New World Order Origin

In conspiracy theory, the term “New World Order” or “NWO” refers to the emergence of a bureaucratic collectivist one-world government.
The common theme in conspiracy theories about a New World Order is that a powerful and secretive elite of globalists is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an autonomous world government, which would replace sovereign nation-states and put an end to international power struggles. Significant occurrences in politics and finance are speculated to be caused by an extremely influential cabal operating through many front organizations. Numerous historical and current events are seen as steps in an on-going plot to achieve world domination through secret political gatherings and decision-making processes.

Prior to the early 1990s, New World Order conspiracism was limited to two American subcultures, primarily the militantly anti-government right, and secondarily Christian fundamentalists concerned with end-time emergence of the Antichrist. Skeptics, such as political scientist Michael Barkun, have expressed concern that right-wing conspiracy theories about a New World Order have now not only been embraced by many left-wing conspiracy theorists but have seeped into popular culture, thereby inaugurating an unrivaled period of people actively preparing for apocalyptic millenarian scenarios in the United States of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. They warn that this development may not only fuel lone-wolf terrorism but have devastating effects on American political life, such as the far right and the far left joining forces to launch an insurrectionary national-anarchist movement capable of subverting the established political powers.

During the 20th century, many statesmen, such as Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, used the term “new world order” to refer to a new period of history evidencing a dramatic change in world political thought and the balance of power after World War I and World War II. They all saw these periods as opportunities to implement idealistic or liberal proposals for global governance only in the sense of new collective efforts to identify, understand, or address worldwide problems that go beyond the capacity of individual nation-states to solve. These proposals led to the creation of international organizations, such as the United Nations and N.A.T.O., and international regimes, such as the Bretton Woods system and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which were calculated both to maintain a balance of power as well as regularize cooperation between nations. These creations in particular and internationalism in general, however, would always be criticized and opposed by American paleoconservatives on isolationist grounds and by neoconservatives on benevolent imperalist grounds.


In the aftermath of World Wars I & II, progressives welcomed these new international organizations and regimes but argued they suffered from a democratic deficit and therefore were inadequate to not only prevent another global war but also foster global justice. Thus, activists around the globe formed a world federalist movement bent on creating a “real” new world order. A number of intellectuals of the reformist left, such as British writer H. G. Wells in the 1940s, adopted and redefined the term “new world order” as a synonym for the establishment of a full-fledged social democratic world government.
In reaction, conspiracy theorists of the American secular and Christian right, whose paranoia was fueled by Second Red Scare-era unfounded fears of Masonic, Illuminati, and Jewish conspiracies to achieve world communism, began misinterpreting any use of term “new world order” by members of the Establishment, even when they were simply acknowledging a change in the international balance of power, as a call for the imposition of a state atheistic and bureaucratic collectivist world government, which controls the means of production, while the surplus (“profit”) is distributed among a ruling class of bureaucrats, rather than among the working class.
In the 1960s, a great deal of right-wing conspiracist attention focused on the United Nations as the vehicle for creating the “One World Government”, and contributed to a movement for United States withdrawal from the U.N.. American writer Mary M. Davison, in her 1966 booklet The Profound Revolution, traced the alleged New World Order conspiracy to the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve System in 1913 by international bankers, who she claimed later formed the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921 as the shadow government. At the time the booklet was published, “international bankers” would have been interpreted by many readers as a reference to a postulated “international Jewish banking conspiracy” masterminded by the Rothschilds and Rockefellers.
Claiming that the term “New World Order” is used by a secretive elite dedicated to the destruction of all national sovereignties, American producerist journalist Gary Allen, in his 1974 book Rockefeller: Campaigning for the New World Order and 1987 book Say “No!” to the New World Order, articulated the anti-globalist theme of much current right-wing conspiracism in the U.S.. Thus, during the 1990s, the main demonized scapegoat of the American far right, represented by the John Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby, shifted seamlessly from crypto-communists who plotted on behalf of the “Red Menace” to globalists who plot on behalf of the New World Order. The relatively painless nature of the shift was due to growing right-wing opposition to the globalization of capitalism but also in part to the basic underlying apocalyptic millenarian paradigm, which fed the Cold War and the witch-hunts of the McCarthy period.
In his 11 September 1990 Toward a New World Order speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, President George H. W. Bush described his ideals for post-Cold-War global governance in cooperation with post-Soviet states:
Until now, the world we’ve known has been a world divided – a world of barbed wire and concrete block, conflict and cold war. Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a “world order” in which “the principles of justice and fair play … protect the weak against the strong …” A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.

