First published in 1972, this, to my understanding, was the call to arms of the John Birch Society. Powerful, wealthy, and well-connected international figures (Insiders, in Allen’s terms) were marching the world to a one-world government under the banner of socialism and/or communism. This effort was a long, elaborate, slow-drip campaign to bring freedom loving people under the harness of total government.
These are my “thoughts to self” I typed up in response to my mom sending me the book to read. I heartily appreciate her effort and the desire to find some common ground in this wacky world we inhabit, but this will probably make less sense to those who don’t have a copy of the book on hand to refer to. Still, for those of you who have read the book, I hope this all makes some sense.
Hi, Mom.
Good to see you a couple weeks ago! Sorry things got cut short AND you had to have the extra headache of hiccups with your car.
Apologies for the typed-up response here. I started with a hand-written letter but quickly reached the point where my handwriting devolved into something that not even I could read. Also, reading is a slow process for me and writing is even slower. Given that, it’s nice to have the ability to go back and insert some thoughts as they occur.
First off, I want to lay out my hopes for this letter. As we’ve sent short messages back and forth, I like the idea of finding common ground and points of agreement. So, the effort here isn’t necessarily to change your mind about anything but more to just try to explain my thinking and views on the world, and perhaps find points where we overlap.
I [finally] got through with Gary Allen’s None Dare Call it Conspiracy and have some thoughts to share. I tried to put the thoughts together into some coherent sequence but then threw in the towel and just figured that it would be easier to go page by page and shout out any reactions.
First off, Allen’s foundational argument is that in the arena of global politics, we have to choose between believing things happen entirely by plan OR things happen entirely by accident. I think this sets his whole argument up under a false structure and a false choice. The reality is that yes, some things do happen because they are planned but also, some things just happen by accident. And sometimes (often?) planned actions have unintended outcomes. So I think we can safely dispense with trying to explain the world by looking through the lens of everything being completely planned OR everything being completely left to chance. It’s likely a combination of the two.
That said, I don’t think it is at all controversial or conspiratorial to argue there is a small group of ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful people who are trying to bend the world to their desires. And yes, ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful families tend to hang out together and their kids tend to marry each other. That shouldn’t be shocking. I guess the question is who exactly are these people, and what do they want? Call it one world government, call it corporatocracy, call it plutocracy, call it oligarchy, I think the outcome tends to be the same: rule by the rich and powerful, not by the citizens. I think we’re in complete agreement on this front.
If we’re talking about rule of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich, guys like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, etc., seem to be the front runners, at least in terms of their massive accumulation of wealth and their desire for political power. As a group, they tend to be ardently pro big business, anti-worker, and anti-regulation of any sort. This also lands them in the anti-socialist camp. And in their political contributions (which the Supreme Court just ruled can now be unlimited), they overwhelmingly support Republicans. If there is a conspiracy of wealth and power, and “Insiders” wielding undue influence, I think these guys and others of their ilk are it.
On page 29, Allen claims that “total government” can come in the form of “communism, fascism, socialism, Caesarism, or, Pharaohism.” I’d also add authoritarianism to that list. But if the goal of the Insiders is total government and they don’t really care how they get us there, shouldn’t we be equally concerned with fascism or authoritarianism as we are with socialism? Allen makes this statement but then spends the rest of the book ignoring his own advice to be on the lookout for all forms of total government.
Throughout the book, every place where socialism is portrayed as the end result of decades of clever planning and patient gradualism, I can’t help but notice how easy it is to swap out socialism with fascism. If the Insiders are indeed so clever and diabolical in their planning, it seems conceivable to me that they would claim to have socialism as their goal, when in fact it’s authoritarianism or fascism that they are striving for.
On that front, you mentioned in a letter not too long ago, as did the most recent issue of The New American, that the official Nazi party was called the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. This is stated as if to prove the Nazis were socialists. My reading of history is that this claim isn’t true. Hitler used the promise and banner of socialism to appeal to the working class, but what happened after the Nazis came to power? Actual socialists did not fare well. They ended up in concentration camps, not in power.
