In Radio Interview, Scott Wolter Returns to Familiar Themes, Promises New Claims and Evidence at Some Future Date

​Recently, former television personality Scott Wolter appeared on the Earth Ancients radio show to discuss the Knights Templar in North America, and the interview started off about as badly as possible when the host, Cliff Dunning, asked Wolter to describe the “earliest” European arrival in the New World, which established that our host is basically trolling for white pride. This becomes clearer when Dunning returns to the question at the end and rephrases “European” into “pre-Native,” suggesting that he sees the first Americans as white. To his credit, Wolter redirected the question to Native American oral traditions, though these are rather fantastical claims about Native American “world elders” who claim to meet with representatives from every continent in the world every eight years, and have for tens of thousands of years. I need not note that there is no evidence of global confabs in Ice Age America—where communication across the continent was already a challenge, let alone globally—but perhaps it is an imaginary version of the more recent “World Elders Forum” of the past few years that brings together indigenous leaders from around the world.

​A rather lengthy section of the interview rehearses the story of the Kensington Runestone yet again, and the only really interesting part of that discussion is the fact that Wolter is now invoking fringe history speculator Robert Schoch, a geologist, as a touchstone for the “scientific method” he employs. The name-check is interesting because Wolter has taken to citing him more frequently in recent years because of his desire to fold the fiction that the Sphinx is antediluvian into his own revisionist history of the world.
 
After this, Wolter expands on an old claim by creating a demonstrably false one. He now asserts that following the suppression of the Templar order, there was “an organized immigration, if you will, quietly by the Templars” through which hundreds or even thousands of the former knights emigrated to the future United States. “It didn’t start after the put down. It started before the putdown.” This is prima facie false since there are decent records of the fates of many of the Knights Templar, and so far as European records allow for reconstruction of their lives, there are not hundreds or thousands of missing men. Wolter anticipates this critique, retorting that “You don’t have any evidence that it didn’t happen, so we’re even, aren’t we? There’s this thing called the Kensington Rune Stone. There’s this thing called the Newport Tower. [...] So we do have evidence.” Yes, he actually said this. Let’s just make sure we’re clear: We know the names of many of the men who were Knights Templar, and they left traces in the legal and ecclesiastical documents of Europe. Wolter would need to find hundreds of missing men.
 
Having gotten onto a tear about how the public and scholars “don’t understand” the hidden history of the world, Wolter offers that the elites leaders of the Templars were goddess-worshipers, and that they descended in direct “bloodline” relations from the royal family represented by Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Since Wolter does not establish a particular principle of descent—primogeniture? matriarchal descent? what?—it becomes impossible to take the claim seriously. It is often said that every European man is descended from Charlemagne along some branch of the family, and Charlemagne lived only 1,200 years ago. After the 1,300 years between Jesus and the end of the Templars, it would be similarly impossible for claims of ancestry to have any more than fictive meaning unless there is a specific and documented principle of descent and evidence that it was followed. I gather that he thinks that the Jesus bloodline were, in the manner of Preacher, incestuous but imagine this: Depending on the rule of descent they recognized, a single infidelity in those 1,300 years could negate all the efforts the conspiracy undertook. It happened to the Romanovs, in all likelihood, and there have been rumors about other royal houses. What are the chances that the Jesus bloodline, should such a thing even have existed, remained fanatically pure for 1,300 years or more? 
 
Wolter also slips into New Age hippie mode, rhapsodizing about goddess worship and repeating a Noble Savage style claim that Native Americans lived in perfect harmony with nature: “Can you name another culture around the globe that has the ability to live in harmony with their environment better than Native Americans?” The archaeological record does not support the idea that Native peoples had basically no impact on the environment.
 
Wolter claims that the Templars simply told no one about their American colony until long after their intermarriage with Native people caused them all to assimilate and disappear from the historical record. That seems wrong to me, since when the Norse established Vinland, news quickly leaked out and spread to the Danes, who leaked it to the guy who leaked it to Adam of Bremen, who wrote about it. How, pray tell, did a continental organization, shipping thousands of men across the ocean, keep all of their friends and family from ever breathing a word about their relatives’ disappearance?
 
Beyond this, it’s clear that Wolter is possessed of a sloganeering form of American nationalism, for he attributes this behavior to the Templars’ hatred of the “tyranny and oppression of the monarchs of Europe, right?” Wrong. There is no suggestion in Templar documents that they opposed European monarchy, and in the Levant they served to defend and protect the Latin Kingdom established by European aristocrats. Similar to the anti-Catholic Americans of the nineteenth century, Wolter claims that the Templars hated the Church that they spent centuries serving, and he alleges that they were advocates of freedom of religion. Wolter explicitly links both propositions to the founding of the United States, which he falsely sees as the only place where anti-monarchical and anti-clerical beliefs flourished. Since he is unfamiliar with European history, he has no recognition of the similar sentiments that drove the Protestant Reformation, the English Civil War, and numerous other uprisings and convulsions before the establishment of the United States, and which served as precedent and model for the Founders of America, more so than any imaginary goddess cult of social democrats.
 
Wolter suggests that academics and government officials are covering up the truth about Templar colonies in America for fear that the Templars would be able to claim America based on the imaginary land claim he pretends the Kensington Runestone to be.
 
In testament to how little Wolter has actually done in the six years since America Unearthed debuted, Dunning directs the interview back to the pilot episode of that show, and Wolter rehearses its plot and his claims from the show for what must be the hundredth time. He spices it up a bit with knee-jerk spasms of outrage against “academics” whom he views as a dogmatic keepers of a massive lie. Dunning, who confessed to having no knowledge of early American history and no knowledge of Christian dogma, nevertheless feels comfortable asserting that academics have both all wrong. Wolter adds that he believes that the World Elders made copies of all the documents in the Library of Alexandria and spirited them off to secret repositories. But, he added, he does not want to “get into it.” Of course he doesn’t want to prove his claims by providing these documents.
 
Wolter also explains his descent into numerology, repeating earlier claims about Masonic secret numbers encoded in the Kensington Runestone but now tying them to New Age mysticism circulating in feminist web discussions about the number 13 belonging to the goddess and 14 symbolizing resurrection, and he declares that Jesus is nothing more than a Christianized Osiris—a claim derived from, but more extreme than, the frequently discussed parallels between the Egyptian and Christian resurrection stories.
 
As the interview comes to a close, Wolter says that the number 8 is also a goddess number, and therefore the eight-sided Dome of the Rock and the round Newport Tower (the Old Windmill) are both connected through secret goddess worship. He alleges that the Templars copied Temple Mount architecture for the Newport Tower (actually built as a windmill in colonial times—though Wolter denies this, claiming that it is structurally unfit for that purpose). Yet the Dome is an octagon and the Tower is circular. He also wrongly feels that the five-pointed stars on the U.S. flag derive from the apparent path of Venus over its eight-year cycle. The actual reason is more prosaic: The Flag Act of 1777 failed to specify the number of points on the stars, and early flag makers used five-pointed stars because English heraldry—which was part of the common Anglo-French culture of the colonial era—used five pointed stars, while Germanic heraldry used six-pointed stars. It was just what was familiar and customary.
 
Wolter finished the interview by urging young adults to “demand” that their professors allow them to pursue conspiracy theories about the peopling of the Americas, and he claimed, rather grandly, that young people will overturn the conclusions of historians and archaeologists because of their belief in alternative history. Wolter claims that he has new information at the ready but “can’t” talk about it, by which he means that he won’t talk about it until someone pays him to do so. “Buckle up baby because the real fun is soon to begin,” he promised, ominously.