​An Australian white supremacist carried out the deadliest mass shooting in New Zealand history this week when he murdered 49 people in two mosques in Christchurch. Australian media identified the attacker as personal trainer Brenton Tarrant, who broadcast his rampage live on social media, and police confirmed that he left behind a 74-page manifesto in which he wrote about his hatred of immigrants and non-white peoples, using the language of Neo-Nazism and white supremacy. He spoke of “white genocide,” a common theme among the far right, and one we have seen invoked repeatedly in the racist embrace of the Solutrean Hypothesis among white nationalists. 

​In the streaming era, TV shows come and go so quickly that there is barely time to binge-watch one before the next drops. Frankly, I don’t know where people find the time to watch 10 or 13 hours of TV in a period of just 24 to 48 hours. Because I don’t have that kind of time, it took me more than a couple of days to make my way through Netflix’s new supernatural comedy-drama, The Order, which touches on many of the themes and leitmotifs that I discuss here on this blog: Gothic horror, Hermetic secret societies, ritual magic, Nephilim, ancient books of wisdom, and the connections between all of these and questions of institutionalized power and privilege. These themes make what would otherwise be a pleasant but forgettable college-set teen drama into something a little more interesting.

​As I have been writing my book about the myths and legends associated with the Giza pyramids, I have run across a few facts I wasn’t previously aware of, or which were right in front of my face but which I didn’t fully understand. One of the more interesting I just discovered by accident this past week. It concerns a passage found in the historian al-Maqrizi’s Al-Khitat, which al-Maqrizi composed around 1400 CE. In the passage he relates what at first seems like a rather standard summary of another writer’s views about the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre:

​Generally speaking, if a book opens by thanking God for his help and assistance, it’s not a very good book. Somehow, God’s literary output has declined markedly in quality since his first few bestsellers. Really, after the Qur’an, it was all downhill, even when he is just consulting, as he did with this book. Our inspired volume under consideration today, Jesse James and the Lost Templar Treasure, begins with the unpromising revelation that the author and his mother and sister were disheartened when the James Farm and Museum refused to endorse their family legend that their alleged ancestor, the outlaw Jesse James, faked his death and lived out his life in Blevins, Texas as James Lafayette Courtney—the man who is Daniel J. Duke’s actual ancestor. Our author describes becoming progressively more strident in his beliefs because of the “many rude encounters” he had with experts who declined to embrace his family’s oral tradition that Courtney was James, traditions detailed in his mother Betty Dorsett Duke’s book, Jesse James Lived and Died in Texas, which Duke expects readers to presume to be both true and correct, mostly because the scholarly elites say no.

​In a new interview with Las Vegas TV journalist and UFO culture-warrior George Knapp, former U.S. Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) made claims that Russia and China are in a race with the United States to investigate and exploit UFO technology. Knapp frames this as a revelation in an article posted to his TV station’s website, but on closer inspection, it appears that Reid was (a) remarkably incurious about what he now professes to want to see exposed and (b) not really saying anything that hasn’t already been broadcast on Ancient Aliens for everyone in the world to see.

​In a month’s time, Graham Hancock will release his new book, America Before, which attempts to document what he claims to be evidence for a lost civilization that was destroyed when a comet collided with North America at the start of the Younger Dryas period about 12,900 years ago and triggered horrific wildfires that burned much of the continent. Skeptic magazine has commissioned me to review the book, and my review will be published when the book is released in the United States in April. But in the meantime, Hancock tweeted what he said was supporting evidence that his comet holocaust killed off the megafauna of Ice Age America:

The British Express tabloid recently offered up yet another in the endless list of places where the lost continent of Atlantis is alleged to be. Discussing as though it were new a March 16, 2018 appearance on Coast to Coast AM by Ryan Pitterson, an evangelical Christian Nephilim theorist, the Express quoted Pitterson as saying that Atlantis was located in the Holy Land and that its people were identical with the antediluvian giants fathered by the Sons of God in the sixth chapter of Genesis.