Chip Berlet, an investigative reporter specializing in the study of right-wing movements in the U.S., writes:
When President Bush announced his new foreign policy would help build a New World Order, his phrasing surged through the Christian and secular hard right like an electric shock, since the phrase had been used to represent the dreaded collectivist One World Government for decades. Some Christians saw Bush as signaling the End Times betrayal by a world leader. Secular anticommunists saw a bold attempt to smash US sovereignty and impose a tyrannical collectivist system run by the United Nations.

American televangelist Pat Robertson with his 1991 best-selling book The New World Order became the most prominent Christian popularizer of conspiracy theories about recent American history as a theater in which Wall Street, the Federal Reserve System, Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg Group, and Trilateral Commission control the flow of events from behind the scenes, nudging us constantly and covertly in the direction of world government for the Antichrist.
Observers note that the galvanization of right-wing populist conspiracy theorists, such as Linda Thompson, Mark Koernke and Robert K. Spear, into militancy led to the rise of the anti-government militia movement, and their use of viral propaganda on the Internet contributed to their extremist political ideas about the New World Order finding their way into the far left literature of some black nationalists, but also the previously apolitical literature of many Kennedy assassinologists, ufologists, lost land theorists, and, most recently, occultists. The wide appeal of these subcultures then transmitted New World Order conspiracism like a “mind virus” to a large new audience of seekers of counterknowledge from the mid-1990s on.
After the turn of the century, specifically during the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, many politicians and pundits, such as Gordon Brown, Henry Kissinger, and Barack Obama, used the term “new world order” in their advocacy for a Keynesian reform of the global financial system and their calls for a “New Bretton Woods”.[ These declarations had the unintended consequence of providing fresh fodder for New World Order conspiracy theorists, and culminated in former Clinton administration adviser Dick Morris and conservative talk show host Sean Hannity arguing on one of his Fox News Channel programs that “conspiracy theorists were right”. Fox News has been repeatedly criticized by progressive media watchdog groups for not only mainstreaming the conspiracist rhetoric of the radical right but possibly agitating its lone wolves into action.
Conspiracy theories
Freemasonry
Anti-Masonic conspiracy theorists believe that “high-ranking” Freemasons are involved in conspiracies to create an occult New World Order. They claim that some of the Founding Fathers of the United States, such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, had Masonic symbolism and sacred geometry interwoven into American society, particularly in the Great Seal of the United States, the United States one-dollar bill, the architecture of National Mall landmarks, and the streets and highways of Washington, D.C.. They speculate that Freemasons did this in order to mystically bind their planning of a government in conformity with the luciferian plan of the Great Architect of the Universe whom, they are said to believe, has tasked the United States with the eventual establishment of an hermetic "Kingdom of God on Earth" and the building of the Third Temple in New Jerusalem as its holiest site.
Freemasons rebut these claims of Masonic conspiracy. They assert that Freemasonry, which promotes natural theology through esotericism, places no power in occult symbols themselves. It is not a part of Freemasonry to view the drawing of symbols, no matter how large, as an act of consolidating or controlling power. Furthermore, there is no published information establishing the Masonic membership of the men responsible for the design of the Great Seal or the street plan of Washington, D.C. The Latin phrase "novus ordo seclorum", appearing on the reverse side of the Great Seal since 1782 and on the back of the one-dollar bill since 1935, means "New Order of the Ages" and only alludes to the beginning of an era where the United States is an independent nation-state, but is often improperly translated by conspiracy theorists as "New World Order" or "New Secular Order".[25] Lastly, Freemasons argue that, despite the symbolic importance of the Temple of Solomon in their mythology, they have no interest in rebuilding it, especially since “it is obvious that any attempt to interfere with the present condition of things [on the Temple Mount] would in all probability bring about the greatest religious war the world has ever known”.
More broadly, Freemasons assert that a long-standing rule within regular Freemasonry is a prohibition on the discussion of politics in a Masonic Lodge and the participation of lodges or Masonic bodies in political pursuits. Freemasonry has no politics, but it teaches its members to be of high moral character and active citizens. The accusation that Freemasonry has a hidden agenda to establish a Masonic government ignores several facts. While agreeing on certain Masonic Landmarks, the many independent and sovereign Grand Lodges act as such, and do not agree on many other points of belief and practice.
Also, as can be seen from a survey of famous Freemasons, individual Freemasons hold beliefs that span the spectrum of politics. The term “Masonic government” has no meaning since individual Freemasons hold many different opinions on what constitutes a good government, and Freemasonry as a body has no opinion on the topic. Ultimately, Freemasons argue that even if it were proven that influential individuals have used and are using Masonic Lodges to engage in crypto-politics, such as was the case with the illegal Italian Lodge Propaganda Due, this would represent a cooptation of Freemasonry rather than evidence of its hidden agenda.
