Zach Dorfman is senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that 2018 is a uniquely worrying moment in America’s great, clamorous experiment with representative government. And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Loose talk of a “deep state” seeking to undermine the Trump administration and its allies has entered the political mainstream. Outlandish as the charge might be, we shouldn’t be surprised: Conspiratorial thinking has long had a grip on American politics, and warping effects.

This is the story of one such example, now largely forgotten. It is about an archconservative congressman, Larry McDonald, who became a leader of the New Right, founded his own private intelligence agency and died at the hands of his geopolitical nemesis, all while in office. McDonald was a militant cold warrior and talented zealot who built his own mini-deep state—a foundation that worked with government and law enforcement officials to collect and disseminate information about supposed subversives.


The tale of Representative Larry McDonald might be the weirdest, most unbelievable one in modern American politics that you’ve never heard.

It isn’t entirely without precedent. “Private spy rings can be traced back all the way to the 1920s,” says Darren Mulloy, a professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University and an expert on radical political and social movements, “or even back to [Allan] Pinkerton’s detective agency at the end of the 19th century.” The tradition picked up during the 1950s, Mulloy says, reportedly with the likes of anticommunist groups like the American Security Council and the John Birch Society.

Such groups “perpetuated conspiracies by gathering so-called intelligence in an effort to discredit people to try and link them to grand and dastardly schemes,” Seth Rosenfeld, author of Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power, told me. “So, whether it was a communist conspiracy then, or a ‘deep state’ plot now, these are attempts to undermine people who are dissenting from the powers of the moment.”

It was from this earlier era that McDonald emerged. But in his Cold War story are many lessons for our own age—about the dangers of obsession, and our national obsession over danger.



***

In the post-Watergate election of November 1974, the American people elected 75 new Democratic members of Congress. These “Watergate babies” represented the most liberal group of incoming representatives in the country’s history—with one very notable exception. Even by conservative Southern standards, Larry McDonald, a telegenic rhetorician from northern Georgia, was one of the most radical congressmen, from either party, elected during the later 20th century.

While in Congress, McDonald was “famously out of step” with his colleagues, says Kevin Kruse, a Princeton historian and scholar of the conservative movement. “He emerged as a very far right voice in the time he was there.”

By his own telling, in his early years, Larry P. McDonald—the “P” stood for Patton, after General George S. Patton, a distant relative—was happy with his life as a practicing urologist in exurban Georgia. But by the early 1970s, McDonald had become a well-known local right-to-life activist, not to mention a commanding and persuasive orator with a mellifluous voice. Spurred above all by what he saw as insufficient anticommunist zeal, he ran for Congress in 1972, winning election on his second try two years later.

During nearly a decade in Washington, McDonald espoused extreme views: a philosophy of steep cuts in government spending and foreign aid programs; abolishing the income tax; and undoing almost all the post-New Deal welfare and regulatory state. He called Martin Luther King Jr. “wedded to violence” and opposed a federal holiday in King’s name. He kept a framed portrait of Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco in his office. He opposed subsidized school lunches and all federal funding for education, and argued for the complete loosening of gun laws and the deportation of “illegal aliens.” He emphasized America’s “Christian heritage,” and he decried the welfare state’s “road to totalitarianism” and America’s “retreat from greatness.” One of McDonald’s Republican congressional challengers excoriated him publicly as a “fascist.” The columnist Jack Anderson called him “a bush-league McCarthy.”

As his star rose in the early 1980s, McDonald, though still a Democrat, became a national force for the New Right—the movement of conservative Christian and other ideologically orthodox organizations that pried power away from the Republican political establishment—forging close relations with Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority, Senator Jesse Helms,and Richard Viguerie, the godfather of conservative direct-mail campaigns. McDonald was also aligned with the conservative financier Nelson Bunker Hunt, and star Republican strategist Lee Atwater worked on his 1980 campaign. In Congress, McDonald’s closest confidant and voting partner was another doctor with outré views, Ron Paul.

But national security was McDonald’s animating issue. “Larry was very concerned about security,” Kathy McDonald, the congressman’s widow, told me by phone. “He felt that we weren’t focused enough on national defense, and on the deterioration of American sovereignty.”

