Goldwag - The new hate: a history of fear and loathing on the populist right

ALSO BY ARTHUR GOLDWAG

Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies:
The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones,
Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more

Isms & Ologies: All the Movements, Ideologies, & Doctrines
That Have Shaped Our World

The Beliefnet Guide to Kabbalah

Copyright 2012 by Arthur Goldwag

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goldwag, Arthur.
The new hate : a history fear and loathing on the populist right / Arthur Goldwag.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN: 978-0-307-90707-3
1. Right-wing extremistsUnited States. 2. Hate groupsPolitical aspectsUnited States. 3. Conspiracy theoriesPolitical aspectsUnited States. 4. Politics and cultureUnited States. I. Title.
HN 90. R 3 G 62 2012 306.2097309051dc23 2011028589

www.pantheonbooks.com

Cover illustration by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
Cover design by Emily Mahon

v3.1

This book is for Nathan and Eli

The ecumenicism of hatred is a great breaker-down
of precise intellectual discriminations.

RICHARD HOFSTADTER,
THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS

O n February 18, 2010, The New York Times ran a story about a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement. Urged on by conservative commentators, it said, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

It wasnt exactly news to me. In the fall of 2009, I published a book called Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies. I had written it to satisfy my curiosity about, as one of my blurbers put it, the wilder reaches of human beliefand, more particularly, about totalizing systems of thought and faith, a subject I had become interested in while I was researching my previous book, Isms & Ologies. By the time I finished writing it, Id learned all I thought Id ever need to know about the New World Order and its demonic financiers, from the Templars of the twelfth century to the Illuminati, the Elders of Zion, and the Bilderberg elites today.

I delivered Cults to my publisher just after Election Day 2008. When the copyedited manuscript came back to me in January, I couldnt help noticing that the controversy about the president-elects birth certificate wasnt fading; in fact, it was beginning to gain some real traction. I considered adding a paragraph or two to bring the book up to date but after due reflection decided that references to such a transitory political derangement might just as easily date it. Who will remember any of this in six months? I thought.

Had I ventured to define birtherism back then, I would have called it the wishful notion, cherished by a hard core of Obama haters, that he is a citizen of Kenya or Indonesia and hence ineligible to be president.

But citizen or not, whos to say that Obamas not a Communist

By the time my book hit the stores, Id seen the words Wheres the Birth Certificate? printed in ten-foot-tall letters on a billboard beside Interstate 78, not far from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Glenn Beck.

Now best remembered in far-right-wing Mormon circles, Skousen drew a straight line from the biblical patriarchs through Americas founding fathers and found them equally inspired, but in general he took a more dire view of things; most of the time he seemed convinced Oddly enough, Fox Newss headquarters is also located in Rockefeller Center, albeit in a newer, more reliably capitalistic precinct of the vast complex. Walled off from its neighbors insidious influences, 1221 Avenue of the Americas, one can only presume, is the West Berlin of television news.

But it wasnt just conspiracies that people were talking about as my book went out into the world; secret societies and cults were enjoying a renaissance too.

On the wider cultural front, the novelist Dan Brown, whose mega-best-selling Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code had revived some of the most egregious anti-Catholic stereotypes of the Know-Nothing era, was getting ready to launch his next blockbuster. Instead of scheming cardinals and Opus Dei hit men, The Lost Symbol focused on Freemasons in Washington, D.C., with all of their esoteric secrets and hidden histories. In Browns telling, the awesomely powerful Masonsbillionaires, politicians, and paradigm-changing scientistsnot only quaff rare vintages from human skulls but are on the brink of discovering the secret of eternal life.

Ingenious deconstructions of videos by rappers like We were living in strange times.

In his seminal essay of the same name, written in 1964, the historianand Secret Societies came out, I was able to observe this paranoid style for myself, up close and personal.

For one thing, I had launched a blog.Sharia movement bears a distinct resemblance to anti-Semitic movements of the past.

One day, as I was preparing my notes for a talk that I had been invited to give at a Masonic temple in Manhattan, I noticed this announcement on a 9/11 Truth Web site:

Arthur Goldwag is a self styled conspiracy debunker, who rather than vehemently attacking our movement claims we are sadly misinformed. I urge all Patriots in NYC particularly Masons to join me in confronting this so called debunker and NWO apologist.

I spotted its author as soon as I took my place behind the lectern. He was seated in the middle of the second row, pointing a video camera at meimplicitly putting me on notice that any lies I told would be duly recorded and exposed. He was bearded and wore his hair in dreadlocks; his T-shirt was emblazoned with an image of the twin towers. When I opened the floor for questions, he introduced himself as a Mason, a member of the John Birch Society, and a constitutionalist. In the exchange that followed (which was surprisingly low-key, to my great relief), I told him that I didnt understand how he could accuse me of apologizing for a New World Order that I dont even believe exists.

He answered me with a question of his own. How do you feel about the Bilderbergers holding their meetings in contravention of the Logan Act of 1799?

I admitted that I wasnt familiar with the statute. book of Revelation prophesied the Vatican. I told her that while I dont personally put much stock in prophecies, I acknowledge that there are those who do, some of whom do indeed interpret the Whore of Babylon in precisely that light.

Do you know about the Club of Rome? she asked.

Not enough to talk about it in a public forum, I answered cautiously, but I knew where she was going. According to a significant body of conspiracist literature, the Club of Rome isnt the global think tank that it pretends to be, dedicated to the search for solutions to the problems of sustainability and managed growth. No, it is a neo-Malthusian front for the global elites genocidal plan to exterminate nine-tenths of the worlds population by means of starvation and forced sterilizationa project conceived by the eugenicists at the Rockefeller Foundation and