Trump's Conspiracy Fueled Visions

The Origins of the MAGA Agenda

November 8, 2024 Noon - Making America great again involves hurting a lot of people. Bigots of all persuasions now believe they’ve been given a permission slip to hawk their wares in public. Bully boy incels of the right are ramping up public and private expressions of hate and likely getting support from overseas enemies of democracy.

It is probably too early to get down to specifics about what, where, and when many of Trump’s promises will see daylight. We know about Project 2025. There’s a list of “first day” executive actions floating around. There are the known shared beliefs of The Base. So we know bad things are coming. 

What we don’t know are unforeseen logistical challenges and, most importantly, the state of mind for our incoming chief executive when it comes to setting things in motion. Project 2025 was written with the chaos of the early days of the first Trump administration in mind, the hope being that more of the conservative agenda it proposed could be put into place quickly. 

At this juncture what we do know is the 20th century origin of the MAGA agenda: The John Birch Society. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, this group seemed to be everywhere. There were bookstores, radio programs, magazines, and conferences. It adopted a grassroots image in its early years, despite being funded primarily by millionaires, like Fred C. Koch.

The organization peaked in 1964, when it appeared as though they were taking control of the Republican Party’s agenda. The failure of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign gave moderates in the GOP room to re-take the party for a while, as chapters of the group drifted further from mainstream politics.

In the 1960s the JBS operated a storefront on El Cajon Boulevard, along with bookstores in Pacific Beach and Chula Vista.

As the group disintegrated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, disaffected members split into two general groupings: the financiers and the soldiers. 

The Lynde and Harry Bradley foundation continues to this day as a funding source for right wing causes ranging from charter school advocacy to election denialism. Two of Fred C. Koch’s sons went on to be the bankers for a vast array of causes, with their most important contribution to the cause being Americans for Prosperity.

Revilo P. Oliver, expelled from the JBS when his antisemitism crossed into suggestions of violence, went on to midwife the National Alliance (a neo-Nazi group.) Robert DePugh was ahead of the curve, leaving the Birchers to found the Minutemen, a militia organization organized into small cells that stockpiled weapons for an anticipated counter-revolution.

In San Diego, there was a chapter of the Minuteman organization, organized to wage war on known leftists and train the citizenry for the expected communist takeover.  During the anti-Vietnam War period, the Minutemen claimed to have active sympathizers in the SDPD and FBI, giving them a level of protection for violence inflicted on local antiwar activists. 

In the early 1970s, the Minutemen evolved into the Secret Army Organization, which ran a terror campaign against local activists, culminating in the drive-by shooting of Paula Tharpe in Ocean Beach. A subsequent trial revealed connections with law enforcement throughout the group’s existence.

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Although conspiracy theories about secret societies and plots date back as far as the written word in Western cultures, the John Birch flavor came out of the reordering of world powers post WWII.

At its core was founder Robert Welch’s view that the United Nations was a vessel for globalists seeking to establish a totalitarian one world government. Everything the JBS opposed, from fluoridation of drinking water to the Civil Rights Movement (a commie plot) was connected to the conspiracy to subjugate free nations everywhere. 

As much as the JBS was an extremist group, it also reflected the deep sense of grievance of its founder. Not only was the New World Order (as Alex Jones calls it today) about seizing the reins of power, ordinary events were operations aimed at subverting or silencing individuals. Everything everywhere was connected, and the “deep state” was behind nearly all of it.

All of the worst elements of MAGA have been influenced by what the Birchers did, and the idea that most aspects of governance are part of the conspiracy prevails on the right today.

Steve Bannon’s idea of smashing the state works by convincing the rubes that they’re victims, eliminating or neutering the entities held to be responsible, and creating an opening for unlimited grifting for those in on the game.

The Trump coalition is broader than the one Robert Welch and Frederich Koch created, with connections to the minds (and pockets) of a vast array of ultra wealthy individuals, most of whom are self-segregated from society at large and especially from those whose lives have been the stepping stones of their fortunes.

What’s made the modern day wannabe monarchs more successful is an understanding of how power works along with the ability to distract other’s attention from what’s being done to them.

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You can’t separate the results of the US general election from what’s happening worldwide. 

Via Politico:

• And of course, there are the global factors of which many Americans aren’t even aware, as FT’s John Burn-Murdoch reports in a remarkable analysis about how post-pandemic inflation anger didn’t spare Democrats. 

• “The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters,” he writes. “This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records.” 

• In fact, the U.S. — which has seen a stronger economic rebound after Covid than other developed countries — had one of the smallest anti-incumbent shifts. And American politics in the 21st century more broadly have been swingy and anti-incumbent.

Via the Washington Post:

• In the corridors of power in Moscow, the win for Trump’s populist argument that America should focus on domestic woes over aiding countries like Ukraine was being hailed as a potential victory for Russia’s efforts to carve out its own sphere of influence in the world.

• In even broader terms, it was seen as a victory for conservative, isolationist forces supported by Russia against a liberal, Western-dominated global order that the Kremlin (and its allies) have been seeking to undermine.

• In his first remarks since the election, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that the West’s post-Cold War monopoly on global power was “irrevocably disappearing,” before going on to praise Trump for behaving “courageously” during an attempt on his life this summer.

Via Mohamed Adow,  Founding Director of Power Shift Africa, a leading non-governmental organization and think tank based in Nairobi, quoted at CarbonBrief.org:

• Ultimately, no one can run from the climate crisis, not even Donald Trump. Extreme weather is killing people, economies and livelihoods are being wrecked, the science is clear, and the solutions are known. The rest of the world won’t just stand by and let one man’s ignorance ruin the home we all share.

• Climate action is not a wall where if you remove one brick it falls down. It is like a trampoline with many springs. If you take one out, others can bear the load. The impetus for climate action over the next four years will not come from the politics of the White House, it will come from the economics of clean energy, from Europe, emerging markets and sub-national actors in the US and around the world.

• For Africa, this is an opportunity to step up and fill the void left by the US presidency. Africa has vast renewable energy potential combined with the moral authority of being victims of climate harm but not perpetrators. With the right investment from other countries, African nations can demonstrate how it’s possible to break the link between development and fossil fuels and raise up a continent of climate champions to showcase the power of clean energy. 

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Read This and Feel Better

Finally, some thoughts shared by Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, who interviewed Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, whose words — especially, “do not obey in advance” — from his essential On Tyranny: 

• Snyder told me the most important thing for the moment is to avoid isolation and be around other people. “They want you to be alone,” the historian said of autocratic governments because isolation feeds the sense of powerlessness that allows the regime to do its dirty work unimpeded. “Nobody is going to fix this alone,” Snyder said. “That’s not how this works.”

• Second, he suggested: “This is a good time to figure out what you’re good at. Define some little human-sized zone, whether it’s your library or your garden or your trade union. Take something positive that you know and do it.” He also noted that the political feeling of despair in opposing Trump and his MAGA movement doesn’t mean you can’t work for change on the state and local level, where one can still hash out issues with forward-minded politicians.

• Snyder then suggested, with a laugh, what he called “a dumb little idea” — except that it wasn’t.

• “Take a moment and write down a letter about the things you care about, that you’re willing to take a stand about. Write that down, put it in an envelope, and take it out of your desk as we’re going through these things” — like when Trump takes office in January, or early in his term.

• Those of us who opposed Trump, and who were devastated to learn how many of our fellow citizens want to live under his strongman rule, need time to mourn this week’s news. But it’s well worth listening to Snyder’s words about not just living under tyranny, but someday soon finding reasonable ways to confront it. We are going to need each other, whether it’s in the streets or just at the dog park. And you — we — are not alone.