More specifically, he warned of a communist conspiracy against America that, in his words, “permeated virtually every level of society.” This internal subversion by secret red sympathizers, in McDonald’s thinking, was the single greatest threat to America. For McDonald, the Soviets were endowed with an almost cosmic menace. “We are at war,” he once said. “It’s an economic war, it’s a war of subversion, it’s a war of espionage, it’s a war of ideas, and it’s a war of terrorism, and it’s a war of infiltration.”

Friends of Larry McDonald. The Georgia congressman, top left, forged relationships with Senator Jesse Helms and Reverend Jerry Falwell (top right); campaign strategist Lee Atwater (pictured with Roger Stone and Ed Rollins, bottom left); and Congressman Ron Paul (bottom right). | AP; Getty | AP; Getty

The congressman’s views were closely in line with those of the John Birch Society, whose members believed treasonous American elites were facilitating the communist plot. (The Birchers once accused Dwight Eisenhower of being “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”) Mainstream conservatives famously excised the Birchers in the 1960s, but McDonald was a true believer. His first wife, Anna, once estimated that, over the years, he had hosted 10,000 people in his living room for Bircher-inspired lectures and documentaries, according to a 1980 profile of McDonald in the Atlanta Constitution. For his efforts, Birchers nationwide repaid McDonald with financial support in his campaigns. In 1982, while a sitting congressman, McDonald was named the John Birch Society’s national chairman. He zipped around Washington in a black Mercedes Benz with JBS1 vanity plates—John Birch Society 1.

With the Birch Society, says Kathy McDonald, “Larry went knocking door to door, talking to people. The Society was focused on getting information out to the average American. They were painted as wackos, but they’re not—they’re very good patriotic Americans.”

McDonald’s sense of besiegement bled into his personal life. He often wore a bulletproof vest, his brother told the Atlanta Constitution in 1983. He kept significant assets in silver. At least one report from the same paper said he stocked purified drinking water and dehydrated food in his living room. A legendary teetotaler, McDonald also reportedly abstained—at least some of the time—from other pleasures of the flesh. “We’re at war,” his ex-wife said the future congressman once told her, according to the Atlanta Constitution, “and people do not make love in wartime.”

Then there was the “alternative” medicine. In 1976, McDonald became embroiled in a nasty lawsuit filed by the wife of a former patient, who claimed McDonald had hastened her husband’s death. Throughout the 1970s, McDonald advocated the use of laetrile, an extract derived from apricot and peach pits, delivered via injection, as a cure for cancer. (McDonald discontinued his medical practice upon election to Congress.) In 1963, the FDA had said laetrile had no medical value and was potentially poisonous to users, forbidding its interstate sale. But that did little to deter its boosters, many of whom were affiliated with the Birch Society. McDonald was ordered to pay thousands of dollars in the malpractice suit. Yet he faced no consequences when, in October 1976, an Atlanta Constitution reporter conducted an undercover investigation and found that one of McDonald’s closest confidants, a fellow Georgia physician, was requesting that patients seeking laetrile treatment make their checks out to the Larry McDonald for Congress campaign.

Then there was the potential gun-running scandal. By 1977, there were multiple news reports that McDonald—who said he personally owned about 200 firearms—was the subject of active grand jury proceedings over potential felony weapons registration violations. According to Atlanta Constitution, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms launched an investigation into whether McDonald in 1974 had induced terminally ill, laetrile-using patients to sign “stacks” of federal firearm purchase forms in their own names, obscuring the true owner of the guns: McDonald. (“Larry was a hunter,” recalls Kathy McDonald, “and he did have quite a few firearms.” But she calls the news reports on the subject “exaggerated.”)

Allegedly, McDonald stockpiled the guns at the very same laetrile-administering doctor’s office that had doubled as his campaign headquarters, the Constitution reported. McDonald—who told associates his weapons purchases were “in anticipation of a possible communist invasion or insurrection in the U.S.”—also appeared to sell the guns. Multiple associates said he told them he could obtain untraceable weapons for them, and at least one person told the Constitution that he actually purchased such a fraudulently acquired weapon from McDonald. After all that, however, the investigation appeared to sputter, and charges were never filed.

Soon enough, though, it would be clear that alleged medical malpractice, campaign fraud and gun-running were the least of McDonald’s concerns.



***

From 1974 onward, McDonald was in Congress, but he was not of it. He did not fret overmuch about legal or legislative minutiae, or spend his days backslapping or glad-handing with other legislators for his piece of the pork barrel. He had much grander priorities: America was at war, and post-Church Committee intelligence reforms had crippled the government’s ability to ferret out enemies in its midst.

