all day.
Jordan's made that joke 15 times on the podcast.
I've just edited it out every time.
Yeah, that's it.
You're wise to do that.
So this second candy company didn't work very well because it was the Great Depression and people didn't have disposable income for candy.
Probably was a bad time to start a candy business 1929.
And his new company fell apart in 1933.
Fortunately, Brax was still making money and he was doing well enough as a salesman that they took him on as a full-time employee, which kept him afloat for the next year or so.
In 1934, he started his third candy company, the Midwest Candy Company of Attica, Indiana.
And unfortunately, his candy was as bad as his company's name.
And Welch's third enterprise failed.
So he says, what about the family sucker?
How was that doing?
Was he still selling the papa suckers?
No, he had to leave the papa sucker behind when he had a fight with his business partners.
So all the papa suckers that are getting sold.
They're keeping suckers?
Yeah, they're keeping the pop-up.
That's the worst loss.
That's the worst loss right there.
He's not getting a dime from any of the papas that are getting sucked these days, which is a real shame.
So yeah, three failed candy companies.
And in 1935, Bob Welch files for bankruptcy, which is, you know, pretty on brand for him.
It's the financial equivalent of like running away when you get into an argument.
So so far, everything scans.
He returns to Boston and he gets a job working for his younger brother, who was also in the candy business and a lot more successful than his older brother.
The James O. Welch Company was a success.
And this is what finally brought Robert Welch the wealth he desired.
He was made VP in charge of sales and advertising.
And as the company grew, this meant Robert spent years traveling across the country to offices in Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
Now a wealthy man, he began racking up positions on government boards, the Boston Chamber of Commerce, the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce, and eventually a role as a national counselor for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Is there anything that turns you into a right-wing lunatic more than getting rich off of somebody else's work?
Yeah, especially your brother's work.
Yeah, right?
Isn't that a regular right-wing thing?
Isn't that how they all get to where they are?
Go ahead, sorry.
He takes a lot of credit for the company's success, but judging by the fact that he had three failed candy companies and only succeeded when he latched onto his brothers, I'm going to guess that James was the talent in the family.
That might be the case.
Yeah.
Didn't he, if I recall correctly, didn't they make some like pretty like memorable candies?
Yeah, no, the James O. Welch companies made some of the all-time great candies.
They all sound weird when you hear them described today.
I think, right?
Yeah, and they have some sort of weird sugary rope thing.
I don't know.
Like, they made a bunch of candy.
Cowards.
It was old-timey candy.
Yeah.
It's not like the God-fearing modern candy that we have today.
It was all strange and terrifying and involved in the camera.
Whohound little nibbles?
Those little see, you can't even sell kids something with whore in the name now.
It's just the social justice warriors.
Yeah.
Cancel cultures, run amuck, and now we can't have our whorehound candy.
Why can't I buy a fuck stick today?
Why can't I go to any candy shop I want to and buy a fuck stick?
I wanted a fuck, a fuck stick and a papa sucker.
Come on.
So I just feel like all men.
It's sugar mamas.
Sugar mamas.
Oh, really?
Jesus.
Way to be a misogynist, Dave.
But I think, but isn't like Sugar Daddy and Sugar Baby, aren't those also candies?
They have junior mints, sugar daddies, sugar babies, sugar mamas, Welch's fudge, Welch's frappe, and pom-poms.
Wow.
I finally understand the popularity of incest porn on the internet.
I think it all comes from there.
It's so creepy.
It all comes from the papa suckers and the sugar mamas.
It all starts there.
I see it.
It's all making sense now.
And the pom-poms.
Yeah.
You know, now that you say that, Jordan, it makes the Welch Company motto, suck on a mama, make a lot more sense.
Yeah, that does sound right.
That all is starting to scan now.
So like all men who get rich through a mixture of blind luck and family ties, Robert Welch decided to write a book.
The road to salesmanship was about exactly the book you'd guessed that it was.
I found a copy of it on Amazon today for $3.99, and the product description text is wonderful.
I'm just going to read you the Amazon description text, which is a little bit off the beaten path, but it's quite funny.
The Road to Salesmanship brackets pamphlet, Robert Welch, Robert not capitalized, Welch capitalized, 1941, rare and out-of-print collector's item, limited availability.
The road to salesmanship, pamphlet in brackets, by Robert Welch, this time capitalized, 1941.
This is a document and then news sentence that was written by the founder of the John Birch Society, but written decades before he founded the John Britch Society.
Now they start calling it the John Britch Society.
This is not about the John Britch Society or any projects or principles of the John Britch Society.
This is a unique look at the early thoughts of Robert Welch, long before he founded the John Britch Society.
I enjoyed that.
So I looked through the book a bit.
I found it online.
There's also a free copy.
Don't pay Amazon for this fucking book.
So I and don't read it also.
It's not worth reading.
But I skimmed a couple of chapters just to see if there was anything entertaining about it because I was hoping that it was filled with, I don't know, a bunch of crypto fascist nonsense.
And it's even too boring for that.
It seemed to have been mostly folksy anecdotes about his sales experience and inoffensive advice on how to sell stuff.
He does start the, he does, I enjoyed that he starts the book by noting that unlike like loser jobs like bricklaying and lumberjacking, being a salesman is a true profession, like being a doctor.
Like he specifically throws shit on bricklayers and lumberjacks.
Any idiot can do those jobs.
Salesmen Versus Military Production00:10:35
Selling shit, that's hard.
Salesmen do occupy the same rarefied territory as doctors nowadays.
You know, you think about a used car salesman, you're like, that guy is a surgeon, the same level of quality.
Well, Dr. Smith is just a used body salesman.
I mean, you would think when the coronavirus first hit, our first responders were the doctors, the nurses, and the candy salesmen.
Yeah, absolutely.
Also, I really do think the candy sells itself.
Yeah.
It doesn't take much.
I'm not impressed by a candy salesman.
I mean, as long as it's not a disastrously gross candy, or as long as it's not called the Papa Sucker, you're going to be all right.
You're going to be all right.
MMs have never needed an ad campaign.
Yeah.
That's just a good idea.
Yes, they absolutely have.
But it's just a way.
They had a long one every Christmas.
They've actually had some great ad campaigns.
Yeah, but they didn't need them.
They would have sold their chocolate with her without them.
Yeah.
And meanwhile, I think the only job that Robert Welch did was the papa sucker.
Suck on your papa.
Yeah.
Oh, boy.
Yeah, I didn't expect us to go down.
Anyway, Jamie puffed us on for this episode, apparently.
He ends the book on a series of final don'ts for salesmen, which include, and these are the actual text of all of these is more boring than you'd expect, but the don'ts are funny.
A knife can have two edges.
Everybody knows a drum is hollow.
People rent offices to do business in.
Remember the future.
And professors belong in classrooms.
Wait, those are the don'ts?
Those are the don'ts.
So don't professor.
Yeah, don't be unless you're in a classroom.
Don't teach people about candy when you're trying to sell to them.
Ooh, that's a good point.
Don't be a professor.
Oh, I get you now.
Especially don't be a liberal candy professor.
Oh, you can't do that.
Oh, they'll remake.
I like to imagine that the knife has two edges thing is a reference to the many knife fights that candy salesmen got into in the 1940s.
That wouldn't surprise me.
Brutal business.
It's dangerous work.
You saw what happened to the Augustus Gloop Kid.
Yeah, and that Robin Williams movie, The Candyman.
So the impression that I got from my limited reading of this book is that young Bob Welch was something of a pompous know-it-all, but I got no hint that he was particularly unhinged or unreasonable.
Like, it's not, there's nothing like, there's no hints as to what he became in the book.
He just seems like kind of a dick, which I guess is one hint, but not much of one compared to what happens next.
So during World War II, Welch served on the War Production Board.
If it seems odd to you that a candyman would be appointed to help manage national military production during a global battle for the survival of democracy, yes.
Yes, it does.
But that is what happened.
What are bullets but M ⁇ Ms?
Yeah.
A bullet's just another kind of papa sucker.
We have a long history of giving people jobs they're not qualified for in this country.
It's our greatest strength.
So as a result of his work in the War Production Board, Welch spent more and more time in Washington, D.C. during the 40s.
He also became chairman of the National Confectioners Association's Washington Committee.
