Not all of the speculation about the meaning and origins of the Georgia Guidestones has been favorable. To many people, the vague wording of the monument’s text seems ominous, and the anonymity of its creator suspect. Far from considering the landmark to be a positive icon of social or spiritual enlightenment—or even a benign tourist attraction—there are those who believe it to be the manifesto of a nefarious secret group of megalomaniacs bent on enslaving mankind.
In November of 2008, the collection of stones standing on a bare hill just off of Highway 77, north of Elberton, Georgia was vandalized. The slabs of Pyramid Blue granite stood nearly twenty feet tall, and had remained in this quiet pasture for twenty-eight years largely without incident. The grass was kept neatly trimmed, and the evergreen bushes that formed the border of the five-acre property were regularly pruned. It had been a peaceful, quiet piece of history nestled in the countryside of rural north Georgia.
But the peace was broken. Racial epithets and cryptic slogans were spray-painted in red across the carved faces of the megaliths. A bucket of polyepoxide was poured across several of them. The inscriptions on the stones were nearly illegible in places.
On December 15, 2008, a user calling himself “Nsane Sk8er007” uploaded a video to the popular website, You Tube. In the video, a man describing himself as an “anonymous patriot” stood in front of the newly defaced monument in a black-hooded sweatshirt with a bandana tied around his face. Behind him, propped against the stones, were signs and posters bearing slogans that echoed the sentiments of the vandalism:
“STOP THE NEW WORLD ORDER”
“WE ARE NOT YOUR SLAVES”
“NO SPP TTC NWO NAU”
The man in the video spoke in an altered voice. “This is a message to the global elite,” he began.
What you see today, at your Star Gate, the Georgia Guidestones, here in Elberton, Georgia, is but a minor fraction of what will happen if you keep meddling in our affairs. We know who you are and have only simple requests: Stop poisoning our food and water. Stop your New World Order nonsense … Should you dare to eliminate our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and round American citizens up with foreign troops into FEMA death camps … patriots by the million will ascend [sic] on you with the ferocity of patriots that have fought before us.
He was not the first to have broadcast such a message.
To one who was unfamiliar with the whole history of the landmark, this scene would certainly seem most bizarre. Even the most controversial of monuments in rural areas like Elberton rarely draw enough outrage to merit defacement or active protest. In the center of nearly every town in the American South there is a memorial to the Confederate dead, or a likeness of Robert E. Lee. Many who have concerns about modern-day racial inequalities have very strong feelings about these structures, but there have been no demonstrations or vandalism in their vicinity in recent years. The Georgia Guidestones, however, have always drawn a wide array of unusual attentions, despite their unassuming appearance.
The guidelines on the Guidestones only account for a portion of their renown. Only some of the controversy that surrounds Elbert County’s biggest claim to fame can be linked to what is explicitly stated on the stones. Much of it is speculation and rumors of conspiracy that go far beyond northeast Georgia, and the range of opinions on the true meaning of this rural monument is very wide indeed.
The people who vandalized the stones in 2008, and the people who agree with them, profess to believe that the Georgia Guidestones are an integral part of a global plot on the part of a powerful group of unnamed individuals to subjugate and oppress the world’s population and create a “New World Order.” These detractors of the Guidestones have been some of the most outspoken people to discuss the subject to date. Many of them are quite active in their efforts to spread their beliefs about the stones, and some have taken those efforts even further, making public appeals to have the monument removed.
In the public forum, there are four men who have had perhaps the biggest effect on the discussion of the Guidestones within this conspiratorial context.
On November 19, 2008, The Elberton Star reported that the Georgia Guidestones had been heavily vandalized. Every surface of the granite monument had been spray-painted with political slogans in strong language, and the English and Swahili translations of the tenets of the Guidestones had been splashed with epoxy. The investigating authorities offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the apprehension of the responsible party, but no arrests were ever made.
On December 15, 2008, a video was uploaded to the content-sharing website YouTube depicting a masked man standing in front of the newly defaced monument. Date-stamped the day before, the nearly five-minute-long video was entitled “A Message to the NWO from The Georgia Guidestones.” The user who posted the short film to the website described it in the following words:
An anonymous patriot appeared at the georgia guidestones, sending a riveting message to the global elite, giving them their final warning. If they do not repeal their heinous acts and restore our rights we will rise up in a way that they will never forget. We will overthrow every high ranking position and replace their seats with patriots while we try the elite for treason.70
The video begins with a brief montage of still images. The first image is of a portion of the English guides. Slowly the camera pans in until only the first tenet, “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000,” is visible. An array of close-ups of individual segments of the graffiti and political signs that are propped up against the stones is shown next. Vandalism across the flagstone reads, “Stop the New World Order,” while the signs further condemn a series of ideas, among them a “North American Union,” the “Security and Prosperity Partnership,” and the “Trans-Texas Corridor.”
The camera finally settles on the image of a man in a black hooded sweatshirt. He is wearing sunglasses, and a bandana is tied around his mouth. He reads an angry message off of a piece of paper he holds in his hands. Addressing his concerns to a group of individuals that he refers to as the “Global Elite” and the “New World Order,” he delivers an impassioned speech for the camera.
“Now more than ever,” he says, “it is time to act. We can no longer sit by and let the malevolence of oppression work behind closed doors.” He warns the “Elite” that if they proceed with the plans that he believes that they have to imprison Americans in “FEMA death camps” and to “eliminate” the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights, that “patriots” such as himself will not stand for it. “What you see before you at your Star Gate, the Georgia Guidestones,” he warns, “is but a minor fraction of what will happen if you keep meddling in our affairs.” He asserts that there has been an increase in American gun sales, and cautions the Elite, “You will not sleep; you will not smile.”