So, he founded his own intelligence network.

It started as an in-house operation. When McDonald entered Congress, he tried to land a spot on the Internal Security Committee, the successor to the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). But there wasn’t much appetite in Congress anymore for rooting out subversives, and the committee was in the process of being dissolved. So, according to a 1981 Constitution article, McDonald instead hired former HUAC committee staffers to work in his congressional office and continue their research on domestic threats under his tutelage. One of these hires, Louise Rees, was also a former undercover FBI and police informant who had reported on the activities of leftists up and down the East Coast. According to the same article, McDonald arranged for these staffers to work out of an office adjacent to his main congressional quarters, with a separate door, effectively sealing off the employees from prying outsiders. Another of McDonald’s researchers, a former military intelligence officer, bragged to the Constitution about FBI agents and police officers visiting to pick up the staffers’ latest research into left-wing groups.

In 1979, McDonald embarked on his most ambitious project yet: establishing his own foundation, which would in fact serve as a massive intelligence clearinghouse. The organization was called Western Goals, and it set up shop in a 200-year-old townhouse in Alexandria, Virginia. Full-time staffers tended to a 6,000-volume library, and wrote and edited publications and newsletters about domestic subversives, terrorism and the evolving communist menace abroad, which were circulated to supporters. According to copies of the organization’s annual reports, Western Goals established two mysterious European offices too, in West Germany and Austria.

“Nothing was like Western Goals,” Mary Jo Buckland, who worked there in the early 1980s, told me. “Nothing.”

Even as an employee, Buckland says, she was unaware of what the organization was doing much of the time. “A lot of the funding came from Germany—more than what came from the U.S.,” she recalls. “A lot of it was kept from us. … The Germans all wore a lot of medals and had a lot of money. The Germany people never came to the U.S; they would fly Western Goals’ accountant to Germany. Something didn’t feel on the up and up.” (Perhaps coincidentally, McDonald was an advocate for releasing convicted Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess from his decades-long imprisonment; McDonald even suggested during a political debate that Hess be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, according to a report in a local paper.)

The most critical part of Western Goals’ work was its computer database—a gigantic repository of information about allegedly communist-aligned individuals and groups in the United States. “Congressman McDonald was trying to gather information on subversive activities, have it all in one place,” says Buckland, whose work was largely on the business side of the foundation. She says there was a staffer at the Western Goals office whose sole job was to enter information into its database—“all day, every day.” The organization was relatively open about its database—it is featured in Western Goals’ annual reports, which I found at the Hoover Institution’s archives at Stanford University.

The power of Western Goals. Through its newsletters and other publications, Western Goals reached some of the most high-level people in Washington, including President Ronald Reagan, shown at bottom right with Larry McDonald. At top right, Western Goals researcher John Rees and its onetime director, Linda Guell, with Nancy Reagan. | Hoover Institution | Hoover Institution

A key Western Goals employee was John Rees, Louise’s husband. According to Break-Ins, Death Threats and the FBI: The Covert War Against the Central America Movement, a 1987 book by Boston Globe journalist Ross Gelbspan, John Rees set up the Western Goals computer database and wrote many of its published reports. (Improbably, he considered himself a journalist by profession.) Going back to the 1960s, Rees had worked as an FBI and police informant; he once went undercover as a Roman Catholic priest and anti-nuclear activist to infiltrate student groups. At Western Goals, he used his connections with law enforcement officials all over the country to solicit information about suspected radicals. Even among other Western Goals employees, Rees was seen as “shady,” Buckland told me. (Indeed, not all law enforcement officials appeared to be taken by Rees: A declassified FBI file from the 1960s, before Western Goals existed, calls him a “name dropper” and “an opportunist without scruples.”)

By the early 1980s, thanks to McDonald’s far-flung network of donors and supporters, Western Goals’ average yearly budget was swelling—rising to nearly a half-million dollars in 1983, according to journalists John Lee Anderson and Scott Anderson—and the group had attracted a host of prominent figures to its cause. (The number of full-time employees, though, remained small—fewer than 10.) Board members included Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s former right-hand man and Donald Trump’s then-mentor; Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb; John Singlaub, a founding member of the CIA and retired Army major general later implicated in the Iran-Contra affair; a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; two retired Marine Corps four-star generals; three serving congressmen; and the far-right oligarch Roger Milliken.

