by Jonathan Kay
It is an impulse that Donnelly and his fellow anti-Stratfordian cranks would have understood well. As I listened to Ranke recite his elaborate adventures crisscrossing the flight corridors of northern Virginia, it was difficult not to be reminded of Orville Ward Owen, a successful Detroit doctor who became so obsessed with Shakespearean conspiracism in the 1890s that he built a machine to “decode” Bacon’s secret messages—a device consisting of two garbage-can sized spools, onto which was mounted a thousand-foot-long canvas sheet containing all Bacon’s known works (including, of course, those attributed to William Shakespeare). Owen and his assistants would take a seat directly in front of the tautly mounted catalog of Bacon’s mind, and then spin the spools rapidly, making the canvas sheet whip around like the magnetic ribbon in an audio cassette. While staring intently at the sheet, they captured and recorded the various repeating words and phrases that jumped out of Bacon’s life work—and from this, cobbled together a six-volume opus called Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story, which not only confirmed Owen’s theory that Bacon had written Shakespeare’s works—as well as those of Christopher Marlowe and a half-dozen other famous writers—but that Bacon was Queen Elizabeth’s son.
Sadly for Owen, the theory didn’t fly. Even in this, the late golden age of Baconian conspiracism, Owen’s “Cipher Wheel” was widely mocked. On his deathbed, in 1924, he warned a confidante to steer clear of Baconianism, “for you will only reap disappointment. When I discovered the Word Cipher, I had the largest practice of any physician in Detroit . . . Instead, [I] lost my fortune, ruined my health, and today am a bedridden almost penniless invalid.”
The Evangelical Doomsayer
In 2002, Megadeth founder and front man Dave Mustaine—regarded by many aficionados as the greatest heavy metal guitarist of all time—thought his music career was over. “I had fallen asleep on my [left] arm,” he later told an interviewer. “The circulation was cut off to the nerve on the inside of my left bicep. When the nerve lost circulation, it shrunk like a crunched up straw . . . The doctors said that I wasn’t going to play again. They said I would get 80 percent use of my arm back, but not 100 percent, and I was told that I was certainly never going to play the way I played before again.”
But the doctors were wrong. After months of physical therapy, Mustaine taught himself to play the guitar again. In 2004, he reformed Megadeth, and the band has been a going concern ever since.
Mustaine returned to music a new man. At one point during his recovery, he climbed a hill and beheld a faraway cross. “Looking up at [it], I said six simple words: ‘What have I got to lose?’ ” he later recalled. “Afterwards, my whole life has changed. It’s been hard, but I wouldn’t change it for anything. [I’d] rather go my whole life believing that there is a God and find out there isn’t than live my whole life thinking there isn’t a God and then find out, when I die, that there is.”
Some rockers who find Jesus migrate to the Christian-rock genre—which combines a conventional guitar-driven music style with pious lyrics that offer praise to God. Mustaine didn’t go down that path. But he did begin to infuse his Megadeth compositions with apocalyptic imagery drawn from the modern American Evangelical tradition. The result was the 2009 album Endgame, whose title he described this way: “As a Christian, I believe [the elites’ ‘end game’] is one-world government, one world currency . . . It’s part of the master plan. It’s what I believe. I [signed on] to that when I became Christian. I know that there’s going to be a cataclysmic ramping up of all of these things that we’re seeing right now. And it gets worse and it gets worse and we’re watching our country disintegrate right now . . . That’s what Endgame is all about. It’s about educating our fans.”
The album cover of Endgame (which is also the name of a 2007 film written by Mustaine’s friend, radio host Alex Jones) is a conspiracist masterpiece, combining an assortment of New World Order motifs in a single, vivid scene. Dominating the image is a legion of bald prisoners, their heads branded with government markings, marching to their doom down a narrow metal chute, which is formed by walls made up of FEMA coffins. “[We wanted it to be] like these Hebrews being marched through the Red Sea,” Mustaine explained. “And all the people that are in the Homeland Security jumpsuits with the bar code on their head—you know it doesn’t say in the Bible if the bar code is going to be going this way or if it’s going to be going that way, so we did some cool imagery . . . We made it look like a mohawk, but then when you zoom in on it, it’s actually their bar code.”
