Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know.
President Donald Trump generated mocking headlines and news stories around the world this past week as he turned his speech before the United Nations General Assembly into a laundry list of complaints and insults about the venerable global institution.
Sometimes yelling, Trump told U.N. representatives that their countries were “going to hell” and groused about malfunctions of his teleprompter and the U.N. building’s escalator. Trump’s allies on Fox News openly pondered bombing or “maybe gas” in response to the escalator problems.
As strange as Trump’s behavior was, it was largely in line with the antagonistic position Republicans and conservatives have had with the United Nations for decades.
The U.N. was founded in the aftermath of World War II and was meant as a global problem-solving body designed to avert the mass carnage that the war had inflicted on the world. America was key to the enterprise, operating as one of the pivotal permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.
Almost immediately, the right made clear that they hated it.
The racist and conspiratorial John Birch Society, which was the home for many in the conservative movements in the 1950s and ‘60s, made a mark by organizing against the U.N. They falsely described the body as a path to spread communist ideology and pushed back against American involvement.
Decades later, conservative leaders like former President Ronald Reagan understood that while his administration ultimately had to give lip service to working via the U.N. behind closed doors, they could openly express their opposition.
In one chilling instance, while serving as governor of California, Reagan mocked the U.N. for giving Black-led African nations a seat at the table, referring to the representatives as “monkeys from those African countries” who were purportedly “still uncomfortable wearing shoes.” The racist conversation occurred with then-President Richard Nixon, who laughed along with his fellow conservative.
Former President George W. Bush went to rhetorical war with the U.N. during his 2002 campaign to get the world to back his plans to invade Iraq. Pressuring U.N. nations to back a resolution against Iraq, which was then led by tyrant Saddam Hussein, Bush warned that the organization would render itself “irrelevant” if it did not endorse his stance.
Ultimately, the main reason for the war—supposed weapons of mass destruction—turned out to be nonexistent, and the U.N. representatives who opposed war turned out to be on the right side of history.
At the same time the establishment right was fuming about the U.N., so too was the fringe. Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and other members of the “Patriot” movement have long insisted that the U.N. is a key organizing member of the fabled “New World Order.” In Jones’ alternate reality, the NWO is once again a part of a communist plot to infiltrate American lives and usurp free will.
For the right, the U.N. is a useful proxy for what they do not like. Echoing their disdain for American cities, the U.N. exists as a flawed but necessary meeting place and organization meant to foster global collaboration and to solve key international problems. These run the gamut of ending wars, limiting carbon emissions, handling refugees, and more.
The U.N. has come up with frameworks like Agenda 21, which lay out ideas for how to deal with massive global problems. Agenda 21 works toward sustainable development, but the right has spent years arguing it is the U.N.’s left wing cookbook for global control.
It isn’t difficult to draw a line from that unhinged rhetoric to Trump’s international meltdown. When he fumes and whines at the assembly, he’s just the latest conservative leader telling the world—in extremely crude terms—how much he and the right-wing movement hate working together to make the world a better place.
