Fucking Around With Parapolitics vs A NWO Shill [Trenchant Edges]

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes, 23 seconds. Contains 2879 words

Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, a fashionably late newsletter.

A Newsletter about what people scribble in the margins of their minds when they don’t know what the fuck is out there.

Today we’re starting an entirely different thread that’s been eating at me for the last few years. The New World Order/Great Reset conspiracy.

I was first exposed to it when I picked up a copy of this book in the late 90s or early 00s:

Thanks for just leaving Christofascist propaganda around your house, Grandma

By the end of high school, I’d heard a ton of talk about it in dark corners of the Internet, but I was already moving away from libertarianism and early exposure to John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hitman cued me to oil politics early enough that I began moving away from blaming bad people and towards blaming systems.

We should probably talk about what the New World Order is. We’ll do a full breakdown later, but for now, it’s the notion that all international cooperation is a secret plot by communists (Read: Jews) to destroy national sovereignty of all nations (read: The USA). It’s something of a millenarian belief milieu, often tying into other conspiracies and usually Christian End Times.

In other words, it’s a post-world war 2 update to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Anti-UN, Anti-”globalism”, anti-Liberal internationalism.

Anyway, while it sometimes points the toward some of the right bad actors, on the whole, it skips over the majority of the issues that have caused our world to play out like this. Nor does it really provide much in the way of solutions to change it.

Annoying.

Anyway, let’s get into things.

Fucking Around With Parapolitics

One of the fun parts of being me is that as a certified crazy person, I draw others to me like moths to a flame before they find out I’m the wrong kind of crazy person.

CW: I’ve watched the Zapruder Film of the JFK assassination like 30 times today, and describe bits of it in detail below. If that would upset you, skip this essay. No one will know except you and the NSA contractor’s bots your FBI agent’s job was outsourced to.

A few times a week I run into someone who will make claims like this one. Usually, I try to be a little more patient, but the person in question was shilling the NWO conspiracy pretty hard the previous day.

Rather describes the Zapruder film extremely badly here, messing with the timeline and making it very unclear what happens.

Lots of people, understandably, take this as evidence he’s part of the coverup. And I agree it’s suspicious. I’ve just watched the Zapruder film like ten times and yeah it definitely doesn’t look like Kennedy’s been shot from behind. And Rather leaves out the head jerk back before Kennedy slumps forward, as well as messing up less important details.

If I was making this criticism again, I’d probably point out that Rather isn’t a machine and IMO seems kinda confused about what’s actually on the film. Yes, it looks bad, but it’s not ironclad. It’s *not* proof.

But I want to at least pay respect to what this commenter who banned me thinks of as good intentions. And he makes some points worth repeating. Media collusion with powerful interests in the state and capital is widespread and hella dangerous.

Now, I'm most abrasive to believers. Because few of them actually can defend their beliefs, so I try not to do shit like this. But when it comes to parapolitics, the downside of people doing it badly is Qanon. IE: People who think they're fighting for freedom advocating for a fascist coup that will kill all of the people who annoy them. Look up how many of them have murdered family members for disagreeing about Qanon.

That's a pretty big downside.

I consider "the media is propaganda" to be kind of.... baby's first insight about the world. At least, it was for me. And actually, now that I've written that, I realize that's just something I "lucked" into when I was like 10 or 11. It's long since stopped causing me any distress.

And I'm wrong for assuming it's common knowledge. Need to shift my approach there.

But like, if you don't recognize that anti-mainstream views are often as compromised by the same monetary and influence networks that run the mainstream medias you'll be taken for ride after ride. There is no duality between good and evil in the real world, that only exists in the human mind.

Opposing "evil" does not make one "good."

That's a limitation of the way we've been trained to think about the world and of our upper cognitive limits. It’s a narrative bias. If good and evil were real, there would be tangible signs of them. There are not. All those horrible things humans do? You and I could do them too under certain circumstances.

If this poster (who I hope I've removed the name of) had asked me why I don't think Dan Rather's initial reporting of Kennedy's assassination doesn't prove that every newscaster after him is an intelligence asset, I'd have said that while absolutely bad reporting and suggestive of something really wrong, it’s not actually proof of shit because there are lots of other possibilities that need eliminated first.

Like, this was 3 days after the first successful assassination of a US president in 100 years, who a month earlier averted nuclear war with the USSR against the military he was commander in chief of.

