"America First" was originally a slogan of the Ku Klux Klan. The phrase was adopted by the America First Committee (AFC), founded to lobby to keep the United States out of World War II, and comprised of the leading American fascists. Also involved in its founding was the Regnery family, godparents of the Old Right, who were also part of the founding of the American Security Council (ASC). Described as the "heart" of the Military-Industrial Complex, the ASC denounced FDR's New Deal economics, and through the Red Scare of the McCarthy Era and the formation of the John Birch Society, they fed the American right with theories of a global Communist conspiracy, in order to advance the neoliberal agenda of the Mont Pelerin Society. Key agents of the ASC were the Secret Team, headed by Ted Shackley of the CIA, who were involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and then heroin smuggling in the Golden Triangle, which would evolve into the Iran-Contra Operation under Reagan.
The other side of the evolving dialectic was created when of the mind-control technologies first explored by the Nazis were imported to the US after World War II with Operation Paperclip, and became known as MK-Ultra. The explosion in the use of LSD that followed resulted in hippie Counterculture of the 1960s and the Human Potential Movement of the Esalen Institute in California. Through the influence of Aleister Crowley, the darker side of this experimentation evolved into Chruch of Satan and the Manon killings, as well as Discordianism and the chaos magic of the Oder of Thanateros, to which belonged Timothy Leary.
Although the Carbonari initially failed in installing a Masonic Pope with Cardinal Rampolla, a purported member of Crowley's OTO, they succeeded in hijacking the Catholic Church with reforms of Vatican II. The backlash resulted in the evolution of Catholic Traditionalism, associated with the synarchist myth-makers of the Priory of Sion, who were connected with Le Cercle, the umbrella organization of the Fascist International, who produced the French Nouvelle Droite and Operation Gladio.