This self-styled “Anonymous Patriot” delivered all of these proclamations under the cloak of anonymity provided by a face-mask and the voice-altering software through which he ran his words. But the mystery of the man’s identity did not last for very long. A few short weeks after the original video was posted, another video appeared—this one on the Google Video website—that contained the audio recording of a phone conversation between an unknown man referred to only as “Louie” and a political activist named Jim Stachowiak.71
The conversation was largely about a conflict that Stachowiak was having with a woman, who in the video is simply referred to as “Patience.” The source and details of that conflict are not made clear within the conversation, but in the course of the dialogue, Stachowiak says the following:
You know what? I’m gonna go back to the Guidestones in a week. You know what I’m gonna do, Louie? I’m gonna go back and do another fucking video, and guess what I’m doing? I’m not wearing a mask. I’m gonna say—you know what? I’ve wore [sic] masks … You know what? I’m gonna say: Fuck you, New World Order. I’m not afraid to show my face. Fuck you. Yeah, I’m the guy that was the Anonymous Patriot. Fuck you.72
No such second Guidestones film ever surfaced, but an Internet radio personality named Christie Aphrodite did upload a video to Google Video that included an unedited version of the “Message to the NWO” footage, wherein Stachowiak’s voice was unmodified. In her video, Aphrodite also makes the claim that Stachowiak performed the vandalism as well, though she does not substantiate this allegation with any evidence.73
Jim Stachowiak is a complex figure in the conspiracy theory scene. On the website for his Internet talk radio show, Freedom Fighter Radio, he claims to have been “active in protecting, preserving, and restoring America since the age of 17 when he organized the famous Panama Canal protest.”74 Stachowiak also states that he is affiliated with the Georgia Civilian Militia, and he frequently insinuates that he is involved with the American Resistance Movement, though other members of those organizations have disputed those claims.
Stachowiak is member of a growing online community of people who describe themselves only as “Patriots.” They are vehemently opposed to pieces of legislation and governmental actions that they perceive as infringements upon constitutionally protected liberties, and they seek to increase public awareness of these violations. The episodes of Stachowiak’s radio show and his various self-published articles all espouse beliefs which conform to the standard platform of the Patriot movement, but some of his ideas and actions have been perceived as too radical even by his fellow Patriots.
Like many members of the movement, Stachowiak believes that the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, were “an inside job”75 that the U.S. government orchestrated in order to further consolidate its power. He was a vocal opponent of the policies and procedures of George W. Bush’s administration—notably the Patriot Act—but he has even more vehemently opposed himself to Barack Obama. Referring to him as “Mr. Hitler with a tan,”76 he encourages his listeners to demand that the forty-fourth American president produce his birth certificate to prove that he is a natural-born United States citizen and therefore eligible to serve in the office he was elected to. He professes to believe that Obama and his administration are socialists and that they are linked to an elite group who seek to bring about the New World Order.
But none of those ideas are terribly controversial in Patriot circles. What has caused so many of his fellow activists to avoid him and Christie Aphrodite to develop a website that is devoted to “setting the record straight about Jim Stachowiak, his behavior and his affiliations,”77 are his vocal expressions of dislike for certain groups and the actions that he has taken against those who disagree with him.
In December of 2008, Stachowiak was expelled from the Patriot activist group, We Are Change, for violations of that group’s code of conduct. Shortly thereafter, a video was uploaded to Google Video that contained an audio recording of the conversation between Stachowiak and the local chapter head of We Are Change wherein Stachowiak was ejected from the organization. In the video, the chapter head—who seems to have been the same “Louie” to whom Stachowiak made his declaration about being the Anonymous Patriot—informs Stachowiak that he can no longer represent himself as a member of We Are Change due to his interactions with another member of the group named “Patience.” Stachowiak responds to this by saying that though he is “not attacking We Are Change,” he is now “going public” with his accusations against the woman named Patience. Louie states that he is going to end the call, and Stachowiak threatens, “If you end this call I’m gonna call [Child Protective Services] on Patience.”78 They argue for several minutes, and Louie finally ends the call.
A few months later, Stachowiak published an article on his website wherein he characterized We Are Change as “a front for Socialist [sic] who are using the youth and others to advance their Anti-American Socialist Agenda.”79
As to whether or not Stachowiak carried through on his threat to attempt to have Patience’s children removed from her custody by the authorities, reports are unclear. However, on the website for her radio show, Truth Brigade, Christie Aphrodite claims that Stachowiak did in fact call Child Protective Services to report allegations against herself.
Other members of the Patriot movement have also accused Stachowiak of misconduct. One individual posted a criticism of his behavior to a forum on the website Above Top Secret alleging that Stachowiak “was banned from Operation America Rising for statements to kill all Muslims … [and] he was also banned from the Gathering of Eagles for fighting and nearly starting a riot at GOE1.”80
Indeed, on at least one occasion the host of Freedom Fighter Radio was considered too radical by the authorities as well. On November 4, 2008, Election Day, Stachowiak was arrested outside of a polling place. Holding an American flag that was hung upside-down, and sporting a shirt printed with the words, “Kill Congress,” Stachowiak stood outside the library in Evans, Georgia where voters from the area were coming to cast their ballots. He was a source of alarm for passersby, in part because he was well within the boundary past which the expression of political opinions is strictly forbidden at a polling place, but mostly because of the pepper spray, stun gun, and pistol holster that hung on his belt.
