JBS: defending the rule of law; leading the Americanist cause for more than four decades, The John Birch Society uniquely understands the globalist conspiracy and how to win the battle to preserve freedom. (Freedom Fight).

"The people never give up their freedom except under some delusion," warned James Madison -- and the father of our Constitution was right. The enemies of freedom are masters of delusion. And before the American public had absorbed the horrors of 9-11, freedom's enemies began promoting the delusion that our Constitution, and the system of government it created, cannot adequately deal with our present crisis.

Immediately, opinion molders took up the refrain that "everything changed" on September 11, 2001. Suddenly the American people, heirs to an unparalleled legacy of freedom under law, were being told that the question was not whether we would have to trade freedom for security, but how much freedom we would have to surrender. Spokesmen from a supposedly conservative Republican administration insist that the president must be given open-ended powers to declare and wage war abroad, and to imprison people without trial at home. These demands are echoed in the pages of "conservative" publications and over the airwaves on "conservative" radio and television talk shows, while liberal politicians and pundits offer partisan dissent.

The truth is missing almost entirely from this carefully orchestrated false debate. Our present predicament resulted from our government's persistent violation of its constitutionally prescribed role. Over the course of decades, a corrupt ruling elite controlling our federal government has entangled our nation in scores of bitter foreign quarrels, making enemies willing to enlist in suicidal terrorist campaigns against our nation. That same elite has used our tax dollars, in the form of foreign aid, to support the foreign regimes sponsoring and organizing international terrorism. And at the same time, our nation's borders have been thrown open and our population left shockingly vulnerable to attack.

How has this happened? Part of it is due to the natural tendency of all human institutions to decay as a result of human corruptibility. But our nation's decline has been too dramatic and too systematic to be the result of natural erosion. We are dealing with an organized, deliberate effort to destroy the constitutional protections and institutional layers of strength that have protected our freedom and prosperity -- in a word, a conspiracy.

British statesman Edmund Burke observed: "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." This is the vision behind The John Birch Society, which Robert Welch created in December 1958 to dispel the delusions promoted by freedom's s enemies and to champion freedom.

Because this is not merely a "war of ideas," but rather a death struggle against an organized cabal seeking total power, Mr. Welch created the Society as a means of providing organized leadership. The JBS exists to help freedom-loving Americans understand, confront, and defeat the conspiratorial threat to all that we cherish. Too many Americans, still shocked by the 9-11 attack and deliberately led astray by the "leaders" chosen for them by the Establishment, do not understand that the ominous growth of an American police state we see today is an outgrowth of a long-existing conspiratorial campaign -- and that, with the proper leadership, that campaign can be defeated.

Visionary Leadership

Although members of The John Birch Society have fought the battle against totalitarianism on many fronts during our almost 44-year history, experience taught Mr. Welch that two fronts in the freedom fight are especially critical. One front is fought in the domestic arena -- the other in the international. Both consist of exposing and opposing the conspiratorial drive to build a national and (eventually) global police state.

The essential role of government is to protect the rights and property of law-abiding citizens. This is why local law enforcement -- police departments, county sheriffs, and state police -- are critical bulwarks safeguarding our freedom. In a free country, those who enforce the law are not agents of the central government, but of the local citizens to whom they are immediately accountable. Ordinary citizens in such societies look on policemen with respect and gratitude. In totalitarian dictatorships, police exist to defend the regime against its subjects, provoking fear and suspicion. This is why our Constitution recognizes that law enforcement is almost exclusively a state and local responsibility.

In 1963, Mr. Welch introduced the "Support Your Local Police" (SYLP) program as an ongoing action campaign of The John Birch Society. At the time, many observers found this decision puzzling: Didn't everyone support their local police? What possible value was there in a "motherhood-and-apple pie" campaign on behalf of the police? Such observers didn't understand that Mr. Welch had an uncanny ability -- based on careful study of history and current developments -- to project the lines and anticipate future threats.

"The Communists know, as the American people do not, that the city and community police forces now constitute one of the most important remaining obstacles to the gradual, insidious, and at first invisible, establishment of the mechanics of their Communist police state," wrote Mr. Welch in the July 1963 JBS Bulletin. "The local working police are the best friends everywhere, of anti-Communists like ourselves, because they constantly run up against all of the dirty tactics of the Communists, and of the dupes and allies of the Communists, in their respective areas."

Mr. Welch understood that a well-entrenched conspiracy seeking total power would eventually work to discredit our nation's independent local police agencies and bring them under central government control. Two years after Mr. Welch introduced the SYLP program, the Watts riots erupted in Los Angeles, inaugurating a campaign of urban unrest that included the Vietnam-era "anti-war" riots on college campuses and in the streets of many U.S. cities.

While street terrorism in the form of destructive urban riots convulsed our cities, the same revolutionary apparatus (the Communist Party, USA and its allies) that fomented the violence launched a second thrust in the form of a campaign to create "civilian police review boards." This innocuous name was intended to spread delusion by implying that our police are not already under civilian control. Under state constitutions and state and local laws, all of our police agencies come under civilian authority. The subversives sought to establish "civilian review boards" dominated by their own activists, appointed by left-wing politicians, to handcuff, subvert, and then take over, law enforcement.

