Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul carry on Kentucky’s tradition of conspiracy theories

Try to imagine.

Shadowy, far-right-wing extremists pushing conspiratorial claptrap are trying to take over the Republican party. Kentucky’s two Republican senators rebuke the peddlers of paranoia and beg the GOP to shun them.

These frenzied fanatics are dangerous, warns one senator, because they take “our minds away from the ways our problems ought to be met.” Declares the other, “secret societies motivated by hatred, distrust, selfishness and character assassination will never build a positive and dynamic society.”

Just a sweet dream shared by never-Trumper Republicans and Democrats? Nope, it’s real history.              

The radical rightists were members of the John Birch Society. The senators were John Sherman Cooper and Thruston Morton.

Kids will stop shooting hoops in Kentucky before Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul tell the GOP’s current crazies, notably fans of Q-Anon and its kindred kooks, to take a hike.

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“They are reflecting their constituency,” said veteran journalist Bill Straub. “Politics is politics, and you still have to get elected.”

McConnell, who interned under Cooper, tries to have it both ways with GOP wackos like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. While he said her “loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party,” the minority leader “said nothing about her loony lies and conspiracy theories in the nearly six months since the QAnon adherent … won the Republican nomination for her House seat,” the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote last February.

Louisville Courier-Journal columnist Joseph Gerth invited his readers to choose whether Paul is “a QAnon conspiracy theorist, an Alex Jones crackpot or a garden variety kook. Or all three.”

I vote “all three.”

While the crazies have won the GOP’s soul, the Birchers lost in the 1960s, thanks to Republican moderates like Cooper and mainstream conservatives like Morton.

While QAnoners et al. rant about a “Deep State” Democratic pedophile ring and a Jewish space laser that set California woods ablaze, the Birchers raved about the Red Menace.

The society claimed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” that the civil rights movement was Communist-inspired and out to found an “independent Negro-Soviet Republic” and that fluoridated drinking water was a Moscow-directed plot to soften up our brains for a communist takeover.

“The people are concerned about the safety of the country,” the Associated Press quoted Cooper in 1962, one of the chillier Cold War years. “This [the John Birch movement] appeals to them because it offers some kind of escape, however irrational.”

Straub, who covered politics in Frankfort and Washington for years, said the GOP’s flight into conspiratorial fantasy is being driven by a big chunk of the party’s base: whites who fear a “minority white” America. (By 2045, Hispanics, Blacks, Asians and multiracial populations will comprise 50.3% of the population, according to the Brookings Institution.

“I refer to it as the white people’s ‘Battle of the Bulge,’” said Straub, referring to Adolf Hitler’s failed attempt to defeat U.S. forces late in World War II. “[Whites] are making their one last gasp at trying to turn the tide, but eventually they are not going to succeed,” said Straub. “But in order to get elected in (nearly 87% white) Kentucky, you have to cater to the white vote and the white vote has shifted further to the right than in the past.”

Anyway, like Cooper, Morton insisted that the GOP had no room for what he termed “a clandestine organization engaged in character assassinations,” the AP reported in 1965. “If representative government is to prevail, it must prevail in the open. Secret societies motivated by hatred, distrust, selfishness and character assassination will never build a positive and dynamic society.”

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Though the Birchers failed to supplant the GOP establishment six decades ago, they survived on the fringes of Republican politics as an ancestor of the Tea Party and QAnon. They made it “Inside the GOP tent” with the election of President Barack Obama and with “the rest of the country browning more deeply with each generation,” wrote Don Terry in a 2013 Intelligence Report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Hence, “the line between the radical right and the conservative mainstream is increasingly difficult to discern,” he added.                         

Straub said elements of the American body politic have always believed in conspiracies, no matter how baseless and absurd. In the 1850s, the American or “Know-Nothing” Party — briefly Kentucky’s majority party — claimed German and Irish Catholic immigrants were secretly scheming to overthrow Protestantism and American democracy. (Look up “Bloody Monday” in the Kentucky Encyclopedia.)

In 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” a cautionary essay aimed at the rise of the Republican far right led by Sen. Barry Goldwater, a Bircher favorite and the GOP presidential nominee. “I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind,” he explained.  

Even Goldwater, who lost to LBJ in a landslide, eventually distanced himself from Birch Society founder Robert Welch. Straub doubts McConnell, Paul and the rest of the GOP will, like Cooper and Morton, forcefully disavow the “paranoid style” that characterizes the Trumpian GOP and its QAnon lunatic fringe.

“The country turned to a lunatic five years ago,” Straub said. “The lunatic is probably going to run again in 2024.”

Berry Craig is a professor emeritus of history at West Kentucky Community College in Paducah and an author of seven books and co-author of two more, all on Kentucky history.

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