Thread by @JYSexton

All right.

With people claiming the pandemic is a New World Order plot and Trump screaming about "liberation", we need to talk about conspiracy theories and how the GOP merged with Neo-Confederate religion.

Here's what I learned writing. AMERICAN RULE.

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611439/a…

First things first, this nonsense about the New World Order business is just a reiteration of anti-semetic conspiracies like the Protocol of the Elders of Zion garbage that influenced the Nazis and basically every other 20th century fascist movement. It's the same lie.

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The idea behind the NWO is that shadowy/satanic cabals control world affairs and, in America, that those cabals are determined to destroy American Life, especially, and note this, WHITE American life.

White supremacy and white supremacist societies are fueled by conspiracies

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White supremacy is fragile because it is a total fabrication. Any failure in a white supremacist society has to be explained by outside manipulation or interference or internal traitors.

Why? Because white supremacy dictates that whites have to be perfect in their actions.

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The Confederate States of America worked this way. They were founded on conspiracy theories that the North was possessed of shadowy cabals dedicated to ending slavery.

It wasn't true, but it galvanized an entirely new, treasonous, white supremacist society.

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In the South, those conspiracy theories merged with their religion, which was extremely dedicated to the idea that the Christian God was white supremacist, rageful, and extremely racist. That was their ideology, and it could only be destroyed, you guessed it, by conspiracies.

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American conspiracy theories, whether explicitly religious or not, are predicated on the idea that the Devil or Satan is constantly battling with the Christian God and attempting to marshal an army of sinners or unwitting accomplices to undo God's major project: America.

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In the Founding of America, the Founders were mostly deists, but they used emerging Christian forces to solidify the country and ensure the Revolution and then the Constitution.

In this, America was paired with the plans of an almighty God.

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Fast forward to the 1960's. Jerry Falwell was a Neo-Confederate preacher whose main focus was opposing Civil Rights and desegregation. His sermons were about how the Confederate God had drawn a line between the races that had to be respected.

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According to Falwell and other Neo-Confederate preachers, any attempt to end segregation was an affront to God by evil forces in the sway of the Devil. America's white supremacist order was to be considered holy and above reproach. Any attempt to trouble it was then wicked.

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Preachers like MLK who used Christianity's social justice aspects to fight for Civil Rights were considered "wicked" by Falwell's type. They were distrusted as agents of evil and Communism, the two being merged during the Cold War.

It was another "satanic" conspiracy.

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What we think now as a culture about MLK is not what it was like at the time. It was widely considered, especially in the South, that MLK was a communist traitor and that his Civil Rights agenda was a Russian ploy to destroy America (or, as you might guess White Supremacy.)

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Quick Note: In case you haven't noticed, since the Founding, the idea of "America" has been synonymous with White Supremacy and those two concepts synonymous with this Confederate Religion.

These people literally believe America and White Supremacy are RELIGIOUS TRUTHS.

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Because of the Cold War, America has consistently regarded every attempt at Civil Rights, economic reform, or human rights campaign as a conspiracy from Russia.

Look up the Lavender Scare while you're at it. The First Red Scare and what happened to African Americans.

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While fighting Russia, America persecuted every group besides white men because they believed the cause of America was white supremacist in nature.

In all these "conspiracies" the conspirators are everyone but white men: women, LGBTQ, African Americans, immigrants.

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Around the world, this is also how American foreign policy operated. Any 2nd or 3rd world country that moved leftward was considered victim to a Communist/evil conspiracy and then either overthrown or manipulated out of their own democracy.

Self-determination was malleable.

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The result of the Neo-Confederate movement in white Christianity was a new paranoia that Satan was working with the rest of the world against white supremacy.

One of the main proponents of this was Pat Robertson, who pushed the conspiracy constantly and at every turn.

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Robertson and others like him coined The New World Order, a new conspiracy that took the complexity of global finances and governance and simplified it to a simple paranoid message: Americans had been betrayed by its own leaders and a cabal of satanic forces.

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A quick note: all these conspiracies (NWO, Elders of Zion, the Deep State) are actually projections of white supremacist manipulation and power plays. The people who wield them are actually blaming their own crimes and movements on minorities.