In 1947, he received the candy industry's highest honor, the Kettle Award from Candy Industry Magazine.
So he's really, he's arrived.
You can't top the Kettle Award if you're a candy man.
For what did he receive this award?
For getting all those kids to suck on their papas.
Yeah.
But I mean, like, high sales.
Was he a good candy creator?
Was he just around lineup?
Did he win World War II?
Why did he get this award?
Honestly, I think, and this isn't written anywhere, but reading between the lines from everything I read about his earlier life, I think his real talent was that he was very good at getting other rich businessmen to like him.
And I like, that's why you'll notice the thing that he really does best.
He wasn't a particularly good business owner or candy salesman, but he was great at being on the board of big candy industry companies because rich guys liked him.
I think that was his talent.
It's that sort of thing.
It'll take you a long way in America.
Yeah, I mean, the analog is like people who get a lot of stuff through networking.
Like maybe not their intrinsic skills.
They might get more gigs or shows or stuff because of the ability to schmooze and stuff.
And Robert Welch is, from everything I can tell, it seems like he was pretty good at that.
And that's how you get a kettle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's how you get a kettle.
You got it.
You get a kettle.
Look, nobody's trying to take the man's kettle award.
Sure, he fucking brought us closer to fascism than any other living or any other American who's ever lived, but he won that kettle.
He earned the kettle.
Oh, did you know the weekend is freaking out because he didn't get the kettle?
Do you know that Tom Hanks won kettle two years in a row?
Both of them for his Forrest Gump.
Life is like a box of chocolates.
All right.
That was the best thing that ever happened to the candy industry.
Okay.
Exactly.
You're right.
We need to get away from it.
It rippled throughout the next year.
Academy Award two years in a row.
Kettle two years in a row.
Very impressive.
All right.
All right.
I thought it was because of Philadelphia, but never mind.
He doubled where he eats Reese's peanut butter cups in Philadelphia.
I don't know if that's true.
Yeah, Tom Hanks is actually the only man to get the egot cay.
Yeah.
Okay.
So Welch's real gift seems to have been in organizing people and businesses.
He had a genius for managing teams and for getting, again, rich people to like him.
In 1950, he was appointed to the board of directors for the National Association of Manufacturers.
He held this job for a while and through it was in regular contact with wealthy and powerful people in a bunch of different industries.
And it's at this point that I'm going to start quoting from The World of the John Birch Society by DJ Malloy, which is a real fun book about a bunch of terrible shit.
Welch first became involved in politics in 1946 when he volunteered to work on Republican Robert Bradford's successful campaign to become governor of Massachusetts.
He was appointed vice chairman of the state's Republican Finance Committee two years later.
In 1949, Welch went a major step further, however, when he announced his intention to become the next lieutenant governor of the Bay State.
Like many other conservatives and businessmen of the time, reducing government interference in the economy and turning back the creeping collectivism of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal were among Welch's principal concerns, as he made clear in an interview with Courtney Sheldon of the Christian Science Monitor on the eve of the election.
Our first and most important job, Welch explained, is to keep us from going any further than we have already gone in the extension of government ownership of business, operation of business, interference with business, control of business, and control of the details of our daily living.
He was also very strongly opposed, he said, to socialized medicine at the national or state level, to federal aid to education in any shape, manner, or form, and to federal housing plans.
So, 1940s, Bob Welch is like, not only fuck the New Deal, fuck the concept of state-paid health care, fuck the concept of federal aid to education, and fuck federal housing.
He was really ahead of him.
He doesn't know how to grow the candy business.
You make dental care free for everyone.
Candy goes out of the roof.
Come on, man.
And if all of this is a long-term business strategy, that's actually a good plan.
I think so.
It is.
It is.
And if all those poor people don't have to pay rent, Jesus.
You get a second kettle for that.
You give poor families their rent for free.
They're going to buy a lot more candy for those kids.
It's true.
Hell yeah.
It's true.
He is right about education being a real barrier to the candy industry, though.
You want people as dumb as hell if you want them eating enough candy.
Oh, that's true.
Any kind of nutritional information in schools is going to be a hindrance.
Yeah.
So from the late 1940s, it was kind of clear the guy that Bob Welch was going to turn into in a speech in May 1949.
He argued that it was no secret that there was a war going on in the United States between collectivism and individualism.
He described this war as occurring on many fronts.
In the field of commerce and industry, the battle is between free enterprise and state socialism, he said.
In politics, it is between the people's ownership of the government and the government's ownership of the people.
In sociology, it is between self-reliance and dependence on a welfare state.
In international relations, it is between a brutally aggressive tyranny and the remains of an independent civilization.
So that's rich people would just be like, oh, I want more money.
Like, I would at least be able to engage with that, but that's a whole long list of fake bullshit.
Leave me alone.
Just say you want more money.
And what's impressive about it is that it's the exact same rhetoric that you hear out of the like mainstream Republican Party today.
Totally.
Like, like, Welch really like the thing that he predicted more than anything was like the way to kind of frame this battle.
But because like, yeah, that it's a fight between in this period, the like neat, the late 1940s and 50s, when like the government has just finished a long stint of cracking down brutally on left-wing organizing, defining like this as a battle between free enterprise and state socialism.
Like that was the thing he was doing was not just attacking socialism, which Americans had done for a while, but defining like the mainstream Democratic Party as socialists and refusing to deviate from that line.
Like that was really kind of one of Welsh's big innovations.
Branding.
Branding your enemies as opposed to yourself.
Yeah.
And also the idea that, no, we're, we're not, this is not, you know, politics is not some sort of grand debate between, you know, two sides with different opinions on how things might work, trying to figure out the way to make a better society.
It is a fight between tyranny and any hope of survival.
And like the other side is nothing but pure tyranny.
It's like evil stuff.
Yeah.
Like our head of the Federal Elections Commission said.
Yeah, it fucking rules.
Yeah.
Well, described the battle between liberals and conservatives in the United States as a war that would determine whether we are going to leave our children and our grandchildren a world at least as good as the one we have inherited or one that has already plunged into the incipient shambles of a new dark ages.
He was right in the inverse, I suppose.
Yeah, I mean, he did help bring us into a new dark ages.
So good on you, Bob.
You know who else is going to bring us into a new dark age?
Liberals, Conservatives, And War00:03:47
CBS?
Yeah, I mean, they're going to try.
But they're going to do it with the help of the products and services that support this podcast.
That made no sense.
That our products and services are going to plunge the world into a new dark age?
No, that they're going to help CBS do it.
I think they might.
Ow.
Is the masked singer on CBS?
I have no idea.
Who is the masked singer?
In point.
Do they have the same masked singer every time?
Absolutely not.
The whole point is guessing who's behind the mask.
Oh, okay.
I've never seen it.
They have celebrities in costumes and then they sing and then a panel of judges guess who's behind the mask.
All right.
Well, that's worse than Bill Gates and Rashida Jones at least.
Sarah Palin was on it.
Of course she was.
Never mind.
It's today only second to Bill Gates and Rashida Jones.
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And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
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I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
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My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Bernie Sanders Style Supporters00:14:58
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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We're back!
And we're talking about the masked singer and how it's almost certainly evidence that the United States has, in fact, slid into a new dark age through which there is no escape.
And Dr. Drew was on it, too.
Why not?
See, that's the kind of thing, like, if aliens came down and I had to like defend the continued existence of human civilization, I think I could do a pretty good job until they brought up clips from that show.
Like, I think I could defend us from like war crimes charges and stuff, but not that.
Here's this guy who's on the radio giving medical advice to teens for 20 years.
He's dressed like a hippopotamus singing a song poorly.
Yeah, you know what?
You know what?
What are you going to use?
A virus?
Big lasers?
Like, just do it.
Just be quick about it.
If the first questions aliens ask is, was Sean Spicer a good dancer?
We're going to be in real trouble there.
But you know who wasn't on the masked singer?
Sean Spicer.
Robert Welch.
Yeah, Bob Welch was not.
Although he would have hated that show and called it evidence of a communist conspiracy.
So Bob Welch's appetite had been, you know, pretty sufficiently stirred by the 1950s.
And again, he had, you know, he'd kind of climbed as high as the candy industry would get him.