The album’s title track begins with a mock public-address announcement, declaring, “Attention! Attention! All citizens are ordered to report to their District detention centers! Do not return to your homes; do not contact anyone! Do not use any cellular or GPS devices! Surrender all weapons at once! Attention! This way to the camps!” And then come these lyrics:
I woke up in a black FEMA box
Darkness was all around me, in my coffin
My dreams are all nightmares anymore
And this is what I dream every night
The Leader of the New World Order, the President of the United States
Has declared anyone now residing inside the US of A
Without the [radio-frequency identification] chip, you’re just an illegal alien
An enemy combatant of America, welcome to the New World Order
This is the end of the road; this is the end of the line
This is the end of your life; this is the . . .
A society in a society, inside the fence life as you know it stops
They got their rules of conduct and we got ours
Be quick or be dead, you crumble up and die, the clock is
Ticking so slowly and so much can happen in an hour
I learned my lessons the hard way, every scar I earned
I had to bleed, inside the day yard
A system of controlled movement, like a giant ant farm
Any time is long time, now you’re not in charge of your time anymore
The Ex-President signed a secret bill that can
Land a legal US Citizen in jail and the
Patriot act stripped away our constitutional rights
They say a concentration camp just popped up, yeah, right!
Refuse the chip? Ha! Get persecuted and beat by the
Tyranny of mind control, for the mark of the beast
All rights removed, you’re punished, captured, and enslaved
Believe me when I say, “This is the Endgame!”
Like Joseph Farah, the Birther and WorldNetDaily editor profiled in the previous chapter, Mustaine epitomizes the conspiracist type I call the Evangelical Doomsayer. Conspiracism is attractive to the Doomsayer because it organizes all of the world’s menacing threats into one monolithic force—allowing him to reconcile the bewildering complexities of our secular world with the good-versus-evil narrative contained in the book of Revelation and other religious texts.
The prototypical Doomsayer is an Evangelical Christian who vigilantly scans the news for signs that the world is moving toward some final, apocalyptic confrontation between good and evil. Early American history is littered with Doomsayer cults founded on this practice. But over the course of the twentieth century, as described in Chapter 1, the Doomsaying tradition fused with secular New World Order conspiracy theories that predict America’s subjugation by a godless evil empire based in Moscow, London, Turtle Bay, or Tora Bora.
In many cases, the Evangelical Doomsayers I’ve met are not actually Evangelists, or even Christian: So saturated is American culture with the imagery of Christian eschatology that it has been widely co-opted by esoteric religious movements and cults such as Jonestown, the Nation of Islam, Garveyites, Rastafarians, Heaven’s Gate, and the Branch Davidians. As scholar James Alan Patterson has reported, the common denominator in all of these is not any particular conception of God or theology, but a fascination with “visions pertaining to endtime, imminent cataclysm, judgment, and redemption.”
Once you strip away their jargon, radicalized Marxists also can be classified as Evangelical Doomsayers. Clipped to its spiritual essentials, their view of society is one in which injustice upon injustice will be heaped upon the toiling classes until some final cataclysmic revolution against the capitalist oppressor will deliver a classless New Jerusalem, in which man himself will be transformed into a viceless, iron-willed slave to the revolution. A similar analysis applies to Marxism’s tier-mondiste offshoot, “decolonization,” which Frantz Fanon rhapsodically described in The Wretched of the Earth as “quite simply the substitution of one ‘species’ of mankind by another . . . the creation of new men.”
The Firebrand
Every radical political movement needs a street leader—someone with the self-confidence required to bark commands into a megaphone, and the charisma required to elicit compliance. For the New York City–area Truther movement, that man is Luke Rudkowski, a blond, baby-faced twenty-four-year-old Polish American construction worker who lives with his parents in Brooklyn’s working-class Bensonhurst neighborhood. At rallies, Rudkowski always dresses the part of Truther statesman—in a funeral director’s suit that he bought for two dollars at the Salvation Army. At Truther “street actions” on 9/11 anniversaries, he tends to affect a solemn, weary look—as if his knowledge about the New World Order weighs heavily on his shoulders.