If the goal of socialism (page 31) is to wipe out private property, what is the goal of fascism, where corporate and government power are merged? I think one goal would be a massive concentration of wealth. Would Elon Musk be the world’s first trillionaire if he hadn’t backed Trump in the 2024 election? Maybe, but I have my doubts. Just to clarify my views on the ultra-rich, I don’t really care how much someone wants to make. If Musk has the desire and drive to be worth trillions of dollars, fine by me. Go for it. At the same time, I don’t think it’s outlandish to have a floor we don’t allow people to sink below. Sometimes people get unlucky in life and I think having a social safety net isn’t enslavement, rather it gives people a chance to rebuild their lives and get back on a path towards self-sufficiency. Or, if they just can’t do that, is it so bad to offer both sympathy and charity?
The Founding Fathers believed (page 33) that “each branch of government… would be jealous of its powers and would never surrender them to centralized control.” Looking at our current Supreme Court, Congress, and Executive Branch, I think our Founding Fathers made a dangerous assumption here. When the Legislative and Judicial branches capitulate, not to an Executive Branch with socialist tendencies, but to an authoritarian with fascist tendencies, I think all the hand-wringing over the dangers of socialism is blinding us to the current day situation where we find Trump’s White House starting multiple wars, taking over control of Venezuela (and their oil reserves), removing the power of the purse from Congress, leaning on a very permissive Supreme Court (where two of the majority’s six seats were filled in a legally questionable manner by Trump), threatening the integrity of our elections, and overall, operating with a shocking lack of checks and balances. When a member of Congress is virtually guaranteed re-election via a combination of gerrymandering (unlike what we’ve ever seen before), and unlimited campaign funds from the likes of Musk and such, why would anyone rock that boat? And for a Supreme Court Justice who is seated for life? There’s absolutely no accountability there. I do give a tip of the hat to Massey and Marjorie Taylor Greene for giving it a try, but that didn’t work out so well for them…
And yes, I 100% agree with Allen that once you have a single branch of government holding the reins of power, dictatorship is nearly inevitable. And my fear is that is where we are right now. And socialism isn’t the threat. It’s authoritarianism.
The whole of Chapter 3 and the discussion of centralized banking and national debt burden as a way to control the government is a lot to take in. Still, a few questions pop to mind:
- What executive administration has racked up the most debt? It’s sitting at $40 trillion today.
- What executive administration, since the advent of the Federal Reserve, has been most active in terms of replacing board members with his own appointees?
If you answered with Trump for both those questions, you’re correct. I think we’re in agreement as to that being untenable.
Page 60. “Businessmen welcoming… Federal government into their affairs” isn’t something to be surprised by. It’s explained by the businessmen (aka, corporations) being able to write the very legislation governing their industries. Big business complains about the complexities of our tax code, yet it was their lobbyists who wrote it in the first place. And the cynical view is that the tax code is deliberately written to be so convoluted and so complex that only those with access to high-priced attorneys can navigate it. By design.
In the subsequent pages, I had some other notes to self where my left eyebrow shot up, but my overriding thought was this: How well does Allen’s argument hold up 55 years after the publication of his book? Is communism still on the march? Is one country after falling to communism? Not exactly. And how well does Allen’s argument against socialism hold up? According to Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer, authors of On Courage: How to be a Dissident in an Age of Fear, nearly 3 out of 4 people on the planet live under some form of autocracy. Not socialism.
When it comes to creating an enemy, the Insiders seem to have run out of steam with the USSR. It’s interesting to note that barely a decade elapsed between the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Twin Towers. Whether 9/11 was orchestrated or not, the resulting enemy of “terrorism” is a way better candidate for a never-ending war than any particular country. It’s hard to claim victory over an ideology.
My point here is that the Insiders don’t really care who the enemy is, as long as one exists. The cries of “Communism!”, “Socialism!”, “Terrorism!” all strike the same tone in my ear, with the message being one of “For your safety, acquiesce to the federal government, and in particular, the executive branch.”
Page 106. This is a bit of an aside, but the whole “buying patents” section doesn’t make any sense to me. Patents are public and to qualify as a patent they have to describe a process or method in sufficient detail so that anyone else who has expertise in that field could recreate the item described in the patent. There’s no need for some clandestine “buying” of patents for the USSR to get access to US patented technology. It’s publicly available. From there, if a US company wanted to have patent protection for their invention in other countries, they would have to file, country by country, to get that protection. This whole section strikes me as fear mongering.
Page 116. “Most Americans fear big government…” Okay, but shouldn’t there be some definition of “big government”? In my view, our choice isn’t necessarily between big vs. small government. Some portions of government, like the military, need to be big to accomplish their mission. Some portions of government, like local public libraries, can be pretty darn small to accomplish their mission. I think “competent” vs. “inneffective” or “transparent” vs. “corrupt” or “self-serving” vs. “Serving the public good” would be better metrics for establishing the value of government.
