Thread by @davetroy

1/In 1933, a group of bankers and industrialists tried to overthrow the US Government and kill FDR.

They recruited Gen. Smedley Butler to lead an army of 500,000 "veteran supersoldiers" patterned on the French "Croix de Feu". Their gripe?

The departure from the gold standard.

2/Butler, a respected WWI veteran, heard them out, if only to learn what they were up to. He had no interest in the gold standard or in abusing the trust of veterans. After a few months he'd had enough. He reported the plot to Congress.

3/Butler's extraordinary claims were met with skepticism and derision, but Congress held hearings and found his claims of a plot to be accurate. Butler was smeared in the press for being 'senile.'

He was 52.

Read "The Plot to Seize the White House."
ia802702.us.archive.org/22/items/pdfy-…

4/That plot, organized by industrialists such as J. Howard Pew, JP Morgan affiliates, Dow Chemical, GM, Remington firearms, Mellon, PPG, EF Hutton, Rockefellers et al, was soon forgotten — they owned (or influenced) the media that might cover it.

5/Pew was close friends with Robert Welch, who went on to found the John Birch Society on the same set of principles as the 1933 plotters: the gold-standard and staunch anti-communism. JBS festered, and failed to establish true mainstream support for its agenda.

6/In 1981 after the election of Reagan, JBS bigwigs regrouped and created the Council for National Policy. The CNP was largely responsible for planning and executing the January 6th insurrection, COVID disinfo, and is obsessed with gold — and now crypto.
washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/…

7/Today, we're simply re-litigating the New Deal. We're reliving the 1933 Business Plot, and the dark anti-communist fever dreams of the John Birch Society. IT'S THE SAME STUFF. Until we deal with this anti-democratic strain in society, we'll keep repeating the same conflict.

Compare this chatter from 2021 (“creeping socialism! communist fears!”) to that from 1933, 1946, 1981 and tell me it’s not the same crazy paranoiac anti-democratic strain of ideas from the same people.

I’ll wait.

thehill.com/homenews/state…