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How One Conspiracy Theory Group Pushes Anti-U.N. Legislation Around The Country

By Hayes Brown and Scott Keyes on May 9, 2013 at 4:00 pm

A John Birch Society-sponsored sign (Credit: Wikimedia)

A fringe conspiracy theory group that believes the United Nations is out to steal the freedoms of the American people has been working with state legislatures around the country to pass a series of laws that reflect their paranoid, isolationist worldview.

The John Birch Society, a nativist organization founded in the 1950s, is famous for opposing the Civil Rights movement and espousing other far-right views, including that President Eisenhower was a communist infiltrator and Nelson Mandela is “a communist terrorist thug.” The John Birch Society’s views are so far right, in fact, that even conservative icon William F. Buckley denounced the group as “idiotic” and “paranoid.”

Their longtime foe, the United Nations, in 1992 passed a series of non-binding recommendations related to developing resources in a way that can be sustained across generations. The phrase that these documents created — sustainable development — has become a code-word for right-wing black helicopter conspiracies.

By targeting these recommendations, the sinister sounding “Agenda 21,” the Birchers have found a way to promote their views under the guise of protecting the American people from the United Nations stealing away their property. Missouri became the latest state to pass just such a law on Wednesday, sending SB265 to Gov. Jay Nixon (D) for his signature. Under the provisions of SB265, the Missouri government is banned from passing any future laws that would fall under the scope of Agenda:

Neither the state of Missouri nor any political subdivision shall adopt or implement policy recommendations that deliberately or inadvertently infringe or restrict private property rights without due process, as may be required by policy recommendations originating in, or traceable to Agenda 21, adopted by the United Nations in 1992 at its Conference on Environment and Development or any other international law or ancillary plan of action that contravenes the Constitution of the United States or the Missouri Constitution.

The Missouri draft closely mirrors draft anti-Agenda 21 legislation in Oklahoma that was pulled following a local scandal. ThinkProgress contacted the office of State Sen. Patrick Anderson (R) who sponsored the Oklahoma bill and was told that the language was based almost entirely on a law passed in Alabama. Jerry Bassett, the Director of the Alabama Legislative Reference Service, told ThinkProgress that while he could not tell us who the original drafter of the bill was, the member who brought it forward had the bill completely typed and ready when he did. Bassett also told ThinkProgress the original copy of the bill, still in the LRS’ files, has the words “Tea Party bill” written on it.
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Climate Progress

Republican Party Officially Embraces ‘Garbage’ Agenda 21 Conspiracy Theories As Its National Platform

By Stephen Lacey on Aug 15, 2012 at 2:08 pm

If you want to understand just how extreme and conspiratorial many in the “mainstream” Republican party have become, look no further than a resolution on Agenda 21 passed quietly in January.

Agenda 21 is a completely non-binding international framework for sustainability passed in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit. The framework, which sets out very loose aspirational goals for making communities more efficient and less carbon-intensive, was signed by then President George H.W. Bush and later upheld by Presidents Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush.

Since the framework was adopted, right-wing conspiracy theorists have pushed bizarre theories about Agenda 21 being a central tool for the United Nations to create a one-world government and take away the rights of local property owners. In recent years, elevated by the megaphone of extreme pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, these conspiracies made their way into mainstream politics. Today, Agenda 21ers — many affiliated with the Tea Party and the John Birch Society — are peddling fears about Agenda 21 in order to stop basic efficiency and renewable energy programs on the state level.

Conspiracy theorists active in politics have called Agenda 21 “socialism on steroids” that would cause Americans to be “herded into centers like the UN wants.”

And in an April presentation on Agenda 21, activist Victoria Baer had this to say about John McCain’s support of ethanol, which she also claimed was part of a UN plot: “We should have left him in Hanoi with Jane Fonda…he is a traitor, a pure traitor.”

Yes, Baer called John McCain — a decorated Vietnam War veteran who spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war — a traitor who should be “left in Hanoi” because he supported minimal increases in domestic ethanol production.

Baer also claims that the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. National Parks Service, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture — agencies founded more than 100 years before Agenda 21 — are “all out of the UN to have these wonderful little furry animal organizations to cut our land away from us.”

In fact, the Agenda 21 language explicitly states that countries and local communities have “the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies.”

So what do these historically-challenged and completely inaccurate claims have to do with the Republican party? The Republican National Committee has officially adopted these conspiracy theories as its national platform. In January, the RNC adopted a resolution calling Agenda 21 “insidious” and “covert.”