It was April 2007 when Rudkowski made a name for himself in activist circles. At the time, he already was dabbling with the 9/11 Truth movement—but he was frustrated by its emphasis on low-key tactics. Rudkowski believed it would take something more than blog postings and church-basement lectures to rouse America from its ignorance. One day, by chance, he noticed a headline in one of his father’s Polish-language newspapers: Former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski—Trilateral Commission cofounder, Council on Foreign Relations member, Bilderberger—was speaking on the Upper East Side. In an instant, Rudkowski realized what he had to do.
A few hours later, Rudkowski was in the crowd at the 92nd Street Y, activated camcorder in hand. After patiently waiting during Brzezinski’s presentation about the war on terrorism, he rose to his feet during the Q&A, and delivered this statement, captured for all to see on a widely circulated YouTube video:
Earlier on this year, you gave a speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where you alluded to the fact that the Bush Administration may stage a terrorist attack to justify a military action against Iran. And then in your book, you also acknowledged the fact that a memo was uncovered where Bush and Blair discussed painting a U2 spy plane in U.N. colors so Saddam would shoot it down. Although you have argued that deceptions to the American people may be necessary in order to deal with these enemies, how are we to know how many other terrorist incidents have been state-sponsored false-flag incidents including the largest one—the attacks of 9/11? How do we know, how do the American people know that 9/11 wasn’t staged, wasn’t engineered by you, David Rockefeller, the Trilateral Commission, the CFR, and Bilderberg Group, sir?
As Rudkowski can be heard saying all this on the video, the crowd remains silent—until he gets to the end, when the radical gist of Rudkowski’s accusation dawns on everyone all at once, and the room erupts in boos. Rudkowski perseveres, but is reduced to shouting staccato barbs through the repeated pleas to “sit down and shut up”:
It’s a question. Answer my question. You sponsored al-Qaeda, sir. You are a criminal. You sponsored al-Qaeda. In 1979, you gave them money. That’s true. You are CFR. scum. You are CFR. and New World Order scum. You and David Rockefeller will never have a New World Order. National sovereignty will prevail. Answer my question. Answer my question . . .
At this point, event organizers approach Rudkowski and ask him to turn off his video camera. Instead, he starts screaming, “9/11 was an inside job! Mr. Brzezinski is responsible!” and, “Wake up, people!” Then he dashes for the exit, camera rolling, guards in pursuit. Only after putting a few blocks between himself and the Y does Rudkowski stop to catch his breath, turn the camera around, and triumphantly declare into the lens: “Yeah, Brzezinski—you got yours!” The YouTube clip ends with Rudkowski on the subway back to Brooklyn, removing his suit jacket and white shirt to reveal a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, “F**k the Federal Reserve.”
The next day, Rudkowski put his video from the Brzezinski confrontation on YouTube. Almost immediately, the link went viral. Accolades poured in from Truthers around the world, who were thrilled to see their theories get an airing—if only for a few seconds—at a respectable Manhattan speaking event. Admirers contacted Rudkowski, asking if they could be part of his next guerilla theater stunt.
Coalescing under the banner, “We Are Change,” Rudkowski and his followers began ambushing other alleged New World Order insiders at public events—including Rudy Giuliani, who then was making a run for the GOP presidential nomination. They also slipped into a subway car carrying New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and managed to hector him for a full sixteen minutes. Rudkowski got up during a pretaping of Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report and began speechifying about the Bilderberg Group—an episode that didn’t make it to the air, but, like everything else We Are Change does, was posted with much fanfare on YouTube. In their most ambitious stunt, group members secretly configured a public-address sound system in a Barnes & Noble bookstore the day before a scheduled appearance by Bill Clinton. While the former president signed books, the system was activated, causing a loud disembodied voice to announce that “9/11 was an inside job.”