During the 1960s, the SYLP campaign consisted of many battles fought from coast to coast against efforts to create leftwing civilian review boards. One of its most impressive victories came in November 1966, when voters in New York City overwhelmingly rejected a civilian police review board measure in a citywide referendum. The groundwork for this important victory had been laid by New York SYLP committees and by policemen who were proud members of The John Birch Society.

Above and Below

While other observers understood the radical left's assault on our police departments, Robert Welch saw and explained the bigger picture. "Next to the Communists, the greatest enemy of our local police forces is the federal government, with its proffered grants-in-aid, training programs, guidelines, and other means of molding these local forces into components of a national gestapo," he wrote in the February 1971 JBS Bulletin. "The most important job of our Support Your Local Police Committees has now become to keep our local police independent of the federal controls which inevitably follow such subsidization." (Emphasis in original.)

Drawing on his vast study of the longstanding campaign to subvert law enforcement, Mr. Welch noted that urban violence and terrorism, from the 1886 Haymarket Square riot to the urban riots that punctuated the 1960s, "were the result of plotting and agitation, by professional revolutionaries, on behalf of their bosses at the top." He further pointed out: "These bosses were not themselves even recognized as revolutionaries, and certainly were not downtrodden. They belonged to the very top, financial, social, political, and educational circles of the respective countries."

These "silk hat revolutionaries" -- operating out of such redoubts as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and other similar bastions of the one-world elite -- have principally led the concerted attack on America's local police. As Mr. Welch observed, "The discontent, turmoil, and insurrection at the bottom was only one of many methods by which this top Inner Circle was, with only selfish aims in mind, gaining ever more power for itself."

But Mr. Welch understood that civilian review boards were not the only route being pursued by those seeking to subvert our police agencies. In 1967, he warned that these forces "have now turned to 'training' of local police forces, financed by grants of money from the central government. Even the Supreme Court has admitted (or decreed) that whatever the federal government subsidizes, it controls."

Fast-forwarding to 2002, we see the Bush administration using the exact same tactic as it ladles out federal subsidies to state and local police agencies in the name of "Homeland Security." This is merely an updated version of a drive begun in the 1960s under the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), created as part of the Nixon administration's "war on crime" by a cluster of officials who had backgrounds in the Ford Foundation and the CFR.

While crime-weary Americans and overworked police officials initially welcomed the LEAA, the program's true purpose was to accelerate the drive for a centralized police system. In a candid moment, LEAA Associate Administrator Clarence Coster revealed the organization's true agenda, telling a meeting of police chiefs that American police must be nationalized: "Today, in this country, we have 40,235 law enforcement agencies, ranging from one-man departments to New York City, with more than 40,000 police officers. This many units form a completely ungovernable body."

"Ungovernable" by whom? Every one of those police agencies was accountable to state, county, or city governments, and to the communities in which they served. But what Coster meant was that they weren't governed by Washington, D.C. and couldn't be outside of the control of a central, national police agency. Coster's unguarded comment validated the warning by Robert Welch in the March 1974 JBS Bulletin: "Your federal government is still doing everything it dares, as rapidly as it dares, to establish a mammoth national police force that is ultimately responsible to nobody except the President of the United States."

Largely because the JBS exposed the true purpose of the LEAA, that embryonic national police agency was abolished in 1983. That threat has now re-emerged in a more potent form in the proposed Department of Homeland Security -- but as our experience with the LEAA illustrates, that threat can be defeated through principled, organized effort.

Battling Terrorism

The JBS campaign to expose international terrorism began in the late 1960s, and was carried out in tandem with an effort to preserve our multi-layered, constitutionally sound internal security system. Mr. Welch understood that just as the threat of domestic unrest was being used to advance the consolidation of police power in the U.S. central government, international terrorism would be used to consolidate police power in the United Nations and in other international agencies. Once again, his foresight has been sadly vindicated: The UN -- "terror central" -- has been given the role of directing the global "war on terrorism," and the Bush administration is actually coordinating its domestic counter-terrorism efforts through the UN.

In the January 1978 John Birch Society Bulletin, Mr. Welch warned that the architects of a UN-dominated world order "are giving special aid and attention to the use everywhere abroad today of the one most powerful weapon, namely terrorism, for consolidating Communist power over any area where infiltration, treason, and diplomatic pressures have already prepared the way."

In country after country, "the use of terrorism has long since proved to be the most effective means breaking the will to resist on the part of any people ... and of then tightening all the features of that bondage as rapidly as fear, despair, or helplessness make it practicable to do so," wrote Mr. Welch.

Let's March!

While the task at hand is formidable, it is achievable. From Valley Forge to United Flight 93, Americans have displayed the resolution and courage to do what is necessary to defend liberty. But these traits do not spontaneously coalesce into determined, productive action. George Washington's in sight and character rallied the Continental Army to victory over the British. Todd Beamer's prayerful leadership and defiant battle cry "Let's Roll!" made possible a desperate counter-attack that may have saved the lives of thousands of Americans. Beamer and his fellow patriot-heroes drew a line in the sky that said: Evil stops here.

Inspired by such examples, and guided by principles laid down by our founder, the JBS is holding the line against the drive to turn our beloved nation into a totalitarian police state. We need the help of dedicated patriot-volunteers willing to work and sacrifice on behalf of liberty. We invite you to join us in this epic endeavor.

Mr. Smith is chief executive officer of The John Birch Society.