This is the second item in a three-part series on The John Birch Society and the impact that it has had and will have in the future.

The first 50 years of The John Birch Society has produced hundreds of successes, large and small, national and local that are a credit to our organization. Most of the time we received no recognition from the public, but each success, especially their accumulation, slowed down the Insider timetable for complete control over the lives of Americans.

In some cases, battles have been waged that were never "on the radar" of the average citizen. Yet the battle would have had significant impact on Americans had we not been involved.

I will go down a list of only a few of the important successes.

The first significant success was our "Committee Against Summit Entanglements," which completely ruined the move by President Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union as part of a grandiose scheme to make Russia look as if they had mellowed and could be part of the "world community."

The Eisenhower trip was to accomplish in the USSR what Nixon later did with China — to open it up to the world. But unlike our success in stopping Eisenhower, in Nixon’s case, we did not have sufficient prior warning to stop his trip to China, the purpose of which was to show the world that Mao was really a fine fellow, even after killing millions of his own countrymen — and ours — in Korea.

In the case of Eisenhower, our Society was able to attract hundreds of key opinion molders to our effort and in a short time put a halt to this Insider ploy.

Perhaps our greatest success has been the ongoing dissemination of hard-copy material promoting the basics of classic liberal arts, such as economics, history, etc.; and exposing the organizations and people behind the quest for power.

Leading off with None Dare Call It Treason and None Dare Call It Conspiracy, and ending with our "Merger In The Making" issue of The New American, we have disseminated hundreds of millions of pieces.

In the visual arts, such as movies, filmstrips, videos, and DVDs, our members have produced hundreds of titles reaching audiences in the tens of millions. In the period of 2007-2008 alone, tens of millions of Americans came in contact with JBS media initiatives on talk shows, articles, interviews, etc. In this same period, at least a half million people have seen our DVD, Overview of America.

The impact of this level of effort has been instrumental in helping with our action campaigns. Indeed, without our action campaigns, the dissemination of knowledge is almost worthless. One of the most profound aspects of Robert Welch's legacy was putting legs under literature. It produces a profound affect.

In addition, the dissemination of literature had to promote a sound solution at the same time that it identified a problem. Education without action leads to frustration. This is also true when working for a solution since a bad solution will lead to frustration.

One of our most significant campaigns was the "Support Your Local Police" (SYLP) committees. This campaign was so successful that soon you started to see every outfit in the country using the theme of "Support Your Local Something or Other." This effort prevented a well established initiative by the communists and our own government to nationalize our police departments. No country can be totalitarian if the people control their own local independent police departments. It is as important as the 2nd Amendment. The United States may be the last country in the world with truly local police departments.

One of our visual aids, the movie, Anarchy, USA, along with the SYLP committees and our "Truth About Civil Turmoil" (TACT) Committees, and several of our courageous Black members were instrumental in shutting down the communist-led street violence of the 1960s and 1970s. We showed that these terrorist organizations, such as the Black Panthers, were communist-led by individuals like H. Rap Brown, who later became a Muslim to promote his Marxist agenda.

In this regard, and based on the same foundation, we stopped the original Aztlan movement of Cesar Chavez posing as an agricultural worker movement, and the American Indian Movement to take over the American Indian reservations to use as Marxist enclaves independent of any American governmental jurisdiction.

One of the most important campaigns that we initiated was to oppose the move for a Constitutional Convention.

It was a judo move by the Insiders, using conscientious Americans with a variety of good causes, such as a balanced federal budget, to support something they did not want: to scrap and completely rewrite the Constitution. The problem was in the fine print of the resolutions before the legislatures. The resolutions identified good causes but buried in the solutions was a call for an amendment to the Constitution to be implemented in a constitutional convention. The convention call was two states away from being called when we jumped in and stopped it.

This stealth operation was completely off the radar of the American people. Its ramifications were not understood by the state legislators until we informed them of the consequences of calling a constitutional convention, that there was no limit to what a convention could do.

The same was true for the Equal Rights Amendment. In this case, we, in most instances, provided the state level organization and allowed others to take the credit nationally.

