Paranoid Right - been there, done that

[LVZ]

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2010/jan/24/new-conservatives/

In the 1950s, conservatives were angered when their champion, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, was shoved aside by Republican elites in favor of the moderate Dwight Eisenhower.

Kathy Olmsted, a University of California, Davis historian of the period, notes that they accused the one-time Supreme Allied Commander of being a communist agent, an allegation made repeatedly by candy tycoon Robert Welch.

[Dogmudgeon]

1. Robert Welch founded the John Birch Society

He also gave the world Lemonheads and Junior Mints, which were candies before they were bands.

--d!

[LVZ]

2. Many years ago out of curiosity I sat in on a Birch Society meeting

I was a long-haired bearded student at the U of Arizona at the time. Given my counterculture look, I was surprised at the positive reception I got. I think they had a delusion that the original dittohead Birch Society programming was starting to infect a larger public, even someone like me.

The meeting itself was a rather boring affair - slide after slide about how John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King were all communists. It was so surrealistic that I found it hard not to laugh at some of the head-nodding insanity in that room.

[Brother Buzz]

3. Hell, hardline anti-communist rightwinger Richard Nixon even considered them "nuts and kooks."

and he was from the ground zero hotbed of the john Birch Society movement, Orange County, California.