Award winning author and speaker Claire Conner exposes the plans of right-wing radicals to return America to 1900 in this informative clip.
The daughter of the first two John Birch Society members in Chicago, Conner has a unique “insider” perspective into America’s right-wing.
As noted on her website, her award winning book, Wrapped in the Flag “chronicles the radical right wing world of the 1960s when conspiracy ruled and the John Birch Society made national headlines. The daughter of a John Birch Society leader, Claire introduces us to the extreme ideas of a powerful political fringe group dispensing radical solutions to America’s problems.”
Following in the footsteps of its hero, Senator Joseph McCarthy, the John Birch Society believed that an international Communist conspiracy was on the verge of taking over the government of the United States. Top politicians, including President Dwight Eisenhower, were labeled as Communist operatives. John F. Kennedy was deemed a Socialist traitor.
Birchers fought civil rights, labor unions, environmental protections, Medicare, welfare programs, the United Nations and even water fluoridation. Today, the society continues many of those same campaigns from its national headquarters in Appleton, Wisconsin.
Claire Conner’s intimate account—based on records, documents and her firsthand knowledge—takes us deep inside one of the most radical right-wing movements in U.S. history. Moving seamlessly between memoir and history, humor and pain, past and present, Wrapped in the Flag serves up keen insight into the impact of extremism on one woman, her family and, if unchecked, on our country.
In the clip, below, from The Brainwashing of My Father, Conner talks about what the radical right-wing means when they say they want to “Take America Back.”
“The right-wing wants to rid us of the IRS, rid us of the Federal Reserve, rid us of the direct election of Senators, rid us of every piece of progressive legislation ever passed. The Radical right wants to take us back — back 114 years. They saw 1900 in America as like the apex of when we were great as a nation, 1900. Before the income tax, before the federal reserve, before any progressive legislation was considered or passed. Before child labor laws, before women had any rights, before women even had the right to vote.”
Watch:
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