Illuminati
The Order of the Illuminati was an Enlightenment-age secret society founded on 1 May 1776, in Ingolstadt (Upper Bavaria), by Adam Weishaupt, who was the first lay professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt. The movement consisted of freethinkers, secularists, liberals, republicans and pro-feminists, recruited in the Masonic Lodges of Germany, who sought to promote perfectionism through mystery schools. In 1785, the order was infiltrated, broken and suppressed by the Bavarian government for allegedly plotting to overthrow all the monarchies and state religions of Europe.
In the late 18th century, reactionary conspiracy theorists, such as Scottish physicist John Robison and French Jesuit priest Augustin Barruel, began speculating that the Illuminati survived their suppression and became the masterminds behind the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. The Illuminati were accused of being enlightened absolutists who were attempting to secretly orchestrate a world revolution in order to globalize the most radical ideals of the Enlightenment: anti-clericalism, anti-monarchism, and anti-patriarchalism. During the 19th century, fear of an Illuminati conspiracy was a real concern of European ruling classes, and their oppressive reactions to this unfounded fear provoked in 1848 the very revolutions they sought to prevent.
During the interwar period of the 20th century, fascist propagandists, such as British revisionist historian Nesta Helen Webster and American socialite Edith Starr Miller, not only popularized the myth of an Illuminati conspiracy but claimed that it was a subversive secret society which serves the Jewish elites that supposedly propped up both finance capitalism and Soviet communism in order to divide and rule the world. American evangelist Gerald Burton Winrod and other conspiracy theorists within the Christian fundamentalist movement in the United States, which emerged in the early 20th century as a backlash against the principles of the Enlightenment, modernism, and liberalism, became the main channel of dissemination of Illuminati conspiracy theories in America. Right-wing populists subsequently began speculating that some collegiate fraternities, gentlemen’s clubs and think tanks of the American upper class are front organizations of the Illuminati, which they accuse of plotting to create a New World Order through a one-world government.
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an antisemitic canard, published in 1903, but first translated into English in 1919 or 1920, alleging a Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy to achieve world domination. It propagandized the idea that a cabal of Jewish masterminds, which has coopted Freemasonry, is plotting to rule the world on behalf of all Jews because they believe themselves to be the chosen people of God. The Protocols has been proven by scholars, such as Irish journalist Philip Graves in a 1921 The Times article, and British academic Norman Cohn in his 1967 book Warrant for Genocide, to be both a hoax and a clear case of plagiarism. There is general agreement that the Okhrana, the secret police of the Russian Empire, fabricated the text in the late 1890s or early 1900s by plagiarizing it, almost word for word in some passages, from The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a 19th century satire against Napoleon III of France originally written by Maurice Joly, a French lawyer and Legitimist militant.
Partly responsible for feeding many antisemitic and anti-Masonic hysterias of the 20th century, The Protocols is widely considered to be influential in the development of conspiracy theories related to a New World Order (such as the notion of a Zionist Occupation Government), and reappears repeatedly in contemporary conspiracy literature. For example, the authors of the 1982 controversial book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail concluded that The Protocols was the most persuasive piece of evidence for the existence and activities of the Priory of Sion. They speculated that this secret society was working behind the scenes to establish a theocratic “United States of Europe” (politically and religiously unified through the imperial cult of a Merovingian sacred king from the Jesus bloodline, who occupies both the throne of Europe and the Holy See) which would become the hyperpower of the 21st century. Although the Priory of Sion, itself, has been exhaustively debunked by journalists and scholars as a hoax, fringe Christian eschatologists concerned with the emergence of a New World Order became convinced that the Priory of Sion was a fulfillment of prophecies found in the Book of Revelation and further proof of an anti-Christian conspiracy of epic proportions.
Skeptics argue that the current gambit of contemporary conspiracy theorists who use the The Protocols is to claim that they “really” come from some group other than the Jews such as the Illuminati or alien invaders. Although it is hard to determine whether the conspiracy-minded actually believe this or are simply trying to sanitize a discredited text, skeptics argue that it doesn’t make much difference, since they leave the actual, antisemitic text unchanged. The result is to give The Protocols credibility and circulation when it deserves neither.
Round Table
British businessman Cecil Rhodes advocated the British Empire reannexing the United States of America and reforming itself into an “Imperial Federation” to bring about a hyperpower and lasting world peace. In his first will, of 1877, written at the age of 23, he expressed his wish to fund a secret society (known as the Society of the Elect) that would advance this goal:
To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity.
In his later wills, a more mature Rhodes abandoned the idea and instead concentrated on what became the Rhodes Scholarship, which had British statesman Alfred Milner as one of its trustees. Established in 1902, the original goal of the trust fund was to foster peace among the great powers by creating a sense of fraternity and a shared world view among future British, American, and German leaders by having enabled them to study for free at the University of Oxford.
