Arthur Goldwag

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• Commented on Goldwag: The Sarah Palin Conspiracies
  You are right, that was a careless error (at least the link was correct). I'm going to see if I can get Boing Boing to change it; at the same time, I'd like to clarify the "Russia from my house"...
• Commented on Goldwag: The Sarah Palin Conspiracies
  "I can see Russia from my house" was the meme, and you are absolutely correct that Palin didn't say it. I shouldn't have implied that she did. Here are Palin's actual words, from the transcript of her Charlie Gibson interview:...
• Posted Goldwag: The Sarah Palin Conspiracies to Boing Boing
  Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books. Today's is my last guest post here. I want to take this opportunity to thank Pesco and Boing Boing for inviting me here and giving me the latitude to say whatever I wanted to about whatever crossed my mind. I'm especially grateful to everyone who took the time to comment on my posts, whether you agreed with them or not. You're an amazingly thoughtful, opinionated, funny, articulate, out-of-the-box bunch, and for the most part admirably civil. The reservoir of wit, knowledge and intellectual firepower that Boing Boing has on tap is truly astonishing. As I'm sure I've said before, I don't write because I know so much--I write because it gives me an opportunity to learn. And you've all taught me a great deal. I hope I can come back and contribute to Boing Boing again; in the meantime, you're all welcome to drop by my own blog any time. I began last Monday with my lucubrations about Orly Taitz and the birther movement. For the sake of symmetry, I will close out with some remarks about another woman of the right, Alaska's ex-governor Sarah Palin....
• Commented on Goldwag: Cranks, Curiosities, and the Process Church
  And while this also has nothing whatsoever to do with Process theology, it's funny that one of the men who pioneered it in the '60s, David Ray Griffin, has become one of the leading spokesmen for 9/11 Truth. I wonder...
• Commented on Goldwag: Cranks, Curiosities, and the Process Church
  The redacted chapters are posted on the Web, at a site that's too creepy-sounding for me to feel comfortable about providing the link. They were interesting....
• Commented on Goldwag: Cranks, Curiosities, and the Process Church
  sorry about that....
• Posted Goldwag: Cranks, Curiosities, and the Process Church to Boing Boing
  Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books. Charles P. Peirce's bestseller IDIOT AMERICA: HOW STUPIDITY BECAME A VIRTUE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE includes a wonderful portrait of Ignatius L. Donnelly (1831-1901), the lawyer, US Congressman, founder of a failed Utopian city, and bestselling author of three influential books: ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD (1882), which sparked the Atlantis mania that continues to this day, RAGNAROK: THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL (1883), which anticipated Immanuel Velikovsky's WORLDS IN COLLISION (1950) by more than half a century by attributing a world-wide deluge that sank Atlantis and wiped out the world's Mammoths to a near-collision with a comet (TRIVIA QUIZ: Can you guess what other pseudo-scientific classic was published in 1950? ANSWER: L. Ron Hubbard's DIANETICS), and then in 1889, THE GREAT CRYPTOGRAM, which argued that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays and scattered clues to his authorship throughout them. Pierce considers the wildly creative, fiercely productive, and swiftly-forgotten Donnelley to be one of America's great cranks. "Cranks are noble," Peirce says, "because cranks are independent. A charlatan is a crank who sells out." It's like the difference between kitsch and dreck--people who make kitsch are sincere. Cynical purveyors of political and cultural dreck like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh know better--they're in it for the money and the power and the fame....
• Commented on Goldwag: I Was A Teenaged Straussian
  Just received this very interesting comment on my own blog (http://arthurgoldwag.wordpress.com) from Hume's Ghost of The Daily Doubter (http://dailydoubt.blogspot.com/). Regarding Shadia Drury, the most damning thing I’ve seen about Strauss’ personal views is the letter he wrote shortly before he...
• Commented on Goldwag: I Was A Teenaged Straussian
  I will only be guest blogging through the end of the week; not sure if I can fit that in. Let me think about it, though. And I very much appreciate your interest....
• Commented on Goldwag: I Was A Teenaged Straussian
  Albert Pike's MORALS AND DOGMA (which I understand does not speak for the whole of the Craft) attributes an enormous influence to Kabbalah. Another--perhaps a better way--to have put it would be to say that many of Masonry's enemies perceived...