So like what you see in the late 40s is he reaches the heights that a candy man can hit, and he immediately starts screaming about how communists are going to have infiltrated the Democratic Party and are going to destroy democracy.
Isn't that the least?
He lives like a normal career check.
Yeah, isn't that what?
Yeah.
The problem is that Eminem Mars was run by Marxist collectivists.
Yeah, I assume it was because he didn't have a wonk evader.
You know, he could only go as high.
I'm going to make so many more fucking Willy Wonka references.
I predict you will.
Oh, it's not going to stop.
I do not have trouble seeing it.
Bob Welch is a lot like Willy Wonka, to be honest, because I think they both believe business owners should be able to kill children.
Yep, I agree with that.
And enslave people.
Yes, he is.
So Bob Welch, you know, in the 1950s, starts getting way more into politics.
Now, it's unclear precisely when his terror of the left began.
Again, when you read this guy's background, the stuff that wasn't just written by the John Birch Society decades later, it kind of comes out of left field.
Like he's just a candyman, and then boom, he's screaming about the new dark ages.
But however, it started, it was in full form by July of 1950 when he wrote this in a fundraising letter for a politician: quote: The strategy of the socialists is to divide and conquer, call all businessmen crooks so that nobody will speak up for them and strangle them with controls and taxation, bribe all the farmers with their own money into a selfish pressure group for more bribes, infiltrate the labor unions and convert them into political tools,
discredit the medical profession until the rest of the public clamors for government medicine, attack every segment of our population with tactics which alienate the support of all other segments.
The forces on the socialist side amount to a vast conspiracy to change our political and economic system.
Wow, your face changed while you were reading that.
It was almost like you went deep into that.
I channeled Bob.
That was dark.
There's a lot I love there, including the idea that socialists were going to discredit the medical profession in order to convince people to demand government medicine.
It was like, no.
False flag, buddy.
What discredited the medical profession was people going to the ER and getting a $40,000 bill for a three-hour visit.
That'll do it.
Yeah.
There are two ways to go on that thought process there, I suppose.
So this was the first time Bob Welch used the word conspiracy in a public statement, and it would not be the last.
Tragically, Welch's increasingly unhinged rants about socialism did not translate into success at the ballot box.
Probably because a lot of Americans in 1950 had directly and recently benefited from massive social welfare projects.
It really helps.
It really helps when you actually feel the effects of government working for you and you're like, oh, maybe this isn't an evil thing, you know?
And then, but millions of us didn't starve because of the civilian conservation project.
I don't think that's a bad conspiracy, to be honest.
Yeah.
Is the conspiracy that we didn't starve to death during the Depression?
Because I liked that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That was a good one.
Yeah.
So, yeah, he lost the race for lieutenant governor by a margin of more than 100,000 votes, which in 1950 was like most of the country.
Yeah, with inflation.
Yeah, with inflation, that's 10 million votes.
Yeah, yeah.
So it was not a close election.
Still, it is worth noting that nearly 60,000 Americans had cast their votes for Bob Welch and his giant left-wing conspiracy.
After his defeat, he wrote about his hopes that this core of supporters would, in the next years, grow into, quote, a far stronger, more militant, and more effective force of political strength than other campaigns to come.
He insisted, this crusade has just started.
Because it's always a good thing when right-wing ideologues describe what they're doing as a crusade.
That always gets white men all hot and bothered whenever you give them the opportunity to go on a crusade against anybody who's not a white man.
So that's what I'm saying.
You know my motto, Jordan.
ABC, baby, always be a crusading.
That's what you got to do.
Does ABCDC not the mass singer?
It's fox, because of course it is.
Yeah, it's scanned.
Okay.
So Welch tried his hand at politics again two years later when he attempted to be elected as a delegate for Senator Robert Taft's run for president.
Y'all remember when Bob Taft ran for president?
He was great.
Big old fellow.
Real.
You're thinking of William Howard Tom.
You are thinking about the first Taft, although I assume they were both would have had problems with the White House bathtubs.
No, this was Taft the sequel or the attempted sequel to Taft.
And like most CCs.
Yeah, it was not as good as the original.
Two T-Mot domes.
Okay.
So Taft was actually running to the right of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was also running for president at that time.
And at that point, for understandable reasons, Dwight Eisenhower was probably one of the most beloved men on the entire planet.
Yeah, that whole highway thing.
He hadn't done the highways yet, but he had helped beat the Nazis.
He was even more.
What did he do for me lately?
That's what I'm asking.
Okay.
He was even, Eisenhower at this point was even actually pretty popular with a lot of Soviets, including Marshal Zhukov, the most prominent commander of Soviet forces during World War II.
It's actually kind of a fun story that Marshal Zhukov, who again is like the main Soviet general who beat the Nazis, like he and Eisenhower were like real good buddies.
And Eisenhower gave him a tackle box filled with a bunch of hand-carved fishing lures.
And Zhukov kept it with him until the day he died.
It was right next to him when he died.
Really?
That's very cute.
Yeah, isn't that adorable?
Yeah.
I mean, admittedly, both guys are responsible for the deaths of millions.
So there is also the Nazis.
Ah, that's fair.
That's fair.
And other people.
You're not wrong.
Also, be funny if Zukov didn't fish.
Yeah.
You just really love them lures.
That's good.
It's very thoughtful.
So anyway, the fact that Eisenhower was, despite being a pretty hardcore Cold Warrior himself, capable of seeing communists as human beings enraged Bob Welch.
And Bob Welch was further enraged by the fact that Eisenhower supported taxing people to spend money on things that would benefit the public good, like highways.
That, to Bob Welch, was Marxism.
I want more money.
I don't need roads.
Just say it.
Yeah, you got to think all rich people are basically like Doc Brown.
Like, we don't need roads.
Yeah, exactly.
Where we're going.
Just dirgibles for the rich, and everyone else is a mud farmer.
That's the glorious dream of Bob Welch.
I do like any alternate universe where dirigibles factor heavily in the future.
I love it.
Well, I can't imagine Bob Welch getting his way and there not being thousands of dirigibles.
And giant mechanical spiders.
Oh, yeah.
You're going to have some.
Yeah.
So obviously, Ike won that election.
He's kind of hard to beat.
Again, if you really want to win an election, beat the Nazis.
That'll do.
If Biden defeats the Nazis, I will vote for him a second time for sure.
If Biden had sacked Hitler's Berlin, yeah, I think people would have, he would have, he would have had a more commanding lead.
What is Hitler's Berlin in South Carolina now?
Is that where it's at?
Or did I ask Florida?
So the final delegate count in that convention between Eisenhower and Taft was a blowout, 845 to 280.
So again, the final one, not particularly close, but the first count of delegates had been much narrower with 595 for Eisenhower and 500 for Taft.
It was a contentious and ugly contest between the two men.
Eisenhower's people accused Taft's people of stealing delegates.
There were a number of different votes before they got to the final count, and there were ugly floor fights.
And while Ike did prevail clearly in the end, a lot of Taft supporters were left feeling that they'd been cheated.
There was kind of a stop the steal thing, and Bob Welch was like the main architect of it.
Was Roger Stone like a baby at the time?
Yeah, I mean, I think he was a baby at the time.
Stop the rat fuck.
First round was rat fuck.
Yeah, you can kind of, honestly, the best, like the best way to describe it might be, it seems sort of like what happened with Bernie Sanders in 2016, at least in terms of how his supporters felt.
You had this like candidate who had a strong base of fanatical supporters who were like, the party leadership has fucked us out of winning.
And that's probably the case.
It does seem like the Republican Party leadership tipped the scale for Eisenhower.
At the same time, hard to imagine Taft doing better than Eisenhower.
At the time, Robert Welch, who was infuriated, called it the dirtiest deal in American political history.
Dirty new one?
Yeah.
There was a famous deal that he was mad about.
Not long ago.
Nothing made him angrier than Taft getting screwed.
Wow.
That's a papa sucker for you.
The Bernie Sanders of not wanting people to have health care.
So Eisenhower went on to electorally pants his Democratic challenger in one of the most overwhelming landslides in U.S. political history.
Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, would go on to do absolutely nothing of note, but that is, that was Ike's VP.
Most Americans were fine with more or less everything that went on.
And really the whole fight over Taft being cheated out of the nomination did not become a major national story.
The early 1950s were a time of broad political consensus among the nation's white supermajority.
