Sorry, this post was delayed by an illness.
In this article I will use the real names of John Birch Society officials who have passed away, but for current members, I will mostly use general phrases such as “an executive,” “a field director,” etc., to avoid legal entanglements should it turn out that I errantly misquoted someone. Any mistakes in this post are unintentional.
I stress “some of the leadership” in the post’s title because I know, through long association, that the Society’s vast broad membership are good Americans with strong devotion to freedom and patriotism.
In November and December of 2023, I was contacted by at least seven prominent members of the John Birch Society (JBS). (All were current high-ranking employees, except for one who had left the Society’s staff a few months earlier.) This number of contacts was quite unusual, as I have had very little involvement with the Society for more than ten years. However, all of these members had a consensus: Namely, that something has gone wrong with the Society’s leadership headquartered in Appleton, Wisconsin.
l should probably start this article by defining very basically what the John Birch Society is, or at least was.
It was established in 1958 by Robert Welch as an opponent of communism and socialism here in America, and as a proponent of limited government, believing that the more power a government has, the more ruthless it is apt to become. Welch also understood that the U.S government was increasingly under the control of an oligarchy operating behind the façade of a democratic representative government, and that this oligarchy was seeking to erode U.S. sovereignty.
The Birch Society was running strong in the 1960s, with perhaps 100,000 members. When Senator Barry Goldwater—the conservative Republican Presidential nominee in 1964—made the following famous remarks at the 1964 GOP convention, he may have primarily had the Birch Society in mind, as Birchers were often maligned as “extremists”:
In 1983, Mr. Welch, now in his 80s, handed over chairmanship of The John Birch Society to Dr. Larry McDonald, a physician and member of the U.S. House of Representatives representing Georgia. In the following 1983 clip, Dr. McDonald eloquently defends The John Birch Society on the TV show Crossfire from co-hosts Pat Buchanan and especially Tom Braden (CIA-CFR) who relentlessly attacked McDonald for the Society’s “conspiracy theories.”
Regrettably, shortly after this interview, Dr. McDonald vanished under bizarre circumstances. On September 1, 1983, he boarded Korean Airlines Flight 007, bound for South Korea. The civilian airliner allegedly veered into Russian airspace. The Soviets then shot the plane down, killing all 269 on board—an extreme reaction, since it was not a military aircraft.
There are various theories as to what really happened to KAL 007. One of these is that the plane was not actually destroyed, but only damaged and forced to land on or near the Russian island of Sakhalin (this was the initial report from Japanese radar stations). Tending to support this was the Soviet refusal to allow inspection of the waters where KAL 007 was supposedly shot down, in order to search for bodies, wreckage, the “black boxes,” etc.
Did the presence of Dr. McDonald—one of communism’s most formidable opponents—have anything to do with the takedown of KAL 007? We may never know.
Far more certain is that Dr. McDonald’s disappearance would create a long-standing void in The John Birch Society’s leadership, a void that would lead to years of internal conflict.
My First Odd Encounter with JBS Leadership
In 1985 a decision was made that the Birch Society’s weekly, The Review of the News, and it’s monthly, American Opinion, were to be combined into a new biweekly magazine, The New American. Its editor was to be Jeffrey St. John. This resulted in a walkout by nearly all of the Birch Society’s top writers—including Gary Allen, author of None Dare Call It Conspiracy, The Rockefeller File and many other great books; Scott Stanley, editor of The Review of the News; author Alan Stang and many other talented writers. It meant the Society was now virtually without veteran journalists.
But Robert Welch’s retirement and Larry McDonald’s disappearance left the Society with an even more important role to fill. Who was now to run the Society? A. Clifford Barker succeeded Larry McDonald as CEO.
I was delighted to receive a phone call from Mr. Barker, who said he wanted me to start writing for the Society’s new magazine, The New American. I naturally said yes.
Mr. Barker invited me to meet with him at his office at JBS headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts. The conversation went extremely well. However, Mr. Barker then said he wanted me to meet a John Birch Society executive, who I will leave unnamed. Suddenly everything went from desert warm to ice cold. The executive never so much as looked at me. I suppose we started with a token handshake at Mr. Barker’s request. Even though I had been reading the Society’s materials for seven years, and was “on board” with its program, the executive put me down at every turn. He contradicted virtually everything I said. I didn’t know why. But the reversal was shocking. I remember leaving the meeting thinking, “You know, I don’t think they’re going to hire me after all.”
Sure enough, Barker called me a day or two later and said it had been decided that the magazine couldn’t use me. No explanation was given. However, I felt no disappointment. After all, I hadn’t expected the initial invitation anyway. For me, it was “easy come, easy go.”
Jeffrey St. John didn’t last long as editor of The New American. He was swiftly replaced by Gary Benoit, who would go on to edit the magazine for over 30 years. A Bircher friend of mine, the late Gerry Mazzarella, introduced me to Gary, recommending me as a contributor to the magazine. Gary published my first submission to the journal, an article on Ferdinand Marcos and the Philippines. From then on my relationship with The New American tended to be a very happy one.
In 1986, I published an article on Pearl Harbor, drawing on various works, but especially John Toland’s 1982 book Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath. The article was a hit, and even the executive who had initially rejected me said very good things about it.