The holster, as it turned out, was empty save for a miniature reproduction of the Constitution, which, as he later asserted to a local reporter, he wore in such a fashion because “the Constitution is our best weapon against tyranny.”81 But this did not stop the Columbia County police from arresting him for disorderly conduct. According to the arresting officer, the primary cause for his detainment was not that he had violated the “no political speech” rule, but that a woman in the crowd had reported that Stachowiak told her he was a police officer. Stachowiak denied the claim, saying that he had told her the truth—which was that he was “ex-law-enforcement” 82—and the charges were eventually dropped.
But despite the various controversies that surround him, Stachowiak has continued to record new episodes of Freedom Fighter Radio twice per week. He covers topics like the healthcare debates, alternative speculations on the 9/11 attacks, the tragedies at Waco and Ruby Ridge, and other common Patriot subjects. Though he has never devoted an entire show to the Georgia Guidestones, the original video of the Anonymous Patriot was posted to his blog.
From the videos and articles they have posted around the Internet, it seems clear that Stachowiak and the Patriots consider R. C. Christian’s monument in Elberton to be a part of the vast global conspiracy that they call the “New World Order.” What is not clear is why he made that connection in the first place. Because while Stachowiak seems to have been the “Anonymous Patriot” and may have even been the person behind the vandalism of the Guidestones, he has never specifically iterated the reasoning behind his conclusion that the monument has ties to the NWO.
But Stachowiak was not the first person to speak publicly on the matter. In fact, just one year before the stones were defaced they had appeared in the documentary Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, which outlined, in detail, the New World Order conspiracy theories. In the movie, the director, Alex Jones, refers to the monument briefly as “a cold testament to the Elite’s sacred mission.”83 Stachowiak was certainly familiar with Jones’ work—as he reposted many of the news stories from Jones’ website, Infowars, and even devoted an entire episode of his own radio show, Freedom Fighter Radio, to playing back the audio component of Endgame—so it is quite likely that his interest in the Guidestones began with that film.
In the Patriot movement today, the work of Alex Jones is extremely influential. His nationally syndicated radio show and his websites, Infowars and Prison Planet, are mainstay sources of information on the theories and ideas espoused by the movement as a whole. While his statements on the Guidestones have been few and brief, what little he has said has likely been the only information that many people have ever heard about the monument, its meaning, and its origins.
Jones first appeared on the Patriot scene with a public access television show in Austin, Texas, wherein he would take calls from viewers live on the air. Not long thereafter, in 1996, he was brought on at a local talk radio station, KJFK, to host the show as a radio program that would come to be called The Final Edition. On The Final Edition, Jones first managed to draw national attention to himself when he orchestrated a plan to help the Branch Davidians of Waco, Texas, to rebuild the church that had been destroyed during the events of the ATF siege in 1993.84
Like many members of the Patriot movement, Jones’ political outlook and worldview seem to have been heavily influenced by the events that transpired in the cities of Waco and Ruby Ridge in the early 1990s. In Waco, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms set out to investigate a group of people who were members of a fringe sect of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, the Branch Davidians, regarding allegations that they were in possession of illegal weaponry. But violent confrontations arose during the raid that ultimately caused the deaths of eighty civilians, twenty-five of whom were children. In Ruby Ridge, Idaho, U.S. Marshals were tasked with taking into custody a man who had failed to appear at his own trial. But the mission did not go smoothly, and in the ensuing conflict the man’s wife and son were both killed.
Both events sparked massive controversy when they occurred. Among those who would become the founding members of the Patriot movement, it was perceived that in both cases, Federal authorities had overstepped their boundaries and killed innocent citizens. The federal authorities in charge of managing the siege at Waco were accused of knowingly jeopardizing the lives of the innocents inside the compound with their use of tear gas and live ammunition, and the Marshals and FBI agents at Ruby Ridge were criticized for their implementation of a nonstandard set of Rules of Engagement which authorized the use of deadly force without the necessity of a verbal warning beforehand. A tide of fear and distrust of the federal government grew.
In 2000, Alex Jones directed his second feature-length documentary, America: Wake Up (or Waco). In the film, Jones recounts the events of the ATF siege of the Branch Davidian compound, Mt. Carmel, in a way that is highly critical of the federal forces, referring to the raid as “government-sponsored terrorism.”85 Rejecting the official story that most of the residents of the compound died as a result of the fire that they themselves ignited—succumbing to wounds received both from both the flames and the detonation of ammunition that the Branch Davidians had stockpiled inside—Jones claims that the videos of the siege that were released were doctored to support the government “cover-up,” and that federal agents were directly responsible for the deaths. At several points in the film, he calls for indictments of the federal officials responsible for the raid, especially Attorney General Janet Reno, who he refers to as “Hermann Göring in drag.”86
By contrast, Jones portrays the Branch Davidians in a very sympathetic light, interviewing the grieving mother of their leader, David Koresh, and highlighting the number of children who died during the siege. “No matter what propaganda you want to believe,” Jones states, “those babies did not deserve to be murdered by the black ski-mask thugs.”87
The tone of the film as a whole is decidedly hostile and untrusting of the United States government, and Jones makes frequent reference to other theories of federal malfeasance—the alleged smuggling of Nazi scientists into the country after WWII and the staging of the Oklahoma City bombing, among others—all of which feed into the grander conspiracy theory that is propagated by the Patriot movement. “Welcome to the New World Order,” Jones says angrily as he stands over the wrecked remains of the Mt. Carmel compound. Because he, like many other Patriots, does not believe that the siege in Waco, Texas, was an isolated incident. They believe that it was but a small part of a vast global conspiracy that has been at work in the world for centuries.
