Scott and Janet Wolter Accuse Academics of Stockholm Syndrome, Say Disney Movies Are Goddess Allegories

Mexican authorities are investigating after a group of self-described Jehovah’s Witnesses toppled ancient altars and broke stone carvings in Mayonihka sacred to the Otomi Indians.  While Jehovah’s Witnesses leadership denies that the vandals belonged to their faith, the vandals allegedly confessed that they had damaged the altars because God forbade idol worship.

Earlier this week our favorite conspiracy theorists, Scott and Janet Wolter, appeared on The Secret Teachings radio show to discuss—what else?—the Kensington Rune Stone, which is for them a monomaniacal obsession akin to Ahab’s quest for the white whale. They then went on to rehash material from America Unearthed and to summarize the book Janet published last year with Alan Butler.
 
I must confess that I cannot quite understand the purpose of rehashing the same material over and over again across every fringe radio show. Surely, after more than five years of media appearances across every conceivable fringe podcast, radio show, and cable program, Wolter’s fan base is now familiar with the outlines of his superhero origin story. In many cases, he tells the same story on the same radio show more than once. It’s boring, honestly, if you listen to more than one of these appearances.
 
In the first part of the Wolters’ two-hour appearance Sunday night, Scott Wolter rehearsed his Kensington Rune Stone origin story and his paranoia that “academics” are conspiring to use a three-pronged attack against him: attacking his competence, attacking his lack of academic engagement, and attacking his personality. He then alleges—falsely, so far as I know—that his research has appeared in “peer-reviewed journals” that he declines to name. “If your precious peer review in academic journals is so wonderful, how did they get it so wrong in the first place that we have to come in and clean up the mess?” he asks, referring to his belief that he has correctly dated the Kensington Rune Stone. “You end up with circular arguments with these people. […] They won’t accept anything unless it supports the opinion they want to believe.” The show’s host calls it “psychological Stockholm syndrome” whereby academia can’t see beyond their own paradigms. “I kind of like the analogy of Stockholm syndrome,” Wolter said. “I think I’m going to use that.”
 
Janet Wolter chimes in and says that after writing her book accusing the Grange of masterminding a plot to dominate the world in pursuit of goddess worship, she and Scott Wolter have joined their local Grange and are having a lot of fun with “like-minded individuals.” Scott said that he most enjoys the fact that the Grange empowers women, unlike the Masonic Lodge which he had joined last year. Scott says that despite being an active member of the Grange and Masonry, he remains an “objective observer” of these two groups and what he has previously identified as their secret plots to rule the world.
 
Scott Wolter believes that Masonry has helped him to achieve esoteric knowledge that he would not otherwise have learned, while Janet Wolter says that the Grange helps to improve family life. I don’t think that there is much doubt that the two cannot separate themselves from their “research” and therefore have an emotional connection to these groups’ ideals that they are raising to the level of world-historical. In other words, they want to believe because these groups happen to align, to a greater or lesser degree, with their own hippy-dippy feminist liberalism. “If you understand the principles of Freemasonry,” Scott Wolter says, “these are the people you’d want making decisions.” He adds that more Freemasons should be put in government to break gridlock, and the says that Donald Trump would never have been a candidate if Freemasons had more power in the Republican Party.
 
Following this, Janet Wolter gives a summary of many of her claims about Washington, D.C. and the sexual symbolism she believes occurs in and around the Washington Monument. The two Wolters explain that they believe that the shadows cast by various monuments are permeated with symbolism pointing toward the future direction of America, and they add that the two of them and British fringe writer Alan Butler have not found all of the secret “shadow play” yet.
 
Janet Wolter says that there is a secret shadow alignment to Constitution Day, a September 17 holiday created in 2004. According to her, the Founding Fathers signed the Constitution on that day in 1787 in honor of the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter because “that week” is the time that the Mysteries were celebrated in Greece. This is debatable. The Lesser Mysteries were celebrated in the late winter or early spring, while the Greater Mysteries occurred on the 14th or 15th of the Attic month of Boedromion. Since that month stretched from mid-September to mid-October, this would put the festival closer to October 1. Thus, there is nothing to suggest a connection to the signing of the Constitution in 1787 or the creation of Constitution Day in 2004.
 
Scott Wolter then, unprompted, brings up Pirate Treasure of the Knights Templar in order to grouse about those who complained that the show described him as a “historian.” “What is a historian?” Wolter asks. “Someone who reads about history, right, about certain places? If you’re fortunate enough to go to those places and immerse yourself in the history and see it, read about it—what else do you do?” I mean, seriously? Wolter doesn’t know what historians do? Has he no familiarity with historiography, archival research, critical analysis of sources? Of course not. It’s just reading books and repeating what you’ve read. No wonder he thinks it’s so easy.
 
Scott Wolter reviews some of the “investigations” he did on America Unearthed, including the New York City obelisks and the Tucson Lead Artifacts, and talks more about the making of that show, apparently because his entire fringe history career has collapsed into an endless recycling of that 2012-2015 series. At some point in the near future his audience will have forgotten about the show, and he won’t be able to make hay out of revisiting the series over and over again. At any rate, Wolter has learned nothing since he “investigated” the Tucson Lead Artifacts. He maintains that they are genuinely medieval, and he now asserts that the artifacts contain both Masonic and “Venus Family” symbolism—allegedly around a thousand years before the founding of Freemasonry. He further disputes that the artifact depicting what seems to be a diplodocus could be a fake showing a dinosaur because the image had forked tongue and dinosaurs did not have forked tongues. Proving he has learned nothing, he remains ignorant of the fact I pointed out years ago that at the time the artifacts were hoaxed popular depictions of dinosaurs sometimes showed forked tongues.
 
Wolter adds that he has learned from the Masons that the Bible is full of Masonic symbolism and allegory. For some reason they end up talking about Star Trek and celebrating the show’s progressive racial and sexual politics, which he calls “beautiful.” Wolter says that Star Trek is a Masonic allegory, and that Disney films, too, are Masonic. Janet Wolter claims that Disney princesses are really Masonic goddesses, and the two Wolters and the host claim that Cinderella is really a retelling of Isis and Osiris. This isn’t a standard interpretation, but can be found in extreme feminist tracts and in fringe history, where pretty much every female character is made into either Isis or Mary Magdalene, who are identified with each other as well. Mainstream scholars believe that the folktale’s earliest known version is the story of Rhodopis, a Greek slave-girl who marries the king of Egypt after he went searching for the owner of a particular shoe, a story first recorded by Strabo (17.33) in the first century BCE, and repeated in Aelian’s Various Histories (13.33) in the third century CE. Because Rhodopius was a courtesan—i.e., a whore—I imagine there is a tendency for fringe types to identify her with the Magdalene, traditionally labeled a whore, and thus with Isis, whom feminist writers have tried to equate with the Magdalene due to the belief that the Magdalene represents some sort of ancient goddess figure.