I wrote a cover story on the Kennedy assassination In 1988, the 25th anniversary of that event.
But what particularly interested me was exposing the oligarchy running America. I disliked the nebulous term “the Insiders” which the Birch Society was then using to describe them. I wanted to know their specific names, what positions they held, and what actions they had undertaken to advance globalism and socialism. I discussed the idea with Buck Mann, publisher of The New American and Western Islands (then the Birch Society’s book-publishing arm). Buck loved the idea and wanted it as an article for the magazine.
There was no Internet then. The best window on who the oligarchs were seemed to be the membership roster at the back of the Annual Report of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). I examined its historical rosters to see who held what positions in each Presidential administration. Their predominance was shocking. At the Boston Pubic Library, I also examined every issue of Foreign Affairs, the CFR’s flagship journal, going back to its first issue in 1922. This gave me a good idea of the evolution and motives behind U.S. foreign policy.
I was actually working as an employee of the JBS research department at the time. This gave me access to the Society’s extensive collection of information. Though there was no Internet then, the research department was a “paper Internet”—countless filing cabinets alphabetized by subject. I remember there were three deep cabinet drawers filled with information just on the Kennedy assassination.
The research department also had a library filled with rare conservative books.
All these elements contributed to my writing The Shadows of Power. I threw my heart into the project. When Buck Mann saw what I was doing, he knew that it was too extensive to fit into The New American as an article. He said “Let’s make it a book” and instructed his secretary to draw up a standard book contract for me. I assembled and captioned 126 photographs that supported the book’s content; documented it with more than 300 endnotes; and indexed the book myself.
The Shadows of Power, which closed with a ringing endorsement of The John Birch Society, became a best-seller. Here is the print history page from a 2002 printing. It will be seen that the book was still selling well 14 years after publication. These numbers add up to 100,000. And the sales continued briskly after that.
Let’s move ahead to 2009. Watch the first 40 seconds of the following video in which Jim Fitzgerald, Director of Field Activities for The John Birch Society, introduced me at a JBS luncheon, and listen to what he had to say about The Shadows of Power.
I gave many PowerPoint talks on the New World Order’s history for the JBS in the Eastern United States. After these talks I would then sign a large number of copies of Shadows (which was then being sold very cheaply and at bulk rates). Meanwhile, the host who had introduced me would be signing up new members for the JBS. (I also gave these talks at churches, the Campaign for Liberty, Oath Keepers, and other patriotic groups. My most comprehensive, up-to-date 2023 PowerPoint on the New World Order’s history, right up to Climate Change lockdowns, can be seen here, though it is over 2 hours long.)
Today, however, The Shadows of Power has been frozen out. To exemplify this, on November 15, 2023 I emailed Appleton that as my own stock was running low, I wanted to place an order for 30 copies of The Shadows of Power (I am entitled by contract to purchase the book at an “author’s discount”). I was told that Appleton didn’t even have 30 copies in stock. It was not until January 4, about seven weeks later, that 30 copies finally became available. How was it that the Society’s best-selling book had become virtually nonexistent? This was not the first time Appleton had been unable to fill an order from me due to low inventory.
The price of an individual copy had been raised from $10.95 to $24.95. Furthermore, bulk rate sales were terminated. This made it impossible for resellers to get the book at a discount. They would have to buy it for $24.95 plus shipping, meaning they would have to resell it for at least $30 to make a profit. On the day I am publishing this post, a new copy on Amazon goes for $44.50. Even the Kindle edition, initially priced at $9.95, now sells for $24.95. Why the sudden increase? There are no printing costs for an e-book, and no one wants to shell out $25 for one. I sell Kindle books myself, and they go for less than $10. Someone clearly didn’t want Shadows being purchased and read.
This leads me to the main reason I recently received a flurry of phone calls from high-ranking Birchers. In November 2023, a meeting was held in Appleton that included both executives and field staff. A highly successful regional field director demanded to know why Appleton had made The Shadows of Power so expensive as to be unbuyable. The executive running the meeting—reportedly after glancing at a former top executive for approval—then gave the following answer. This is not an exact quote; I wasn’t there; it is just a paraphrase based on the reports I got from witnesses who heard it.
He said he had received a phone call from _________, a field coordinator who had long been the Society’s top recruiter. He claimed this recruiter told him that I (James Perloff) had become an anti-Semite. (Therefore, supposedly, it had become necessary for the Society to distance itself from me and my work.)
This claim that I am an anti-Semite (anti-Jewish racist) is something I would have expected to hear from the Southern Poverty Law Center, not a Birch Society executive. A couple of quick points about this. Perhaps the exec didn’t know that the Perloff family was Jewish. My family emigrated from Russia in 1904-5 during one of the pogroms. Our name in Russia was “Perlovsky”; “Perloff” was an Americanization of that name. My father was Jewish; my mother was Western European.
I have never denounced “Jews,” nor have I denounced anyone based upon their race, religion, or ethnicity. What I have done is to criticize well-documented war crimes by the Israeli government. Since October, Israeli bombs have killed more than 10,000 children in Gaza. Is it “anti-Semitic” to oppose this? Evidently some people think so. I should also mention that, as anyone familiar with my books and website knows, only a tiny percent of my work has concerned Israel or Zionism. I have written on dozens and dozens of other subjects. Visiting https://jamesperloff.net/blog/ one can scroll through the descriptions of all my blog posts and see that this is true.