In 2007, Alex Jones made a film that attempts to explain the totality of that conspiracy. The documentary, Endgame: Blueprint for Global Destruction is Jones’ most successful and popular film to date. In it, he outlines the evidence as he sees it that a group of people in positions of power, referred to interchangeably as the “Power Elite” and the “Global Elite,” have been manipulating political systems and world events in order to bring about a state referred to as the “New World Order.”
At the beginning of the film, Jones posits an Orwellian possible future that he believes will occur if the “Elite” are able to successfully execute their plans:
In the near future, Earth is dominated by a powerful world government. Once-free nations are slaves to the will of a tiny Elite. The dawn of a new Dark Age is upon mankind. Countries are a thing of the past. Every form of independence is under attack, with the family, and even the individual itself, nearing extinction. Close to eighty percent of the Earth’s population has been eliminated. The remnants of a once-free humanity are forced to live within highly controlled, compact, prison-like cities … No human activity is private: Al supercomputers chronicle and categorize every action. A prison planet dominated by a ruthless gang of control-freaks whose power can never be challenged: this is the vision of the Global Elite, their goal … A worldwide control grid, designed to ensure the overlords’ monopoly of power forever. Our species will be condemned to this nightmare future unless the masses are awakened to the New World Order master plan and mobilized to defeat it.88
There are a wide variety of theories as to what the exact goals and plans for the New World Order are, but Jones explains the most prevalent ones in Endgame. The most unifying of these theories is that the “Elite” are attempting to create a single world government and to abolish the concept of nationhood. Proponents of this theory see the Guidestones as “a testament to the Elite’s plan for a world religion, global laws with a global court and army to enforce it [sic]”89 because they advocate the institution of a world court in the sixth tenet, “Let all nations rule internally, resolving external disputes in a world court.” NWO believers see the creation of both the United Nations and the European Union as frightening harbingers of a plan nearing fruition.
Rumors that the United States, Mexico, and Canada are planning to join together, politically and economically, into a North American Union styled after the European Union are indicative of these fears. As evidence of the United States’ willingness to join such a coalition, Jones cites the planning of the Trans-Texas Corridor—a transportation network that was proposed in 2005 as a way of routing the high volume of long-distance freight and traffic from Mexico around major population centers. Patriot critics of the TTC saw it as a method of strengthening U.S. ties to Mexico, both physically and symbolically. In 2009, the project was officially discontinued due to extreme public outcry.
Jones and his supporters believe that the NAU would just be the next step on the way to a single world government. Once North America was united, a similar alliance would occur in Asia, and then the two mega-nations, along with the EU, would merge to become one global power.
Another very common theme within New World Order conspiracy theories is eugenics. First codified in 1865 by Sir Francis Galton, eugenics is the practice of guided evolution and genetic modification of human beings. It could theoretically allow a society to institute a breeding program to intentionally increase the frequency of the physical and mental characteristics that it considered desirable in mankind and decrease the frequency of those deemed undesirable. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the idea of eugenics was quite popular among scientists and statesmen alike. But after Adolf Hitler put into practice some of the theories of eugenics during his reign in Germany—attempting to use them to “purify” the “Aryan race”—the prevailing public sentiment for the so-called science turned sour.
Alex Jones suggests, however, that the application of eugenics in Western countries neither began nor ended with the Third Reich. He states that oil magnate John Rockefeller exported concepts of eugenics to Germany and that the ideas of eugenics and social Darwinism did not in fact fall out of fashion but merely rebranded themselves as the modern ideas of “trans-humanism, population control, sustainability, conservation, and environmentalism.”90 Jones also asserts that Nazi eugenicists were smuggled into the Allied nations to continue their work after the end of WWII. Citing as evidence the compulsory sterilization laws that existed in thirty-one U.S. states until the late 1970s—under which authority thousands of patients in mental institutions were forcibly removed of their ability to reproduce—Jones insinuates that the program of eugenics still continues to this day in America. “The Elite have left a massive wave of destruction behind them,” Jones says, “as they cold-bloodedly experiment on civilian populations as if we are [sic] lab rats.”91
Adherents of the NWO theory also believe that the “Elite” are working to eradicate roughly eighty percent of the world’s population. In the minds of these supporters this is further evidence that the Georgia Guidestones are part of the Elite’s plot because “set in stone it is written that the population never rise above five-hundred million.”92 Jones argues that population control will begin as a global one-child policy like the one currently in place in China. He implicates celebrities such as Bill and Melinda Gates, Ted Turner and Warren Buffett as being part of the conspiracy because of their major contributions to organizations devoted to reducing over-population.
But he does not believe that population reduction will be limited to restrictions on breeding. In discussing the controversial claims of some scientists that an outbreak of a virus like Ebola would be beneficial to the human race because it would drastically reduce its numbers, Jones ominously portends more dire measures that the “Elite” might take. He claims that the “dark builders” plan to intentionally release bio-weapons on the population at large, disguising this dispersal as a terrorist attack.
To the Patriots, perhaps the most damning piece of evidence against the Georgia Guidestones is that they were “erected by a secretive group.”93 Those who subscribe to the theories about the NWO contend that its agenda is being pushed by a small group of the “Global Elite,” men and women in possession of great amounts both of power and wealth. Jones asserts that this group evolved out of secret societies of the early Renaissance like the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians. The members, he contends, worked in secret because their agenda was to subvert national governments and the Church. And he believes that members of similar societies today work to do exactly the same thing.
