“Done to death by slanderous tongues

Was the Hero that here lies.”

— Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare

“O Lord, deliver my soul from wicked lips, and a deceitful tongue.”

— Psalm 120:2

Slanderous tongues and wicked lips, unfortunately, have been a fact of life in our fallen world from time immemorial. In the 20th century, however, with the rise of the totalitarian “isms” — communism, fascism, Nazism — slander and deceit have been weaponized and honed by state-sponsored propaganda departments into lethal instruments for demonizing, then criminalizing, all opposition.

Americans have taken comfort in the belief that we have a “free press” not subject to the controls of government propagandists. Once upon a time that was true; the Fourth Estate, protected by the First Amendment, was a vital part of the checks and balances that protected our liberties from the danger of oppression by omnipotent government. But the media watchdogs of the Republic have become the lapdogs of the Deep State. The “Fake News” meme has stuck to the “mainstream” media because it fits. It describes perfectly what the American public witnesses each and every day. More and more Americans have come to realize that the major corporate media are not merely infected with a “liberal” bias, but that these institutions have actually become house organs and transmission belts for the globalist insiders who are the “permanent government” that runs Washington, D.C., regardless of which party of the Republican-Democrat duopoly holds the White House or Congress.

The relentless, coordinated leaks and attacks against President Donald Trump by this Big Government-Big Media cabal demonstrate how perilously close America has come to being transformed into something more closely resembling Communist China, Soviet Russia, or Putin’s Russia today. For the past two years, the Big Media universe — New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, Yahoo! News, NPR, PBS, etc. — has marched lockstep in outraged, unceasing opposition to Donald Trump, to “Trumpism,” and to Trump’s base, that “basket of deplorables.” Whatever opinions one may hold about Trump, his policies, and his style, it is clear that the political insiders and their media cohorts view him as a serious threat to their long-laid plans for global government in a New World Order, which is why they have been running in no-holds-barred, full-tilt-treason, smear-and-destroy mode since November 2016. When President Trump booted their Deep State co-conspirators out of their perches atop our intelligence agencies — James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, et al. — these serial liars and leakers were welcomed into Big Media, where they have carried on their treasonous efforts to overthrow the results of the 2016 election.

A new low in this Deep State propaganda effort was struck on September 5 with the publication in the New York Times of an incredible op-ed by an anonymous “senior official in the Trump administration” who admitted, nay boasted, that he/she, along with many colleagues, is part of the “resistance” sabotaging the Trump administration from within.

The Times op-ed, entitled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” carries this subtitle: “I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

In his article “Bureaucracy vs. Trump, America, Constitution,” in our special “Deep State” issue of The New American (January 8, 2018), Alex Newman pointed out that, according to an analysis of election donations by The Hill, “some 95 percent of the money donated by federal employees who gave in the 2016 presidential election went to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”

There are literally thousands of these Obama-Clinton cadres still in place, actively subverting the Trump administration’s program from within, while their Marxist-Maoist, street-rioting comrades and their virulently anti-Trump allies in the media attack from without.

Playing the Race Card

The most vicious lines of attack on President Trump — which the far-left and the establishment media never tire of employing against anti-communists and conservatives — are the constant charges of racism and anti-Semitism. The communist Antifa thugs chant “No Trump, No KKK, No Racist USA!” as they riot and burn America’s cities. The leftist punditocracy at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and the rest of the Fake News cabal echo these smears with a continuous flood of stories and op-eds likening Trump to Hitler and Mussolini, and label-lynching him and his followers with the usual defamatory tags: Nazi, neo-Nazi, fascist, white nationalist, white supremacist, racist, anti-Semite, xenophobe, anti-immigrant, etc.

There are, of course, real people who genuinely qualify as racists, anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, fascists, etc. However, they comprise a pretty small cohort of the American population and are politically insignificant, except for providing the Left with a pretext for ad hominem attacks on those who oppose Big Government statism.

The incredible volume and vehemence of the attacks on President Trump by the media and political elites are unprecedented for any White House occupant. One must go back to the 1960s to the concerted smear offensive against The John Birch Society to find anything comparable. Founded in December 1958, the organization quickly alarmed both the communists and the globalists with its education-and-action program.

On February 25, 1961, the official Communist Party newspaper on the West Coast, the People’s World, launched a Kremlin-directed attack on the upstart group in an article entitled “Enter (from Stage Right) THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY.” The article depicted the Birchers as a dangerous, secret, fascist society. Coming from a recognized communist publication, the People’s World hit piece would have had very limited impact, except for the fact that the “liberal” establishment media soon joined in to amplify the baseless charges. Time magazine was one of the first, followed by almost the entire “mainstream” press. An avalanche of media stories and editorials proceeded to falsely accuse the Society of being racist or anti-Semitic. Others achieved the same effect with the “sandwich smear” — placing the Society’s name in-between virulent groups such as the KKK and Nazis, in story after story, knowing that thousands of repetitions would establish this false association as fact in many minds.