Secondly, the recruiter who made the alleged phone call about me being an anti-Semite called me several times and denied that he had ever made such a statement about me. This man is an old friend. We had often traveled the U.S. East Coast together for the JBS, me giving PowerPoints with him introducing me. Israel and Jews never came up in any of the PowerPoints or even in our personal discussions. The claim that he phoned Appleton and called me an anti-Semite was a complete fiction. As a matter of fact, the recruiter told me that he had never called this executive ever, to discuss anything. The exec who told this story either had a defective memory or invented the story out of thin air.
The recruiter told me he was demanding a complete retraction of the claim that he called me an “anti-Semite”; otherwise he would resign from the Birch Society’s staff. I cautioned him against this, because if—as some believe—the Society may have been infiltrated by an FBI/Cointelpro type of operation that is trying to destroy the JBS from within, this is just what they would want—first eliminate the top recruiting book, then get rid of the top recruiter. He received no reply to his demand for retraction, and is in fact resigning, though this is also in part due to his advancing age.
When you come down to it, making The Shadows of Power virtually unavailable is based on a pretext that makes no sense. The “logic” is evidently this:
- Someone who reads The Shadows of Power MIGHT look me up on the Internet.
- If they did, they MIGHT buy my 2013 book Truth Is a Lonely Warrior, which has a chapter critical, not of Jews, but of Zionism and of well-documented Israeli war crimes, which I will elaborate on later in this post. (See also endnote 1)
- Even though the chapter denounces racism and explains that I am of Jewish descent, the reader might somehow decide that I was an anti-Semite.
- The reader might then conclude that, if I was an anti-Semite, The John Birch Society might be anti-Semitic “by association.”
- Therefore the Society must suppress The Shadows of Power, even though it was written 25 years before Lonely Warrior and made no comments critical of Israel or Zionism.
That’s quite a few “leaps of logic.”
There is yet another problem. For more than two decades, the Birch Society has sold my book Tornado in a Junkyard (a critique of Darwinism), published in 1999. The Birch Society reordered cases of the book from me in 2019, 2021, and 2023. But according to the “logic” above, couldn’t a reader of Tornado look me up on the Internet, find Truth Is a Lonely Warrior, mistakenly conclude that I was anti-Semitic, etc.? Why is the Birch Society afraid of The Shadows of Power, but not of Tornado in a Junkyard? The same thinking should apply to both books.
I believe a reasonable conclusion is that the real target is The Shadows of Power. Why would anyone in Appleton want to get rid of the Society’s own best-selling book, one that had been such a successful recruiting tool for three decades? I will present more evidence about this shortly, but first a few words about my other odd experiences with Birch Society leadership.
The Strange Case of Allen Bubolz
In 1988, I was working in the Birch Society’s research department, and wrapping up work on The Shadows of Power. Things were going slowly on the latter, as the Society’s typesetters and artists were continually trying to make deadlines for The New American and rarely could find time for the book. The slow-down had a bright side, however; it gave me more time to make Shadows a better book.
One day, some dour-looking JBS elders—board members, I believe—tramped through the Belmont headquarters. They complained that the Society’s membership and revenues were declining. They attributed this to bad management, if not outright incompetence.
I knew differently. The real reason for declining membership and revenues was obvious: Ronald Reagan had been President for seven years. Although Reagan’s rhetoric far outshone his actions, American conservatives felt comfortably complacent with a “conservative” in the White House. Furthermore, hadn’t Reagan and Gorbachev brought the Cold War to an end? Although today communism is raising its ugly head again, through, e.g., Antifa and Klaus “You will own nothing and be happy” Schwab, in 1988 it was widely believed that communism was dying. Therefore, why become an activist in a conservative, anti-communist group like the JBS? It had nothing to do with a deterioration in the quality of Belmont’s management.
Nevertheless, the board members insisted that it did, and furthermore that there was only one solution. The Society’s leadership was to be turned over to Allen Bubolz, a Bircher who was a successful businessman in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he worked in his father’s insurance company. The idea was that Bubolz would lend his management expertise to the JBS, and turn things around.
But a lot was wrong with this picture. Bubolz was unwilling to serve as a full-time CEO. Much of his time would continue in the family business. Furthermore, he was unwilling to move to Belmont or San Marino, California (the Society’s secondary headquarters). Instead, he insisted that the employees at both headquarters move to Appleton so they could be under his supervision.
This made no sense. Numerous outstanding employees, many with years and even decades of invaluable experience, would be unable to make the move. How could one man’s importance exceed everyone else’s put together? And what evidence was there that Bubolz’s success in the insurance industry would translate into success for the Birch Society, an entirely different type of organization?
I well remember a telephone conference call that took place in Belmont with all staff present in one room. Mr. Bubolz, on the other end of the line, explained the plan and asked if there were any questions.
I said, “Mr. Bubolz, what if something were to happen to you? Or suppose you just couldn’t stay on as CEO? The Society’s entire staff would be out in Appleton with no reason for being there.”