It's a sleight of hand.

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The Elders of Zion document was actually a plagiarized account of manipulations by white politicians repackaged to push the onus on Jewish conspiracies.

These conspiracy theories are paranoid retellings of the means by which white supremacy maintains control.

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Conservative America embraced the New World Order conspiracy, sprinkling in mentions of it when they needed to oppose the UN or gun control or even modest reform.

It was a message: we're warriors for white Americans who could be overthrown by Satanic forces.

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This is how the NRA gained purchase in the 1990's. During the Clinton Administration the NRA leaned heavily into the NWO conspiracy theory that was growing among the nascent Patriot Movement and militias. They used NWO rhetoric in their fundraising and organization.

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Here's something I didn't know: in the wake of Waco, the GOP and NRA actually worked together to try and manipulate the investigation into the Branch Davidian fire, all the while fundraising jointly to stoke paranoia that the US had been betrayed by Clinton and the UN.

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The New World Order conspiracy theory was incredibly lucrative for Republicans and the NRA alike, and they fused into a paranoid fringe Right Wing movement that grew and grew and grew...with the help of Right wing media, including Rush Limbaugh and eventually Fox News.

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Again, the NWO is an oversimplification of globalism. It takes an extremely complex topic and boils it down to: your white supremacy is in danger and your jobs are in danger because satanic forces will it.

It hides that the Right has pushed for this economic realignment.

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What the Republican Party has done is change actual reality where they cannot win elections and shift their supporters into an alternate reality where they are their only hope in the face of a satanic force that could destroy them.

That's where we are. That reality.

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The problem, besides it being a non-working reality, is that Right Wing manipulation has consequences. Timothy McVeigh believed he was a soldier in the war against the NWO. So did Dylann Roof and god knows how many other white mass shooters and bombers.

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The continual insistence on pushing the idea that we're in an invisible war against the NWO and other conspiracies inspires murder, mass shootings, and now Americans to go outside and spread an incredibly deadly pandemic.

And all of it is just political manipulation.

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There is no New World Order. Or Deep State. Or Qanon nonsense. It's only economics and political manipulation. It's a system of governance that's been bought and sold as opposed to shadowy cabals plotting disaster.

But it's lucrative and beneficial to push that conspiracy.

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All of it is rooted in the idea that a Neo-Confederate God chose White America as his people and that Satan and minorities are out to destroy it.

That's every Alex Jones broadcast. Every Donald Trump speech. It's the essence of American political unreality today.

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When Trump tells his supporters to "liberate" themselves, it's a reference to the idea that they're being held hostage by a global, evil cabal. A satanic conspiracy.

It's a call to fight in the invisible war that doesn't exist but preys on white supremacist paranoia.

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For more on this, I've written extensively about the Cult of the Shining City, what I call this Neo-Confederate, white supremacist, nationalist cult.

Here's a rundown on The Muckrake:

themuckrake.com/main/a-faulty-…

On @newrepublic I talked about the bizarre history of how Neo-Confederate preachers merged with Ronald Reagan's hypercapitalistic economic reform to create this bizarre cult that currently puts all of us in danger.

newrepublic.com/article/157062…

When Trump supporters talk about these conspiracies, when they go out in public and say there's no pandemic and it's all a plot, they're lost in a fabricated reality that was created by Neo-Confederate religion and Right Wing politicians looking for profit and power.

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All of this is about protecting white supremacy and economic domination. It's about misdirection that keeps voters from realizing who is actually keeping them in poverty and powerless. It's about warping reality until nobody can even recognize what's real anymore.

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If we're going to survive this pandemic and protect our democracy, we must reassess our past and realize how bizarre and warped it is, and how those myths and lies created this new, terrifying unreality that so many Americans are stuck in.

We have to do this. Now.

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PS: I grew up in this, in the Cult of the Shining City, and I can tell you: the fear of the New World Order is very real. We prayed about it in church. We were told to study books and movies about these conspiracies. It all sounds absurd, but in that cult it IS reality.