At the request of JBS founder Robert Welch, the California Senate Factfinding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities, chaired by Senator Hugh M. Burns (a Democrat) extensively investigated these charges. To the chagrin of the Society’s accusers, the 62-page report issued by the subcommittee exonerated the JBS of the scurrilous charges. Among its many findings, the investigative panel wrote: “We have not found the Society to be either a secret or a fascist organization, nor have we found the great majority of its members in California to be mentally unstable, crackpots, or hysterical about the threat of Communist subversion.” Moreover, according to the report, “Our investigations have disclosed no evidence of anti-Semitism on the part of anyone connected with the John Birch Society in California, and much evidence to the effect that it opposes racism in all forms.”

Indeed, racism is a form of collectivism, which is anathema to Birchers, who are staunch individualists and believe each individual must be judged on his own merits. Leonard Patterson, a black member of the JBS and its speakers bureau, had previously been a high-level leader of the Communist Party USA. He had been trained in Moscow, Russia, where he roomed with Gus Hall, who would later become the longtime head of the CPUSA. Lola Belle Holmes was another black ex-communist who joined the Society and became a speaker, warning about the communist plans to foment racial warfare in America. Other prominent black Americans who belie the claim of Birch Society racism are author-columnist George Schuyler, Reverend Freeman Yearling, Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, Reverend Steven Craft, Charles E. Smith, Alvin Smith, and former FBI undercover operatives Julia Brown and Gerald Kirk.

Contrary to the anti-JBS propaganda, the Birch Society also has always welcomed Jews as members. Prominent New York businessman Alfred Kohlberg was a founding member of the National Council of the Society. The late David Eisenberg, an Arizona aeronautical engineer, was a faithful member for more than five decades, serving many of those years on the Council. Authors Samuel Blumenfeld and Georgia Gabor (a Holocaust survivor) were speakers for the Society, as was the late Avraham Shifrin, a survivor of the Soviet “Gulag” system, the slave labor camps that were the graveyard for tens of millions of Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and victims of other nationalities. Shifrin, who eventually emigrated to Israel and wrote The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union, toured the United States for the Society in the 1980s, exposing the reality of communist tyranny, as well as the fact that U.S. government aid and trade policies were subsidizing and propping up the Soviet regime.

The Buckley Betrayal

The incessant, malicious attacks by the communists, socialists, and their liberal media allies inflicted damage on the young Birch Society, but the most serious toll was exacted by William F. Buckley, Jr. and his neoconservative National Review. The mainstream media mavens, who have never been friendly to genuine conservatism, continue to regularly praise Buckley for “purging” the JBS from the conservative movement in the 1960s. Buckley, a member of the glob­alist Council on Foreign Relations and Yale’s secretive Skull & Bones society, as well as a veteran of the CIA and a boon companion of New York Times publisher Abe Rosenthal, relentlessly savaged the JBS for, supposedly, “discrediting” conservatism and anti-communism with “paranoid” conspiracy theory. He was rewarded by his Deep State confreres by being anointed as the spokesman for conservatism — as it was redefined. Buckley and National Review became the prophets of “Big Government conservatism,” an oxymoronic philosophy that defended and embraced much of the welfare state of FDR’s New Deal, JFK’s New Frontier, and LBJ’s Great Society. Buckleyism reoriented modern conservatism, making it more “stylish” and “respectable” and more amenable to key liberal positions and institutions (gay “rights,” “pro-choice” on abortion, gun control, internationalism, the United Nations, the Federal Reserve, NAFTA, WTO, UN treaties, NATO, the European Union, etc.).

Buckley, the liberals’ favorite conservative, was given a plum media platform at the socialist PBS for his Firing Line television program, which he used not only as a peacock throne for his own advancement, but also as a friendly forum to boost avatars of the Left such as George McGovern, Henry Kissinger, Allen Ginsberg, Jesse Jackson, Jimmy Carter, Jack Kerouac, Noam Chomsky, Huey Newton, Timothy Leary, Allard Lowenstein, Hugh Hefner, and other enemies of Christian morality and limited constitutional government. But Robert Welch and the Birch Society, according to Buckley, were pariahs who must be ostracized. He and his National Review acolytes later extended that ostracism to L. Brent Bozell, M.E. Bradford, Joseph Sobran, Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, Paul Gottfried, Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul, and other former Buckley allies who strayed from the new “conservative” party line dictated by the Buckleyite enforcers of globalist group think. While left-wing organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League, People for the American Way, and Media Matters attack genuine conservatives/constitutionalists from the left flank, the Buckley faction hammers them in a pincers attack from the faux right flank.

This controlled right-left pincers strategy was on full display during the 2016 election cycle, as Buckley’s neoconservative heirs at National Review and the Weekly Standard — William Kristol, David French, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, George Will, Mona Charen, Andrew McCarthy, et al. — formed the core of the “Never Trump” Republicans. Their smearbund attacked Trump more ferociously than even many of Trump’s detractors on the Left. The fact that Trump overcame this combined left-right ambush to win the White House is an indication that a great many more Americans have become awakened to this deadly con game and are no longer willing to follow the “leaders” assigned by the glob­alist thought cartel.

Pro-globalist socialists have twisted virtually every word and action of Donald Trump to make them bad — just as they have done with the JBS for decades.

To find out more about The John Birch Society, click here. To join, click here.

This article originally appeared in the October 8, 2018 print edition of The New American. The New American publishes a print magazine twice a month, covering issues such as politics, money, foreign policy, environment, culture, and technology. To subscribe, click here.

Photo: AP Images