Plagues

There’s a lot of conspiracy theories out there these days. There is a great deal of panicked anger and paranoid denunciation, pissy, childish taunts, and disillusioned disappointment with the state of reality. And all of this fuels into the narrative, the story of our lives, reflected back to us from the shiny edge our refrigerators, safely locked behind closed doors. watching the world fall apart on TV.

Fighting against all this misery is a new sort of communion–a new religion to those so much devoted to mythologize this moment into the voice of an unknowable god speaking to them. Some may call it evangelism or radical Islam; there might be a few Jesus freaks. and even several truly conspiratorial agencies, white nationalists and others, with their curiously intricate White Power religion, ominously titled Christian Identity. Before we move on to more relevant subjects, and the secular faiths that have spread all over the world like a newfangled virus, we should probably pause for a moment to hear something about just how deep some of these fundamentalists take their beliefs, and to what ends.

So, Christian Identity: It is an exclusively American religion. It’s membership is under 50,000. This is what they look like:

Now the faith is a strange–surprisingly very well written–variation on the relevant parts of the bible they use to excuse their excesses. Even the holy words get revised, transformed into a sort of horror story, where the sense of danger so overwhelms hope for redemption, that it could only end with a flaming, apocalyptic war.

In cheap summary, because I am already tired of promoting this shit (https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22897855165&searchurl=an%3Dcharles%2Bcarroll%26sortby%3D17%26tn%3Dthe%2Bnegro%2Ba%2Bbeast&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title1–this book is titled The Negro a Beast, by some monster named Charles Carroll written sometime around 1900. It’s subtitle is: “In the Image of God, the reasoner of the age, the revelator of the century! The Bible as it is! The negro and his relation to the human family! The negro not the son of Ham.” Can you imagine the torture of reading this? If you are brave enough, (I was not) there is the link.), let us turn to the holy warrior shrieks of Minister Wesley Swift, the founder and high priest of the Church of Jesus Christ, Christian:

Now; in the Cabala before the Jews twisted it all up, and reincarnated their Moses’s through the generations, they said that Moses was a Serpent Killer, and stepped upon the Snake. This was a treading upon the snake..an old tradition given by Adam so that the seed of Adam would bruise the Serpents head. The Dragon which is the Incarnation of all Satanic power, and all Satanic forces in the earth was thus always revealed. What Moses did then was to combat these invisible forces, some of them probably very visible as speckled birds within their midst. The Children of Israel responded and that symbolism was hid in that Ancient way. You will note another period when there was another period attached to this symbolism even though your race is not given credit for it. But it was in the days of Daniel when he had been raised up but he spoke in the days of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazer, when Darius took over and old Babylon was broken down and the Mede and Persian Empire was set up, and you will remember that the same pagan Priests sneaked back in to rule over the religion of the Empire. You say:…what was this religion? It was probably a development of all pagan evil which Satan could gather from the corners of the earth. This mystery evil was elevated to a high degree in that day, and it was in this period when Darius who was also a Persian (Aryan) but he fell for this same Hokus Pokus and he said to Daniel:..You are a wise man, recognizing that there was no man wiser than Daniel and that he served the Eternal YAHWEH (God)..then he said to Daniel:..Why don’t you also serve Baal? What is the matter with Baal, don’t you know that he is also a great god? What is the matter with you, don’t you know that there are many gods? But Daniel said:..Baal is no god, he is just made of Plaster of Paris and he is no god. Darius said:..but he must be a god for he eats the food I put out for him each night. The Priests have told me that he is a great god, and I know that he eats the food that I put out each night. Daniel said:..that is quite an idea..if he eats the food then you can let those Priests of Baal slay me. But if he does not eat the food then lets slay the Priests of Baal. I think that was a good idea. The Priests of Baal went for the idea and the told the King to have his cook make up all of the finest dishes that they knew how and bring on the best wine. And they would lock up the temple and the King would put his seal on the lock. Thus in that hour..all these evil Kites who were deceiving the people with all their pagan religions, and occult practices tried first a simple fraud..this was an idol set up in the midst of the Temple. Though they had a corner on this affair. The King had the food prepared and the wine was brought and then Daniel went into the Temple and sprinkled some ashes all around on the floor, and then the King and Daniel shut the door and sealed it. The next morning the King called Daniel and said:..lets go down to the Temple and see if Baal ate any of the food. They entered the Temple and all the food was gone, all the dishes were clean..all the food had been eaten, and the King said ..see, I told you so. But Daniel was looking at the floor and he said:..Baal sure had a lot of funny sized shoes, little feet, big feet, larger feet, tracks were all over the place. Daniel said:..if Baal came down to eat this then these are his footprints. All over the Temple were footprints of the Priests of Baal, their wives, their children, they were all over the place where Daniel had sprinkled the ashes. So they followed the tracks and found that there was a trap door in the idol and this led out to the houses of the Baal Priests. So Darius realized that this was no god, and even these Priests that they met in a physical world had to contend with physical reality..they were feasting on the generosity of Darius the King. The King was now ready to destroy the idol and also the Priests, but they said:..now wait just a moment, maybe this idol is no god, but what about the Dragon that we have? He is a god and we will prove it. Daniel said:..’Bring him forth’. And they brought out a Dragon..he was like a monster Petradactyle of Ancient days, and he was very much alive..and they said:..now he eats food right in front of you..so he is a god. I suppose they could have brought out any type of big animal and said he is a god because he eats food. Therefore proving he was not a god rested on someone else. So Daniel the Prophet of LIGHT said:..well, if he is immortal then he is a god, but is he Immortal? If he is a god then he can eat anything for nothing will hurt him. And the Priests said:..oh, yes he is a god and he can eat anything, nothing can hurt him. So Daniel said:..O.K. lets try it. Daniel then prepared a little pitch, a little unslaked lime, and put pieces of fat in it..you what that means? He mixed up carbide. A little fat a little pitch around it to hold it together. The Dragon gobbled it down, the flame sizzled and the Dragon exploded with a bang! And DANIEL WAS A DRAGON KILLER! Darius then seeing the value of this situation cut the heads off of these Kike Priests. We think that was a good idea, I wish we could scatter a few ashes around Washington D.C. and track where they go to when they are through for the day. If we were to do this it might embarrass the President and a few others. For you would find Dragon tracks all over trying to effect your nation, trying to upset your faith.

