Cecil’s column Does May Day actually commemorate the birth of the Illuminati? was written at the beginning of the Reagan administration, a time when right-wing paranoia and conspiracy theories were nowhere near as well-developed as they are today.
I was struck by the following paragraph, though:
Now the Council on Foreign Relations is as staid and as establishment an organization as exists in this country. Cecil was obviously lulled by the dense gray print of their tome Foreign Relations because he didn’t see that he missed the forest for the trees. It wasn’t the Illuminati he should have focused on but the CFR itself.
Despite - or perhaps because - of its establishment grayness, the John Birch Society seized on the CFR and the equally august Trilateral Commission as the uber-governmental groups that were going to force the One World Society down our throats. Gary Allen, one of the authors of None Dare Call It Conspiracy, was a prominent Bircher and deeply involved in the far fringes of the right.
Nobody still believes that rubbish today, of course. After all, it’s been 35 years since the book came out and our world is still as fragmented as ever, talk of a NAFTA Superhighway notwithstanding.
You’ve be wrong if you thought that. On a wonderfully loony right-wing blog Wizbang.org, I found poster DJ Drummond, about whom I know nothing except that he wrote a daily set of entries before the election proving with strict mathematical logic that every poll in the country was wrong and biased. (Polling organizations are headquartered in Washington, DC. and NYC, so are obviously liberal stooges. He gave their addresses, even. What more proof do you need beside a zip code?) He gave the true numbers that would validate him after the actual results of November 4 proved him right. That was the last we heard of those numbers, but not of his posts.
And yet he is a virtual centrist among the posters at Wizbang. So not crazy is he that he started a thread called Insane Paranoid Conspiracy Thread so that the others wouldn’t clutter up his threads.
Now listen to what LaMedusa posted in that thread.
This was a rational for his belief in, what else, the NAFTA Superhighway as well as the certainty that all citizens will soon get RFID chips so the government can track their every move.
There’s a force behind the CFR, though. It’s the Anti-Christ. Who has even fooled the Illuminati.
LaMedusa does not get any support from the others and she is generally mocked in that thread. So I am certainly not trying to start any board wars or make accusations of the Wizbangers’ acceptance of these particular conspiracies. We get people projectile vomiting even loonier theories over here.
Reading that thread and Cecil’s old column so close together just triggered thoughts about the retention and progression of certain mush-brained beliefs, ones we are certain to see rise again in a world they no longer control.
I confess that if the CFR has been running things for decades I can’t see any reason why it matters whether Democrats or Republicans are nominally in charge of the government, but I’m a stooge dedicated to keeping the masses ignorant of the true forces behind those behind those who are in the shadowy rear.
Booga-booga.