Bircher Sees ‘Green’ Threat To U.S. Rails Against Environmentalists, Specter Of One-World Government

With the Berlin Wall reduced to knickknacks and the Soviet Union exiled to history books, one might think the John Birch Society would relax its watch.

Not so. The threat to America has gone from red to green, society President John McManus said.

Environmentalists are the new handmaidens of the forces of one-world government, said McManus, who was in Spokane on Thursday as part of a Northwest tour to boost membership in the society.

“The father of environmental extremism is Karl Marx,” McManus warned.

Complaints about acid rain and global warming - which McManus contends are absolutely baseless - transcend national boundaries. That provides the perfect opportunity for the United Nations to set up a mechanism to usurp the United States’ sovereignty under the guise of protecting the environment, he said.

Although the threat comes from a new direction, McManus said the goal is the same as it has been for more than 200 years: creation of a world government run by a few powerful people.

McManus, a former engineer from Massachusetts, doesn’t attempt to explain why anyone would want to try to run the world, considering all its problems.

“That didn’t stop Stalin or Hitler or Genghis Khan,” he said, acknowledging in the next instant that they all failed.

Environmentalists may not know they are part of the conspiracy, McManus said. Many people help the plot without knowing it, merely cashing in on a chance to gain wealth or fame.

Only a few people at the core of the conspiracy know the full plan, he said. Who? “We don’t really know,” McManus said.

While some groups such as the freemen and the militias are relative Johnny-come-latelies to conspiracy hunting, the John Birch Society has been at it for nearly 40 years.

The group lost momentum while Ronald Reagan was president, McManus said.

“We gained it back when George Bush started saying ‘new world order,”’ McManus said. “We’d been saying that would be the term for 25 years.” Former skeptics joined, saying they now believed, he said.

It may seem odd that a group smart enough to plan and nurture a conspiracy for more than two centuries would be foolish enough to tip its hand like that.

They couldn’t help it, McManus explained. The phrase was “like a secret handshake” to let key people know this was part of the plan.

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