Alex Jones and L. A. Marzulli Freak Out Over Hidden Messages in the Super Bowl Halftime Show2/8/2017 Since the advent of the Trump Administration, it’s like the craziness at the center of Washington has sucked all of the air out of the room and made it harder to find weird things that aren’t connected to politics. Fringe historians declared their political allegiances months ago, with characters like L. A. Marzulli, David Wilcock, and J. Hutton Pulitzer endorsing Donald Trump and others like Giorgio Tsoukalos and Scott Wolter risking their aggrieved audiences by opposing the House of Orange. Consequently, it was no surprise that again this year conservative extremists blasted the Super Bowl halftime show for promoting occultism, which seems to be conservative code for liberalism.
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A Christian radical who made his career from fomenting anti-Islamic sentiment is now openly attacking other lunatic Christians’ conspiracy theories because they aren’t anti-Islamic enough. Joel Richardson is the author of a number of Islamophobic books like Islamic Antichrist and is a frequent contributor to World Net Daily, a conservative news and opinion of site of dubious credibility. He is the director of a documentary from the site’s film division called End Times Eyewitness. An article posted on WND on Sunday explains Richardson’s new claims, which directly challenge a different Antichrist conspiracy theory, one that directly contradicts Richardson’s own.
From the world of alternative facts, a fake news story going viral on social media claims Giorgio Tsoukalos of Ancient Aliens appeared on L. A. Tonight, a local Los Angeles talk show, and alleged that space aliens used a brainwashing device that deploys sound waves to reprogram human brains in order to elect Donald Trump president. The program doesn’t exist, the screenshots of his appearance are actually from his guest spot on a 2011 episode of The Mo’Nique Show (with Mo’Nique misidentified as “Latifa Johnson”), and Tsoukalos had to take to Twitter on Saturday to deny that he claimed an alien space ray reprograms voters’ minds with pro-Trump propaganda.
If only every intersection between Trump and fringe history were so humorous. When I was researching the way Nephilim theorists have decided to embrace the Book of Enoch, I looked into some of the ancient attitudes toward the non-canonical text. It’s rather a complex story, but the general trend is that before 1 CE, many Jews embraced the myth of fallen angels having relations with human women to spawn giants, but over time, attitudes changed and the new theology that the “Sons of God” mentioned in Genesis 6 were actually the human descendants of Seth took hold. Christians, however, were divided between those who favored the old view and those that preferred the new. The Church Fathers struggled with this for centuries, and you can see the differing opinions in their various writings.
Newsweek has a fascinating piece about the people who believe that there is a lost Viking or Spanish ship in the deserts of California, somewhere between Coachella and Baja. It’s a modern myth, one born of some tall tales spun in the 1800s and especially after the 1930s, but it is a story that continues to fascinate believers, often treasure hunters, down the present. The most popular version of the story, from 1939, is a secondhand account of a man who claimed to see a stereotyped Viking vessel in the desert, complete with round shields attached to the sides, just like in the picture books. The present Newsweek article takes the form of a profile of the adventures of former mattress salesman John Grasson, a man born in 1957 and currently living on disability, who is both a treasure hunter and a believer in the UFO crash at Roswell.
It seems that Simcha Jacobovici’s hidden agenda to Judaize Atlantis reached its intended audience. Since his documentary claiming that Atlantis was the Biblical city of Tarshish and that Atlantis was the source of Judaism aired on the National Geographic Channel on Sunday, the story has been picked up by conservative and evangelical publications such as World Net Daily and Breaking Israel News. From there, it has spread across the conservative social media landscape. I’ve seen dozens of Facebook posting about how Atlantis is “really” Jewish, or how Atlantis is “linked” to the Jewish Temple and thus to Christian Zionism and the Second Coming. (In short: The subtext is that Atlantis, being non-Arab, justifies the existence of Israel as a Westernized, non-Arab state by predating Palestinian claims by thousands of years.) Given that Nat Geo is a division of 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox News, it’s hard to put down to coincidence a subliminal thread of conservative propaganda running through the documentary, particularly when the presumed audience for the program quickly picked up exactly the message they were meant to see.
Between “fake news” and “alternative facts” and gag orders on scientists, it feels a bit like we’re watching the lights go out one by one in the intellectual world. I read through the news coverage of Sunday’s National Geographic Channel documentary Atlantis Rising, and it was astonishing how little anyone cared about the fake experts, ethical problems, and misleading claims. I couldn’t find a single critical review. Have we really become so inured to fakery that there is no outrage left to spare when a respected name like National Geographic openly engages in it? A supine media, beholden to celebrity, plays along, and as long as the fake experts are out-and-out lunatics like on the History Channel, everyone smiles and nods and pretends it’s OK as long as James Cameron gives his multimillion-dollar seal of approval. To be fair, when NatGeo did the same thing back in 2011, the only reason there was critical uproar is because the archaeologists seen in the film at alleged to the media that Richard Freund had hijacked their findings. By contrast, when NBC aired ancient astronaut documentaries in the 1970s, there was outrage in newspapers, magazines, and even academic journals. Today, we simply expect that everything on TV is a lie that the rubes will believe and the sophisticates will ignore.
In the continuing chronicle of celebrities who love ancient astronaut theories, today’s entry comes from Rob Lowe. He told Radio Times that the show is his guilty pleasure, along with other trashy supernatural reality shows: “My guilty pleasures are shows like Ancient Aliens, Finding Bigfoot and America’s Most Haunted.” I hope he likes laughing at them rather than believing in them.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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