The John Birch Society and The Tea Party: Liberty That Includes Subjugation

In the past, I have written briefly about the Tea party but only to note the irrational nature of its body politic. I speculated that such a brief narrative was needed and nothing more. Honestly, as a man of African descent, I don’t desire to give them attention, since it appears it is all they want. But my confederates seems to be preoccupied with them as if they matter, when they really don’t, seeing it was our in action at the poll rather than their substance that got us stuck with this congress.

The way I see it, this is nothing new. Many of us have no knowledge of history, and barely recall Martin King Jr. let alone the Nativist or John Birch Society. The Tea party, if anything, is just another fringe extremist group coopting politics for they lack mirrors to look themselves in the eye. The John Birch Society was founded by Robert Welch in 1958. It was named after Captain John Birch, who during his military operations in China, was killed by Chinese communists on 25th August, 1945.

The goal of the organization from Welch’s perspective was to establish and operate a "secret, monolithic organization" that would "operate under completely authoritative control at all levels" mainly through its flagship publication American Opinion. However it was politics – a hatred for democrats and Harry S. Truman, and Eisenhower, who he believed were part of a communist conspiracy that fueled his efforts. Similar to today’s Tea Party, that project the fuel against the nation’s first African American President Barack Obama because they desire to project him as being a socialist.

In theory the John Birch society and the tea parties are the same. Maybe that’s why my late great Uncle, Louis Young, whenever some would make him mad he would call them a fringe, radical, Birch society communist.” Lesson being, that they were the real communist working against the American status quo. Welch would be a great Tea Party member, for if any one disagreed with him, all he had to do was call them a communist sympathizer. Just ask John Foster Dulles and Allan W. Dulles .

The John Birch society felt their way of life was under attack and like the Tea Party, they wanted to take America back to the way it was. Maybe this is why they were also vehemently opposed to the Civil Rights movement. The tea-party movement reminds me of people whose vision of the government is conspiratorial and dangerously detached from reality and simply Nativist in origin. They even had support from one of my favorite writers and essayist of the modern era, William F. Buckley. Now I did not agree with him political, but he was a wordsmith and smart, smart enough even to get the Republican Party to adopt Barry Goldwater as its presidential candidate.

But what scares me the most about the tea party is extremism, the kind that will not listen or have tolerance for the views and opinions of others. This even is a fear of mine with most African Americans for many of us will avoid civil discussion due to our ineptness of information in general and our inability to listen to any one whom may disagree with us, for if they do, we ignore reason and logic and are quick to interject “hater” as if it is a real rationale.

During the Kennedy administration, a FBI investigation was launched against the top dogs in the Birch Society. Hypocrisy in its purest form since Kennedy himself held similar beliefs, especially concerning integration, civil rights and voting rights for African Americans. After all he and his democratic party voted against all of the aforementioned. Hypocritical I say because in September 1961 the John Birch Society organized the protests against the enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi.

The irony for me, and one reason I consider the present day Tea Party, more like the John Birch Society than any independent movement against taxation is because the people they purport to admire, namely Thomas Jefferson, albeit smart, was just as backwards in the universal understanding of the concepts of liberty and freedom.

Jefferson is the personification all of the Tea Party and their precursor movement the John Birch Society and I understand why. Here is a man who has is image imbued in the nation’s capital as the embodiment of liberty and freedom. Yes, he fought against the Stamp Act, which taxed everything from newspapers to dice and was passed by the British House of Commons in 1765 by a vote of 294 to 42. However, this is the same man who owned more than 600 slaves over his life time across multiple plantations but wrote “all men are created equal.” He even wrote and supported laws to stop the importation of slaves to the colonies, but only in refutation to the crown. Over his life he only freed two slaves and was a rapist of black women who even fathered children with them. When he died, he still did not free his slaves but rather left them to his family as part of his estate or sold them to pay off his debts.

Today’s Tea party is an extension of the America that cannot accept or belive a person of African descent is a true citizen - born on these shores or not. They would be more supporttive of any black many to be in the basement of the Whitehouse, like the wife of James K. Polk, who turned the basement of the Whitehouse into a quarters for slaves, than have a man of color sitting in the oval office. They are equal to the white supremacist, who manifested disdain for any black man who held or desired to hold a political office for their belief was that they were not entitled to such not being white. They would be more akin to the men who were murders, or whipped black men (like Andrew J. Flowers of Tennessee) for running against and beating a white man for political office. They would be like those who would tell Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first African American to serve in either house of congress, was blocked because white politicians, that he did not meet the constitutional requirements that a person be a citizen for at least nine years before serving as a senator. Their position being that blacks had only been free since the fourteenth amendment in 1868 and Revels was elected to serve in 1870 making him many years short of this standard (original birthers).

Yes the present day tea party admire Jefferson, more for his views, which included the beliefs that blacks were intellectually inferior, lazy and didn’t work hard and maintained run down appearances. They believe as he wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia that blacks were not the equals of whites and that “deep root prejudices entertained by the whites… will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.” Yes the Tea party is an extension of these execrated beliefs and all they do is in an effort to dehumanize others of non-European origin, in particulars African Americans, especially if male and President of the United States.