Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

by Andy Borowitz

In 1958, Welch, a former executive at the candy company responsible for Junior Mints, founded the John Birch Society, a conspiracy-theory factory and the QAnon of its day. (His cofounder was Fred C. Koch, who, having also sired the Koch brothers, has a lot to answer for.) The Birchers were a community of crackpots who believed, among other wigged-out fantasies, that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Soviet agent. One commie plot keeping Welch up at night was a demonic scheme to drug the entire U.S. population by fluoridating the water supply.III Though he was known mainly for finding a Bolshevik under every rock, the right-wing Willy Wonka shared other febrile anxieties in his manifesto The Blue Book of the John Birch Society. One of his more inventive theories was that the United States was being devoured from within not only by communism and fluoride but by the steamy, youth-corrupting novel Peyton Place. By finding the fake Lenin quote in Welch’s loony book, Reagan demonstrated that his voracious reading encompassed