'Birchers,' the history of a group that helped pave the road to Trump - The Washington Post

With "Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right," Dallek joins a chorus of historians who have insisted, since Donald Trump's victory in 2016, that the contemporary Republican Party, with its nationalist, isolationist, nativist and conspiratorial inclinations, can be understood only by looking back to far-right mobilizations of earlier eras: to groups such as the Birchers, who were long considered too marginal and too extreme to have played a decisive role in shaping American conservatism, much less all of American politics. "More than any other far-right group, and more than the most hardline Goldwater, Nixon or Reagan Republicans," Dallek writes, "the Birch Society staked out a vigorous challenge to conservative orthodoxy and bequeathed to subsequent generations an extreme antigovernment zeal and rhetorically violent appeal."…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/03/22/birchers-john-birch-society-radical-right-matthew-dallek/