On a sweltering day in July, Mark Fulmer looked cool and collected in the bonus room at the Spring Creek Barbeque in Bedford, a suburb outside of Fort Worth. He stood at a podium in front of about a dozen right-wing activists who had come for the inaugural luncheon of the John Birch Society—a far-right group of conspiracy theorists founded during the Red Scare.
“I was talking to some people about John Birch at the Texas True Project meeting last night,” said Fulmer, the chapter’s founder and the event’s keynote speaker. “And a couple of them said, ‘John Birch? Isn’t that from the 1950s, and they’re still around?’ And I say, ‘Yes.’”
(True Texas Project, a group that emerged out of what used to be the Texas Tea Party, was recently labeled an anti-government hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.)