Mr. Bubolz assured me that nothing like that would happen. He said he was committed to staying on as the Society’s CEO for a long time to come.
I then asked the really tough question. How could sacrificing so many key personnel be justified in order to accommodate the needs of one individual? I don’t remember just how I worded the question, but I tried to put it as politely as possible.
At this point, Mr. Bubolz said he was having trouble with his phone and that he hadn’t been able to hear my question. An angry local Birch executive came up to me and told me to hush up.
Bubolz never answered the question. I was disappointed that none of the other Belmont employees in the room backed me up. I sensed that there was a military-like attitude of “orders are to be followed, never questioned.” I agree with the principle of following orders from superiors, but not when they don’t make sense.
Shortly thereafter, I was fired as an employee of the research department. And I was the only person in Belmont to get fired. I asked the reason and was told it was a “cost-saving” measure, something that apparently applied only to me. Of course, many other employees were later forced from their positions by the move to Appleton.
I was concerned that this would also mean termination of The Shadows of Power, but fortunately that project continued.
The Society moved to Appleton in May 1989. In 1991, Mr. Bubolz, failing to keep his long-term pledge, resigned as CEO. If I recall correctly, he cited the pressing needs of the family business as his reason. The Society was now in Appleton, with no reason for being there, because he had been the only given motivation for the move. I suppose it could be argued that the Society saved money by consolidating Belmont and San Marino into one headquarters, but Bubolz was the only reason to choose Appleton.
I want to say that Mr. Bubolz struck me personally as a very nice man, definitely a family man, but the move made no sense and there was certainly more to it than we were being told.
As for me, I had met the woman I was to marry and I had less than $1000 in the bank after throwing myself all-out into writing The Shadows of Power.
So I reverted to my primary profession (I had been a registered nurse since 1975). I began working full-time as a medical-surgical nurse at one of Boston’s premier hospitals. The work was hard, but the money was good, and as royalties from The Shadows of Power started coming in, my financial picture brightened. (The royalty was only 5 percent of the cover price—the Society kept the rest; I should have negotiated for a better deal, but was too excited at having a book published to argue when the contract was drafted.)
I will skip over the 1990s other than to say I read a number of reports from high-ranking Birchers who had resigned from the Society over dissatisfaction with its leadership. The most common complaint that I recall was over the leadership’s unwillingness to try anything new, innovative and creative. This was ironic, since the Society was a strong advocate of free enterprise, of which innovation is a hallmark. I don’t know whether or not this complaint would still stand today.
I Get Red-Starred
In 2001, Gary Benoit asked me if I would write another cover story about Pearl Harbor for The New American. There were two reasons for this. One was that Robert Stinnett had just published his book Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor, which provided new information about the Pearl Harbor attack. The other was that in May 2001, Touchstone Pictures released the movie Pearl Harbor starring Ben Affleck, even though there was no popular demand for such a film, and Touchstone Pictures was not known for patriotic movies.
I didn’t know it at the time, but in September 2000 the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which consisted of eminent neocons like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, had published a paper calling for an increased U.S. military presence overseas, but warning: “The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”2
Nor did I know that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had addressed the 2001 graduating class at West Point, discussing Pearl Harbor and quoting Elihu Root: “Before you leave the Army, you will be engaged in another war. It is bound to come, and will come.”3
Nor did I know that Philip Zelikow—who would go on to chair the 9/11 Commission—had co-written an article for Foreign Affairs noting that if the device that detonated at the World Trade Center in 1993 had been nuclear, it would have been “like Pearl Harbor.”4
Nor did I know that Andrew Krepinievich, Director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, had said: “One may conclude that, in the absence of a strong external shock to the United States—a latter-day ‘Pearl Harbor’ of sorts—surmounting the barriers to transformation [to a stronger defense program] will likely prove a long, arduous process.”5
The bandying about of the phrase “new Pearl Harbor” amongst Washington elites suggests that some knew something big (the September 11 attacks) was coming—and the movie Pearl Harbor was evidently intended to psychologically prep the public to respond with warlike vigor.
I was later disappointed that The New American didn’t seriously investigate the possibility of U.S. government complicity in the crimes of 9/11, especially since the JBS had a reputation for exploring conspiracies. In my most recent PowerPoint on the New World Order, I gave four major examples of discrepancies in the official 9/11 narrative. For those interested, watch between 1:21:43 and 1:40:47.
You can see my most up-to-date work on Pearl Harbor here. In any event, my 2001 cover story on Pearl Harbor was a hit for The New American.
But things deteriorated quickly. I was about to have another run-in with Birch leadership, going from “hero to zero” almost overnight.
The following narrative might serve, for some, to indirectly support the “anti-Semite” claim against me, but I believe it needs to be said.
Shortly after publishing the Pearl Harbor article, by pure chance I happened to watch a History Channel episode on one of World War II’s greatest mysteries—Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain. Hess was Hitler’s personal deputy. On May 10, 1941, he flew an unarmed Messerschmitt right through the British defenses and parachuted to the ground in Scotland. What happened afterwards raised many questions. Intrigued, I began a detailed investigation of this incident.
Winston Churchill had Hess thrown in the Tower of London. The initial “official” British press reports were that he had deserted the Third Reich. But if so, why didn’t Churchill parade him about, making speeches denouncing Germany?
