“They (the Koch brothers) are spending millions to destroy the country that made them rich”

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Former ‘Bircher baby’ offers views on today’s Tea Party
By Rick Christie, February 16, 2014

Don’t laugh at the radical right, said Claire Conner, whose parents were movers and shakers in the John Birch Society, “the most powerful and effective right wing organization America ever has seen.”

Many thought Birchers were “crackpots and freaks,” she said, and some believe they were a phenomenon of 1960s, that “died out like bell bottoms.”

Back then, Birchers made news when they called Democratic President John F. Kennedy a traitor. They said Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “conscious agent of Communist conspiracy.”

“Don’t laugh,” Conner told the Democratic Women’s Club of Martin County at a Stuart meeting. “It worked for them then. It works for them today.”

Today’s extremists, she adds, “want to take America back — back 100 years.”

Conner has written a book, “Wrapped in the Flag,” about growing up in the bosom of the John Birch Society, her awakening, and what she believes is a continuing right wing extremist threat to the U.S.

Birchers fought civil rights, labor unions, environmental protections, women’s rights, Medicare, welfare programs, the United Nations and even water fluoridation.

Today’s radical right continues many of the same campaigns and fights to empower corporations and discredit government.

John Birchers targeted Kennedy with a plan to make him a “one-term president,” she said. Today’s extremists targeted President Barack Obama the same way and continue to try to discredit him.

Fred Koch, father of the Koch Brothers, who spend their billions today pushing radical right and Tea Party candidates, was a founding member of the John Birchers and a Conner family friend. The senior Koch made his fortune building power plants for Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. Two of his sons, in addition to using their billions to bankroll Tea Party candidates, also work to discredit government and tear down President Obama.

Just this week, the South Florida Tea Party financed a telephone campaign in Martin County, aimed at discrediting environmentally-friendly county commissioners.

“They (the Koch brothers) are spending millions to destroy the country that made them rich,” Conner said. “I’m tired of being the only one screaming about that…We have to make Koch money like poison,” she said, by not voting for candidates they support.

Right wing extremists have a constant voice on TV’s Fox News Channel, she said, fueling the perception that government is the problem,

Today’s radical right believes that the rich are blessed by God, she said, and deserve even more money. Those who aren’t rich are not blessed and don’t matter.

Democrats, she said, “should be raising hell,” but “have conceded intellectual real estate” to extremists.

Life with two activist Bircher parents “was like a cult.” Conner was servant for them and babysitter for her siblings.  Extremism, she said, “caused my brothers and sisters unbelievable trauma.” A right wing family, she said, is headed by a dictator.

As an adult, she distanced herself from her parents, and for a while organized anti-abortion campaigns. She later came to believe in a woman’s right to choose.

The 2014 election, she said, is “critical, the most important year since I’ve been born.” She urged the Martin group to support Democrats. “If Republicans take control of the Senate,” she said, “they will impeach the president.”

She also urged her Democratic audience not to laugh at Rand Paul, “another Birch kid,” or at Sen. Ted Cruz, who she said “looks and sounds like Sen. (Joseph) McCarthy but is more personable.” (Sen. McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, spread fear that Communists were taking over in U.S. government and elsewhere during the 1950s. The Senate eventually censured him.)

Conner, a young-looking “almost 70,” makes a strong case that the Birchers live on in today’s extremists.

When she struggled with her writing, she said, her husband urged her on. “Finish your book,” he told her. “They’re back!”

“They never went away,” she said.

Her book, like her talk, is a window into what growing up in the radical right did to her and to her family. It gave her a mission.

“Extremism broke my family. As long as I have breath in my body,” she said, “I will not let it break my country.”
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