From the New York Times review by Jennifer Szalai of the book by Matthew Dallek titled “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right”:

Before the 2016 presidential election and Trumpism, before Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, there was the John Birch Society: Founded in 1958 at a secret meeting of 12 men, the group was named after a young missionary and intelligence officer who was killed by Mao’s Communist forces in 1945. As the historian Matthew Dallek explains in “Birchers,” his illuminating new account of the society’s right-wing activism amid postwar prosperity, a number of the founding members were business leaders, and all of them felt deeply aggrieved.