oldshowbiz:

The John Birch Society was an extremist organization in the 1960s which relentlessly characterized the Civil Rights Movement as a Communist plot. They published many pamphlets deriding MLK as a violent man and suggesting he was a Soviet agent. 

Among the people who belonged to the John Birch Society were its co-founder Fred Koch, his billionaire son Charles Koch, and a Wisconsin lecturer named Paul Weyrich.

While they did have lunatic support, the John Birch Society was dismissed and discredited by most Americans. The majority of the Republican Party felt they were too extremist and did harm to the GOP. 

Richard Nixon called them “dictatorial and totalitarian [having] rendered immeasurable harm to the cause of individual liberty.“

Bob Dylan and George Carlin mocked the John Birch Society in their early performances. Jokes at their expense could be seen everywhere from the Tonight Show to Mad Magazine.

Conceding that they were a laughing stock, many of its operatives fled in order to rebrand and re-strategize. Starting anew in the 1970s, the radical extremists started front groups, now known as “think tanks,” which propagated the Birch-style philosophy. But this time they had enormous billionaire support. 

Paul Weyrich co-founded the Heritage Foundation, the Christian Coalition, and the Moral Majority. He argued that slavery was harder on the slave owner than the enslaved. He had close connections to prominent members of the extremist Christian Reconstructionist movement. 

Charles Koch became the most notorious briber of the political system, lobbying so aggressively that he managed to re-write the laws of the United States for his own selfish gain. 

Sixty years later, through the relentless use of corporate lobbyists and legalized graft, media consolidation and the power of propaganda, the John Birch Society philosophy - once discredited as too extreme - took hold.