When word leaked out that Hess had come with a plan for peace, Churchill—on the advice of his press baron, Lord Beaverbrook—concocted a new story: Hess was a madman; thus anything he said about peace was to be simply disregarded.
Today we know that the plan Hess brought included:
- Complete cessation of all hostilities between Germany and Britain;
- Complete independence for France;
- Partial return to autonomy for Poland
The flight’s timing—May 10, 1941—was very significant, because one month later—June 22—war was to break out between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Germans did not want to fight a two-front war.
In fact, Hess’s flight was the culmination of many peace offers from Germany. The Germans had tried to end the war through every neutral source possible—the United States, the Vatican, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland.
Churchill spurned all peace offers. Although the British army had been swiftly defeated in Europe in 1940, culminating in the Dunkirk withdrawal, Churchill—at the behest of his handlers—continued the war by having the RAF ruthlessly bomb German cities. When the Germans finally retaliated after three months, Churchill brought American newspapermen around to view the damage and bemoaned that this presaged a German invasion. Yet Churchill already knew from decoded German intercepts that no such invasion was planned.
Anyone who still believes that Germany intended to invade England should read Pat Buchanan’s book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. After the surrender of France, Germany withdrew 3.3 million of her 3.8 million troops that had been in France, or about 85 percent. They would not have done this had they been planning to cross the English channel next. Furthermore, the Germans never built troop transport ships, tank barges, or other items that would have been needed for an invasion of Britain.6 No one considers Pat Buchanan a “conspiracy theorist” or “Nazi.”
An even wilder claim made was that Germany planned to cross the Atlantic and conquer the United States. In a radio speech made on May 29, 1940, aviator Charles Lindbergh of the America First Committee stated:
Great armies must still cross oceans by ship. . . No foreign navy will dare to approach within bombing range of our coasts. . . . Let us stop this hysterical chatter of calamity and invasion that has been running rife these last few days.7
Any German invasion of America would have required air support, but the Germans didn’t have even one aircraft carrier.
As to Rudolf Hess, he spent the rest of his life in confinement. At the Nuremberg trials, he was sentenced to life imprisonment at Spandau prison. By 1967, all the other prisoners there had either died or been released. But for the next 20 years, Hess remained the sole inmate at Spandau—which was designed for 600 prisoners. This was done under a rotating guard of 200 soldiers—American, British, French and Russian, and at a cost of $100 million per year.
During his time at Spandau, no one—not even his own family—was allowed to ask Hess about his flight to Britain. When one of the American commandants, Lt. Colonel Eugene Bird, attempted to do so, he was placed under house arrest.
People around the world began questioning why Hess couldn’t simply go home. The British government blamed Russia, but Mikhail Gorbachev said Russia had nothing against it.
Shortly before his scheduled release in 1987, news flashed around the world: Hess had hung himself at Spandau. This was ludicrous. Hess had suffered a stroke, and couldn’t even tie his own shoelaces, let alone hang himself. An independent autopsy requested by the Hess family indicated that he had been strangled. Indeed, in their book Double Standards: The Rudolf Hess Cover-Up, British authors Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince and Stephen Prior provided documentation that Hess was strangled at Spandau by two members of the British SAS (Special Air Service), a special ops unit. Even in 1987, the British government was terrified that Hess would reveal that the war between Britain and Germany had been—as Pat Buchanan puts it—unnecessary.
I found it quite significant that Winston Churchill could have ended the war on very favorable terms, but refused to do so. I felt it was just as important as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor maneuverings that brought us into World War II. I wrote an article about it for The New American, but it was bitterly rejected, only the second time in my association with the magazine that they had declined a submission.
Moreover, the then-CEO of the JBS labeled me “pro-Nazi,” and had my name “red-starred”—meaning that I was not to write or speak for the Society; that I was in fact blacklisted, expelled. It’s my understanding that, according to JBS policy, a person is supposed to be notified when they are “red-starred,” but I was not. In the meantime I immersed myself in other projects, such as writing The Case against Darwin in 2002, and in 2003 creating a “politically incorrect” music CD, Freedom Shall Return, which we made in a studio with professional studio musicians—songs honoring home-schoolers, Vietnam vets, religious freedom, the Confederate flag, etc. You can hear these songs at https://jamesperloff.net/music/.
In 2008, I was diagnosed with stage 4 Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma; it had spread throughout my body and I had a swelling in my neck the size of an orange. I was told at Dana-Farber Hospital in Boston that, without treatment, I had only three weeks to live. Although I would have preferred a naturopathic approach, my cancer was too far advanced for naturopathy to catch up with. I had to undergo a brutal chemotherapy regimen. This resolved the cancer, but the combination of disease and treatments left me too weak to resume my work as a registered nurse for about eight months.
I had enough energy to write, though, so I contacted Gary Benoit at The New American. That’s when I first learned I had been “red-starred.” However, that CEO was now gone, the “red star” had been removed, and I was welcome to write for the magazine. I produced some of my best work, including articles on the CFR, the Federal Reserve, the Ukrainian Holodomor, the fall of China to communism, the 1979 fall of the Shah of Iran, the Transatlantic Partnership, and much more.
