I am shocked that a local “tea party” political organization, the Patriot Connectors, based in Wayne County but with a number of Pike County supporters, recently featured the long-time president of the John Birch Society as their honored guest and featured speaker.

For more than 50 years, the John Birch Society has promoted extremist conspiracy theories, opposed civil rights and promoted anti-communist paranoia (their national headquarters is in Wisconsin, close to where red-baiting demagogue Sen. Joseph McCarthy is buried).

In the 1960s, the John Birch Society claimed the Civil Rights Movement was manipulated from Moscow, with the goal of creating a “Soviet Negro Republic” in the U.S. They were staunch supporters of racist Alabama Gov. George Wallace and reportedly had 100 chapters in and around Birmingham, where white supremacists bombed a Baptist church, killing four little girls.

More recently, in December 2012, two days after the horrific mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, when 26 people, including 20 first-graders, perished, the John Birch Society published a profoundly offensive article suggesting that affirmative action, immigration, media depictions of white men as “crazed racists” and an overall “assault on white men” may have led the killer, Adam Lanza, to his psychotic actions.

“Is it impossible to believe,” the article read, “that a young white man such as Lanza, who has been exposed to this systematic abuse his entire life, may not have been consumed with both self-hatred and rage? For that matter, may not his cultural animus toward whites have figured in Lanza’s choice to leave a trail (judging from news photos) of mostly-white bodies?”

In the 1960s, the John Birch Society’s views were so extreme that even William F. Buckley, an intellectual architect of American conservatism, denounced them, calling them “far removed from common sense,” and urged the Republican party to distance itself from their influence. Buckley’s biographer wrote that his opposition to the John Birch Society was out of a fear that “the right-wing upsurge in the country would take an ugly, even Fascist turn....”

Responsible conservatives are still repudiating the John Birch Society. In 2012, the American Conservative Union board voted not to invite the John Birch Society to its annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

So why would a local political organization, Patriot Connectors, invite the John Birch Society’s president, John McManus, to be its special guest speaker this past June?

While the John Birch Society today claims they are neither racist or anti-Semitic, its past is difficult to overlook, especially when McManus, the current president, joined its staff in 1966, worked side by side with the extremist group’s founder, served as its public relations director and was their official spokesperson.

Other than McManus, Patriot Connectors’ has had other political activists and elected officials as featured speakers, most recently Delaware Township Supervisor Tom Ryan, who spoke to them last week.

But prior to the Patriot Connectors engagement with the John Birch Society, Pike County Commissioner Rich Caridi, Sen. Lisa Baker, Rep. Mike Peifer and Pike County District Attorney candidate Kelly Gaughan, also spoke to the group.

I hope that all of these political leaders will repudiate the John Birch Society and decline to associate with the Patriot Connectors group as long as they feature speakers and organizations with such a history of extremism and intolerance. A line must be drawn.

Fascism doesn’t happen overnight, it creeps in quietly, on tippy-toes, incrementally, legitimizing piece by piece what was once thought unacceptable and unimaginable. American political discourse is not improved with a “rehabilitation” of the John Birch Society.

[Sean Strub is a resident of Milford, PA.]