In July of 2000, Alex Jones set out to infiltrate a private men’s club called the Bohemian Club at their notorious retreat at Bohemian Grove in northern California. In recent years, the Bohemian Club has been the subject of much speculation by conspiracy theorists, mostly as a result of its having so many high-profile members. Despite being founded as a society primarily for artists, its membership today in large part consists of the CEOs of large corporations, the heads of financial institutions and defense contract companies, and even some U.S. presidents. At their annual retreat in Bohemian Grove, the membership is frequently supplemented by foreign dignitaries who are invited as guests of the active members.
Alex Jones made a documentary film, Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove, about his activities infiltrating the group, and British journalist Jon Ronson featured Jones and his exploits at the retreat in a four-part investigative television series, Secret Rulers of the World. Jones recorded footage of his experiences in the Grove, notably the “Cremation of Care” ceremony, with a hidden camera on his companion’s belt, and provided analysis of that footage in his documentary.
The footage shows Jones and a friend entering the rustic, wooded campground that is Bohemian Grove through a break in the forest that surrounds it. In Dark Secrets, Jones claims that he was stopped numerous times by the security personnel—not only men from the local sheriff’s department, but also the Secret Service—but these confrontations do not appear on the tape, a fact that Jones explains by claiming that they did not have enough digital storage on the camera to record the entirety of their exploration. Most of the video is, in fact, unquestionably innocuous, revealing only quaintly primitive living, cooking, and dining quarters and drunken middle-aged campers chatting and singing along to old rock-and-roll songs while an off-camera musician plays the bagpipes in the distance. But there are plenty of things that Jones does find sinister throughout the camp.
He comments on the frequency with which he sees signs written in Latin and French, and takes fastidious care to document each stone owl—the symbol of the Bohemian Club—that they find in the Grove. But the real threat that Alex perceives is in the famed “Cremation of Care” ceremony, a kind of pageant performed on the first night of the retreat every year.
In Jones’ footage of the ceremony, a large crowd of onlookers is shown watching as the robed actors process onto the staging area across the lake as bagpipes play. The procession itself is made invisible to the camera by the darkness, but Jones claims that he saw cloaked men walking before a carriage and carrying a “bound body.”94 Then the procession reaches the better-illuminated center of the stage, and the main actor in the pageant recites several poetically worded lines extolling the virtues and beauty of the natural environment around them. He then enjoins them to “shake off [their] sorrows with the city’s dust and cast to the winds the cares of life.”95
Then the music swells, and the meat of the ceremony begins. The lead actor announces, “By the power of your fellowship, Dull Care is slain,”96 and the audience cheers. He explains that the bundle is Care’s body, which has been brought to the “funeral pyre,” and a man in a boat ferries the “corpse” across the lake to the prepared fire pit. Then the voice of Care taunts them, saying that though they burn him every year in the Grove, he is always waiting when they return to the “marketplace.” The lead actor counters this, saying that though Care has power over them throughout the rest of the year, they are able to banish him for at least the space of their holiday. They continue back and forth for a time, until finally the fire is ignited and the bundle with it.
Alex Jones explains his interpretation of this ceremony in his documentary. He sees it as a pagan rite developed to worship the ancient god, Moloch, by simulating a human sacrifice. As evidence of this he cites the cover of the program that he was given as a member of the audience that night. On the cover of the program—which reads “Cremation of Care 2000, Directed by Craig Jones”—there is a picture of the central area of the stage during the ritual. A figure stands in front of a large fire. Jones “enhances” the picture and claims he sees a figure in the flames that “anatomical experts”97 whom he consulted agree can only be that of a human baby. At one point in the documentary, Jones also claims that in addition to the symbolic “Cremation of Care,” there may also be an actual human sacrifice performed at Bohemian Grove, “according to some occult experts,”98 but he does not elaborate on or cite his sources for this allegation.
Jones believes that the Bohemian Grove retreat is further evidence that there is an underhanded conspiracy between members of a “Global Elite,” but others who have witnessed the events there have expressed differing opinions. Journalist Jon Ronson commented in his own documentary that it seemed like the members there were just “sacrificing all their troubles in the world for a two-week holiday,”99 not miming a pagan child sacrifice. Ronson also would also later say that his “lasting impression [of the Grove] was of an all-pervading sense of immaturity: the Elvis impersonators, the pseudo-pagan spooky rituals, the heavy drinking. These people might have reached the apex of their professions but emotionally they seemed trapped in their college years.”100
But whatever the true meaning of the “Cremation of Care” ceremony, to Alex Jones and other Patriots like him, the pageant is most terrifying because of its seemingly “pagan” trappings. Because while it is generally not overly emphasized in Jones’ work in particular, another of the common elements in the New World Order theories is that the conspiratorial plot of the “Global Elite” is satanic, pagan, or anti-Christian in nature.
In July of 2005, Alex Jones interviewed a guest on his radio show who spoke under the pseudonym “John Conner.” As a fellow subscriber to the New World Order conspiracy theory, Jones asked Conner to summarize his opinions on the subject. Conner explained that while he agreed with everything that Jones had said about the matter, to him the New World Order seemed to have an additional dimension to it. The master plan of the “Elite,” he insisted is “not only a political venture …but it is a spiritual venture.”101 To explain, he went on to say, “the president of the New World Order will one day be the Antichrist, and that’s what this is all leading up to.”102
Many Christians today believe that the final book of the New Testament, Revelation is a literal and prophetic account of how the world will one day end. In this futurist Christian eschatology, it is believed that a variety of globally catastrophic events will occur that will ultimately lead to the end of life on Earth, God’s vanquishing of Satan, and a final judgment whereby God assesses the merits of all of the souls that ever were, damning some and rewarding the others. A key component in this narrative is the figure of the “Antichrist.” It is believed by those who subscribe to this theory of the “end times” that a man will come to rule the Earth while the plagues and catastrophes are visiting mankind, and that he will be seen by many to be the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, but in fact he will be just the opposite. This man will lead the people further away from the path of God through his deceit, which will only cause God to wreak further havoc on the world.
