The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  Not every Bircher adopted Griffin’s ambivalence. The group’s founder, Robert Welch, was certain that the modern Master Conspiracy could be traced back to the Bavarian Illuminati. The organization was institutionally opposed, however, to the idea that the conspiracy was a Jewish plot.41 The society’s most popular conspiracy book—Gary Allen and Larry Abraham’s None Dare Call It Conspiracy (1971)—declared that “it is unreasonable and immoral to blame all Jews for the crimes of the Rothschilds as it is to hold all Baptists accountable for the crimes of the Rockefellers.”42 It also included a blurb on the back cover from Barney Finkel, the president of an organization called the Jewish Right, declaring that “people of the Jewish faith have been the number one historical victims of the Communist Conspiracy.” Rabbi Marvin S. Antelman went a step beyond that in To Eliminate the Opiate (1974), giving the Illuminati a starring role in “a conspiracy . . . to undermine Judaism.”43 (Jew-baiters did join the John Birch Society, but the group made an effort to keep them out. The most prominent anti-Semite in sixties Birch circles, Revilo Oliver, was expelled for his views, at which point he moved to a farther-right group called the Liberty Lobby.)

  Anti-Illuminati messages weren’t limited to the printed page. Griffin’s comments about Weishaupt, for instance, appeared in The Capitalist Conspiracy, a filmstrip suitable for showing at a Birch Society meeting or similar venue. And in the late 1960s, an actor, director, screenwriter, and pro-blacklist activist named Myron Coureval Fagan recorded a series of LPs called The Illuminati and the Council on Foreign Relations. The records, which drew heavily on Carr’s worldview, were produced by a young actor, nightclub entertainer, and music producer and promoter named Anthony J. Hilder, who a few years before had been recording surf rock records but had been drawn into politics by the Goldwater campaign and now was devoted to exposing evil cabals. (Hilder would soon be a target as well as a popularizer of conspiracy theories. He had been handing out literature at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Robert Kennedy was assassinated there, and by his account he had stood at one point just a few feet from the shooter, Sirhan Sirhan. Since then, various conspiracists have attempted to implicate Hilder in the assassination.)44

  Outside the populist Right, you were more likely to hear the Illuminati invoked as a foolish fear that had foreshadowed anticommunism than as the hidden hand behind communism itself. When the leftist New Masses mentioned the secret society in 1940, it did so to mock the “lurid accounts” of the Federalists who had seen the Illuminati as a “dread Comintern”—and, by extension, to mock the opponents of the actual Comintern.45 The Communist screenwriter John Howard Lawson struck the same note in 1947: “Today the old propaganda machine is again grounding out its lies. The imbecilities of the Illuminati campaign are repeated in our press and on the radio.”46 He meant the Illuminati campaign of the 1790s, not the anti-Illuminati voices of his day.

  But within the populist Right, the Illuminati were becoming stock demons. By the time Todd surfaced in Phoenix in 1972, he could draw on any number of sources as he shaped his story. The Council of 13 and Council of 33 came from Carr’s books, for example, and one of the comic books Todd made with Jack Chick cited Lady Queenborough. Hicks and Lewis report that Todd listened closely to the Fagan/Hilder records and that Todd’s then wife, Sharon, researched the Illuminati at the local library. He also lifted details from The Satan Seller by Mike Warnke, a book and author we’ll discuss shortly.

  Even when Todd wasn’t consciously borrowing material from earlier conspiracy theorists, his stories echoed the country’s established conspiracy mythos. His vision of Charles Manson’s army sacking the United States carries more than a faint trace of the legend of Murrell’s rebellion or of Jedidiah Morse’s warnings that the Illuminati intended to invade the South with an army of Haitians, inciting slave rebellions as they crossed the countryside. Todd’s Illuminati were based outside the country, had infiltrated the government, were preparing a wave of riots, and had undetected agents in almost every institution of ordinary American life. They were simultaneously an Enemy Outside, Above, Below, and Within: a master narrative that could absorb virtually any paranoid story that Todd encountered.