So like, again, people were pretty happy.
The Eisenhower years are generally referred to by, again, white folks as like a golden era in America.
Because most people are going to be able to get a lot of people.
Hey, we get to eat alone, right, guys?
We all get to eat alone.
This is pretty great.
I love this country.
We get to buy terrible houses in the suburbs.
You look like me.
This place is great.
I just love this club.
I just bought a house for $11.
And I got a negative 4% loan.
It's really good.
They're paying me to have this house.
Owe me for buying this house.
Yeah.
I accidentally fell and landed on a fucking, what's the thing that people don't get anymore that they used to get?
Pension.
Oh.
I forgot what pensions were because they don't exist anymore for most of us.
Unless you're a cop.
So, yeah.
Again, most Americans, at least most of the Americans who, again, were white and thus the kind of people who got asked about things at that time, were pretty happy with Eisenhower's victory, but not Bob Welch.
Taft's defeat was something of a black pill for him, convincing him that party politics was hopeless and that party politics could never save the United States from the looming specter of communism.
1952 was also the year that Welch published his first political book, May God Forgive Us, which is solid time.
Give it to the man.
Love it.
Yeah.
That's Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God was already taken at that point, I believe.
So he couldn't use that one.
His first book is basically the title.
It was like, It's too late.
Yeah, you're fucked.
Oh, shit, Sophie.
Remind me to pitch you're fucked to, I don't know, Penguin or somebody.
We'll figure out what it's about later.
On the art of rat fucking, his salesmanship book.
Zen and the art of rat fucking.
A guide for hard-nosed Buddhist political operators.
I would read that book.
That actually sounds great.
That does sound fun.
That does sound fun.
Fundamentalist Roots Of A Book00:06:55
Yeah.
So it's one-hand rat fucking.
So May God Forgive Us was a full-throated condemnation of U.S. foreign policy in Asia, which Welch saw as the government basically handing an entire continent over to the commies.
He blamed it on the quote, almost unbelievable combination of trickery, chicanery, and treason of the Harry Truman administration.
Truman, as far as Welch was concerned, was basically a communist.
Now, the fact that Harry Truman had literally dropped two atom bombs in order to scare the Soviet Union didn't seem to change Welch's political calculus at all.
He was a communist.
It was too far left for me.
It was an act, man.
Can't see through it.
Can't see through the bullshit.
It was actually the deep state who launched those nuclear bombs.
So Truman was like, no, don't do it.
No, he was a hardcore Trotskyist.
Yeah, true.
Yeah, it was Peter Strzok actually dropped the nukes, if I recall correctly.
Sounds good.
So Bobby was most distraught by what he saw as the abandonment of nationalist warlord Chiang Kai-shek to communist warlord Mao Zitong.
That's where we get our Chiang Kai-shek reference.
I always love to have some good.
I like to throw in some red meat for the Chang gang, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Universal basic income.
Yeah, the whole thing.
Yeah.
Mauser C96s that fire 45 ACP slugs.
Oh, all the good Chinese warlord stuff.
So it was during the research for this book that Welch first came across a name that would come to define the rest of his life's work.
John Birch.
Y'all know who the actual John Birch was?
I do.
He does.
He explained it to me, and I'm so good at remembering exactly where the original forgotten.
I do know one thing about him, which you will almost certainly say here very shortly.
I actually don't think he's bluffing.
I think Jordan's bluffing.
I will tell you this.
What's the one thing you know?
The one thing I know that I remember specifically from you is, according to his friend, John Birch would have hated the John Birch Society.
Yes.
Yeah.
That is what I doubt.
That does seem fair.
Although there's debate about that.
But that is one account that you can find for sure.
Yeah.
We'll talk about his life and you can tell me how you think after that.
Okay, there's one thing I've skimmed about John Birch.
Okay.
Skimmed is even general.
Yeah, there's one thing that you overheard about John Birch and happened to remember.
I vaguely recall hearing this bit of information.
And now you understand my knowledge base.
Yes.
So the actual John Birch was born in India in 1918 to parents who were Christian missionaries on a three-year mission trip that ended in frustration and disappointment, presumably because most of the people they met were fine with the gods they already had.
Atlantic writer Thomas Mallon notes that, quote, evangelical zeal conflicted with the more material progress being pursued by the missionary Sam Higginbottom, their boss at the Allahabad Agricultural Institute.
In other words, John Birch's parents wanted to be like, you know, super Jesus-y with people, and their boss was more about improving people's material needs and hoping that inspired them to find Christ.
So they got tired of that shit.
We should give you food.
And the other guy's like, what if we told him they were going to hell?
That would probably work too, right?
What if food was contingent on them accepting Christ?
Yeah.
So the guy who cared about helping people stayed in India, helping people, and the Birch family moved back to Georgia.
So that's where John was born in India, but he grew up in Georgia.
And it would be fair to describe him as growing up a religious fundamentalist.
Like he was not just a religious man, but by the standards of the time, a fundamentalist.
Gotcha.
He went to Mercer University and was described by a biographer later in life as obstinate, passionate, and headstrong.
And I'm going to quote from The Atlantic here.
He hated Professor Felix Frankfurt.
The most notable stateside episode of his brief life involved participating in a 13-member student group against five professors whose theological views they deemed heretical.
The accusing students were a decided minority on the Baptist campus, and charges against the faculty were dismissed after a 10-hour hearing.
Birch went on to graduate at the top of his class, but found himself shunned by a portion of its members.
He began to feel that he had been used, provoked into the fight by some of Macon's towny Baptist ministers.
So, again, he's very hardcore religious and is like willing to accuse a bunch of professors of heresy.
But then after the whole situation shakes out, he starts to feel as if he's been manipulated by like ministers in the area.
And he kind of like he kind of has an awakening.
And after this point, most degree became less extreme religiously.
Like seems to have realized he was being manipulated.
Why do I feel like 60% of that debate was entirely about whether or not Jews were people?
Like you get the whole thing, right?
There was a JQ in that discussion.
So, yeah, John was smart enough to realize he'd been manipulated and he left that school.
He went to a Bible Institute next run by a popular evangelical radio preacher who suggested that Burch should travel to China as an evangelist.
John arrived there in September of 1940 in the middle of a long and almost impossibly bloody war between China and Japan and a civil war in China.
It was a rough fucking place to be in 1940.
Not an easy time to be anywhere really in China.
So John actually traveled closer to the danger and moved almost 200 miles from where he had initially moved in China to the city of Shangrao, which was very close to the front line.
Now, while he was a foreigner in China to sell people on Christianity, it does seem like he legitimately fell in love with the culture.
He learned to speak fluent Mandarin in just a year, which is not something you would do.
Yeah, he's very gifted with languages.
And yeah, that's probably not the kind of thing you do if you didn't have some appreciation for the culture.
The Atlantic notes that this exceeded.
I learned their language just to tell them they're dirty commies.
That's what I did.
Tell them they're commies.
Yeah, it's also noted by his biographer that he recognized his own racial prejudice, which was obviously a product of growing up white in Georgia and was struggling to overcome it in the 1940s.
So it seems like a guy who like grew up in a pretty regressive background, but was making significant strides to be a better person, open to new ideas and new people and new cultures.
Definitely not a villain, would be fair to say.
By 1942, Birch had become discouraged by the bureaucracy of the missionary effort in China, feeling as if it distracted from the more important work of providing meaningful aid for a nation that was riven by war and starvation.
He volunteered to serve in the U.S. military mission to China as a chaplain.
Before he got an answer, he wound up helping to rescue Jimmy Doolittle's raiders, who had just bombed civilians in Tokyo as revenge for Pearl Harbor and had landed in China.
As Birch's biographer notes, quote, they saw a gaunt Western man with several days' growth of beard, and one of the airmen exclaimed, well, Jesus Christ.
The missionary replied, that's an awfully good name, but I am not he.
So got a bit of wit to him.
Missionary Discouragement In China00:04:59
All right, you little, you little clever bastard.
Shut up.
Just say hi.
You gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta throw out something good there.
You gotta have a like.
I would have gone with, that's my dad's name.
That's the way you do that.
That's my dad's name.
That's the way you pull that one off.
Yeah.
That would have been a funnier remark.
If only John Birch had done more stand-up sets.