A subset of the Patriot population believes that this eschatological prophecy and the New World Order conspiracy are intrinsically linked. Among these, Mark Dice—or “John Conner,” as he called himself until 2007—is perhaps the most vocal public figure. The New World Order, Dice claims, is “a satanic plan to give birth to the Antichrist.”103 He believes that the evil figure discussed in Revelation is a member of the “Global Elite,” and that the Elite themselves are attempting to control the world, not only for the money and power, but also to further the agenda of the devil. “They are fulfilling Bible prophecy,” he asserts.104
Mark Dice first gained mainstream notoriety in 2005, when he asserted publicly that pop star Jessica Simpson was “a singing stripper” after seeing one of her music videos.105 He branded the starlet as a bad role model, and cited her as just another example of the corruption of Christian values in America today. The attention that this comment brought him allowed him to secure guest spots on Patriot radio programs like The Alex Jones Show to spread the totality of his message. And one of Dice’s favored topics of discussion, both in these guest appearances and in his own books, is the Georgia Guidestones.
Like Alex Jones and Jim Stachowiak, Mark Dice firmly believes that the Georgia Guidestones were created as a symbol of the New World Order. But Dice takes this a step further, saying that the stones “have a deep satanic origin and message.”106 He asserts that the stones were erected by a secret society of the Global Elite that he calls the “Illuminati,” and he considers the monument to be “empirical evidence of the Illuminati’s agenda.” 107 Because of these beliefs, he and the group he founded, The Resistance, issued a press release in the summer of 2008 calling for the removal and destruction of the stones:
We have atheists and Satanists getting the Bible’s ten commandments removed from public property, yet the satanic Georgia Guidestones have stood for decades, and nobody seems to care. Well, we do.108
Dice’s dislike for the monument is founded partially on its resemblance to Stonehenge, a historically pagan site, but it is predominantly based on the tenets that are engraved in the granite, which he calls “the Illuminati’s ten commandments, a mockery of the Christian Ten Commandments.”109 He objects strongly to the messages that he perceives are encoded in the words of the precepts.
The first and second tenets of the Guidestones—“Maintain population under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature” and “Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity,” respectively—are for Dice, as for many Patriots, the most indicative that the monument is linked to the New World Order. Conspiracy theorists have long proposed that a large part of the Elite’s plan involves the elimination of a large portion of the population because “all the work has been done” in creating the infrastructure for the NWO, and now all of the “useless eaters”110 are no longer necessary to them. Dice sees these two tenets as supportive of that plan, as they propose a population cap that is much smaller than the current world population, and “obviously guiding reproduction means … forced sterilization,”111 another common trend in NWO conspiracies.
The third precept, “Unite humanity with a living new language,” Dice finds objectionable largely due to his Christian perspective. It conjures to his mind the story of Babel, the biblical city where all men spoke a common language, until God intentionally confused them into speaking many tongues. Some biblical scholars have argued that the people of Babel were confounded because of their hubris, and thus many Christians believe that a globally common language would be an affront to God. Similarly, the words of the fourth guide, “Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason,” evoke the idea of religious intolerance to Dice. “This of course is suggesting judicial control over matters of faith and religion,”112 he says, claiming that one day “Christianity will be deemed a heresy”113 and forbidden by the “Elite.”
In the fifth suggestion that the Guidestones make to “Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts,” Dice takes issue with the vagueness of the wording. He worries who will decide “what is ‘fair’ and what is ‘just,’ ”114 and he rejects the implication that it is the job of the government to protect the people. His complaints are much the same for the seventh tenet—“Eliminate petty laws and useless officials”—saying that while, on the surface, this sounds reasonable, it is actually a way of saying that the Illuminati are going to “streamline the legal code lending all power of interpretation to the individuals who hold the power.”115
A further red flag is raised for Dice in the sixth precept, which enjoins mankind to “Let all nations rule internally, resolving external disputes in a world court.” Despite the mention here of separate national rule, to the Patriots who fear the coming of the New World Order, the establishment of a world court is just a step in the direction of the establishment of a unified world government. Dice calls this injunction “chilling” and claims that it suggests “the New World Order’s world court should oversee all matters.”116
Dice admits that the last three guidelines seem “fairly benign,”117 but he holds that this is only true on the surface. “We have to be very careful with the semantics … and the interpretations of these commandments,”118 he says. He suggests that it takes a careful reading to be able to decode the Illuminati messages within the stones. In the eighth tenet, for example, he asserts that the suggestion to “Balance personal rights with social duties” is actually a “socialist” mandate that portends that individuals will be required to sacrifice their rights under the New World Order. The ninth dictate to “Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite,” while seeming merely poetic to the layman, speaks of Satanism to Mark Dice. “Who is the Infinite?” he asks. “We know the Infinite to the Illuminati is Lucifer.”119 And in the final lines of the inscription, “Be not a cancer on the Earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature,” Dice perceives an insult to humanity. He states that this is the Illuminati asserting, “the vast population of planet Earth has become a consuming cancer,”120 further justification for the planned massive depopulation that he feels is alluded to in the very first guide.