This fucked people up. My dad was in school in Dallas that day and he described Nov 22nd 1963 in the kind of shocked detail I describe 9/11 in. It’s not unreasonable to expect watching the guy who literally helped save the world a month ago explode in red mist to mess with a person. And that assumes Rather saw the full video. The head going back is only about 10 frames long, and I didn’t even really process it on the first viewing.

I can’t imagine how hard it’d be to put on a NewsMan face 3 days after the assassination and describe in detail what happened.

Now, my giving Dan rather a lot of generous benefit of the doubt here doesn’t excuse how badly he botched it. I’m not going to belabor the point more, but that’s just the most obvious possibility. We also don’t know if he watched the whole video, or that it was unedited, or so on.

There are lots of ways that failure could happen.

Anyway, let’s continue the “conversation” since neither of us was super into conversing.

My point here is that when you allow your beliefs to become too obscure for most people, it becomes increasingly more difficult to work with them. If US Intelligence didn’t invent 9/11 Truthers, they should be ashamed.

That statement probably needs context: I’ve been at a dozen or so events involving left wing organizing since 2010 where 9/11 Truthers showed up. In each case, 100% of what they did was try to get people to care about 9/11 being an inside job. They were always super distruptive and refused to do anything until everyone signed on about their pet theory.

The second time I saw this happen really got me rethinking what conspiracies are for in the US: As well as providing dubious people like your’s truly a bit of income, they’re very good at atomizing people into inaction and providing ready rifts for others to exploit.

Anyway, I’m posting this last bit just for completeness’ sake.

Yes, obviously the news contains a ton of propaganda. But you can’t approach it with naive rejection, you have to examine shit piecemeal. I know that sucks, but the news is not biased in equal ways in all things. It varies blah blah go read Manufacturing Consent blah blah.

Media litercy isn’t just knowing bias exists, but being able to recognize & analyze it in real time. Hell, most of it is just leaving out details that don’t appeal to their intended audience.

Anway, I think I’ve made my point here. It’s really easy to think you’re getting the inside scoop on What’s Really Happening when all you’re doing is shuffling what seat you’re using in delusiontown.

To borrow from a sensible TikTok:

For “some reason” this was the best image I could find with this quote and I decided to avoid any awards myself ;-)

Let’s take a look at our second essay today.

NWO Shills and Me

One of the banes of my existence is a phrase goddamn politicians love to throw around to spice up their rhetoric and cause certain conspiracy buffs to shudder in orgiastic bliss.

New World Order.

If you’re intent on turning the world into a grand struggle between heroes and villains, “the” NWO is probably a touchstone in your life. It’s been bandied about for decades, mostly on the right, as a sign of the coming apocalypse.

You might think I’m being poetic in that last phrase, but I’m not. Quite literally, most of its biggest advocates are millenarian Christians looking for signs of the capital-e End capital-t Times.

The Rhetorical purpose of The Plot as a political tool is walling in your allies and forcing the undecided to choose between either your team or capital-t THEM.

This is why it’s so popular among fascists and revolutionaries. It orders people into friends and enemies. Simplifies the killing fields.

As you probably can pick up by now, I kind of hate these people. It’s the hate that comes from long familiarity mixed with frustration they’re serving their own gratification instead of committing to actually understanding the complexity of the world and thus maybe being able to do something about it.

It’d be easy to assume that’s just one nutty zealot knocking other nuts because they won’t join his bullshit, but that’s not really where I’m coming from. There are plenty of people I disagree with who still have rational understandings of the world.

I think, say, Bill Gates and Peter Thiel are bad for society but I don’t think they’re irrational. They’ve *very* good at self interest.

This is unhooking your rational faculties and letting your view of the world be driven by paranoia and ultimately resentment. Not my scene.

Let’s be clear on a couple of things: The political system of the world is a dynamic global push and pull between different individuals, institutions, and super-organizations. There’s always an interplay between different blocks of cooperating powers and their neighbors, rivals, and allies.

It’s a fucking mess.

Lots of the concerns conspiracy folk raise aren’t exactly wrong, just misdirected and decontextualized. These flaws in their vision aren’t trivial: They actively prevent doing anything to stop “The NWO” except joining up with equally authoritarian Christians.

I still have a lot of unpacking to do on this NWO and its history, but I wanted to start us off with a couple of recent villains of anti-NWO promoters: Klaus Schwab & Yuval Noah Harari.