Milner and British official Lionel George Curtis were the architects of the Round Table movement, a network of organizations promoting closer union between Britain and its self-governing colonies. To this end, Curtis founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in June 1919 and wrote the 1938 book The Commonwealth of God in which he advocated the creation of an imperial federation, that eventually reannexes the U.S., which would be presented to Protestant churches as being the work of the Christian God to elicit their support. The Commonwealth of Nations was created in 1949 but it would only be a free association of independent states rather than the powerful imperial federation imagined by Rhodes, Milner and Curtis.
The Council on Foreign Relations began in 1917 with a group of New York academics who were asked by President Woodrow Wilson to offer options for the foreign policy of the United States in the interwar period. Originally envisioned as a British-American group of scholars and diplomats, some of whom belonging to the Round Table movement, it was a subsequent group of 108 New York financiers, manufacturers and international lawyers organized in June 1918 by Nobel Peace Prize recipient and U.S. secretary of state, Elihu Root, that became the Council on Foreign Relations on 29 July 1921. The first of the council’s projects was a quarterly journal launched in September 1922, called Foreign Affairs.
Conspiracy theorists believe that the Council on Foreign Relations is a front organization for the Round Table as a tool of the “Anglo-American Establishment”, which they believe has been plotting from 1900 on to rule the world. The research findings of historian Carroll Quigley, author of the 1966 book Tragedy and Hope, are taken by both conspiracy theorists of the American Old Right (Cleon Skousen) and New Left (Carl Oglesby) to substantiate this view, even though he argued that the Establishment is not involved in a plot to implement a one-world government but rather British and American benevolent imperialism driven by the mutual interests of economic elites in the United Kingdom and the United States. Quigley also argued that, although the Round Table still exists today, its position in influencing the policies of world leaders has been much reduced from its heyday during World War I and slowly waned after the end of World War II and the Suez Crisis. Today it is largely a ginger group, designed to consider and gradually influence the policies of the Commonwealth of Nations, but faces strong opposition. Furthermore, in American society after 1965, the problem, according to Quigley, was that no elite was in charge and acting responsibly.
American banker David Rockefeller joined the Council on Foreign Relations as its youngest-ever director in 1949 and subsequently became chairman of the board from 1970 to 1985; today he serves as honorary chairman. In 2002, Rockefeller authored his autobiography Memoirs wherein, on page 405, he wrote:
For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents … to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.
Although this statement should be interpreted as being partially sarcastic, it is taken at face value and widely cited by conspiracy theorists as proof that the Council on Foreign Relations (itself alleged to be a front for an “international banking cabal”, as well as, it is claimed, the sponsor of many “globalist” think tanks such as the Trilateral Commission) uses its role as the brain trust of American presidents, senators and representatives to manipulate them into supporting a New World Order. Conspiracy theorists fear that the international bankers of financial capitalism are planning to eventually subvert the independence of the U.S. by subordinating national sovereignty to a strengthened Bank for International Settlements with the intent to “create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole”.
Some American social critics, such as Laurence H. Shoup, argue that the Council on Foreign Relations is an “imperial brain trust”, which has, for decades, played a central behind-the-scenes role in shaping U.S. foreign policy choices for the post-WWII international order and the Cold War, by determining what options show up on the agenda and what options do not even make it to the table;[40] while others, such as G. William Domhoff, argue that it is in fact a mere policy discussion forum, which provides the business input to U.S. foreign policy planning. The latter argue that it has nearly 3,000 members, far too many for secret plans to be kept within the group; all the council does is sponsor discussion groups, debates and speakers; and as far as being secretive, it issues annual reports and allows access to its historical archives. However, all these critics agree that historical studies of the council show that it has a very different role in the overall power structure than what is claimed by conspiracy theorists.
Open Conspiracy
In his 1928 book The Open Conspiracy British writer H. G. Wells called for the intelligentsia of all nation-states to organize for the establishment of a global federation of strengthened and democratized global institutions, with plenary constitutional power accountable to global citizens and a division of international authority among separate global agencies, in order to build a world social democracy.[
Wells warned, however, in his 1940 book The New World Order that:
... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the new world order ... and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we [must] bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.”
Wells’ book was extremely influential in associating the notion of a socialist world state and government with the term “New World Order” in the minds of both supporters and opponents for generations to come. But the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to a period of triumphalism by capitalists world wide, the elimination of the only obstacle to the spread of a neoliberal form of globalization, and a shattering of the confidence of those who hoped that a proletarian revolution would return the Soviet Union (which had become a degenerated workers’ state) to socialism and transform it into one of the building blocks of the new world order envisioned by Wells. Right-wing conspiracy theorists, however, simply changed their focus from the Soviet Union to the United Nations as the bureaucratic collectivist menace.
