Trump’s Pick for Budget Director: A Far Right Congressman Tied to the John Birch Society
Donald Trump’s cabinet and agency picks are almost universally horrifying (if you aren’t an extreme right wing loon), a wildly unqualified crew of billionaire former Goldman Sachs executives, retired generals with strange ideas, and now — a far right Congressman from South Carolina with ties to the John Birch Society.
Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), the ultra-conservative congressman tapped by Donald Trump to run the Office of Management and Budget, recently accepted a speaking invitation from the notorious John Birch Society, an extreme right-wing group known for peddling outlandish conspiracy theories for more than half a century.
In July, Mulvaney spoke at a dinner held by a local chapter of the group, which has long been exiled from mainstream conservatism. Founded in the 1950s, the outfit promoted a paranoid obsession with communist infiltration. It declared President Dwight Eisenhower “a conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” It opposed the civil rights movement as a communist plot. Ever since William F. Buckley Jr., the intellectual godfather of modern conservatism, felt compelled to disavow the John Birch Society in the early 1960s, most mainstream conservatives have dismissed the organization as an embarrassment for the right. But the group still exists and continues to emphasize the communist threat. In recent years, it has pushed more modern conspiracy theories: Obamacare finances euthanasia, the United Nations has a sinister scheme for world domination, Moscow is the hidden force behind Islamic terrorism.
But Mulvaney was fine with speaking to the group. His July speech, flagged by the Democratic opposition research group American Bridge, was billed as an address on “the Federal Reserve’s role in bailing out Europe.” According to its website, the John Birch Society believes that the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional and should be abolished and that “the only constitutional money is gold and silver coin.”
Every day there’s another nightmarish selection from the Trump Horror. He’s building a far right administration that intends to wipe out all the social progress America has made in the past century.