If only Jordan was around back then to do punch-up on social responses.
One note, John.
One note.
Let's take it one more time.
Let's take it from the top one more time.
You can't imagine if you were him giving that response that, like, what, 70 years later, some dicks would be like arguing about whether or not it was funny on a podcast.
Yeah, I imagine I would like that.
I would like 70 years from now, somebody to be like, ah, that was pretty good.
That's worth a life.
That one time Jordan responded to someone saying hi to him was not funny enough.
I'm excited for 70 years from now, behind Behind the Bastards, where they just go through old episodes of my podcast and punch it up, correct my mispronunciations.
But you know what'll be funny still?
You're outright transitions, Robert.
What do you need to do?
Oh, not to most people.
Capitalism's not going to last that long.
Nothing's going to last that long.
I can't.
But you do need to do an arbitrary.
Okay.
Here's a product.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
Writing About Eisenhower As Communist00:07:42
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Amaricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
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We're back.
That was the least funny one I've ever done.
That was a good one.
Hey, what are you?
What do you?
I don't need this shit.
I don't need this.
Seven years from now, people are going to be like, Robert was really being bullied by Sophie that one time when he talked about the John Birch Society.
That was the most noteworthy thing that happened before World War III.
Let's give them notes on it.
Even though none of them survived the initial nuclear exchange.
Anyway.
I'll start the Robert Evans Society.
Yeah, I'm going to wind up being the first victim of space communism.
Space fighters.
Birch would go on to play a minor role in helping Doolittle's raiders escape.
He was commissioned in the military and he worked in the military for a few years.
And, you know, at this point, U.S. military mission in China, broadly speaking, on the right side of things because they're against Japan, who is killing millions and millions and millions of people.
So yeah, he's not a completely unproblematic guy, but not a bad guy.
And yeah, his goal after leaving the service was to do more missionary work.
He was going to move to Tibet, but he never got the chance to do that.
By 1945, Birch was physically and mentally wrecked, both from a terrible war and from repeated bouts of malaria.
He got his final military assignment in August, which was just after the Japanese surrender was announced.
And, you know, that like when Japan surrendered, the Chinese nationalists and the Chinese communist forces started fighting again.
And Birch was with a U.S. military unit and again, sick.
And everyone who was around at the time notes that he was like showing increased signs of paranoia.
He was going through PTSD.
He was not in a good mental place.
And the group he was with.
It's too bad he didn't have hydroxychloroquine.
Yeah, that actually would have helped.
Yes, because it's an anti-malaria.
So Birch's party, the guys he was with, like the U.S. military unit he was with, ran into a group of communist soldiers and they ordered the Americans to disarm.
Birch got angry and insulted people.
And like, we don't exactly know what happened, but there was a fight and Birch was shot dead.
So if he had never learned Chinese, he wouldn't have been able to piss him off as much.
Yeah, the lesson here is never learn another language.
You will get murdered in a field in China by Red Army soldiers.
I think that's what I'm going to take away from this.
Yeah, quit your Spanish lessons today and save your own life.
This podcast is not brought to you by Duolingo.
Yeah.
So Mao Zedong actually apologized for the killing of John Birch to an American general who was like in charge of the U.S. mission in the country at the time.
But Mao kind of walked away from that meeting really angry because the American general seemed to be insistent that he could be, should be able to send American troops anywhere inside of China without like informing the Chinese ahead of time.
So it was a whole, it was a whole big deal.
And it just kind of seems like a tragedy.
Like Birch probably was being a dick, but also was sick and struggling with PTSD and doesn't seem to have been a bad guy.
It's just a bummer.
It's, you know, war.
War sucks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It would be fair to call him a complicated man, but yeah, definitely not a villain.
In death, though, his legacy was really, really simplified, thanks in large part to Robert Welch.
He turned John Birch into a symbol because to Robert Welch, John Birch was the first American to die fighting communism.
Even though he hadn't really been fighting communism, they'd actually been like, broadly speaking, trying to help China.
And they just got into an argument with some communist soldiers, and everyone was probably drinking.
You just were trying to apply nuance to a situation where there's only good guys and bad guys.
And how dare you ever consider the bad guys human beings?
That's crazy.
Yeah, yeah.
Welch does not see any nuance in this.
To him, John Birch is a martyr who gave his life to destroy communism.
And yeah, he starts turning him into basically like the John the Baptist of capitalism.
Like that's that's kind of Bob Welch's goal here.
Which, yeah, I don't, I never knew John Birch, obviously, because he died decades before my birth.
But reading about the guy, you kind of get the feeling he'd be a little bit bummed.
Yeah.
You know who else didn't know him?
Fucking Robert Welch.
Fucking Robert Welch did not know him.
No.
Not even a little bit.
That's fair.
In 1954, Welch started work on what would become one of his most consequential books, The Politician.
He was inspired to write it during a car ride in New York with a friend.
Basically, he's in a car with a buddy of his.
They're on like a driving to New York, and he starts ranting about Dwight Eisenhower and talking about how he's a communist agent.
And after hours of this, one has to assume, his friend is like, hey, why don't you like shut the fuck up and just write a book about this?
That's every time I've been on the road as a comic.
Every single time.
You know, you should write a book, which is a classy way of saying, please stop talking.
Welch does not take this as a classy way of saying, please stop talking.
And he actually writes a book.
I don't think please stop talking is something he respected very much as a way of life.
Not a real please guy.
Yeah.
Nor a stop guy.
Iffy decision to write this book, too.
Yeah, it's not a great call.
A lot of people.
I guess the Leviathan was taken, so he had to go with the politician.
And May God Forgive Us was already.
May God forgive us again.
May God forgive us two electric forgivealou.
Yeah, yeah.
May God forgive us five.
He's got six.
She's all being forgiven by God.
May we be forgiven, Tokyo Drift.
It's a mad, way.
Oh, it's fun.
So Welch started, you know, so he has this conversation with a friend.
He's like, just write a fucking book about Eisenhower, the communist.
So Welch starts by writing a letter, which outlines his feelings on Eisenhower, and he revises it over the years in 1956 and again in 1958.
And basically every year, he sends out a new draft of this letter to anyone who would listen to him.
And he calls it a letter, but by the third revision, it was 80,000 words long, which you might notice is not a letter.
Did he just write, I want more money over and over and over again?
Many.
Yeah.
Talk about what he wrote.
I feel like some of my relatives' like holiday letters might end up being about that long.
I feel like I don't have word counts on it, but if they feel 80,000 words.
I'd assume there was at least one recipe in there, right?
There had to be one recipe.
Sure.
For papa suckers.
How to make a good old-fashioned papa sucker.
I mean, I would be really angry if any of my friends or loved ones sent me an 80,000-word letter.
Like, really?
No.
Oh, that one, I would happily get that one other than a letter that I was supposed to actually read.
Oh, you read it.
Framing Evil Ideologically00:15:40
That's why it's not that.
That goes in the garbage.
Thanks for sending me that letter.
That's great.
You sent me a two-page letter.
Yeah, exactly.
Dear uncle, I have thrown your letter in the trash.
Thank you for sending me such a heavy package.
So, yeah, since by the third revision, it was more than 80,000 words long, Welch decided to start calling it a book.
The politician, as he titled it, became the underground secret text of what became a small cult-like following of friends and admirers who increasingly believed that Bob Welch was something of a prophet.
In February of 1956, Welch launched his first magazine, One Man's Opinion.
He later renamed it American Opinion, which really actually reveals a lot about his thought process.
Like, I think this, no, America thinks this.
It's that idea of the subjective actually being the objective.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's how the artist thinks.
Yeah.
It is pretty telling.
So he left the Welch Company at the start of 1957 and began preparations to turn his circle of followers into a formal political advocacy group.
Now, by this point, Welch was convinced not just that Eisenhower was a crooked politician, but that he was a secret communist agent in the White House.
Like that Eisenhower was actually a communist and was attempting to manipulate the United States into socialism from the White House.
That's so crazy that that stuff used to happen in the past.
It's so wild.
It's just like, how could you be in that headspace where something like that happens?
Were we ever going to be crazy?
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
Imagine looking at Dwight Eisenhower and being so far right that you're like, that fucking Marxist.
Imagine looking at Biden.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, he's the kind of person who, like, everyone is a Marxist if they don't think he should be able to skeet shoot with poor people.
