Of course, they played up that these soirees had great success!

Ha...."teabuggery"....I like that. Gave me a chuckle tonight.

with the Larouchers, at least they're anti NAFTA, job protectionist pro union, unlike the every man for hisself crowd over at the JBS

My wife protested them last year. But they are keeping the meetings so low key it's like hunting down bilderbergers ;P

It was not an official JBS publication but it was sold in their bookstores and recommended reading.

"A few years ago, the JBS fired the editor of its biweekly magazine -- which created quite a stir within the Society."

Actually, Gary Benoit, the editor-in-chief of The New American, is as secure in his position as anybody can be anywhere in the current economy. The individual who was fired was Yours Truly, former TNA Senior Editor William Grigg.

This happened a year after the nasty "leadership" dispute, and shortly after the resolution of a couple of lawsuits that grew out of that conflict.I notice that the main article here links to the "Freedom First Society" in Colorado for biographical information about Robert Welch. The FFS is a rump organization headed by former JBS CEO Vance Smith, who was forced out in 2005, almost exactly a year before I was kicked to the curb.

During the 2005 conflict, Vance Smith and his allies sought to capitalize on the fact that Jack McManus, the current JBS President (at the time, president emeritus and Council member) had given a number of blatantly, brazenly anti-Semitic speeches to schismatic Catholic groups.

Audio and video recordings of those speeches had been made and marketed, and excerpts of some of the worst elements were compiled into a kind of highlight reel for use by Vance's faction in lobbying various people, including myself.

I was furious with Jack; I'd known he was capable of saying some really vicious things (he once referred to AEI's Ben Wattenberg, who had interviewed Jack on the radio, as a "slimy New York Jew"; I about collapsed from shock), but my position is that one's internal prejudices are his own affair. (As an American of Mexican ancestry I apply that principle in dealing with anti-Latino prejudice as well). When I learned that Jack, for years, had been making speeches of that kind, my reaction was a mixture of rage and weary disgust.

But I was just as disgusted with what amounted to an effort by Vance and Company to blackmail Jack into supporting Vance's effort to retain his position. Two of Vance's allies threatened to take the Jack McManus anti-Jewish "highlight reel" to Morris Dees and Larry King.

So, I resigned. I really couldn't imagine staying with the organization if Vance's blackmail effort succeeded. And I wasn't nuts about sticking around if Jack ended up regaining his position as president, given both his bizarre prejudices and his complete lack of discipline and judgment.

After Vance was forced out, Jack McManus called me and personally urged me to rejoin the staff, if only to provide a sense of continuity to members and employees. I did so.

And a year later, Jack was one of four people who agreed to throw me and my family under the bus. This group included three people for whom I had risked my job a year earlier.

The pretext for canning me was that my after-hours, personal blog contained material that 1) was considered offensive by some Mormon JBS members (which was written in the context of Mitt Romney's candidacy); and 2) had potentially libelous material that exposed the Society to a potential lawsuit (a piece of genuinely paranoid speculation without a particle of merit).

The obvious irony here is that the current JBS President actually exposed the organization to *blackmail* by carrying on a years-long part-time crusade against the "Jewish menace." When that was discovered back in 2000-2001, Jack (who was already receiving Social Security) wasn't fired; he was removed as President, given a pay cut, and put on the JBS Council.

That's pretty gentle treatment compared to what was done to me. I have a family of six children and an invalid, frequently hospitalized wife for whom I'm the primary in-home caretaker; this has been the case since about May of 2006. At the time I was fired I was putting in 60-hour weeks, and regularly receiving plaudits for the volume and quality of my work. Yet the course of a single weekend I went from star employee to pariah for reasons never honestly explained to me or anybody else.

I'm hardly the first or only JBS employee to be treated this way; the organization has a long-lived and eminently justified reputation for treating its employees very badly, and attacking, in cult-like fashion, the character of those who depart on less-than-favorable terms (this happened to me, but the scope of the defamation was limited by my ability to use the blogosphere to publicize the truth about what was done to me).

Whatever one thinks of the views of the JBS, there are thousands of genuinely decent, public-minded people who join in the belief that doing so will help save/rescue/restore constitutional government.

There was a time a few years ago when I hoped the JBS would embrace a trans-partisan view, working with people of goodwill across the spectrum to restore the Bill of Rights, end the Iraq war, and oppose corporate welfare (to name just three issues with trans-partisan appeal). But the present upper management -- which is concerned ONLY with preserving the revenue stream that supports their sinecures -- considers it to be more profitable to play to the Limbaugh/Hannity/Beck/O'Reilly faction than to stand for constitutional principles.