Despite a lifetime of offensive statements, Donald Trump can still take your breath away. He did it again on Monday, responding to the Orlando massacre by strongly insinuating that President Obama is an ISIS sympathizer. It was the sort of unhinged accusation that one expects to find in the outer fringes of politics in a crank newsletter, not from the podium where the presumptive Republican nominee is speaking. If it seems like we’ve never heard a major party’s presidential nominee speak like this at such a moment—or any moment—that’s because it’s true.



But Trump’s conspiracy-minded version of America isn’t sui generis. It comes from a long tradition on the American right. And it’s put the lie to one of the biggest political myths in American history: the legend of How American Conservatism Matured.

The story has been told many times, but it goes like this: In the 1950s and 1960s, the American right became infected with anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists, chief among them the John Birch Society. But William F. Buckley and National Review took a firm stance against these hate-mongers, expelled them from respectable conservative politics, and allowed the conservative movement to take over the Republican Party in 1964 and eventually gain national power with Ronald Reagan in 1980.



This edifying tale has been revived recently by conservative opponents of Trump, such as George Will, who writes in National Review:

So, conservatives today should deal with Trump with the firmness Buckley dealt with the John Birch Society in 1962. The society was an extension of a loony businessman who said Dwight Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” In a 5,000-word National Review “excoriation” (Buckley’s word), he excommunicated the society from the conservative movement.

The problem with this story is that it gratifies the pride of conservative intellectuals, but is almost completely false on history. The Birch Society didn’t disappear after Buckley’s “excommunication,” but continued to be a major force on the right, peaking in influence in the 1970s and still existing to this day. More to the point, Bircher paranoia never went out of fashion on the right: It’s there in everything from Birtherism—Trump’s first excursion into the world of Obama conspiracies—to the antics of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. (Even National Review, which prides itself on having expelled the Bircher poison, has hardly been immune to hare-brained conspiracy theories. And while it’s true that National Review after the early 1960s avoided the overt anti-Semitism found in groups like the John Birch Society, the magazine long remained wedded to a barely disguised racism.)