This leads us to the question of what is the actual purpose of government. One view I subscribe to is the government’s purpose is to prevent an accumulation of power in the hands of a few. By that measure, we’re failing. Miserably. Another definition, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, is the proper role of government is to do what individuals cannot do as well on their own. In a sentence, that’s my role is at the Spokane Public Library. We provide access to tools and resources that fall beyond the reach of individual businesses in the Spokane region, but by pooling resources (tax dollars) we are able to support all of the region’s businesses with resources that they wouldn’t have access to otherwise. And I do this work in a small-scale, socialistic way, with the support of small-scale, local capitalism.
In terms of economic systems, big-scale, winner-take-all monopolistic capitalism isn’t what I want. But small scale, locally based capitalism where local consumers know their local producers? Yeah, I’m a fan of that. I have similar views on the scale of socialism. At the local, small scale version, socialism is basically just neighbors helping each other with some shared responsibilities. But do I want some remote, faceless bureaucrat dictating how life must be lived? No. I don’t.
Page 132. “14 signposts to slavery”:
- #3: Detention of individuals without judicial process.
- This is happening daily under Trump’s authority. And with ICE effectively acting as a Federal Police force, with a budget roughly 80% the size of the entire US Marine Corps. That’s frightening.
- #8: An official declaration that anti-Communist organizations are subversive and subsequent legal action taken to suppress them.
- Trump is taking this exact tactic, but with liberal organizations being the focus of the Federal government. Trump officials have taken a governmentwide approach to scrutinizing citizens and organizations opposed to Trump’s policies. Tax agents have examined nonprofit groups. Investigators have looked into the books of labor unions. Prosecutors have brought charges against anti-ICE protesters, asserting that a leftist conspiracy is provoking political violence on the streets, opponents have been branded as “terrorists,” etc. Case in point: just today (10/12/26), Representative Ilhan Omar’s home residence was raided by Homeland Security. Seems pretty fishy to me.
- #14: Any attempt to make a new major law by executive decree.
- Where do we start? Voting rights seem like a good place. Trump’s obsession with doing away with mail in voting and using electronic voting machines (and thus eliminating a paper trail), is particularly ominous.
My read on all of this is that authoritarianism and fascism is the biggest threat to American freedom. Consider the following signs of an emerging authoritarian ruler:
- Rejects, in words or actions, the constitutional rules of the game.
- Denies the legitimacy of opponents.
- Tolerates or encourages violence.
- Indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.
I would add to that first bullet point the fact that Trump is on record in 2020, on a phone call with Georgia’s Secretary of State, pressuring him to “find 11,780 votes” in order to switch Georgia’s electoral votes from Biden to himself. The fact that this didn’t land Trump in prison for the rest of his life, to say nothing of allowing him to be in a position to sway, influence and corrupt upcoming elections… it just boggles my mind how the American public could excuse or ignore that. As citizens, our vote is sacrosanct and deserves to be treated as such. At the RNC convention on 9/11/26 (of all days), Trump led the RNC in a pledge to “cheat like hell” in the November elections. What version of a failure of leadership is that? And that’s not even bringing into play a 200-page diatribe about Trump’s role in the entire Epstein debacle and ocean of shame. The man is an utter failure and one of the sorriest excuses for a human being I’ve encountered in my life.
So to sum up my thoughts: some capitalism can be good. Some socialism can be good. It’s all a matter of scale and the ability to diffuse power to the citizenry. Regarding my views of Trump, not only is he a self-serving, petulant, egotistical rapist, he’s also a prominent danger to our country. I just don’t understand how a significant percentage of our country refuses to see that.
When it comes to refusing to confront evidence, here’s a book I found interesting: Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know, by Mark Lilla. While Lilla doesn’t have some profound breakthrough or solution for the blinders we all tend to put on ourselves, I thought he did a good job of wandering the wilderness of trying to figure out how we come to know what we know and what we believe to know. I hope you enjoy it!
And with that, I think I’ll wrap this up. Not because it’s finished and completely polished, but rather that it has taken me so long to get to this point that I figure I should punt this back over to you.
Even with all her flaws and shortcomings, here’s to America and another 250 years of trying to get it right.
Love,
Mark
