To my fellow Montanans

by Tony Hudson, President, Save the American West

Every generation faces a choice about who we will allow to speak for us, and what kind of political culture we in Ravalli County and across our state intend to build. We cannot control every voice in the public square, but we can draw a moral line between those who contribute to the work of citizenship and those who seek only to inflame, intimidate, divide, and ultimately purge.

In that spirit, it is time to speak plainly about the extremism of the John Birch Society, their seductive rhetoric, both its history and its present posture.

For more than half a century, the JBS has operated on a simple but destructive premise: that America is infiltrated, corrupted, and on the verge of collapse, not because of human imperfection or political disagreement, but because “the enemy” is always lurking behind the next door, your coworkers, your neighbors, a doctrine of distrust.  This organization built its identity not on civic dialogue but on suspicion. And suspicion, when elevated into doctrine, becomes something far more dangerous.

The record speaks for itself. JBS leaders once claimed that President Dwight Eisenhower, a man who led the Allied forces to victory over tyranny, was a “dedicated communist agent.” They charged that the Civil Rights Movement was a Soviet operation. They declared that fluoridated drinking water was a communist mind control plot, and that the United States was losing wars by deliberate design. These were not fringe mutterings. They were the public claims of an organization that insisted it alone could see the “truth.” 

What we see now is not new; it is simply the next chapter of the same story. When political movements lose the ability to make a better argument or the capacity for humility, when disagreement becomes treason, and when complexity is replaced by conspiracy, the outcome is always the same: the purification mindset. A belief that society must be purged of its enemies, real or imagined, in order for virtue to survive.

History has seen this before, and we should be reminded of the cost.  

During the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety believed they could perfect society by identifying and eliminating its “corrupting influences.” They began with real grievances and ended with a guillotine. What started as an appeal to virtue ended in the Reign of Terror, not because the people were wicked, but because the logic of purging extremism can lead nowhere else.

The parallels with the Birch Society are not academic. They are structural.

Robespierre and the JBS share the same underlying assumption: that society can be purified by rooting out enemies, that disagreement is a sign of treachery, and that those who do not conform must be exposed and removed. 

When any movement defines itself by the enemies it imagines, rather than the values it upholds, it inevitably turns inward. And when it does, it devours its own.

America does not need another era of purifying zeal. We do not need an American Committee of Public Safety dressed up in 20th-century rhetoric. We need the opposite: civic courage, patience, humility, and a willingness to work with people who do not share all of our views. Our Democratic Republic will not be maintained by the search for perfect allies, but by the imperfect work of reasoning together,  building and rebuilding, not tearing down.

The Birch Society, where the end always justifies the means regardless of the law, represents a failure of that reasoning. It mistakes fear for insight. Intimidation and absolutism for strength. Our nation deserves better than conspiracy in the place of conversation. We deserve better than purging in the place of persuasion. And we deserve leaders who know that the purpose of politics is not to hunt enemies, but to build a future.

In this moment, when our communities are tired of division and hungry for dignity, we must reaffirm that extremism has no place in American renewal. Not because we fear it, but because we understand where it leads. We have seen its outcomes in history, and we have seen its smaller echoes in our own time. The work ahead requires steadiness, not frenzy. Cooperation, not cleansing, not purging our neighbors, but bringing a more persuasive argument to the table.

Let us be a people who choose to build rather than burn down.