New Age
British neo-Theosophical occultist Alice Bailey, one of the founders of the so-called New Age movement, prophesied in 1940 the eventual victory of the Allies of World War II over the Axis powers (which occurred in 1945) and the establishment by the Allies of a political and religious New World Order. She saw a federal world government as the culmination of Wells’ Open Conspiracy but argued that it would be synarchist because it was guided by ascended masters, intent on preparing humanity for the mystical second coming of Christ, and the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. According to Bailey, a group of ascended masters called the Great White Brotherhood works on the “inner planes” to oversee the transition to the New World Order but, for now, the members of this Spiritual Hierarchy are only known to a few occult scientists, with whom they communicate telepathically, but as the need for their personal involvement in the plan increases, there will be an “Externalization of the Hierarchy” and everyone will know of their presence on Earth.
In 1997, Hasidic rabbi Yonassan Gershom, in an article titled Anti-Semitic Stereotypes in Alice Bailey’s Writings, pointed out that Bailey’s Plan for the New World Order, marked by extravagant fantasy, called for “the gradual dissolution – again if in any way possible – of the Orthodox Jewish faith,” which, he said, indicated that “her goal is nothing less than the destruction of Judaism itself.” This fact is notable since many conspiracy theories tend to portray Jews as the plotters behind the New World Order rather than one of the groups the plotters want to repress in order to create it.
Bailey’s writings, along with American writer Marilyn Ferguson’s 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy, contributed to conspiracy theorists of the Christian right viewing the New Age movement as the “false religion” that would supersede Christianity in a New World Order.[46] Some conspiracy theorists have adopted 21 December 2012 as the exact date for the establishment of the New World Order because of the growing 2012 phenomenon, which has its origins in the fringe Mayanist theories of New Age writers José Argüelles, Terence McKenna, and Daniel Pinchbeck.
Skeptics argue that the term “New Age movement” is a misnomer, generally used by conspiracy theorists as a catch-all rubric for any new religious, spiritual or philosophical belief, symbol and practice that is not fundamentalist Christian. By their lights, anything that is not Christian is by definition actively and willfully anti-Christian. The implication is that these independent and sometimes contradictory schools of thought are all part of a monolithic whole. This is logically and empirically false, and rationally simplistic.
End Time
Millenarian Christian theologians and laymen, such as American televangelist Pat Robertson with his 1991 book The New World Order, see a globalist conspiracy as the fulfillment of prophecies about the “end time” in the Bible, specifically in the Book of Ezekiel, the Book of Daniel, the Olivet discourse found in the Synoptic Gospels, and the Book of Revelation. They assert that human and demonic agents of the Devil are involved in a primordial conspiracy to deceive humanity into accepting a satanic world theocracy that has the Unholy Trinity – Satan, the Antichrist and the False Prophet – at the core of an imperial cult. In many theories, the False Prophet will either be the last pope of the Catholic Church (groomed and installed by an Alta Vendita or Jesuit conspiracy) or a charismatic leader in the New Age movement, while the Antichrist will either be the president of the European Union or the secretary-general of the United Nations or even a virtual actor serving as the figurehead for a supercomputer.
Preterist Christian skeptics of the end-time conspiracism argue that some or all of the biblical prophecies concerning the end time refer literally or metaphorically to events which already happened in the first century after Jesus’ birth. In their view, the “end time” concept refers to the end of the covenant between God and Israel, rather than the end of time, or the end of planet Earth. They argue that prophecies about the Rapture, the defiling of the Temple, the destruction of Jerusalem, the Antichrist, the Number of the Beast, the Tribulation, the Second Coming, and the Last Judgment were fulfilled at or about the year 70 when the Roman general (and future Emperor) Titus sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem, putting a permanent stop to the daily animal sacrifices.
According to such skeptics, many passages in the New Testament indicate with apparent certainty that the second coming of Christ, and the end time predicted in the Bible were to take place within the lifetimes of Jesus’ disciples rather than millennia later: Matt. 10:23, Matt. 16:28, Matt. 24:34, Matt. 26:64, Rom. 13:11-12, 1 Cor. 7:29-31, 1 Cor. 10:11, Phil. 4:5, James 5:8-9, 1 Pet. 4:7, 1 Jn. 2:18.[48]
Fourth Reich
Anti-Nazi conspiracy theorists, such as American writer Jim Marrs, argue that some ex-Nazis, who were surviving members of Germany’s Third Reich, along with sympathizers in the United States and elsewhere, given safe haven by organizations like ODESSA and Die Spinne, have been working behind the scenes since the end of World War II to enact at least some of the principles of Nazism (e.g. military-industrial complex, imperialism, widespread spying on citizens, use of corporations and propaganda to control national interests and ideas) into culture, government, and business worldwide, but primarily in the U.S. They cite the influence of ex-Nazi scientists brought in under Operation Paperclip to help advance aerospace manufacturing in the U.S., and the acquisition and creation of conglomerates by ex-Nazis and their sympathizers after the war, in both Europe and the U.S.