By the early 1980s, Western Goals’ ideas were reaching some of the most powerful people in Washington. In 1982, an opaquely sourced Western Goals report about Soviet infiltration of the Nuclear Freeze movement was reprinted, almost word-for-word, in an issue of Reader’s Digest. (The author of the Digest article was a staunch anticommunist.) When President Ronald Reagan cited the Digest article on national TV as proof of a communist plot, West Wing staffers went into damage-control mode, claiming Reagan had gotten his information from multiple sources, including State Department reports. But the Digest writer said Reagan told him he had had the article checked with the U.S. intelligence community, who had verified the article’s accuracy. An FBI report, declassified in 1983, soon showed Reagan’s claim to be baseless.

According to Break-Ins, Death Threats and the FBI, the State Department in 1982 used a similarly unverified Western Goals report, passed to the organization by the FBI, to publicly label the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, a venerable U.S. pacifist organization, as a communist front. WILPF, incensed, filed a Freedom of Information Act request, which revealed that the State Department authors had copied, word-for-word, the Western Goals report on reputed Soviet front groups. The Department was later forced to withdraw its claim.

Western Goals’ connections to national and local U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies were close and sometimes disquieting. In the 1980s, two former Western Goals employees told the Boston Globe that the organization‘s publications were almost exclusively circulated to the Drug Enforcement Agency, ATF, FBI, CIA and police departments across the country. According to a recently declassified 1985 CIA document, the agency’s then-director, William Casey, once even recommended a Western Goals report about Marxism to a confidant.

Some of these government organizations actually appeared to launder Western Goals’ intelligence to launch investigations into individuals or groups deemed suspicious. According to contemporary news reports, individuals working for local or federal law enforcement would provide Western Goals with derogatory—and potentially illegally acquired—intelligence information about perceived radicals or groups. Rees, the publications director, would then publish this information in a “journalistic” Western Goals newsletter. McDonald would subsequently enter whole passages from this newsletter in writing into the Congressional Record, which shielded him from libel. (By law, members of Congress are immune from lawsuits targeting statements made in the Record.) Western Goals would then cite McDonald’s statements in its own public reports. It was a clever—and breathtakingly cynical—gambit.



***

In hindsight, the public blowup was as spectacular as it was inevitable. In January 1983, the Los Angeles Times reported that a veteran officer with the LAPD’s intelligence-gathering arm named Jay Paul was found to be illegally storing 180 boxes of LAPD materials running 500,000 pages in length, including confidential files, in a garage behind his wife’s law office in Long Beach. The files—political dossiers about individuals and groups such as civil rights organizations—weren’t supposed to exist anymore; a 1975 city law had required the destruction of six tons of these types of records.

In his wife’s law office, Paul had also installed a state-of-the art $100,000 computer system—a computer owned by Western Goals and connected to its main computer system in Alexandria. For two years, the Los Angeles Times reported, Paul had been entering “vast amounts” of information—by some reports, more than 6,000 files—into this computer, apparently from other law enforcement agencies, as well as from his own purloined trove of data. He also reportedly had access to a password-protected terrorism-tracking database from the RAND Corporation, which he likewise entered into the Western Goals computer. (A RAND employee told the L.A. Times he had been led to believe that Paul was accessing the information, which was unclassified, in his capacity as a police officer.) For their troubles, Western Goals paid Paul’s wife a $30,000-per year “maintenance fee.”

Paul said that superiors in the department had knowledge of, and actively encouraged, his work with Western Goals. He claimed he had even taken trips to the East Coast to visit the Western Goals office at his superiors’ urging. (According to documents at the Hoover Institution, on at least one occasion, Paul traveled to the East Coast for the organization’s board meeting to discuss its “computer program.”) The L.A. Times also reported that Paul had linked up a computer in the LAPD’s intelligence unit to the Western Goals computer in his wife’s office, allowing other officers to access the private database at work.

The rot seemed widespread: The LAPD found that a second veteran member of Paul’s intelligence unit had been illegally storing confidential police documents in his home—in addition, sources told the L.A. Times, to files “generated by military intelligence agencies.” A former Los Angeles County official also claimed that former police officers had secretly asked him to store files on their behalf, to prevent them from being destroyed, and that “a branch of the U.S. military” had retrieved some of them.