The John Birch Society was involved early on and provided the base for what became the pro-life movement, the home-school movement, and many other initiatives which, in some cases, made the leaders national icons.

We started the organization that led to the impeachment of President William Clinton. The campaign was sidetracked into an issue of lying about sexual conduct rather than the initiating reason of treason and bribery. The Insiders knew that they could not have the original purpose prevail for two reasons: 1) It would expose an ongoing problem in the federal government of treason which continues today; and 2) They knew that Clinton could be found guilty on these charges.

The Insiders cannot allow the American people to expose and punish treason for they would lose too many of their minions, quitting out of fear of the American people. This is only one of the reasons they expend so much time and energy trying to convince the American people that a conspiracy does not exist.

The last of the hundreds of small and large successes I will mention is that we have been very instrumental in the slowing down of the Insider agenda of regionalizing the Western Hemisphere. We have not been able to stop it all as NAFTA and CAFTA attest, but we were able to stop the FTAA (The Free Trade Area of the Americas) in one year.

Relative to the North American Union (NAU), its exposure has primarily been the work of The John Birch Society, helping to lead coalitions and then working with these coalitions.

Two things set our Society apart from the rest of the field in this campaign. First, we have a true outreach program to the opinion molders. As part of our goal to get one million to read the "Merger In The Making" issue of our magazine, The New American, copies of this issue were sent out to all congressmen, state legislators, media, sheriffs, and in key areas, Democrat and Republican congressional campaign contributors. Also, businessmen, cattlemen, farmers, car dealers, etc.

This was followed up with personal visits and further distribution by our local Chapters. Add to this the PDF online of the "Merger in the Making" issue, which was read and/or downloaded by hundreds of thousands. Then to top it off, we sent out 2.2 million emails to link back to the PDF to 850,000 managers in the manufacturing area, with the remaining people identified as being politically minded as a result of subscribing to political publications.

We know from statements and writings of the Insiders who are promoting the NAU, that they have lost their main advantage, stealth, and their need to regain it. In other words, we have exposed them and slowed them down. Exposure of the Insiders and their plans will always slow them down.

Summing up the NAU campaign, let me tell you of one incident that illustrates how we work successfully and still remain off the radar of even our closest allies in the fight.

In a state where our members have successfully moved resolutions through their legislature, our Regional Field Director was at the state capitol just watching the anti-NAU resolution's progress with a couple of our members. A leader of a local group chided our Director for not having more of our members in the legislative halls. Our man replied that our work had already been done. He explained to him that our members had gone to the living rooms of the state representatives, or met with them in other friendly, relaxed atmospheres and had educated the legislators on the problems of a North American Union. We informed many, gained their commitment, and asked them in turn to inform their peers, which they had done. He went on to say that all that our few members were doing there was monitoring the progress in case they needed to alert our members to apply constituent pressure at the last moment.

The real work is done behind the scenes. Waiting for hearings or legislative sessions, after opinion molders have made up their minds is too late. These meetings and hearings are basically show business to give substance to what those in charge already want. You have to be part of the script writing in order to write in a major role for yourself.

The building of personal relationships with opinion molders is the primary means by which we will save this nation. After all, who would you listen to, those closest to you or strangers?

We work hard, and we work smart. There is no easy way, and no silver bullet.

We could continue detailing other successes, such as our TRIM Committees exposing the voting records of incumbents which ultimately led to laws preventing us from continuing this success; the ongoing success of our "Get US out! of the United Nations" campaign (no less than Pravda, the communist newspaper in Moscow, has stated that the JBS changed the attitude of the American people against the UN); etc.

As stated earlier, it is the cumulative effects of all of our programs, completely successful or not, that has given us decades of time to continue the fight. Without this effort, our country would have already been subjugated.

Remember, the Insiders do not care what you know. They care what you do about it.

And that will remain our task: to enlist more and more people into the fight and organize them to achieve even greater successes until we can have less government, more responsibility and -- with God's help -- a better world.

In part three, I will talk about the future.