The mystery of the true identity of R. C. Christian and the group that he claims to represent is also very unsettling to Mark Dice. He holds that all secret societies are diabolical in nature, stating that the only possible reason for their secrecy is that “if people knew they were worshipping Satan, they would freak out.”121 Like Alex Jones, he believes that the “Elite” originated in the secret societies of the early Renaissance, but Dice goes on to say that they have kept alive the “satanic ideologies,”122 passing them down through time to further the aims of the devil.
The Georgia Guidestones, Dice asserts, were not just built by any secret society either, but by one of the ones that he considers to be the worst. Like many who believe that the Guidestones hold a positive message, Dice believes that the creator of the stones was a Rosicrucian, but to him this is not a good thing. He feels that the pseudonym, “R. C. Christian” clearly “stands for an individual representing the Order of the Rose Cross,” which he describes as a “perverted occult sect of Christianity.”123
He brands the Rosicrucians as among the more dangerous secret societies because their beliefs and values are too similar to those of Christianity. Similar though these teachings are, Dice feels that they are nevertheless incorrect. “The distortions and errors are clear to those who know the Word,” he says, “but only serve to deceive Rosicrucians and draw them from the Truth.”124 Many Christians who take a literal view of the eschatology in the Bible are wary of things that approximate Christian teachings but are not exactly right, because of the predictions in the Bible that there will be many false prophets who pretend to be godly but are not.
Dice’s judgment that R. C. Christian must have been a Rosicrucian is, for him, really the only thing he needs in order to decide that the Georgia Guidestones are affiliated with the New World Order. For he believe that it is the mission of Mormons, Freemasons, Satanists, and Rosicrucians “to dissolve True Christianity into the world religion of the New World Order, so the Antichrist can declare that he is the savior of humanity, and King of the Earth.”125
While Mark Dice was once the most vocal public detractor of the Guidestones to be found, for several years now he has been relatively silent on the subject. Others have taken up the cause, however, and one man in particular has added a few new dimensions to the theory that the monument is deeply connected with the New World Order conspiracy.
Despite being a bit of a latecomer to the conspiracy theory scene, Arkansas native Van Smith has made quite a few contributions to the theories surrounding the Georgia Guidestones. Unlike many of the people who have spoken out about the monument, Smith does not consider himself to be a Patriot activist, or indeed an activist of any kind. A self-described “ordinary man,”126 he makes his living with a computer business and only became interested in the Guidestones after helping his children, who are homeschooled, to complete a scholastic project about them. So disinterested is he in the general realm of conspiracy theories that he refers to the Guidestones as an “unwelcome distraction” 127 from his work. But he claims that he has continued to post his research on his website, Van’s Hardware Journal, “despite the potential risks to [his] career and growing business because the stakes involved for humanity are so grave.”128
In common with men like Alex Jones and Mark Dice, Smith believes that the Georgia Guidestones are part of an Illuminati plot to bring about the New World Order. But Smith’s reason for believing that the Elbert County landmark is connected to a nefarious global conspiracy is very different. Whereas most Patriots connect the two based on perceived similarities between the values espoused on the stones and the values that they presume the “Elite” to hold, Smith believes that there is a more tangible link, and the key to it lies in the Burj Khalifa.
The Burj Khalifa—or Burj Dubai, as it was known during its construction—is an enormous skyscraper in the United Arab Emirates. Located in the heart of the most populous city in the UAE, Dubai, the Burj is currently the tallest man-made structure ever built, and for some this is cause for alarm. Since construction on the building began in 2004, some fringe members of the Christian population in the United States, including Van Smith, have speculated that the aim of the Burj’s creators is to build a “new Tower of Babel.”129
In the book of Genesis, a story is told about an ancient city that would come to be called Babel. It states that following a great flood that wiped out nearly all life on Earth, all of the remaining people were gathered together in one place, and they all spoke one common language. These people decided to build a large city with an extravagantly tall tower in the center of it. But in the tale, God sees what the people are doing and becomes upset, saying:
Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. (Genesis 11:6 – 7 KJV)
He then destroys the city and scatters the people, causing them to speak in many languages instead of one. As with most biblical passages, a variety of interpretations of this story have been proposed by different individuals, but the meaning that Smith takes away from the passage is that the building of a tower so tall was an affront to God.
And Smith sees the Burj Khalifa in a similar light. To him, the erection of another extraordinarily tall tower—nearly one thousand feet taller than the CN Tower in Toronto, which held the record for the tallest freestanding building before the Burj—must be related in some way to the story of the Tower of Babel. “The symbolic meaning of the Burj Khalifa is unambiguous,” he writes. “It is the completion of the second Tower of Babel, a pursuit the Rosicrucians, Freemasons, and their ilk have sought for millennia.”130
The connection that Van Smith sees between the Burj Khalifa and the Georgia Guidestones is less immediately clear, however. While the Burj stands at a remarkable 828 meters tall, the Guidestones have an overall height of merely 5.87 meters, and the circumstances surrounding the creation of the two structures seem utterly dissimilar. Nevertheless, Smith asserts that the connection is “virtually a mathematical certainty.”131 As the basis for this claim, Smith discloses a series of numerological calculations that he has made with the physical dimensions of the Georgia Guidestones.
To begin with, he assesses the measurements of the capstone, the central Gnomon stone, and each of the major stones. The capstone, he observes, is—rounding all measurements to the nearest meter—three meters long, two meters wide, and half a meter thick, meaning that its proportions are 6:4:1. Rounding again, the Gnomon stone is five meters high, one meter wide, and half a meter thick, which gives it a proportional value of 10:2:1. Finally, each of the four major stones is approximately five meters high, two meters wide, and half a meter thick by Smith’s calculations, yielding a ratio of 10:4:1.