This neo-Nazi conspiracy is said to be animated by an “Iron Dream” in which the U.S. gradually establishes the “Fourth Reich”, known as the “Western Imperium”, a pan-Aryan New World Order modeled after Adolf Hitler’s New Order, to ensure the West wins the hypothetical Clash of Civilizations.
Skeptics argue that conspiracy theorists grossly overestimate the influence of ex-Nazis and neo-Nazis on American society, and point out that American imperialism, corporatocracy and political repression have a long history that predates World War II. Some political scientists, such as Sheldon Wolin, have expressed concern that the twin forces of democratic deficit and superpower status have paved the way in the U.S. for the emergence of an inverted totalitarianism which contradicts many principles of Nazism.
Alien Invasion
Since the late 1970s, extraterrestrials from other habitable planets or parallel dimensions (such as “Greys”) and intraterrestrials from Hollow Earth (such as “Reptilians”) have been included in the New World Order conspiracy, in more or less dominant roles, as in the theories put forward by American writers Stan Deyo and Milton William Cooper, and British writer David Icke.
The common theme in such conspiracy theories is that aliens have been among us for decades, centuries or millennia, but a government cover-up has protected the public from knowledge of ancient astronauts and an alien invasion. Motivated by speciesism, these aliens have been and are secretly manipulating developments and changes in human society in order to more efficiently control and exploit it. In some theories, alien infiltrators have taken human form and move freely throughout human society, even to the point of taking control of command positions in governmental, corporate, and religious institutions, and are now in the final stages of their plan to take over the world. A mythical covert government agency of the United States code-named Majestic 12 is often cited by conspiracy theorists as being the shadow government which collaborates with the alien occupation, in exchange for assistance in the development and testing of military “flying saucers” at Area 51, in order for U.S. armed forces to achieve full-spectrum dominance.
Skeptics, who adhere to the psychosocial hypothesis for unidentified flying objects, argue that the convergence of New World Order conspiracy theory and UFO conspiracy theory is a product of not only the era’s widespread mistrust of governments and the popularity of the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs but of the far right and ufologists actually joining forces. Barkun notes that the only positive side to this development is that, if conspirators plotting to rule the world are believed to be aliens, traditional human scapegoats are exonerated.
Brave New World
Antiscience and neo-Luddite conspiracy theorists emphasize technology forecasting in their New World Order conpiracy theories. They speculate that the global power elite are modern Luciferians pursuing a transhumanist agenda to develop and use human enhancement technologies in order to become a “posthuman ruling caste”, while change accelerates toward a technological singularity — a theorized future point of discontinuity when events will accelerate at such a pace that normal unenhanced humans will be unable to predict or even understand the rapid changes occurring in the world around them. Conspiracy theorists fear the outcome will either be the emergence of a Brave New World-like dystopia – a “Brave New World Order” – or the extinction of the human species.
Advocates of transhumanism and singularitarianism, such as American sociologist James Hughes, counter that many influential members of the American Establishment are bioconservative and therefore “anti-transhumanist” as demonstrated by President Bush’s Council on Bioethics’s proposed international treaty prohibiting human cloning and germline engineering. Regardless, transhumanists and singularitarians claim to only support developing and making publicly available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities for the common good; as well as taking deliberate action to ensure that the Singularity — the moment when technological progress starts being driven by superintelligence — occurs in a way that is beneficial to humankind.
Just as there are several overlapping or conflicting theories among conspiracists about the nature of the New World Order, so are there several beliefs about how its architects and planners will implement it:
Gradualism
Conspiracy theorists generally speculate that the New World Order is being implemented gradually, citing the formation of the U.S. Federal Reserve System in 1913; the International Monetary Fund in 1944; the United Nations in 1945; the World Bank in 1945; the World Health Organization in 1948; the European Union and the euro currency in 1993; the World Trade Organization in 1998; and the African Union in 2002 as major milestones.
An increasingly popular conspiracy theory among American paleoconservatives is that the hypothetical North American Union and the amero currency, proposed by the Council on Foreign Relations and its counterparts in Mexico and Canada, will be the next implementation of the New World Order. The theory holds that a group of shadowy and mostly nameless international elites are planning to replace the federal government of the United States with a transnational government. Therefore, conspiracy theorists believe the borders between Mexico, Canada and the United States are in the process of being erased, covertly, by a group of globalists whose ultimate goal is to replace national governments in Washington, D.C., Ottawa and Mexico City with a European-style political union and a bloated E.U.-style bureaucracy.
