My recent LRC blog, Phyllis Schlafly, ‘Mrs. America,’ Was a Secret Member of the John Birch Society, has began to generate quite a controversy.
The Birchers have struck back at neocon Ronald Radosh for authoring the Daily Beast article I alluded to in my blog.
To be honest, Schlafly’s membership in the JBS to me is inconsequential, and is only being raised now because of the buzz about the new docudrama series on Hulu about her.
Just one more attempt by the anti-Trump left regime media and their #NeverTrump neocon allies to attack and vilify one of their demonized enemies because of her endorsement of Donald Trump late in her life, using Ernie Lazar’s independent research on Schlafly as “the silver bullet” in this latest effort against Trump.
Ultimately what I wish scholars would seriously address are the substantial intelligence community linkages and associations with the birth of the modern “synthetic or phony” conservative movement. How did the anti-New Deal, anti-Fair Deal Old Right dissipate and become replaced by this Buckleyite New Right?
Is there perhaps more to this story than historians have alluded to?
As my LRC articles below demonstrate there was a concerted effort by these intelligence entities to reshape American ideological belief systems after 1945 — liberal, conservative, social democrat, and neoconservative.
How the CIA Bamboozled The Public For 70 Years
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr.
And this Amazon book list — Conservatism: The CIA’s Phony Movement
It was “former” deep cover CIA agent Bill Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony “conservative movement.” Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, was later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Burnham, who had maintained many of his former leftist connections, was active in the CIA sponsored front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was secretly funding left-wing, anti-Soviet scholars and publications networks. When later, at Burnham’s urging, Buckley created National Review magazine, the premier “Conservative” publication of the past sixty+ years. Joining Burnham in the endeavor as principal editors were Kendall and his sister Priscilla, all of whom had been employed by the CIA.
William J. Casey (later CIA director under Ronald Reagan) drew up the incorporation papers for National Review, and served as its long-time legal counsel.
4:07 pm on April 23, 2020
