One evening back in the mid-1960s, my father and I were listening to a radio show called The Joe Pyne Show. Pyne was interviewing a guest who had written a book exposing the dark side of the FBI. Pyne brutally ridiculed the guest, who started suggesting that Pyne must be working with the FBI. Pyne succeeded in making the guest look totally paranoid—that was the impression the show left on my father and me. However, years later, it was revealed that the FBI had been closely working with Pyne, and had briefed him on what to say—the entire interview had been a setup to discredit the guest and his book.
I have received information from sources within The John Birch Society that I am now banned from speaking at JBS events. If they could have, they would have probably expelled me from the Society, but since I haven’t been a member for ages, they couldn’t do that. So the speaking ban was the next best thing. This is no loss for me, since I have only spoken once at Birch Society events in the last 13 years. However, it does call for some discussion.
The ban was the result of a series of events that I described in a recent news post.
On July 8, I was interviewed by Alex Newman—at the request of his Operations Manager—to discuss the fall of Shah of Iran in 1979.
The interview went well, but subsequently the Operations Manager informed me that the Birch Society’s “editorial team” had censored the interview due to its “fixation on the Jews.”
I am at a disadvantage here, because I don’t have a copy of the interview. However, to my recollection, the word “Jew” never occurred even once during the podcast. As a matter of policy, I almost never use the word “Jew” in an interview, because it’s a “trigger” word. Where the context calls for it, I use the more impersonal word “Jewish.”
And how many times was the word “Jewish” said during the interview? To my memory, twice:
(1) While enumerating possible reasons why Henry Kissinger and the U.S. foreign policy establishment began turning against the Shah in the mid-1970s, I mentioned—among several other things—that in 1976 the Shah had done an interview with Mike Wallace of Sixty Minutes, in which he said that the Jewish lobby was exerting excessive influence on U.S. policies. This is a widely published interview that can be seen on YouTube and diverse other places, such as here. By the way, many modern conservatives, including Tucker Carlson, G. Edward Griffin, Candace Owens, Pastor Chuck Baldwin, Congressman Thomas Massie, and former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney would agree with the Shah.
(2) I told Alex “I’m half-Jewish myself.”
That was it. To my recollection, that was the full extent of the mention of the word “Jewish” during the interview which the Birch editorial staff alleged was “fixated on the Jews.” As I have said before, if the staff didn’t like these sentences, they could have just deleted them instead of throwing the entire interview into a trashcan.
I should mention that during the latter part of the interview, I said I opposed the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I also made some other negative comment about the Israeli government that I can’t recall—but it was definitely not “racist.”
HOWEVER—and this is important—I still have the notes I prepared for the interview. IT WAS NEVER MY INTENTION TO MENTION ISRAEL, EVEN ONCE. My focus was 100 percent on the fall of the Shah in 1979. That is what Alex had said he wanted to talk about, and that was all I came prepared to discuss.
The only reason I mentioned the Israeli government is because Alex himself asked questions or made remarks that elicited a response about it. When a host asks you a question, you can’t plead the Fifth. But discussing Israel had never been part of my game plan.
This goes back to a false assertion that a Birch executive made at a staff meeting in Appleton, WI (Birch headquarters) in late 2023. Asked by the field staff why the JBS had suppressed my best-selling book The Shadows of Power, he replied that I was an “anti-Semite.” He claimed he based this on a phone call he had received—a phone call subsequently proven to be a complete fabrication. You can read about this sordid episode in my article My Strange Encounters with Some of the John Birch Society Leadership over 39 Years. That executive was removed, and I hoped the “anti-Semite” canard was over, but apparently not. The executive had friends.
I suspect some tempers were perhaps still simmering in Appleton, not only over the executive’s removal after publication of my blog post, but because I had refused to update the new edition of The Shadows of Power in the way they wanted, which I made a video about.
Why do I think I may possibly have been set up? At the risk of being called paranoid or “reading too many comic books,” something doesn’t smell right.
(1) A podcast host who is a senior editor of the Birch Society’s magazine asks me to come on his show to discuss the fall of the Shah of Iran—an event that I hadn’t written on in 16 years. But I was happy to do it, and spent a good part of two days refreshing myself on the topic.
(2) I harmlessly mention the word “Jewish” twice during the interview, in one instance describing myself. I also mention Israel a couple of times, but only because the host prompted me to do so via question or comment.
(3) The Birch Society now censors the entire interview, claiming it was “fixated on the Jews,” a ludicrous falsehood. They know it is ludicrous, and that my time had been wasted.
(4) They’re aware that I had reacted twice before to unfair treatment, and predictably, I write a news item protesting the censorship.
(5) The Birch Society now uses the protest, apparently, as the basis for banning me from speaking at any JBS event—and perhaps other penalties I don’t know about yet. Perhaps The Shadows of Power will be suppressed again.
Maybe this sequence unfolded by chance, but if it did, it still had the makings of a good intel “sting operation” story.
By the way, in reviewing my news post, I realized that the final sentence was too harshly broad. I have not edited the sentence, as I don’t like to change history, but I have posted an addendum that the sentence should have been reworded.
P.S. For those who think I am “fixated on the Jews,” please note:
• My last book, Exploding the Official Myths of the Lincoln Assassination (2024) never once mentioned the words “Jew” or “Jewish.”
• My previous book, Missing Saints, Missing Miracles (2022), mentioned the words 5 times, but only in the context of historic Christianity. For example, I said, “St. Nino, the great evangelizer of Iberia, began to preach the Gospel to both the pagans and the Jews.”
• My book prior to that, COVID-19 and the Agendas to Come, Red-Pilled (2020), never once mentioned the words “Jew” or Jewish.”
• As many of my readers know, I have written extensively, including two books, on the science that contradicts Darwinism, never maligning Jews in the process. See my most recent 38-minute video (2024) on this subject. It never once mentions the words “Jew” or “Jewish.”
• Finally, scroll through the titles of all the posts on this website’s blog. They go back 11 years. There is not a single post with the words “Jew” or “Jewish” in the title.
Very strange for an author who is alleged to be “fixated on the Jews.”