. . . Anyway, most of these conspiracy communities can only dream of sometime graduating into a cult like that one. Most of them are tarnished by various religious and partisan political viewpoints, turning the preacher into just another angry voice on twitter, spitting out their mean-spirited doubt, infecting everyone it touches. The back and forth turns rat-tat-tat and then somebody gets really angry. They are hurt. Offended. They want their opposition to pay! And there must be a reason–there must! Something is out to get me, or screw me over, or rob from me, or force some new law down my throat to keep me from doing whatever I want! Someone must be behind this, someone. Who? Let us dedicate our search through the words of 15 minutes worth of online debating. Yes, who is trying to make me victim of their evil plot?

The coronavirus is both being taken too seriously, and not being taken seriously enough. You can see all these arguments against those swallowed by uncertainty and terror, those “what is the matter with this person,” remarks that are made over and over again the more people actually freak out. And people are freaking out, hording what they suddenly believe are necessities, racing through stores like someone running from hungry space men, seeing how much they can have before there is no room left in the hermetically sealed chamber they’ve turned into their homes.

And yet some people, they write it off as conspiracy–“a man-made,” or “engineered” distraction that is really about “interfering with elections–

–or some devious plot to control free will, complete with curious prophetic references in a mediocre and mostly forgotten horror book from 1981 by second-tier bestselling author Dean Koontz (at the time using the pseudonym Leigh Nichols) called The Eyes of Darkness (https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=82232904&searchurl=kn%3Dthe%2Beyes%2Bof%2Bdarkness%2Bdean%2Bkoontz%2B1981%26sortby%3D17&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title1)

or even a sinister, “Deep State” styled disruption of the laws that bind us, sneaking unknown legislation into the Constitutional code book, thereby changing the laws for everyone, everywhere. That’s what those government stooges do, ya know? They manipulate all of us and before we know it there won’t be no more elections and we’ll always be livin’ under a “state of National Emergencies.” Elections will be cancelled and, to make it seem real, let’s cancel basketball and baseball games too. Let’s cancel concerts and Broadway shows and keep the kids home from school. Let’s stop the learning about anything other than this “made-up” bug, and then point the finger at who’s really responsible and then we’ll get to–

All of this is true, every word, about the sort of people that rampage around, following whatever truth strikes their fancy. And they want to spread it around, top off all our notions of truth until nothing is real, we can only doubt, and we shut the door on all those viruses fighting to get in and get us.