  If the 1960s and ’70s were a fruitful time for talking to conservative Christians about the Illuminati, they were even more propitious for predicting the collapse of civilization. There was a general cultural fear of an approaching cataclysm, an anxiety circulating in secular as well as religious circles. The environmentalists of the era, for example, were often prone to mistaking ecological problems for imminent planetary doom. (In 1969, Ramparts magazine warned on its cover that the oceans could be dead in just a decade.)47 In Christian America, interest in the end-times was surging. The biggest beneficiary of that interest was Hal Lindsey, the coauthor with Carole Carlsson of the immensely popular The Late Great Planet Earth (1970). Lindsey, whose ideas spread rapidly through both the Jesus Movement and the nascent religious Right, interpreted world events through the lens of biblical prophecy and argued that Armageddon was nigh.

  This was no John Todd– or Mae Brussell–level phenomenon. The book has sold more than 35 million copies, and no less than Orson Welles hosted a film based on it in 1979. Welles didn’t believe the Late Great Planet Earth scenario any more than he believed Martians had been invading in 1938: He was doing the project for a paycheck, a way to raise the funds he needed to make his own movies. The author of the film’s press kit later claimed that the documentary had been tongue-in-cheek and that his PR materials had been “equally facetious.”48 But Welles’s narration in The Late Great Planet Earth, unlike his “War of the Worlds,” included no announcement that everything was fiction; the movie was made for an audience of potential believers. Meanwhile, Lindsey and Carlsson kept cranking out sequels: Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth in 1972, There’s a New World Coming in 1973, and so on. Nor were they the only figures with their eyes on Armageddon. Even as John Todd was denouncing Chuck Smith as an agent of the Illuminati, for instance, Smith in turn expected the apocalypse to arrive by 1981, just a year after the takeover forecast by Todd.49

  Even if you weren’t anticipating the Antichrist’s arrival, you might still be alert to the Devil’s influence on the country’s culture and the marketplace. The idea that Satanic symbols were concealed in the Denny’s and Sunoco logos may not have spread beyond the John Todd audience, but around 1980 a rumor took off that Procter & Gamble had hidden a “666” in its logo, a notion that led to boycotts, vandalism, and, finally, the adoption of a new logo in 1985. The larger culture saw a renewed interest in Hidden Persuaders–style subliminal advertising, a fascination fueled by Wilson Bryan Key’s best-selling books on the subject. Key was controversial, but his basic argument was endorsed by some of the country’s most mainstream institutions.50 (I first encountered Key’s ideas in a public elementary school in the early eighties, when my class was assigned to look for concealed come-ons in magazine ads.) The Procter & Gamble crusade was surely influenced by these ideas.

  Key believed that messages were hidden not just in ads but in rock records. He endorsed the idea that the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” was a song about drugs, a notion previously advanced by Gary Allen of the John Birch Society; and he declared that Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water” was “a drug user’s guide to withdrawal into a syringe-injected hallucinatory drug experience—most probably heroin.”51 Such songs were part of a general program of “cultural conditioning for addiction,” he explained.52

  But the most popular rumor about subliminal messages in music sounded more like Todd than Key. When played backward, the story went, many of the most popular rock records revealed references to Satan. This tale wasn’t limited to the conservative church crowd. In 1982, the Minnesota DJ Chris Edmonds attracted attention by playing “backmasked” clips on the radio and telling his listeners what hidden phrases they were allegedly hearing.

  Some pop acts had inserted backward Easter eggs into records, though they tended
to be nonsensical or comic rather than Satanic. The Electric Light Orchestra’s “Fire on High,” for example, parodied the panic with the backward message “The music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back, turn back, turn back, turn back.” More often, the supposed messages were the product of suggestible minds finding patterns in noise. If you listen to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” backward without being told what to expect, you’ll probably hear nothing but strange sounds. If you listen after being informed that there’s a Satanic message in there, on the other hand, you might pick up the phrase “sweet Satan.” And if you’re watching the allegedly encoded words projected on a lecturer’s screen while the reversed music plays, you might hear not just “sweet Satan” but a spooky word salad: “So here’s to my sweet Satan. The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan. He will give those with him 666. There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer. Sad Satan.”53

  A decade earlier, rock fans had searched for evidence that Paul McCartney was dead. (“Turn me on, dead man,” a backmasked Beatle purportedly said in “Revolution 9.”) Now they were searching for Lucifer’s fingerprints. The fact that the bands almost always denied that they’d put the messages there didn’t matter. Even if they were telling the truth, the argument went, Satan could have inserted the incantations himself.

