Former Bircher No Longer Believes in Vast Communist Conspiracy, Fears Vast Conservative Conspiracy Instead

The economist and historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, who sometimes
contributes
to Reason, has
reviewed
Claire Conner’s
Wrapped in the Flag
, a memoir of growing up in a
family of John Birch Society believers. Conner, he concludes,

To see more of James Gill's collage art, click on the pic.is unable to separate fully
her wrenching childhood from the ideas and opinions of those she
generally identifies as right wing. While there is always a note of
tenderness in her writing about her parents, their fanatical
harshness becomes the template for her damning of not only all
Birchers but also most conservatives and even libertarians.

This makes her utterly oblivious to the extent to which she is
still trapped in a conspiratorial worldview, but one of the Left
rather than of the Right. She has graduated from her parents’
belief that America was threatened by a giant left-wing conspiracy,
in which every liberal was either a Communist or a Communist
fellow-traveler, to a belief that America is threatened by a giant
radical-right conspiracy, stretching from the 1950s to the present.
She lumps together with the Birch Society in this gigantic,
ongoing, and diffuse conspiracy such disparate individuals and
organizations as Bill Buckley and his conservative National
Review
; politicians such as Barry Goldwater, George Wallace,
and Ronald Reagan; Ayn Rand and her Objectivist followers; the
libertarian Cato Institute; the modern Tea Party; and white
supremacists of the Klan.

To support this portrayal, Conner engages in the same kind of guilt
by association that Birchers employed to charge, for instance, that
Martin Luther King was a secret Soviet agent.

To read the rest, go
here
.

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