A year or two ago, if you went to The New American website and looked up these articles, it would say “by James Perloff.” But I recently discovered someone has gone through all my articles, removed my name and now attributes them to other authors (or occasionally, “by staff”).
I still have the original hard copies of these articles and can prove that I wrote them.
For example, here is a screenshot of an article I wrote for The New American in February of 2009:
The print’s a little fuzzy from the copying process, but you can see I wrote the article. But go to The New American website, and you will find my name has been removed; it now says the article was written by Steven J. DuBord, who I never even heard of. Just in case they scramble and try to change it back after publication of this post, here’s a screenshot:
(Update note: They did scramble—see Addendum 2 at the end of this post.)
For the August 3, 2009 New American I wrote the cover story, on the Council on Foreign Relations. The Birch Society liked it so much they made it into a mass-distribution reprint.
Go to The New American website, and you’ll find that same article, but it now claims it was written by Denise Behreandt, again someone I don’t know.
In that same issue was my article on the fall of China to Communism:
But if you go to The New American website, no credit for the article is given. It says “by,” then is blank.
As a final example, here’s my article 1984 Revisited from the April 27, 2009 New American:
Go to The New American website and you will see that same article (though part of the first paragraph has been cut) was allegedly written by “by Steven J. DuBord.”
Enough examples. I have looked at many others. Someone went through The New American and removed my name from all the articles I wrote for the magazine. The sole exception I have found is my 2001 Pearl Harbor article; they somehow missed that. As I didn’t write any articles for The New American during the years 2002-2008, the person(s) erasing my name probably stopped looking before they got to 2001. (I have not checked every article—some I’ve forgotten—but on all I’ve checked, with the exception of Pearl Harbor, my name is gone.) Speaking of Orwell, changing the past is “Orwellian.” Down South these days, they remove the names and statues of old Confederates. We call this “cancel culture.” Someone at the Birch Society is running their own cancel culture on me.
A Bircher friend of mine suggested to me that there might be an innocent explanation for this—that perhaps they’re writing the names of the persons who posted (placed) the articles on The New American website. But this makes no sense. The articles were already posted on the website more than ten years ago, with my name on them. Why, after 10 years plus, would they suddenly remove my name and substitute the names of the persons who “posted” them? How would they even remember who posted them after all this time? And why not say “posted by Steven J. DuBord” instead of “by Steven J. DuBord”? And I don’t notice this being done to other writers for The New American, such as Alex Newman, William Jasper, and John McManus.
If they claim this resulted from a software glitch, then why wasn’t it fixed? The New American has back copies of the magazine. It wouldn’t take a staff member that long to compare the articles in the hard copies against the online versions, and see that the right attributions were given. (Relevant to this, see Addendum 4 at the end of this post.)
I don’t know what person or persons did this. Clearly someone in Appleton has it in for me. The question is why. Prior to this post, I have never written anything negative about The John Birch Society, nor have I “hassled” anyone in Appleton.
If you asked them why they erased my name, they would probably say “We can’t have The New American tainted by association with James Perloff,” based on the false claim that I’m an anti-Semite, which in turn is based on another false claim—a phone call that never happened. But none of my New American articles discussed Israel or Zionism. How in the world could someone reading an article I wrote 15 years ago on the fall of China to Communism “taint” the magazine by having my name correctly attached?
What does taint the magazine is blatant dishonesty. Taking one man’s creative labor and falsely attributing it to others, is, yes, blatant dishonesty.
It’s one of the most disgusting things I’ve seen in the world of publishing. It borders on criminality. There are legal implications. If I took someone else’s article, copied and pasted it onto my website, and attributed it to myself, I would be guilty, at the very least, of plagiarism. Or suppose I saw a best-selling book on Amazon, republished it, removed the author’s name and put “by James Perloff” on the cover? I’d surely be on the receiving end of a lawsuit.
This outright theft of the credit for my articles confirms what I have been told by a number of high-ranking Birchers—that there are some rotten apples in Appleton.
It’s possible that this post may ultimately compel them to put my name back on the articles. Alternatively, they might decide to delete them all. In either case, it might seem to make this post incorrect to future readers, but as of its publication date (January 26, 2024), what I’m saying is accurate. One can also sign on to the Liberty Library, which has PDFs of back issues of The New American, and verify that everything I’m saying is true.
My last article for The New American was in 2012. After that I began independently blogging. I also published, in 2013, Truth Is a Lonely Warrior. This book was my attempt to fully summarize the New World Order to the best of my abilities. It was an updating of The Shadows of Power, but went well beyond the Council on Foreign Relations. There are schemes, such as forced vaccination, that simply fall outside the purview of the CFR.
This was the book that had a chapter on Zionism. However, I began the chapter explaining my own Jewish heritage, including a photograph of my Jewish ancestors, and explicitly stated: “lest this book be quoted out of context, let me state that I am unequivocally opposed to racism in any form.”
I then went on to discuss some of Israel’s atrocities, including:
- The bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946, killing nearly 100 people;
- The attempted bombing of British and American civilian targets in 1954 (”The Lavon Affair”);
- The murderous 1967 attack on the USS Liberty, killing 34 U.S. sailors and wounding more than 170, an incident the Birch Society seems to show no interest in;
- Mossad’s deceiving Ronald Reagan into bombing Libya in 1986 by planting a transmitter in Tripoli that broadcast fake terrorist messages;
- Mossad detonating a bomb outside Israel’s own London embassy in 1994 in order to blame Palestinians;
- Innumerable connections to the events of September 11, 2001.
