Extremists in Dallas created volatile atmosphere before JFK’s 1963 visit

[struggle4progress]

4. The Dallas Morning News recently published this interesting look back at the 1960s rightwing

extremism in Dallas, including the role of rightwing millionaires, rightwing Christian fundamentalists, and the then-very-rightwing Dallas Morning News in creating a climate of hate in Dallas

We learn from history -- or we repeat it. Decades later, similar coalitions with similar slogans helped elect Bush II, and they're still around today:

... The real analogue to today’s unhinged right wing in America is yesterday’s unhinged right wing in America ... Now, as then, there is said to be a conspiracy in the highest places to end American Constitutional rule and replace it with a Marxist dictatorship, evidenced by a plan in which your family doctor will be replaced by a federal bureaucrat — mostly for unnamable purposes, but somehow involving the gleeful killing off of the aged ... “on the radio, H.L. Hunt (the Dallas millionaire) filled the airwaves with dozens of attacks on Medicare, claiming that it would create government death panels: The plan provides a near little package of sweeping dictatorial power over medicine and the healing arts—a package which would literally make the President of the United States a medical czar with potential life or death power over every man woman and child in the country” ...
The John Birchers’ Tea Party
October 11, 2013
Posted by Adam Gopnik