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Security

Ron Paul Feeds Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory That Government Could Turn U.S. Into A Concentration Camp

By Eli Clifton on Sep 8, 2011 at 4:30 pm

While last night’s Republican debate offered few surprises as the primary field wrapped themselves in the legacy of Ronald Reagan and roundly denounced the Obama administration’s fiscal, foreign, and social policies, Ron Paul stood out with his unique views on the border fence endorsed by Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain. Paul said:

I think this fence business is designed and may well be used against us and keep us in. In economic turmoil, the people want to leave with their capital. And there’s capital controls and there’s people control. So, every time you think of the fence keeping all those bad people out, think about those fences maybe being used against us, keeping us in.

Watch it:

Paul’s embrace of extreme right-wing conspiracy theories about a U.S. government which enslaves its citizens is even more visible in his disgust with FEMA and his answer to a question at the Ames Straw Poll about whether “HR 645 [The National Emergency Center Establishment Act] could lead to detainment camps for American citizens during martial law.” He responded:

Yeah, that’s their goal, they’re setting up the stage for violence in this country, no doubt about it.

The belief that FEMA, or various other government agencies, might be planning to restrict the movements of Americans or turn sections of the U.S., if not the entire country, into a detainment camp is traced back to the 1950s and, in the 1990s, the far-right “Patriot”/militia movement.

Chip Berlet, a senior researcher at Political Research Associates, told ThinkProgress:

The main font of this [FEMA roundup conspiracy theory] is in the John Birch society publications since the 1950s. The John Birch Society is where Glenn Beck and a lot of the right wing talk radio hosts gets their conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theory was picked up by the antisemitic Spotlight newspaper and the Christic Institute, a progressive, anti-CIA group. In the 1990s the militia movement takes the theory.

While the “American concentration camp” meme has been debunked numerous times as a conspiracy theory coming out of various extremist movements, the sinister anti-government rumors dating back as much as 60 years seem to have found a spot at the table at last night’s Republican debate. Berlet doesn’t see much hope for an end to the FEMA roundup conspiracy theory, telling ThinkProgress:

The conspiracy theory grooms you to be afraid of the government, makes you acept laissez-faire ideas of government involvement, and puts you in an apocalyptic mindset. You still have people to this day who take it so far they form militias and you have people in the John Birch society who say don’t take it so far but still promote the FEMA roundup conspiracy theory.

Yglesias

Myths of Political History: John Birch Society Edition

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 12, 2010 at 12:14 pm

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The John Birch Society was nuts, and it’s too William F Buckley’s credit that whatever else you might say about him he tried to purge the Birchers from the conservative movement. Similarly, I think the fact that Jonathan Rauch wants to bring the conservative movement into closer touch with external reality today is laudable. But this bit of potted political history strikes me as lacking an evidentiary basis:

In October 1965, William F. Buckley made it possible for American conservatives to come in from the wilderness and govern. In his magazine, National Review, he published a 12-page “special feature section” that read Robert Welch and his John Birch Society followers out of respectable conservatism.

Welch and the Birchers saw liberalism and communism as essentially the same thing. Their kookiness, according to Buckley, threatened to discredit both anti-communism and anti-liberalism. “Mr. Welch, for all his good intentions, threatens to divert militant conservative action to irrelevance and ineffectuality,” Buckley wrote. “By the extravagance of his remarks, he repels, rather than attracts, a great following.”

Buckley’s gambit succeeded. The Birchers and their conspiracy-mongering were banished from the mainstream conservative coalition, and the stage was set for the reality-based critique of liberalism that brought Ronald Reagan to power.

My impression is that Jimmy Carter’s 1980 re-election campaign more-or-less succeeded in planting serious doubts in the mind of the electorate about the wisdom of electing a rightwinger like Ronald Reagan. That’s why, for example, Reagan only managed to get 51 percent of the vote. But obviously the economic situation in 1980 was bad and Carter himself got a terrible 40 percent. If you look at the two-party split in terms of Douglas Hibbs’ famous model then 1980 looks like a very typical election:

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Maybe there’s a case to be made that Buckley’s 1965 denunciation of the Birchers helped Reagan win the presidential primary 15 years later, but it seems doubtful to me. As is generally the case with ideological repositioning, I think the main reason to sideline kooks in your political movement is that governing with kooky ideas is going to be bad for the country. The badness is itself a good reason to avoid that fate, and poor governing performance is unlikely to be conducive to your own political interests.

Meanwhile, I think it’s interesting that Rauch didn’t mention the fact that the John Birch Society seems to be making a comeback as something of a player in organized conservative circles.

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