Yeah.
Like, that's, that's, that's Bob Welch's politics in a nutshell.
Um, yeah, and Welch wasn't just convinced that Ike was a communist.
He believed that the majority of both the Republican and Democratic parties, most of their elected leaders at least, were communists and communist sympathizers.
So, uh, Bob Welch, in order to kind of spread this warning about encroaching communism, turned to the massive Rolodex of wealthy industrial magnates that he'd built up over years in the candy world.
He invited all of these guys to a hotel in suburban Indianapolis in December of 1958, and he asked them to stay for two days.
He didn't tell them what it was about or why he was inviting them to a hotel for two days.
Gentlemen, it is a murder mystery.
He kind of.
He just said it was a matter of utmost importance.
So he's very cloak and dagger, very secretive.
And of like the 17 guys that Bob Welch invites, 11 of them show up to see what he has to say.
And I'm going to quote from politics.
Some real cool characters among those 11.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Real cool folks.
Yeah, at least one Bastard's Pod alumni.
Yeah.
After exchanging firm handshakes in the breakfast room of the sprawling Tudor-style house in the Tony Meridian Park neighborhood, Welch explained why he had brought this group together.
The United States faced an existential threat from an international communist conspiracy hatched by an amoral gang of sophisticated criminals.
The power-hungry, God-hating government worshipers had infiltrated newsrooms, public schools, legislative chambers, and houses of worship.
They were frighteningly close to total victory.
Welch felt it in his gut.
These cunning megalomaniacs seek to make themselves the absolute rulers of a human race of enslaved robots in which every civilized trait has been destroyed, Welch wrote in the blue book of the John Birch Society, the organization's founding history.
That would really sound unhinged to me if he weren't proven 100% correct on every point there, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think he got it.
I think he nailed it.
There's definitely a group of cunning megalomaniacs who seek to make themselves the absolute rulers of a human race reduced to robotic servitude.
But, you know, it's Jeff Bezos.
Yeah, it's Peter Thiel and Bezos.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What do we mean?
It's guys who would have been in the John Birch Society.
Exactly.
Yes.
So the chosen few gathered here would form the vanguard of a new political movement, an army of brave American patriots dedicated to preserving the country's Christian and constitutional foundations.
Welch christened the group the John Birch Society, named in memory of a U.S. soldier.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know the guy.
Yeah.
And their goal at the beginning was destroying the, quote, communist conspiracy or at least breaking its grip on our government and shattering its power within the United States.
So I love guys who are like, oh, there's a conspiracy to kill everybody.
And then they create what is essentially the Knights Templar.
Like, what are we doing?
There's a conspiracy.
We have to create a conspiracy to fight it.
We're going to be a secretive group of crusaders fighting against communism.
What's weird and conspiratorial about that?
It's the same thing you hear now.
Like, you know, there's a coup going on in our government, so we have to form a counter coup.
Of course.
And then they're going to form a counter-counter coup against our counter-coup.
Yep.
Yeah.
There's like, what are we even doing?
This is just like one of those dolls inside a doll or an onion.
Well, it's just, it's one of the most effective ways.
If you're trying to convince people to do something that's blatantly evil and horrible, the best way to do it is to convince them that the people you're going to be harming are doing the same thing to you.
Exactly.
That's the like we should have martial law because Biden's going to put in martial law.
Or like that trailer park was going to gear up in their forerunners and drive through my neighborhood firing out the window.
So I have to get in my forerunner and drive through their trailer park shooting into trailers.
There's no other option.
They forced me into it.
False flag also, by the way.
Yeah.
So all 11 of the rich dudes that Welch invited to his meeting became founding members of the John Birch Society.
Are we going to talk about these guys?
Oh, yeah.
We're going to talk about these guys a little bit.
One of them was T. Coleman Andrews, former commissioner of the IRS.
Another was the personal aide, former personal aide for General Douglas MacArthur, who attempted to nuke both China and North Korea.
He's a good guy.
And another of them was Fred Koch, father, well, and founder of the infamous Koch brothers.
Yay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So those are the three that I found worth naming.
What about Ravilo P. Oliver?
Wasn't he there too?
I think so.
Who's Ravilo P. Oliver?
You know these people.
He was a guy who ended up inspiring William Luther Pierce writing his works.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
Yeah, he became a big fascist guy.
I think he was there that first meeting.
Yep, he was one of the founding members.
Yep, you're right.
You're right.
You're right.
He's a real thinker of the crypto early fascist.
Oh, yeah.
Classics professor from the University of Illinois.
Yep.
And one of the Holocaust denial movements leading lights.
What a great meeting.
To have been a fly on that wall.
A lot of cool, cool people.
A lot of real casual anti-Semitism.
It's a collection of actual demons.
Not in the way that you demonize, not in the way you demonize your enemies and all that stuff.
Those guys, even if you're broadly in agreement with what they believe, you should look at that meeting and go, get the fuck away from me.
You guys are terrified.
The ripples are almost astounding, even just thinking about like the idea that Fred Koch, the father of the Koch brothers, is in the same room with Ravilo P. Oliver, who like inspired and helped facilitate the writing of the Turner Diaries.
It's just insane.
It's insane, the tendrils.
It makes sense, though, because one of the fun things to do with the far right and with the normal right is to play like the Kevin Bacon game with the Turner Diary.
Sure, sure.
How can you tie back a Republican politician to the Turner Diaries?
Generally less than four steps.
Yeah.
100%.
Thanks to the Koch brothers.
Hey, good guys.
Good guys.
At least they apologize later on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They admitted easy.
God, I want to fuck up the world badly enough, but also be in a position where I can just be like, oopsie toodles.
Hey, guys.
I'm going to be honest.
This one's on me.
My bad.
My bad.
You know what?
Big enough a man to admit when I've destroyed the entire world, and this is that time for me.
I fumbled.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hey, we all make mistakes.
We all make mistakes.
Best players.
In order to players only go one for three.
One for three is the best baseball players.
In order to make this right, I have purchased a Poe Buddy's Nerfict shirt and I will wear it for the next four days.
Anyway, sorry to everyone who's lost loved ones.
So from the beginning, Welch patterned the John Birch Society off of the revolutionary communist movements he so despised, which is again another like, so you're saying these people are like the epitome of all evil and you're also deliberately framing your group out of after them.
You're scared of them because they're good at it.
I mean, they are good at it, like, obviously.
Alex on Alex Jones.
I don't know if you know this.
We do a little bit about him.
He just put out like, hey, what we need to do is get all the truck drivers together and have them strike in a unified front.
And you're like, do you not hate unionization?
Now you want to use withholding of labor as a means of political action.
Yep.
Interesting.
Yeah.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Not, well, for us.
Yeah, no, for him, there is something wrong.
No, yes, yeah.
Like you shouldn't be.
It's the same thing with like police unions, where it's like, you people use fire hoses on striking workers.
You don't get to unionize.
Like, fuck yourselves.
So from the beginning, Welch patterned the John.
Yeah, he patterned them off of revolutionary communist movements.
In his initial founding documents, Welch wrote that he wanted the John Birch Society to be a monolithic body operating under completely authoritative control at all levels.
In other words, he would be the Mao or the Stalin of his own counter-communist movement.
The society would be organized into cells of 10 to 20 members formed after the revolutionary cadres that were common in underground communist movements.
Like you read about the Khmer Rouge and like the founding of that.
And it's like the same basic organizational strategy.
Because you're trying to avoid infiltration.
Yeah.
And it works.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it is.
Yeah.
It works pretty well.
There's a reason he patterns off of this, even though it is ironic.
Welch informed his followers that he had considered a Republican form of organization for their society, but that while it had certain attractions and advantages under certain favorable conditions, it failed under, quote, less happy circumstances.
The United States, Welch insisted, was beset by less happy circumstances.
And the extent of socialist infiltration in American society made any Republican system open to infiltration, distortion, and disruption.
Robert Welch was, in short, creating an underground fascist political party.
His disdain for anything that even smacked of democracy was quite clear.
Welch told his followers that democracy was, quote, merely a deceptive phrase, a weapon of demagoguery, and a perennial fraud.
So I want more money.
And I don't want people to be able to vote that I should give more money.