Skeptics argue that the North American Union exists only as a proposal contained in one of a thousand academic and/or policy papers published each year that advocate all manner of idealistic but ultimately unrealistic approaches to social, economic and political problems. Most of these get passed around in their own circles and eventually filed away and forgotten by junior staffers in congressional offices. Some of these papers, however, become touchstones for the conspiracy-minded and form the basis of all kinds of unfounded xenophobic fears especially during times of economic anxiety.
In March 2009, as a result of the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation have pressed for urgent consideration of a super-sovereign reserve currency and a U.N. panel has proposed greatly expanding the I.M.F.’s Special Drawing Rights. Conspiracy theorists have misinterpreted the proposal as vindication of their beliefs about a global currency for the New World Order.
Judging that both national governments and global institutions have proven ineffective in addressing worldwide problems that go beyond the capacity of individual nation-states to solve, some political scientists, such as Mark C. Partrige, argue that regionalism will be the major force in the coming decades, pockets of power around regional centers: Western Europe around Brussels, the Western Hemisphere around Washington, D.C., East Asia around Beijing, and Eastern Europe around Moscow. As such, the E.U., the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the G-20 will likely become more influential as time progresses. The question then is not whether global governance is gradually emerging, but rather how will these regional powers interact with one another.
Coup d’état and martial law
American right-wing conspiracy theorists, especially those who joined the militia movement in the United States, speculate that the New World Order will be implemented by martial law after a dramatic coup d’état by a “secret team”, using black helicopters, in the U.S. and other nation-states to bring about a world government controlled by the United Nations and enforced by troops of foreign U.N. peacekeepers.
Before year 2000 some survivalists wrongly believed this process would be set in motion by the predicted Y2K problem causing societal collapse. Since many conspiracy theorists believe that the September 11 attacks were a false flag operation carried out by the United States intelligence community, as part of a strategy of tension to justify political repression at home and preemptive war abroad, some of them have become convinced that a more catastrophic terrorist incident will be responsible for triggering the process completing the transition to a police state.
These conspiracy theorists, who are all strong believers in a right to keep and bear arms, are extremely fearful that the passing of any gun control legislation will be later followed by the abolishment of personal gun ownership, and that the refugee camps of emergency management agencies such as F.E.M.A. will be used for the internment of suspected subversives, making little effort to distinguish true threats to the New World Order from ideological dissidents.
Skeptics argue that unfounded fears about an imminent or eventual gun ban, military coup, internment, or U.N. invasion and occupation are rooted in an extremist form of constitutionalism but also an apocalyptic millennialism which provides a basic narrative within the American political right, claiming that the idealized society (i.e. “Christian nation”, constitutional republic of “sovereign citizens”) is thwarted by subversive conspiracies of liberal secular humanists who want “Big Government” and globalists who plot on behalf of the New World Order.
Mass surveillance
Conspiracy theorists concerned about surveillance abuse believe that the New World Order is being implemented by the cult of intelligence at the core of the surveillance-industrial complex through mass surveillance and the use of Social Security numbers, the bar-coding of retail goods with Universal Product Code markings, and, most recently, R.F.I.D. tagging via microchip implants.

Original seal of the now defunct DARPA Information Awareness Office.Some consumer privacy advocates, such as Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre, who warn of how corporations and government supposedly plan to track every move of consumers and citizens with R.F.I.D. is the latest step toward a 1984-like surveillance state, have become Christian conspiracy theorists who associate spychips with the Number of the Beast mentioned in the Book of Revelation.
Boston University professor Richard Landes, who specializes in the history of apocalypticism and was co-founder and director of the Center for Millennial Studies at B.U., argues that new and emerging technologies often trigger alarmism among millenarians and even the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press in 1436 caused waves of apocalyptic thinking. The Y2K problem, bar codes and Social Security numbers all triggered end-time warnings which either proved to be false or simply were no longer taken seriously once the public became accustomed to these technologies. Skeptics argue that the privatization of surveillance and the rise of the surveillance-industrial complex in the United States does raise legitimate concerns about the erosion of privacy, but such concerns should be disentagled from secular paranoia about Big Brother or religious hysteria about the Antichrist.
The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying information technology to counter asymmetric threats to national security. Following public criticism that the development and deployment of these technologies could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by the United States Congress in 2003.[65][66] The second source of controversy involved IAO’s original logo, which depicted the “all-seeing” Eye of Providence atop of a pyramid looking down over the globe, accompanied by the Latin phrase scientia est potentia (knowledge is power). Although DARPA eventually removed the logo from its website, it left a lasting impression on privacy advocates. It also inflamed conspiracy theorists, who misinterpret the “eye and pyramid” as the Masonic symbol of the Illuminati, an 18th-century secret society they speculate continues to exist and is plotting on behalf of a New World Order.
