Guest op-ed by Geoffrey Kabaservice @ NYTimes.com, June 9

Geoffrey Kabaservice is the author of “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party.”

[.....] As a political historian who writes mainly about the Republican Party, I’ve often puzzled over why far-right groups during the 1950s and ’60s had such an appetite for obvious falsehoods. Robert Welch Jr., a founder of the John Birch Society, famously maintained that President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Other extremist groups charged that a committee of University of Chicago eggheads was rewriting the Constitution to deprive Americans of their rights to vote and hold property, and that the United Nations was training barefoot African cannibals in Georgia for an armed takeover of the United States. Did the people who read those made-up stories actually believe them?

In the 1960s, Republican Party officials and conservative leaders like William F. Buckley Jr. were able to marginalize the John Birch Society and related groups. Today, it’s the conservative establishment that has been marginalized by right-wing media and President Trump’s populist movement. Birch-style fake news stories once circulated only among small audiences. Today, thanks to the internet, they reach millions of Americans who make up a big chunk of the Republican Party’s base [.....]