Schwab is a German engineer, economist, and founder of the World Economic Forum. The WEF was formed in 1971 as the Europe Management Forum after Schwab invited 450 executives to Davos, Switzerland. In 1987 it renamed itself to its current name.

Generic_Old_German_man.jpg

We’re going to go deeper into Schwab’s background and activities, but the basic fact is he’s a successful power broker among the world’s richest people esp in Europe. One of the reasons I’m starting with him here is because I want to know when he first showed up in the anti-NWO literature.

One of the first mainstream books on the subject is Pat Robertson’s 1991 bestseller The New World Order, published about a year after the most popular use of the phrase new world order, in a September 11th address to congress by then-President George HW Bush.

My ebook search doesn’t turn up the WEF or Schwab at all, and this is despite being a prominent power broker for 20 years already.

By contrast, Schwab is a regular punching bag on Alex Jones’ Infowars show. But when did he start to be?

I’ve listened to Jones on and off since 2006, and the first time I remember Jones mentioning the guy was well into the Trump years, referencing Schwab’s 2015 book The Fourth Industrial Revolution.

This is where all this intersects with me again because I remember listening to the audiobook of it back in 2017, so when Jones brought it up as some kind of supervillain manual I just kind of laughed at it. It’s a futurist’s attempt to guess where the world’s going and get people talking about the issues that might come up.

It also reprints Ida Auken’s short story about living in the year 2030 where the line, “you’ll own nothing and be happy” comes from.

We’ll get to it.

Anyway, I dismissed it as typical Jonesian free association but I shouldn’t have done that. See, Schwab is now one of the great villains of Infowars and Jones acts like he always was. That kind of memory hole for inconvenient narratives is VERY typical of his show and the NWO conspiracy itself is a perfect cover to hide those narrative switches from his listeners.

And now lots of people seem to have followed Jones’ opposition to the WEF, we get to hack that apart and see what’s inside. Woo!

This brings us to Harari, a prominent futurist who’s written a few books. I started off pretty taken with Sapiens, but after reading some of Harari’s critics I realized I simply didn’t know enough anthropology to see what he was getting wrong. But that’s beside our point here.

Harari is a prominent speaker for the World Economic Forum and he’s got a habit of saying some pretty provocative and inflammatory things that are very easy to take out of context.

Here’s, uh English one-hit wonder Right Said Fred kneejerk reacting to an out-of-context clip of him trying badly to make a point about modern philosophy of mind & neurology casting doubt on classical ideas of a soul or free will.

I don’t think it’s inappropriate for him to be provocative. It’s kind of a major job for a futurist. But if Harari was trying to give Alex Jones shit to twist and scream about he couldn’t be doing a better job.

But I don’t think that’s his deal, I think he’s basically a hack who says things rich people like to hear and keeps being told how smart he is.

It’s a recipe for delusion.

So I wanted to take a look at a few of his quotes and see what’s under the hood there.

"As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion."

-Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

This is enough of a weird mishmash of ideas that it kinda does push me to doubt both free will and sentience.

There’s so much going on here.

If only. Actually, no. We don’t need this suitcase.

I wrote a few hundred words here, but frankly, this shit’s too long as is. Harari is just another tool shilling around the NGO-Industrial Complex, laundering capital-friendly insights for easy paychecks. Check out Winners Take All if you want to understand all that.

Whew, That was Something

As you can tell things are gonna get a little more contentious here.

One of the things about milieus that makes them distinct from orthodoxies (Like, say, the mideval catholic church) is they’re a contellation of different interlinking beliefs and not any one thing.

So we’re going to have a lot more people who've absorbed bits and piece of the anti-globalist/anti-NWO worldview into their own who don’t like what I’m going to say.

And that’s fine. I would also be upset if someone told me my beliefs were part of a secret fascist plot. And I know very well that fact because that’s exactly what the anti-globalist types do say ;-)

And I’ve read their arguments and considered them. We’ll get into that in more detail later but the broad answer is that capital (especially the Rockefellers early on, but now George Soros & the WEF) created communism as a front to trick people into giving up their freedoms to create a totalitarian global state.

Anyway, the first draft of this essay was done almost a week ago. I’ve been tinkering and switching what’s in it and procrastinating on actually sending it since like Wednesday.

So expect a lot more of me this week, because I’m tired of not publishing. lol.

Anyway, we’ll be back soon.

Hope y’all take care.

-SF