Occultism
Conspiracy theorists of the Christian right believe there is an occult conspiracy, started by the first mystagogues of Gnosticism and perpetuated by their alleged esoteric successors, such as the Kabbalists, Cathars, Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, and, ultimately, the Illuminati, which seeks to subvert the Judeo-Christian foundations of the Western world and implement the New World Order through a New Age one-world religion that prepares the world to embrace the imperial cult of the Antichrist. More broadly, they speculate that conspirators who plot on behalf of a New World Order are directed by occult agencies of some sort: unknown superiors, spiritual hierarchies, demons, fallen angels or Lucifer. They believe that, like Nazi occultists, these conspirators use the power of occult sciences (numerology), symbols (Eye of Providence), rituals (Masonic degrees), monuments (National Mall), buildings (Manitoba Legislative Building and facilities (Denver International Airport) to advance their plot to rule the world.
For example, in June 1979, an unknown benefactor under the pseudonym “R. C. Christian” had a huge granite megalith built in the U.S. state of Georgia, which acts like a compass, calendar, and clock. A message comprising ten guides is inscribed on the occult structure in many languages to serve as instructions for survivors of a doomsday event to establish a more enlightened and sustainable civilization than the one which was destroyed. The “Georgia Guidestones” have subsequently become a spiritual and political Rorschach test onto which any number of ideas can be imposed. Some New Agers and neo-pagans revere it as a ley-line power nexus while a few conspiracy theorists are convinced that they are engraved with the New World Order’s anti-Christian “Ten Commandments”. Should the Guidestones survive for centuries as their creators intended, many more meanings could arise, equally unrelated to the designer’s original intention.
Skeptics argue that the demonization of Western occultism by conspiracy theorists is rooted in religious intolerance but also in the same moral panics that have fueled witch trials in Early Modern Europe, and satanic ritual abuse allegations in the United States.
Population control
Conspiracy theorists believe that the New World Order will also be implemented through the use of population control in order to more easily monitor and control the movement of individuals. The means range from stopping the growth of human societies through reproductive health and family planning programs, which condone abortion and liberal eugenics, or intentionally reducing the bulk of the world’s population through genocide by fomenting unnecessary wars, mass sterilization by tainting vaccines, and environmental terrorism-caused disasters by controlling the weather (HAARP, chemtrails), etc. The Codex Alimentarius, a collection of internationally recognized standards, codes of practice, guidelines and other recommendations relating to foods, food production and food safety, has also become the subject of conspiracy theories about population control.
Skeptics argue that fears of totalitarian population control can be traced back to the Red Scare in the United States during the late 1940s and 1950s, and to a lesser extent in the 1960s, when activists on the far right of American politics routinely opposed public health programs, notably water fluoridation, mass vaccination and mental health services, by asserting they were all part of a far-reaching plot to impose a socialist or communist regime. Their views were influenced by opposition to a number of major social and political changes that had happened in recent years: the growth of internationalism, particularly the United Nations and its programs; the introduction of social welfare provisions, particularly the various programs established by the New Deal; and government efforts to reduce perceived inequalities in the social structure of the United States.
Mind control
Conspiracy theorists accuse governments, corporations, and the mass media of being involved in the manufacturing of a national consensus and, paradoxically, a culture of fear due to the potential for increased social control that a mistrustful and mutually fearing population might offer to those in power. The worst fear of some conspiracy theorists is that conspirators are using mind control – a broad range of tactics able to subvert an individual’s control of his or her own thinking, behavior, emotions, or decisions – to implement the New World Order. These tactics are said to include everything from Manchurian candidate-style brainwashing of sleeper agents (Project MKULTRA, “Project Monarch”) to engineering psychological operations (water fluoridation, subliminal advertising, “Silent Sound Spread Spectrum”, MEDUSA) and parapsychological operations (Stargate Project) to influence the masses. The concept of wearing a tin foil hat for protection from such threats has become a popular stereotype and term of derision; the phrase serves as a byword for paranoia and is associated with conspiracy theorists.
Skeptics argue that the paranoia behind a conspiracy theorist’s obsession with mind control, population control, occultism, surveillance abuse, Big Business, Big Government, and globalization arises from a combination of two factors, when he or she: 1) holds strong individualist values and 2) lacks power. The first attribute refers to people who care deeply about an individual’s right to make their own choices and direct their own lives without interference or obligations to a larger system (like the government). But combine this with a sense of powerlessness in one’s own life, and one gets what some psychologists call “agency panic”, intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy to outside forces or regulators. When fervent individualists feel that they cannot exercise their independence, they experience a crisis and assume that larger forces are to blame for usurping this freedom.