  If you wanted to hear more about Satan’s maneuvers, purported defectors were willing to tell tales from the belly of the beast. The most famous of them wasn’t Todd. It was Mike Warnke, a star of the Jesus Movement’s coffeehouse circuit. Warnke made his first splash in 1972, when he showed up at a San Diego Christian convention with the Witchmobile, a mobile exhibition of alleged Satanic paraphernalia. In public appearances and in a 1973 book called The Satan Seller, Warnke claimed to have emerged from a world of drugs, violence, and ritual sexual abuse, serving as high priest of a three-city, 1,500-member Luciferian organization that was an arm of, yes, the Illuminati. Jon Trott and Mike Hertenstein of the Christian magazine Cornerstone, who exposed Warnke as a fraud in 1992, have suggested that Warnke picked up the idea of the Illuminati from the Baptist pastor Tim LaHaye, who would later become famous as the coauthor of the Left Behind series. “I brought up the term Illuminati first,” LaHaye told them. “I had been reading a book on the subject called Pawns in the Game [by William Guy Carr], and I tried testing him to see if he really knew anything about it. He didn’t seem to have ever heard the word before.”54

  Warnke was much more successful than Todd, both in the size of his audience and in the length of time he was able to extend the deception. Hicks and Lewis’s book on Todd includes a brief foreword by Warnke, who wrote that his rival “could possibly turn into another Jim Jones” and reminded readers “to be careful of those who take the name of the Lord in vain.”55 You don’t say. As we’ll see, Warnke eventually penetrated the mainstream, appearing as a cult expert on several secular TV shows in the 1980s.56

  In one of the more perceptive passages of “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Hofstadter highlighted the role of the alleged defector in spreading conspiracy tales. A “special significance,” he wrote, “attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. The anti-Masonic movement seemed at times to be the creation of ex-Masons; it certainly attached the highest significance and gave the most unqualified credulity to their revelations. Anti-Catholicism used the runaway nun and the apostate priest, anti-Mormonism the ex-wife from the harem of polygamy; the avant-garde anti-Communist movements of our time use the ex-Communist.”57 Warnke and Todd carried on that tradition. One man who was especially interested in defectors’ stories was Jack Chick. In addition to endorsing Todd’s testimony, Chick became the preeminent platform for Alberto Rivera, a purported ex-Jesuit who blamed the Catholic order for everything from Jonestown to the Holocaust to the creation of Islam. Later Chick would promote the claims of Rebecca Brown, a former physician who claimed to have been a high priestess in a Satanic cult. It eventually emerged that Brown had lost her license to practice medicine, in part because she had been in the habit of diagnosing patients as demonically possessed and attempting to treat them with exorcisms.

  Chick was also interested in Satan’s penetration of popular culture: His comics denounced rock (“heavy metal has turned millions into rock-a-holics. . . . They’ve become zombies”),58 the game Dungeons & Dragons (“THE INTENSE OCCULT TRAINING THROUGH D&D PREPARED DEBBIE TO ACCEPT THE INVITATION TO ENTER A WITCHES’ COVEN”),59 the sitcom Bewitched (“that show paved the way for all our occult and vampire programming viewed by MILLIONS today!”).60 And though his tracts weren’t exactly mainstream material, the ideas he expounded weren’t always confined to the country’s margins.

  Take Pat Pulling, a mother who blamed Dungeons & Dragons for the 1982 suicide of her sixteen-year-old son. D&D, she decided, “uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and other teachings. There have been a number of deaths nationwide where games like Dungeons and Dragons were either the decisive factor in adolescent suicide and murder, or played a major factor in the violent behaviour of such tragedies.”61 She sued the game’s publisher, petitioned the government to regulate or ban D&D-related products, appeared on many popular TV shows, and distributed pamphlets to police departments around the country. (One of her suggested questions for cops interviewing gamers: “Has he read the Necronomicon or is he familiar with it?”)62 She also endorsed Jack Chick’s anti-D&D tract “Dark Dungeons.”

