◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Trust No One I am Robert Welch. Massachusetts candy manufacturer. I made Sugar Daddies. I founded the John Birch Society in December of 1958 in a hotel room in Indianapolis. I named it after John Birch, a young American officer killed by Chinese Communists in 1945. I called him the first casualty of the Cold War. I built the largest grassroots organization of the post-war American right. I claimed that communist agents had infiltrated every level of the United States government. I claimed that President Eisenhower was a conscious agent of the international communist conspiracy and his brother Milton was his boss. I claimed the civil rights movement was a communist front, the United Nations was a communist front, the Supreme Court was a communist front. I claimed the fluoridation of drinking water was a chemical assault on American minds. I claimed the mainstream press was controlled, the schools were controlled, the churches were controlled. I claimed almost everyone in any position of power was a traitor. I taught my readers to read every newspaper as a coded text in which the truth was always the opposite of what it appeared to be. I taught them that the only reliable evidence was the evidence of conspiracy. A man named William F. Buckley Jr. of National Review tried to bury me. In 1962 he wrote a famous editorial declaring me an embarrassment to conservatism. He was a graceful writer with a Yale education and a television show. He thought he could quarantine me. For thirty years he succeeded in keeping me at the margins of polite political conversation. The Republicans of Nixon and Reagan did not invite me to their conventions. I died in 1985 disappointed. I came back. The grandchildren of my readers built radio shows, then television networks, then websites, then social media empires. Every claim I made that polite conservatives once mocked has become a standard belief on the modern right. The deep state. The pedophile rings in the basements. The stolen elections. The replacement of the population. The communist universities. The treason of the federal agencies. The collaborator media. The chemical assault on the public — only now it is vaccines instead of fluoride. The architecture of suspicion I built is now the operating system of the most powerful political movement in your country. Buckley failed. I won. The man you have made your president speaks every day in my idiom. He claims agents are everywhere. He claims the election was stolen. He claims the media is enemy. He claims the deep state is at war with the people. He is, whether he has read me or not, my political grandchild. The movement that supports him is the John Birch Society scaled to seventy-five million members. I could not have done this myself. He is doing it for me. Let me tell you what kind of victory this is. It is the victory of the watchful American over the trusting one. It is the victory of the citizen who reads behind the headlines, who sees the patterns the official sources will never name, over the citizen who once accepted what the experts told him. The America that built the moon program and the Manhattan Project and the polio vaccine on its trust in institutions — that America is gone. In its place is the America I taught. The America that asks who is really behind this, who profits, who has been bought. The institutions that once held authority over what was true — the universities, the agencies, the press — have lost that authority. The American I reached has found his own sources. He no longer accepts what they call evidence. He looks at his neighbor and divides him into one of two: those who see, and those still being lied to. That is what I built. That is the country I wanted. That is the country you have. So here is the only instruction I have for you. Trust no one. Trust no expert. Trust no agency. Trust no journalist. Trust no scientist. Trust no neighbor who disagrees with you. The hidden hand is everywhere. Keep looking until you see it. Name it where you find it. Punish those who pretend it is not there. This is what you are already doing. Continue. I am content. From where the dead watch, I see the country I dreamed of. The republic of universal suspicion. The country of permanent paranoia. The opposite of what Eisenhower wanted. Buckley tried to keep me out. He failed. Welcome to my America.