In time, Rudkowski became a regular on Russian television news station RT (which often features conspiracy theorists), as well as Alex Jones’ popular Texas-based radio show. Some even have begun speaking of Rudkowski as Jones’ protégé—high praise in the world of right-wing conspiracism. And he has begun branching out from the Truth movement to other causes. In one widely circulated video from the 2009 G–20 Conference in Pittsburgh, for instance, Rudkowski, megaphone in hand, can be seen shouting slogans as he leads a pack of protestors being routed by an advancing line of police: “We are American citizens! This is not China. This is not Nazi Germany! We have freedom of assembly under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, and we shall uphold our rights as American citizens because we love this country, and we love national sovereignty! . . . U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”
Eventually, the Pittsburgh police arrested Rudkowski for disorderly conduct and threw him in jail for a night—an event that he played for pity on his web postings. Increasingly, Rudkowski presented himself to his followers as a sort of Truther martyr, destined to suffer until the New World Order had been overthrown. One Facebook status update for September 2009, for instance, read: “When a man goes in front of a wave of oppression, he is beat down, but it is his persistence and willingness to stand there, that motivates and inspires others to stand with him and in that creating a relentless force that cannot be beaten down nor stopped . . .” This was followed by: “I want to thank everyone for the love and support, I do this for you and all humanity,” and “Another long night[with] a lot to do . . . 4 a.m. now, been up since 7 a.m. yesterday. But I am thankful for the energy I get from your support because without [it], I wouldn’t be as strong as I am.” The follow-up comments from his admirers included, “You’re a hero for the republic,” “I fear if 9/11 truth is uncovered, the elite will stage something bigger to ‘shut you up,’ ” and “It takes courage to go against the grain, Luke. Keep up the good work!”
Conspiracists of the firebrand type are the easiest ones to spot, because they always are the noisiest. For the firebrand, conspiracism supplies an ideological pretext to strike shocking, militant political postures, and thereby satisfy his hunger for public attention. Most specimens of the type are in their late teens or early twenties, a time when the developing mind is most vulnerable to angry, totalizing ideologies.
In another age, the firebrand manifested himself as a communist or ana
rchist. But since those creeds now seem merely quaint—not shocking—he instinctively has migrated to more exotic beliefs.
Chapter Six
The Church of Conspiracism
Homer conceived the power of the gods in such a way that whatever happened on the plain before Troy was only a reflection of the various conspiracies in Olympus. The conspiracy theory of society is just a version of this theism, of a belief in gods whose whims and wills rule everything. It comes from abandoning God and then asking: “Who is in his place?”
—Karl Popper
The writing and telling of history is bedeviled by two human neuroses: horror at the desperation and shapelessness and seeming lack of pattern in events, and regret for a lost golden age, a moment of happiness when all was well. Put these together and you have an urge to create elaborate patterns to make sense of things and to create a situation where the golden age is just waiting to spring to life again.
—Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years
Enter Satan
In the late 1920s, a British anthropologist named Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard deposited himself in the lightly wooded savannah of Southern Sudan, and took up residence with the traditional farmers and hunter-gatherers of the Azande tribe. The Zande people were divided into a number of separate tribal kingdoms, each with its own dynastic aristocracy, separated from one another by stretches of unpopulated bushland. But as Evans-Pritchard discovered, they all shared very specific beliefs about the supernatural, the details of which became the centerpiece of his 1937 classic, Witchcraft, Oracles, And Magic Among the Azande.
In the Zande mythology, people do not die of “natural” causes: Almost always, blame can be traced back to a witch in the community, or a conspiracy of multiple witches, who have cursed the unlucky victim. Witchcraft, they imagine, is not an abstraction, but an actual substance found in the body (attached to the edge of the liver), which grows with age (thus making the elderly especially vulnerable to sorcery allegations), and passes from generation to generation. At night, this witchcraft substance leaves the body of its host, floats through the air in a haze of bright light, and implants itself in its target—sometimes without the witch even being aware. Once implanted, the vampiric miasma slowly eats away at the soul of the unlucky recipient, until the soul has been entirely consumed and the victim dies.