For details on the above and much more, see my recent post “From the Arab Platoon to Hamas—Israel’s ‘Abu Nidal’ Strategy.”
For those who still don’t believe Israel commits atrocities, I invite them to read Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, a 750-page book by Israeli author Ronen Bergman, based on innumerable interviews he conducted with Israeli intelligence officials.
As just one example he gives, in 1981 the Israelis detonated a car bomb in a Beirut neighborhood, killing 83 people and wounding 300, including many women who were trapped in a clothing factory that went ablaze.8 Is it “anti-Semitic” to condemn this? Some people think so.
An irony was recently pointed out to me. In The John Birch Society, you can criticize the American government all you want—no one will call you “anti-American” if you do. But if you criticize the Israeli government—no matter how truthful, no matter how well-documented, no matter how serious the crime, you will automatically be labeled “anti-Semitic.” This is a double standard with no logic or justice to it. It is not unreasonable to say that some in Appleton are giving preferential treatment to a foreign country, placing it even above their own.
A few years ago, several Birchers contacted me and warned me that Appleton was planning to phase out The Shadows of Power and replace it with a book by JBS CEO Art Thompson, In the Shadows of the Deep State.
I didn’t pay much attention, but then I received a general flyer in the mail from Appleton that went to all Birchers. I wish I still had the flyer so I could provide a screenshot, but as I don’t, I’ll reconstruct it from memory as best as I can.
On the flyer’s left side was an image of The Shadows of Power and on the right side Thompson’s book. Shadows was captioned “If you LIKED this book . . .” and Thompson’s was captioned “ . . . then you’ll LOVE this book.” This is an approximation from memory, not a precise quote.
It is generally bad manners and bad marketing to instruct people that they’re going to love a book before they have a chance to read it and make up their own minds. And why say Shadows was not as good as the new book? Why not just promote the new book by itself?
This appears to have been the first of several steps taken to suppress The Shadows of Power, which made no sense for the Birch Society to do. In my experience, it is unprecedented for a publisher to have a best-selling book and then try to quash it. Why not continue to sell my book while also selling Art’s, and let them work together, in tandem? That would have been a sensible strategy.
I have seven books in print. It never occurred to me that in order to sell my own book, I needed to deter the sales of someone else’s.
Interestingly, Mr. Thompson’s book sells for $10.95 on the Birch Society’s shopping site. $10.95 is the exact price The Shadows of Power was sold at for about three decades. Mr. Thompson’s book is also offered at bulk rates—$6.45 per book if you buy a case (24 or more). If memory serves me, $6.45 per book was also the case rate for The Shadows of Power. So it appears that the marketing strategy for Shadows was co-opted.
By the way, my Shadows book contract states: “If the Publisher permits the book to go out of print with no plans to reprint, the Author shall have the right to reprint.”
I think an attorney could make a strong case that the above clause is, for all practical purposes, in effect. The publisher does not do “printings” in the usual sense. It only makes a tiny trickle of the book available. It has no interest whatsoever in the book, does not promote it, and has in fact suppressed it.
However, the book is not technically “out of print” in the strictest sense.
You would think Appleton would be more than happy to turn the book over to me since they don’t want it. However, I believe they would fight this, because they know I would make the book widely available again, and someone in Appleton clearly doesn’t want the book being read. By the way, I publish my own books, and I know I could I could sell a book this size for about $15 and could once again offer bulk rates.
Furthermore, at one point The Shadows of Power was made into a Kindle book. Even though I am the copyright owner, I was never informed of this development. I only discovered it one day while surfing Amazon. My 1988 contract makes no mention of e-books, of course, because they didn’t exist then. So even if the printing rights reverted to me, who would have the Kindle rights?
Thus there are tricky legal questions involved, and I don’t know if it is worth my time and effort to engage in a legal battle over the book.
I have heard many other complaints about the Appleton leadership, such as poor treatment of its own field staff; its hiring of staff members who are not Birchers (this would never have happened in Belmont) or even much in agreement with the Society’s ideology; and the elimination of “Birch camps,” summer camps that once trained American youth in history and good citizenship, and helped build future membership for the Birch Society. Former JBS coordinator Hal Shurtleff now runs these independently as “Camp Constitution.” (I interviewed Hal here.)
But I have primarily confined this post to my own situation. Someone in Appleton wanted to destroy The Shadows of Power, and now they even want my name expunged from The New American. They want me reduced to what George Orwell’s 1984 called a “non-person.” They are making war on me, but it’s been an unprovoked, one-way war. I have not made war on them. However, I felt the time had come to speak up. When you steal a man’s work and give the credit to someone else, you’ve crossed the line.
In writing this post, it has not been my intention to broadly cast the Birch Society in a negative light. Birchers are good people. The Society has a solid website, which features legislative alerts and other good stuff. And it has certainly not been my intention to inhibit recruitment. To the contrary, there is circumstantial evidence that suggests someone in Appleton is possibly already trying to do that. My hope is to inspire an investigation and, if it turns out to be necessary, for some house-cleaning to be done.