The board. Western Goals’ board members included Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb (far left), and Roy Cohn (second from right), Joseph McCarthy’s onetime right-hand man and Donald Trump’s onetime mentor. | AP; Getty | AP; Getty

Western Goals’ activities appeared to be something of an open secret. An unnamed East Coast police intelligence source told the L.A. Times that the organization had a reputation as a “clearinghouse” for police departments to keep information about people not currently under criminal investigation; the organization, according to the Times’ report, secretly provided police departments access to a “broad spectrum of ‘laundered’ intelligence materials.”

(Western Goals did “try to gather some intelligence,” recalls Kathy McDonald. “It was all from sources that had already been printed, in one form—that had already been gotten out, but had been completely ignored, for one reason or another. Larry and them just tried to shine a light on that.” She did not recollect the details of the LAPD scandal.)

The LAPD launched an internal probe into departmental wrongdoing. (It eventually absolved Paul of all but one count of misconduct and concluded that his superiors had approved his work with Western Goals.) The ACLU also filed a lawsuit against the foundation, on behalf of a number of L.A.-based civil society organizations and celebrities—including Joan Baez, Jackson Browne, Richard Dreyfuss, Norman Lear, Bonnie Raitt, Susan Sarandon and Studs Terkel—whose civil rights the suit said had been violated by the LAPD’s political surveillance activities and Western Goals’ dissemination of them. Most ominously, the L.A. County district attorney initiated a criminal grand jury probe into Paul’s activities. (Charges were never filed, however, and Paul was quietly reinstated to the LAPD. He retired in 1995.)

Western Goals was defiant under threat. According to the L.A. Times, after the LAPD scandal broke, employees physically retrieved computer files from Paul’s computer in California and carted them back to Virginia. LAPD investigators traveled to the East Coast to try and negotiate the files’ release, but Western Goals refused.

The walls were closing in. Yet Larry McDonald wouldn’t see them collapse entirely.



***

Late on August 30, 1983, Korean Airlines Flight 007 departed New York, bound for Seoul. It never made it to its final destination. In the early morning hours of September 1, while the plane was cruising at 30,000 feet, South Korean air controllers lost contact somewhere near Sakhalin Island, a strategically sensitive area in the Soviet Union’s Far East. At first, reports indicated that after the plane had strayed into Soviet airspace, and the Soviet military had forced it to land safely on USSR territory.

In reality, the Soviets had tailed the civilian airliner with fighter jets, and blown it out of the air, according to the Reagan administration, which cited Japanese intelligence intercepts. All 269 men and women aboard the flight were killed, including Congressman Larry McDonald, who had been on his way to a Heritage Foundation-sponsored South Korea-U.S. defense conference.

This was a spiraling geopolitical crisis. After initially denying responsibility, the Soviets said the fighter pilots had thought the KAL flight was a military plane and that it had not responded to multiple demands to land. Reagan made a nationally televised address, excoriating the Soviets for “a crime against humanity.” The Soviets vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the attack; the Soviet ambassador to the U.N. said the plane was in fact on a pre-planned spying mission.

“We were all shocked,” Christopher Burgess, a 30-year CIA veteran then stationed in Russia, told me. “Everyone we were talking to—the people you’d see in the streets, the people you’d buy your bread from—was nervous. They didn’t know what it meant.”

The murder of 269 innocent civilians appeared to be something of a tragic—if iniquitous—miscalculation. The Soviets really did seem to have mistaken the airliner for a military reconnaissance flight, and the KAL flight’s radio equipment did malfunction midflight. But McDonald partisans would not accept this explanation. His chief congressional spokesperson claimed the plane had been shot down because McDonald was on it, even though the congressman had been seated on KAL 007 at the last minute, after missing his scheduled flight. Western Goals, too, claimed that its founder had been targeted for assassination, suing the USSR for $200 million in damages, though the suit was later dismissed.

To this day, Kathy McDonald has her doubts. “It makes you really wonder,” she says, “because as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, Larry was the loudest advocate against communism in Congress at the time. So how amazing, and hard to believe, that the No. 1 anticommunist in the United States was in the plane that was shot down. It’s a little hard to swallow that that was an accident.”

The crash. Larry McDonald was killed when a Soviet fighter plane shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007, killing all 269 people on board. In the aftermath, the Soviet Union’s delegate to the United Nations vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning the attack (bottom left). Back in Washington (bottom right), the National Conservative Political Action Committee sponsored a protest near the White House. | AP | AP

McDonald’s funeral, attended by thousands, was a primal scream of the American right. Falwell, Helms and other conservative luminaries spoke. Christian Right organizations sponsored rallies in downtown Atlanta. Korean-American demonstrators burned Soviet flags in a public square. The single most hard-line anti-Soviet conspiracist in the entire U.S. Congress had, in the end, been murdered by the Evil Empire.

