You might need to click twice on the video for it to play. After watching the video, please see the brief supplementary notes below it which I later appended.
Addendums:
First, concerning Robert Welch. Shortly after founding the John Birch Society in 1958, he published The Blue Book, a kind of bible for the Society. In this book he made it clear that the Society would not tolerate racism. A racist is who someone who prejudicially hates a group of people based on their skin color or ethnicity, who stereotypes them, who refers to them with ethnic slurs, etc. Did Robert Welch expand the definition to mean any criticism of Zionism and the political government of Israel? The book I quote in the above video makes it clear that this was not his intention.
Second, concerning Rudolf Hess. Dr. Larry McDonald, Congressman from Georgia, became Robert Welch’s handpicked successor as chairman of the John Birch Society in 1983. A reader and friend has pointed out to me that Dr. McDonald advocated nominating Rudolf Hess for a Nobel Peace Prize (see here and here). And below are screenshots from the Congressional Record, of a speech in which Dr. McDonald called for Hess’s release from Spandau Prison, praising him as a man of courage and peace. The screenshots are in fine print; you can read them in PDF format by going to https://www.congress.gov/97/crecb/1981/07/31/GPO-CRECB-1981-pt14-3-3.pdf and scrolling down to page 19273. Bear in mind that I was expelled from the John Birch Society (though later reinstated) for making comments comparable to those of its own chairman.
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