The John Birch Society (JBS) is an American right-wing political advocacy group. Founded in 1958, it is anti-communist, supports social conservatism, and is associated with ultraconservative, radical right, far-right, or libertarian ideas.
Ezra Taft Benson was an American farmer, government official, and religious leader who served as the 15th United States Secretary of Agriculture during both presidential terms of Dwight D. Eisenhower and as the 13th president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1985 until his death in 1994.
John Morrison Birch was a United States Army Air Forces military intelligence captain, OSS field agent in China during World War II, as well as former Baptist minister and missionary. He was killed in a confrontation with Chinese Communist soldiers during an assignment he was ordered on by the OSS, ten days after the war ended. Birch was posthumously awarded the Army Distinguished Service Medal.
I Saw Poland Betrayed: An American Ambassador Reports to the American People (1948) is a book written by former United States ambassador to Poland, Arthur Bliss Lane, who observed what he considered to be the betrayal of Poland by the Western Allies at the end of World War II. He resigned as ambassador in 1947 in order to inform Americans what was occurring "behind the Iron Curtain."
Western Goals Foundation was a private domestic intelligence agency active in the United States. It was founded in 1979 by Major General John K. Singlaub, the publisher and spy John H. Rees, and Congressman Larry McDonald. It went defunct in 1986 when the Tower Commission revealed it had been part of Oliver North's Iran–Contra funding network.
John Herbert Rees is a British right-wing journalist and government informant resident in the United States. He was active in the Western Goals Foundation and the John Birch Society.
Revilo Pendleton Oliver was an American professor of Classical philology, Spanish, and Italian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was one of the founders of National Review in 1955, and also was a co-founder of the John Birch Society in 1958, where he published in its magazine, American Opinion, before resigning in 1966. He later advised a Holocaust denial group. He was a polemicist for right-wing, white nationalist and antisemitic causes.
The New American (TNA) is a conservative and right-wing print magazine published twice a month and a digital news source published daily online by American Opinion Publishing Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the John Birch Society. The magazine was created in 1985 from the merger of two JBS publications: American Opinion and The Review of the News.
Robert Henry Winborne Welch Jr. was an American businessman, political organizer, and conspiracy theorist. He was wealthy following his retirement from the candy business and used his wealth to sponsor anti-communist causes. He co-founded the John Birch Society (JBS), an American extreme right-wing political advocacy group, in 1958 and tightly controlled it until his death. He was highly controversial and criticized by liberals, as well as some mainstream conservatives, including William F. Buckley Jr.
William Norman Grigg was an American author of several books from a constitutionalist perspective. He was formerly a senior editor of The New American magazine, the official publication of the John Birch Society.
Nicaragua Betrayed, published by Western Islands in 1980, is the memoir of former President of Nicaragua Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who had been toppled the previous year by the Sandinista insurgency. At the time of the book's publication, Somoza was living in Asunción, Paraguay, as a personal guest of President Alfredo Stroessner.
Francis Birch was an American geophysicist. He is considered one of the founders of solid Earth geophysics. He is also known for his part in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Arthur R. "Art" Thompson is a former CEO of the John Birch Society. He took office in 2005 after launching a "coup" with the support of the organization's former president John McManus. He was replaced as CEO by Bill Hahn in 2020.
George Edward Griffin is an American author, filmmaker, and conspiracy theorist. Griffin's writings promote a number of right-wing views and conspiracy theories regarding political, defense and health care. In his book World Without Cancer, he argued in favor of a pseudo-scientific theory that asserted cancer to be a nutritional deficiency curable by consuming amygdalin. He is the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island (1994), which advances debunked conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve System. He is an HIV/AIDS denialist, supports the 9/11 Truth movement, and supports the specific John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory that Oswald was not the assassin. He also believes that the Biblical Noah's Ark is located at the Durupınar site in Turkey.
The Liberty Political Action Conference (LPAC) was an annual political conference attended by conservative and libertarian activists and elected officials from across the United States. The conference was held from 2011 to 2014, in various locations.
"Birches" is a poem by American poet Robert Frost. First published in the August, 1915 issue of The Atlantic Monthly together with "The Road Not Taken" and "The Sound of Trees" as "A Group of Poems". It was included in Frost's third collection of poetry Mountain Interval, which was published in 1916. Consisting of 59 lines, it is one of Robert Frost's most anthologized poems. Along with other poems that deal with rural landscape and wildlife, it shows Frost as a nature poet.
One Dozen Candles was a series of history and opinion books criticizing communism, labor unions, and welfare policies that was assembled by Robert W. Welch, Jr. and published during the 1960s by Western Islands, the publishing arm of American right-wing advocacy group the John Birch Society. On the series packaging, the name One Dozen Candles was accompanied by the proverb, "It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness." Earlier editions also carried the branding for the "American Opinion Reprint Series" while later editions were part of "The Americanist Library."
The Soviet Negro Republic was a hypothetical future communist republic, proposed by some black communist activists in 1930s America. In 1945, the former leader of the Communist Party USA told the House Un-American Activities Committee that these proposals were not official party policy. During the 1960s, the far-right John Birch Society linked the burgeoning civil rights movement for Black Americans to plans for a "Soviet Negro Republic", claiming that the movement was a communist plot.
Ernie Lazar was an American researcher and a prolific Freedom of Information Act petitioner who amassed a "vast digital and documentary archive of government records on political extremists," used by many scholars, who regarded him as a "hero of researchers."