Within weeks of McDonald’s death, Western Goals’ acting director, the now deceased Linda Guell, was forced to fly to Los Angeles for a grand jury deposition. In exchange for immunity from prosecution, she agreed to provide the L.A. district attorney with subpoenaed computer disks and testify about the organization’s connections to the department. She admitted that the FBI, CIA and other government agencies had used information collected by Western Goals. According to Buckland, the former Western Goals employee, the LAPD also flew her to California for questioning. “Paul was very upset that I was there,” she recalled. “For the LAPD to fly me to L.A., it meant McDonald had a lot of information.”

Meanwhile, John Rees refused to answer his subpoena from the L.A. district attorney, citing journalistic privilege. He even told the Philadelphia Inquirer he still had networks of police contacts feeding him information and that Paul’s superiors in the LAPD had known about his work with the organization and had employed Western Goals material during their investigations.

Back in Georgia, things were getting even stranger. At the urging of several New Right giants, Kathy McDonald declared herself a candidate in the special election to replace her husband—it was, she recalls, “the most difficult thing she ever had to do in her life.” She faced an unusual, deep-pocketed foe. In 1978, Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, had faced an obscenity charge in Gwinnett County, Georgia—near McDonald’s hometown. During the trial, Flynt survived an assassination attempt by a serial-killing white supremacist terrorist who objected to the interracial pornography in Flynt’s magazine. Flynt was left wheelchair-bound for life. He believed (without evidence) that McDonald was involved in the plot, and saw Kathy McDonald’s campaign as an opportunity for payback. So, he took out full-page ads in both of Atlanta’s major newspapers decrying her candidacy, paid for anti-McDonald radio spots, and funneled money to two of her competitors in the Democratic primary. She lost in a runoff.

Western Goals, however, limped on. The organization started fundraising for the anti-communist Nicaraguan contras in 1983, as soon as Congress had forbidden the Reagan administration from providing U.S. support. By 1985, Western Goals was funding a 2,000-person contra military brigade—the Larry McDonald Task Force. Singlaub, a Western Goals board member, had become a crucial intermediary in National Security Council staffer Oliver North’s illegal weapons procurement network. Bereft of independent financial support and lacking McDonald’s guiding hand, Western Goals became a shell for laundering funds for the contras. In 1986, Iran-Contra exploded into public view, dragging key Western Goals board members, including Singlaub, in front of Congress—and killing off what little was left of the organization.

With one potential exception. After departing Western Goals in the aftermath of McDonald’s death, John Rees founded the Maldon Institute, a small nonprofit largely funded by the powerful philanthropic right-wing Scaife family. From the mid-1980s through the early 2010s, Maldon appeared, in a small way, to carry on Western Goals’ work, bragging on its website (since taken down) of connections to former U.S. and European intelligence officials that it paid for information. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, during the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania State Police used Rees’ reports to justify a warrant for a warehouse that protesters—whom Rees’ reporting claimed were communist-funded—were using as a base of operations; police raided the building and arrested 75 people. That same year, Rees organized an anti-terrorism conference attended by FBI agents and representatives of police departments, the Inquirer reported. Attempts to locate Rees for this story were unsuccessful.

***

The conspiratorial mindset that relegated Larry McDonald to the fringes has become surprisingly mainstream today. Tinfoil-hatted fanatics decrying “globalists” (wink) like George Soros or frothing over a fictitious pedophile ring in a pizza parlor are a disturbingly pedestrian aspect of our politics. Politicians subtly, and not-so-subtly, cultivate extremists for expediency and electoral gain. The man who rose to power on the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States succeeded him as president.

Looking back, the story of Western Goals is perhaps a parable for the dark radicalization of the American imagination. “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true,” wrote Hannah Arendt in 1951. Trust in post-World War II sureties declined in the years after Watergate, and has arguably been decreasing, precipitously, ever since. Instead of a “chicken in every pot,” there is a monster under every bed.

Whether we like it or not, we are, to a great extent, living in McDonald’s world today. Sometimes, the paranoid, projecting their vision on others, forcibly join us to them. And, so indentured, we all twist in the dark, together.