By rearranging the numbers in the proportional value of each of the major stones, Smith comes up with the numbers one, four, and ten, which he then chooses to interpret as a date: January 4, 2010. He points out that this is the day that the Burj Khalifa was first opened to the public. Similarly, he rearranges the numbers in the proportions of the capstone to yield one, four, and six and interprets this as a date as well: January 4, 2006. This, Smith highlights, is the day that the former prime minister of the UAE and emir of Dubai, Maktoum bin Rashad Al Maktoum, died following a heart attack.
For a final calculation, Smith sums the numbers in the proportion of the capstone—one, four, and six—to get eleven; then he adds together the numbers of the proportion of the Gnomon stone—one, two, and ten—to get thirteen. He then sums the proportion of the each of the major stones—one, four, and ten—which yields the number fifteen, but he adds the number four to this as well, as there are four of the major stones, and comes up with the number nineteen. Finally, he takes the three numbers that he derived in this fashion—eleven, thirteen, and nineteen—and multiplies them together. The number this produces is 2,717, which Smith notes is the exact height, in feet, of the Burj Khalifa.
Van Smith considers the above numerical connections between the Georgia Guidestones and the Burj Khalifa to be “so solid that they are virtually indisputable,”132 and it is for this reason that he is convinced of the monument’s association with the New World Order. All of Smith’s self-described “incontrovertible evidence”133 is based upon a numerology of his own devising, but he asserts that this is appropriate as, given the frequent application of numerology among theosophists, he finds it quite likely that R. C. Christian intentionally encoded “numerological messages”134 into the structure of the Guidestones. Smith, like Mark Dice, maintains a strong belief that the monument’s anonymous founder was himself representative of an occult group, and Smith asserts that it was likely a theosophical one.
“It is immediately evident,” he claims, “to even the most casual observer possessing only rudimentary understanding of modern occult beliefs that the Georgia Guidestones is the product of theosophy.”135 Van Smith’s understanding of theosophy seems somewhat limited given his assertion that it is a “term that encompasses the Freemasons [and] Rosicrucians,” 136 two groups whose origins predate the development of theosophical doctrine by centuries, but he freely admits that he is no expert on the occult and secret societies in general, and that he is only interested in them at all due to their apparent connections with the Guidestones. But from the knowledge that he does have, he has come to the same conclusion that many other conspiracy theorists have reached—that theosophy and all other occult philosophies are abhorrent:
The body of occult work in active use today is like an endless, sticky, black ocean of tar. I have had the misfortune of swimming in that sea of engulfing darkness while researching this article. For an analytical, reasoning mind, the occult is offensive. For the moral, the occult topics relevant for this article are shocking and repulsive.137
The central tenet of theosophy is that all religions are attempts by mankind to perfect its own nature and to achieve a higher, more enlightened state. Smith believes that by this, theosophists mean that they are attempting to make themselves into gods who will preside above the rest of humanity in the coming New World Order. And he sees the latest skyscraper in Dubai as symbolic of that attempt. “The Burj Khalifa not only signifies a supreme Luciferian attempt to defy and defeat God,” he asserts, “but the completion of the Tower is, for them the beginning of a new age where man can become like God.”138 The Georgia Guidestones are then implicated in this plan as well, he feels, not only due to the content of the words etched into them, but also because of their numerological association with the Burj.
Van Smith also has a few relatively unique ideas about the potential identity of R. C. Christian. He posits first and foremost that he does not believe that the pseudonym was only used by one person, asserting that the author of Common Sense Renewed and the man who actually went to Elberton to commission the Guidestones are two separate people. He does not further substantiate this claim, however. He also writes that he believes that Atlanta media mogul Ted Turner was at least a member of the group that Christian claimed to represent. This he claims is proved by Turner’s frequent public assertion that the United States should mandate a one-child limit on families, as is practiced in China, and also by the fact that Wyatt Martin was reported to have known him. Perhaps most interestingly, Smith hypothesizes that R. C. Christian may be the subject of a relief sculpture that is in Elberton, Georgia. The sculpture was commissioned to be a bust of Franklin Roosevelt, and it is labeled as such to this day, but Smith asserts that it “looks nothing like”139 the United States president and is therefore suspect.
There are a wide variety of opinions as to the meaning and origin of the Georgia Guidestones, and Smith does take the time to address his take on one that is opposed to his own. He finds the theory that the Guidestones were built to help the survivors of a nuclear holocaust or other disaster to rebuild society far-fetched due to the “decidedly unbenevolent [sic] attitude of Luciferian cultists,”140 who he believes designed the monument. He further states that there is “no reputable scientific evidence” to support that theory, whereas “there are good reasons to believe that the Georgia Guidestones is an arrogant advertisement for the demented plans of a deranged but powerful cult to overthrow national governments and install a totalitarian global government.”141
Through his website and the interviews that he has given in the past few years, Van Smith has made quite clear his own opinions about the “abomination to humanity”142 that he considers the Georgia Guidestones to be. But like most of the conspiracy theorists who have studied the monument, he has only given the most cursory of attentions to the book written by its founder to explain it. Further study of Common Sense Renewed and the scant details that are known of R. C. Christian himself provide a very different perspective on the meaning and purpose of the mysterious collection of granite stones.
11. Workers at the Elberton Granite Finishing Company preparing one of the four main stones
12. Stonecutter Charlie Clamp sandblasting the text of the English-language face of the Guidestones