  One person who found Pulling persuasive was Tipper Gore, the wife of Senator Al Gore. Mrs. Gore had launched a crusade against indecent rock lyrics in 1985, and it didn’t take long before the targets of her campaign incorporated more than just music. In her 1987 book Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, the spouse of the future vice president pitched herself as a moderate liberal who was adept with sociological evidence and concerned about feminist issues. Yet she included an entire chapter on the dangers of the occult, and one of the alleged occult dangers she discussed was D&D. “According to Mrs. Pat Pulling, founder of the organization Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons,” Gore wrote, “the game has been linked to nearly fifty teenage suicides and homicides.”63

  As Todd reached the peak of his fame in 1978, his public statements grew more apocalyptic. On Friday the 13th of October, at a restaurant near Elkton, Maryland, he held what he said would be his final workshop. “I received a telephone call from John Todd that this would be his last meeting,” Tom Berry explained in an invitation to the session. “He was told by a former CIA agent that [word has] come down through the CIA to ‘not stop until John Todd is dead.’ Consequently, John has canceled all the bookings scheduled beyond October 13 and plans to go underground at that time.”64 By January, Todd was telling Darryl Hicks that the “riots have already started. You can’t stop it once it’s started, and it’s already started. In just a few days, John Todd will have vanished.”65 That same month, Todd’s wife Sheila sent his followers a communiqué from a ten-acre farm near Florence, Montana. “We get letters continually asking for us to defend ourselves against the many rumors going around,” she wrote. “Brothers and Sisters, we just cannot constantly defend ourselves. All we can say in defense is that if you will wait and watch things will come to pass as John has said they will.”66

  Todd’s reputation was battered by the exposés and the failed predictions, but he still had some believers. When the Journal Champion attacked Todd, it received many letters criticizing its story.67 And when Todd gave a talk at a Holiday Inn near Chicago in 1979, the crowd wasn’t happy when a reporter from Cornerstone asked him some tough questions. While Todd grew more belligerent in his responses, finally screaming at his interrogator, one man in the audience yelled, “Use the whip!” As the reporter and four colleagues left the room, they heard people murmuring that the
y were “demons of rebellion.”68

  As late as 1982, Todd was spotted speaking to a half-empty room at a Holiday Inn in Iowa. He wore a gun, and he kept glancing over his shoulder as he spoke. He had been brought in by a couple named Randy and Vicki Weaver, who had heard his tapes and been intrigued. But Vicki found herself turned off by Todd and by some of the people he attracted. “Watch out for him,” she told a friend, pointing to a man in the room. “He’s a neo-Nazi.”69

  Meanwhile, Todd’s warnings had been taken to heart by the Zarephath-Horeb Community Church, a Christian community in the Ozarks that would eventually evolve into a paramilitary group called the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, or CSA. (The initials deliberately echoed another CSA, the Confederate States of America.) The group’s “propaganda minister,” Kerry Noble, heard his first Todd tape in 1978 and immediately shared it with his church’s elders. “With that first John Todd tape I was given, our group embraced everything Todd preached,” Noble later recalled. “He seemed to confirm all that we felt was wrong in this country, as well as what we believed would happen in the future.” Under Todd’s influence, the church began to arm itself: “[F]rom August 1978 to December 1979, we spent $52,000 on weapons, ammunition, and military equipment, and we began to train militarily.” They also “built our homes with defense in mind, strategically placing them against an attack from the outside. Many of the houses had bunkers built underneath. Those that didn’t usually had a foxhole bunker built nearby.”70

  The church soon mixed Todd’s teachings with the ideas of other conspiracy theorists, many of them affiliated with Christian Identity, a racist movement that believed Anglo-Saxons rather than Jews are the real descendants of the ancient Israelites. The results could be seen in Noble’s brief book Witchcraft and the Illuminati. The chief difference between Todd’s tapes and Noble’s book was that Noble was antiblack, anti-Semitic, and obsessed with homosexuality. Todd denied that there was an international Jewish conspiracy, but Noble’s book cited The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, described Jews as “the most highly organized race of people on the face of the earth,” warned that they “control nearly every major organization in existence,” and called the Talmud “one of the most vile, anti-Christian, satanic books ever written.” The book also declared that “rebellious BLACKS” are among “the enemies of God” and accused many famous figures—including Mike Warnke—of being gay.71