Yeah, I do not want people to be able to vote for anything, really.
Because they will vote for socialism.
So, I mean, it's the same shit that you see today.
There's nothing new here.
Well, it was new here, though.
Like, that's what's interesting about this is that he was like, like, now we have, it's shocking to a lot of people that we have all these mainstream elected Republicans saying openly, like, we're not a democracy.
Democracy is bad.
We don't want democracy when there's this much socialism going around.
If you let people choose things, they'll choose dangerous socialism.
And Bob Welch was the guy fucking 60 years before that who was being like, this is exactly the way we should be framing things.
I have a quick question.
Do you think he is he a believer?
Do you know what I'm saying?
Yeah, I think he's a good idea.
So he's not the same kind of right-wing grifter we're used to seeing all over the place.
I don't think he's a grifter.
I don't think he's a grifter.
He's already rich for one thing.
Sure, sure.
Yeah.
Well, like rich people don't continue the grift.
I think there is an element of a grift in what he's doing, but he's not, he's not seems to be like there's a grift isn't the focus.
There's people who serve the scam, and then there are people who are like, nah, this is ideological.
I think he's more on that side as well.
All right, I think he's an ideologue.
I think he believes in what he's doing.
Okay.
He's making it.
Well, no, of course.
Don't worry about that.
He's not just in it for the money, right?
Gotcha.
He wouldn't be doing this if it was just to sell like pills.
Real pills.
He's not a pill guy.
No.
So I'm going to quote now from The World of the John Birch Society by DJ Malloy.
Quote, all in all, it was a hierarchical structure derived not just from the many years Welch had spent in the world of business, but also from his openly, if perhaps surprisingly expressed, admiration for the organizational tactics of his communist foes.
Acknowledging the similarity between Lenin's notion of the dedicated few and his own plans for the John Birch Society in the Blue Book, for example, the always capitalized founder explained that he was willing to draw on all successful human experience in organizational matters so long as it does not involve any sacrifice of morality and the means used to achieve an end.
If I'm in that room, I'm like, he's going to be removing people from pictures pretty soon.
Yeah, he's going to be erasing us from history once he gets to be dictator.
I don't trust that guy.
He's going to be relying on everyone's wife to send letters to people while the men get drunk and yell about commies.
So membership as one of the dedicated few was not free.
Monthly dues were $24 for men and $12 for women, which probably says something unfortunate.
Life memberships cost $1,000.
There were monthly chapter meetings.
For the first two years of the John Birch Society, things went along smoothly enough.
Word of the society was passed mouth to mouth and cells of birchers sprang up all round the nation.
Welch addressed them all monthly in the society's bulletin, which he wrote every word of.
It was not always easy to get freedom-loving Americans to sign up for an organization that was fundamentally undemocratic, monolithic, and authoritarian in structure.
Welch spent a lot of his time explaining to members why such a strict and unbending hierarchy was necessary.
He told them that the U.S. was a shoreline of beautiful houses threatened by a rising flood.
You can assume the flood's non-white people.
The birches and their ilk were lonesome boys with brooms trying to sweep it back.
What they needed, Welch insisted, was a dynamic boss to get them organized by barking this.
This is, again, from one of his writings.
This is like, so he's like, he's describing like the U.S. is a bunch of beautiful houses and there's this flood threatening it.
And we're loading boys with brooms beating it back.
And all those boys need is a boss who's willing to shout this.
Hey, you guys, all of you, drop those pretty brooms.
You fellows down there on the end, start running for empty bags.
You fellows in those next two groups, start filling those bags with sand.
You men here, all of you, start lugging those bags of sand to put on this wall the communists have busted up so badly.
You fellows over there, all of you, get the heaviest clubs you can find.
Spread yourselves out along the whole length of this wall and don't hesitate to break the heads of any saboteurs you find monkeying with it.
Don't even hesitate to break the heads of those you find creeping towards the wall if you are sure of their evil intentions.
So America is set up perfectly and it's the best country that has ever existed.
Beating Communists With Sticks00:13:26
Totally.
But there are circumstances that are happening right now that really we need a dictator.
I'm afraid so.
There's just nothing.
It's just it's impossible to avoid.
Look, it's circumstantial.
What are you going to do?
We need a dictator.
Otherwise, people are going to spend all their time swinging brooms and not beating people in the head.
Making sandbags.
I find it fun that this starts as like a metaphor for trying to organize people to deal with what is presumably like a tsunami or a flood condition and instead turns into beating communists with sticks.
There's a flood coming.
Punch the water.
Don't do anything to help it.
Just punch it.
I mean, every year or so, I go out to the coast and get into a fight with the ocean.
I think that's why we have not had a major tsunami on the west coast of the United States in years.
I just get drunk and scream, you think you're bigger than me?
Yeah, because of me.
I beat the shit out of the ocean every couple of years.
You should have seen me, Sophie.
Jordan does taunt Lake Michigan often.
You have to, if you don't, if you don't, like, if you don't stand up to bodies of water, they're going to walk all over you.
Literally.
We're all nodding like.
Sure.
Very stoic nods.
Very stoic nods.
Yeah.
Fight the ocean.
That could go in the don'ts of the art of salesmanship right there, I think.
Yeah, I want to start a John Birch society that's just themed at getting people to fight the ocean.
Fight various forms of nature.
Yeah.
Well, mostly oceans.
Punch trees.
Yell at the water.
All of what John Birch was preaching was good enough to earn his society the membership of one of my favorite bastards pod characters, Phyllis Schlafly.
She and her husband, some guy, joined in 1959.
So, yeah, that's good.
Phyllis Schlafly.
I thought Jordan was going to bark at that.
Very careful.
Not a schlaffer, as we used to call ourselves.
Not on the schlaff squad.
So that same year, same year Schlafly and her husband joined the John Birch Society, Robert Welch launched a crusade to recall newly installed Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren.
Justice Warren was a liberal who had written the majority opinion for a decision that overruled state and local segregation laws.
We're talking Brown versus the Board of Education here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Robert Welch did not like Brown versus the Board of Education.
Oh, yeah, why not?
Not wild about the fact that black people got to go to the same schools as white people now.
In Welch's eyes, Earl Warren's opinion on this case meant that he was a communist.
Welch insisted in letters that Warren had violated his oath and he haranged his most gifted followers to turn the effort to recall the justice into a movement.
Privately, Welch wrote that, frankly, with the left-wing control now so strong, insidious, and ubiquitous in Washington, I am not deceiving myself that we have very much chance of really bringing about the impeachment of Earl Warren, although we might, but I don't think that is really as important as dramatizing to the whole country where he stands, where the Supreme Court now constituted under him stands, and how important it is to face the facts about the road we are now traveling on so fast.
So that's really interesting to me because in all of his public publications, he makes it clear that this is a real effort to recall Earl Warren.
And I think we have a real shot and we're going to get this guy out of the Supreme Court.
And in his private letters, he's like, we're never going to do this.
It's all about making people angry.
It's about the rhetoric.
It's about pushing the idea of the fight.
Yeah.
Which is not like anything else that's happened since.
Nope.
No.
A lot of sighs on this episode.
Yeah.
Past and the future compared.
Yeah.
He's a real trailblazer.
So you get a feel for Bob Welch by reading his letters.
I'm going to read you now an excerpt from one he sent to T. Coleman Andrews, who's the former commissioner of the IRS.
The letters start with, screen.
I mean, kind of.
It begins with Welch's.
Yeah, that's kind of what I hear out of all of his writings.
The letter begins with Welch's regret that Andrews turned down an opportunity to spearhead the effort against what Welch refers to in all caps as the movement to impeach Earl Warren.
He calls it that in all caps every time he types about it.
He's a caps guy.
You do well on Twitter.
Is Frankfurter not on the Supreme Court anymore?
I think he's dead at this point.
Okay, I was going to say, because you got to go for him first.
You know, he's your guy.
So, yeah, he starts the letter by being like, it's a bummer that you don't want to help me impeach Earl Warren.
He goes on to discuss gathering storms in the South, which is a reference to the civil rights movement, which Bob Welch stated he thought was directly caused by the Communist Party.
Quote, if blood does flow there, which I agree is entirely likely, it will definitely be because the communists planned it that way.