Addendum, 1-27-2024. I learned from an “inside tip” why my name still appears on my Pearl Harbor article. The article was attributed to someone else. However, a prominent member of the Birch Society, who had always liked the article, was upset at seeing that my name had been removed. He called an editor at The New American, who is a relative of his, and demanded to know what was going on. The editor, embarrassed, said he would correct the situation, which he did. And that is the only reason I am not 100 percent erased on The New American website. (Oddly, the date of the article is listed as December 7, 2023, but I wrote it in 2001.)
Addendum 2. February 2, 2024. I see that, in response to this post, The New American has re-attributed most of my articles to me. They missed on my 1984 post. That is still credited to “Steven J. DuBord.” Screenshot taken on February 2, 2024:
I have posted screenshots such as this in case they later deny that they ever altered the attribution for my articles.
Addendum 3. February 2, 2024. Someone called my attention to the following passage in The Assassination of James Forrestal by former JBS staff coordinator David Martin:
JBS was a Zionist operation and became virulently so with the hiring of John Rees… A British Zionist, Rees hated me personally for no apparent reason. Probably instinctive, maybe because of my background as an anti-Communist “mercenary” in Africa. But Welch ran JBS as a cheering section for Likud [the extremist/supremacist ruling party in Israel, currently headed by Benjamin Netanyahu], referring to [Israeli prime ministers] Begin and Sharon and Shamir as anti-Communist, anti-terrorist, etc. (We learned—I was in the Rhodesian police branch of the security forces—that Israel was aiding the Communist terrorists who were slaughtering so many Africans and Europeans in Rhodesia.) The ADL had a direct control over Welch and he would brook no discussion of Jewish aims or practices—or as I said before, the Jewish creation of Communism. I know because it was my duty as a staff coordinator to expel any member who discussed Jews in a political manner. I never had to do this because by 1979 the membership was thoroughly tamed and compliant.—David Martin, The Assassination of James Forrestal, Second edition (McCabe Publishing, 2021), p. 141, Kindle Edition.
James Perloff adds: When I was at Belmont in the 1980s, I overheard two Birch staff members talking, and one referred to “John Rees, that agent for Mossad,” and they both laughed. At the time, the remark completely puzzled me.
Martin is clearly tougher on the Society than I have been, and I can’t personally certify everything he said here, but if correct, it may explain the Society’s sudden turn against me. In 2011, I was still very much in favor. That year, I was a guest speaker at the JBS Council Dinner in Oklahoma. I was seated right next to Art Thompson, the JBS CEO. We both gave speeches. I am going to conjecture that the turning point was publication of Truth Is a Lonely Warrior in 2013. That book had 23 chapters, and only one was critical of Zionism and Israel. But apparently that was enough for Appleton to try to eradicate—to their own detriment—The Shadows of Power, as well as expunge me from the record. I want to stress to my readers that probably not even one percent of my work has concerned Zionism and the government of Israel. My last book, Missing Saints, Missing Miracles, has only a couple of sentences about Zionism, and my book before that, Covid-19 and the Agendas to Come, Red-Pilled, didn’t mention it at all. Why is Appleton ignoring 99 percent of my work, and obsessed with the other one percent?.
Addendum 4, February 2, 2024. I have just now received an email from The New American saying that the removal of my credit for all my articles was due to “technology upgrades.” The attribution on my Pearl Harbor article was corrected on December 7, 2023, nearly two months ago, as a result of a direct request. So they have known about this “technology upgrade” problem for a long time. The question remains if they would ever have fixed the credits on my other articles had I not published this blog post.
NOTES
- Truth Is a Lonely Warrior also has a chapter on The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. I had always been told, and believed, like most people, that these were a forgery concocted by the Czar’s police to promote anti-Semitic hatred. However, I finally decided to examine them myself. I found they contained many things that would have fallen outside the scope of knowledge of the Czar’s police, such as Darwinism, the mechanics of central banking, the use of vaccinations to distress populations, having a President start wars by issuing executive orders that would override constitutions, the use of sports to distract the people, etc. My book concludes that the Protocols accurately depict what has been going on in the world, but draws no definite conclusion about who wrote them.
- Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century (Washington, D.C.: Project for the New American Century, 2000), 51.
- Paul Wolfowitz, “Commencement Address at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point,” June 2, 2001, https://www.nlpwessex.org/docs/wolfowitzpearlharbor.htm.
- Ashton B. Carter, John Deutch, Philip Zelikow, “Catastrophic Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs, November 1, 1998, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1998-11-01/catastrophic-terrorism.
- Andrew Krepinevich, “Emerging Threats, Revolutionary Capabilities And Military Transformation,” Testimony of Andrew Krepinevich, Executive Director, before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities: March 5, 1999:
http://www.csbaonline.org/4Publications/Archive/T.19990305.Emerging_Threats,_/T.19990305.Emerging_Threats,_.htm. As this link is not currently working, see https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/Sociopolitica/elite/CSBA.htm. - Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008), 330-31.
- Charles Lindbergh, “Let Us Turn Our Eyes to Our Nation,” ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1940/1940-05-19a.html.
- Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, (New York: Random House, 2018), 242.
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