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Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right
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55
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
43/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Matthew Dallek
Publisher:
Basic Books
Date:
March 21, 2023
At the height of the John Birch Society's activity in the 1960s, critics dismissed its members as a paranoid fringe. But as historian Matthew Dallek reveals, the Birch Society's extremism remade American conservatism.
What The Reviewers Say
Illuminating.
Dallek dissents, if only faintly, from the emerging consensus.
Dallek argues convincingly that despite the end of the cold war, amid which the Birchers were born, its antipathies and suspicions continue to animate and inflame..
While written in the typical uninflected voice of contemporary histories, the book effectively demonstrates how one can 'see, in COVID denialism, vaccine disinformation, America First nationalism, school board wars, QAnon plots, and allegations of electoral cheating, a movement from the 1960s... casting its shadow across the United States'.