They have schemed for so long to be in position to fan little fires of civil disorder into a huge conflagration of civil war, if and when they need such a horror in their moves to take us over.
And John Birch, though a minister devoted to peace, was entirely ready to fight for a cause which he considered worthy of sacrifice.
So devoted to peace.
Devoted to peace, this guy.
Something like that.
Well, he's referring to John Birch, who he did not know and saying that, like, we have to be like John Birch, who was devoted to peace but was willing to get into a drunken argument with communist soldiers and get shot to death.
That sounds like most right-wing heroes.
Colonel Travis, he was a drunk.
I don't know that he was drunk.
He may just have been drunk on malaria.
I'm just assuming everyone in the 40s was wasted at all times.
That's a good idea.
John Birch hated Earl Warren.
That is actually a little-known fact.
That is true.
I found that in the right.
I am not making this up.
Nonsense.
Yeah.
So Welch portrayed the John Birch Society's work not as partisan activism, but as an attempt to unite all Americans under an anti-communist banner.
In a 1960 issue of the bulletin, he wrote, It is of vital importance to the communists to split Americans into all kinds of groups, snarling at each other.
And so, he said, the society would not seek to split up Americans.
We are fighting communists, period.
Nobody else.
They put people into all these groups.
And I don't think that we should have black people, Jewish people, Chinese people, liberals, the LGBTQ community.
I don't think we should have any of those people, those specific groups that I have chosen to deny as people.
See?
Yeah.
The left is evil.
Yeah, they're dividing us by allowing people who aren't like me to exist.
Yeah, exactly.
So, yeah.
Welch, by the mid-1950s, had grown increasingly convinced that the entire U.S. government was basically communists all the way down.
And one of the main triggers for this was when Congress voted to censure Senator Joe McCarthy in 1954.
So he liked right on time, by the way.
Yeah, right on time.
Right on time.
Yeah, they got to him quick.
So, yeah.
And because Eisenhower was a big part of finally censoring Joe McCarthy after letting Joe McCarthy be Joe McCarthy for years, Welch, you know, saw this as more evidence that Ike was a secret communist.
The writing's kind of on the wall.
Yeah.
I mean, all of the signs are there if you're looking.
After just two whole red scares, he stepped in.
So the politician Welch's book about Ike remained largely a secret work.
He circulated it among his most loyal inner circle.
He handed it out to like leaders in the movement, but regular members didn't get to know.
It was kind of like their Xenu.
Like when you get high enough up in the Birch Society, you learn that Eisenhower is a communist.
Yeah.
Welch noted about his book in one private letter: Our rather extreme precautions with regards to this document are not due to any worry on my part as to what might happen to myself.
But many of my best-informed friends feel that having the manuscript get into the wrong hands at the present time might do far more damage than good to the whole anti-communist cause.
Yeah, it's Alex Jones.
I mean, and Alex Jones, as a little bit of a spoiler, was grew up on John Birch material.
So not a kawinky dink.
So for the Bircher rank and file, Eisenhower was just a crooked politician who was much too friendly with foreign leaders.
At one point in 1960, Ike agreed to attend a summit with Nikita Khrushchev, British Prime Minister Harold McMillan, and French President Charles de Gaulle.
Welch considered all three of these men to be card-carrying communists.
De Gaulle, which is fair with Khrushchev.
I'll say that.
Khrushchev is fair, but de Gaulle?
De Gaulle.
Yeah.
De Gaulle.
Famous communist Charles de Gaulle.
Charles de Gaulle.
All right.
Yeah.
Didn't he do rituals and dance?
And I don't know.
I can't remember if that was de Gaulle.
I mean, he was pretty problematic in a lot of ways himself, but communist is not an accurate person.
Oh, de Gaulle was very problematic.
Yeah.
So was Macmillan, for that matter.
Yeah.
So Welch considered, again, all these guys to be communists, and he had the John Birch Society send a heavily publicized message to President Eisenhower: if you go, don't come back.
The slogan was sent out in a blizzard of hell.
You will be exiled.
Yeah.
Thank you for hanging out with famous communist Charles de Gaulle.
If you go, what a great friend.
If you go to that meeting, the conference room will be your elbow.
So the slogan was sent out in a blizzard of postcards, letters, and telegrams.
And within the society, it was actually quite controversial since many normal Birchers were not as irrational as the group's founder.
Nationwide, it sparked curiosity for this strange, semi-underground organization.
One curious individual was Jack Mabley, an investigative reporter and columnist for the Chicago Daily News.
So, hey, hometown hero.
Hey!
Yeah.
Mabley attempted.
Well, I mean, technically, Candyman is a hometown hero for Chicago, too, but that's a different.
Yep.
Both hometown heroes.
Two Chicagoans.
The only way to stop a bad Chicagoan is a good Chicagoan.
So, yeah, Mabley starts looking into the John Birch Society.
He kind of finangles his way into attending a meeting, and he talks with a number of its members.
And by hook and by crook, he comes into possession of a copy of The Politician.
Yeah, so it's made its way out of the society's inner circle and into the hands of a journalist.
Now, unfortunately, Robert Welch's prophecies are going to come true.
Yeah.
People are going to know they're crazy.
I'm going to quote now from DJ Malloy's book on the John Birch Society, writing about Mabley's, you know, the article he writes about the politician.
Quote, this fantastic document, Mabley reported, accuses President Eisenhower of treason.
It flatly calls him a communist and for 302 pages attempts to document the charge.
And he provided an exact quote from the book to prove his claim, one that would haunt Welch and the Birch Society for years to come, but which was mysteriously, although understandably, absent when the book was officially published in 1963.
It was, well, I too think that Milton Eisenhower, the president's brother, is a communist and has been for 30 years, this opinion is based largely on general circumstances of his conduct.
But my firm belief that Dwight Eisenhower is a dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy is based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to me to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt.
Through some violation of confidence, someone who had been sent the letter in 1958 had passed it on to Mabley, and the journalist had naturally selected for quotation the most extreme statements he could find without the benefit of any explanation or modifying import of the context around them.
By some violation.
He's like, hey, could I take a look at your copy of that?
Yeah, sure.
Violation.
The end.
Well, it's like...
And I love the idea that that's out of context.
Yeah, that's the thing.
Like, it's that thing people say about Jordan Peterson and Alex Jones.
Like, the defenses they always make is that you're just taking us out of context.
And that's what fucking Welch and the John Birch Society do with this document.
They claim that he was like, well, I said I didn't say that Eisenhower was a communist agent.
I said that I thought he was based on evidence that I'd seen.
That's different than saying he's a communist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The rest of those 80,000 words are the stone cold dead to rights evidence.
That's not just journalist, quote unquote, is not taken into account.
And that is really malpractice.
Agree.
Exactly.
So most people did not buy Welch's defense.
In fact, a Saturday evening Post reporter who wrote about the John Birch Society in 1967 stated that its members spent most of their time talking to outsiders answering questions about Welch's communist Eisenhower conspiracy.
So like this kind of dominates the public perception.
They become a bit of a joke to a lot of Americans because, you know, it's ridiculous.
Yeah.
They should have fooled us.
They got their revenge, didn't they?
So this did not stop the John Birch Society, although it did draw attention to the group for the first time.
This may have helped as much as it harmed.
Tens of thousands of Americans continued to flock to the John Birch Society, eventually growing to 95,000 members in 1965.
Welch's stated goal was a million American Birchers.
And as the 1960s got rolling, it looked like he might actually achieve it.
And that's part one of the John Birch Society.
What a dick.
An erotic novel.
I don't think he's a good guy.
No.
No.
I think he sucks.
And I think my throat is sore, and I need a papa sucker to really soothe me.
Gonna go suck on a papa while we take a quick break.
You guys want to plug your pluggables before we roll out?
Vengeance And Papa Suckers00:02:43
Oh, we got a podcast.
Indeed, we do.
I think people can find that.
You wrote a book?
I did write a book.
You always have to remind me to actually tell people that.
Sure.
It's The Quiet Part Loud.
You can get it at thequietpartloud.com.
I swear.
For free.
Check out Knowledge Fight.
Check out The Quiet Part Loud.
And check out Nothing Else.
If you do anything else on the internet, you have offended and harmed me personally.
And my forthcoming vengeance.
Oh.
God doesn't need to forgive us.
God, what?
In Podcast out.
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