• Commented on Goldwag: I Was A Teenaged Straussian
  do I know you? I assume the Human Events writer was the Beta; it certainly wasn't me! The thing is, as JTode noted, you don't have to be conservative to get caught up in the teaching--it's exciting to discover that...
• Commented on Goldwag: I Was A Teenaged Straussian
  When the reaction to the neo-Cons began to pick up steam, a lot of articles started to appear denying that this conservative or that conservative was really a Straussian. Strauss wrote challenging books; I think the odds are good that...
• Commented on Goldwag: I Was A Teenaged Straussian
  I know that you're joking, but if this had been a formal essay and not a blog entry I might have noticed that I completely neglected to say who Strauss was. How embarrassing! Leo Strauss (1899-1973); born in Prussia, taught...
• Commented on Goldwag: I Was A Teenaged Straussian
  This is from Damon Linker's New Republic review of Smith's book, from 2006. "This is Strauss's notorious doctrine of esoteric writing, which he claimed to have single-handedly recovered from scholarly obscurity by following through on hints and suggestions in the...
• Commented on Goldwag: I Was A Teenaged Straussian
  I'm not just being coy when I say that Drury may not be doing him justice. Though she has studied him deeply, she has a strong political animus towards his followers (appropriately so). Steven B. Smith's READING LEO STRAUSS: POLITICS,...
• Commented on Goldwag: I Was A Teenaged Straussian
  I may well be--I remember very little of what was specifically Bloomian about the translation; at the same time, it almost certainly had a permanent influence on my understanding of Plato. Neoplatonism is indeed very different than Plato. I was...
• Posted Goldwag: I Was A Teenaged Straussian to Boing Boing
  Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books. No, not really. But when I was a freshman in college in 1975, the Poli Sci 101 course that I took was Straussian and neo-conservative to its core. Kenyon College's political science department was (and still is--or at least it was three years ago, as this story in the far right wing journal Human Events confirms) an "oasis" of Straussian and conservative theory. The first text we read, as I recall, was Socrates "Apology." Most of us assumed that Socrates' persecutors were the bad guys, that freedom of thought was strictly good and the suppression of free speech categorically bad. But using Socrates' own mode of questioning, our teachers challenged our blandly liberal presuppositions. Precisely what's good about Democracy? Why shouldn't the state protect itself? Are we sure we understand what the Founders of our own country really meant when they wrote about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"...
• Commented on Freemasonry, Dan Brown, and the New New Age
  I make no claim to reveal Freemasonry's secrets. I'll go a step further and say that there is probably nothing about Masonry in my book that a Mason of good standing wouldn't know. What my book's subtitle (written by its...
• Commented on 9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style
  It's firewalled to non-subscribers, but I just stumbled on a piece that I'd forgotten about that Nicolas Lemann published in The New Yorker in October, 2006. It's called "The Paranoid Style," and it covers a wide range of 9/11/Iraq war...
• Posted Goldwag: Books that inspire me to Boing Boing
  Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books. Pesco requested that I write about some of the books that inspired me as I was writing CULTS, CONSPIRACIES AND SECRET SOCIETIES. I'll need to ask for your indulgence, because I'm going to flash back to my boyhood. When I was in the sixth grade, I came across a mass market paperback called IMPOSSIBLE: YET IT HAPPENED, which, I just learned from the magic of the Internet, was written by R. Dewitt Miller in 1947. It was a prime exemplar of what is sometimes called Forteana, after Charles Fort (1874-1932), a failed novelist, close friend of Theodore Dreiser, and avid collector of news clippings about the eerie and the unexplained--he also gave his name to the magazine The Fortean Times (its cover story this month is about Masonic symbols in Washington, DC). Miller's yarns about spontaneous human combustion, ghosts, premonitory dreams, ESP, apparitions of air-born crucifixes in the smoke-filled skies over World War I battlefields, a fortyeight hour-long midnight that enveloped Colonial New England and I don't know what else, scared the living daylights out of me--but at the same time, I couldn't stop reading it, especially at night, by flashlight. It was an addiction and I eventually had the wisdom to go cold turkey, by giving the book away....
• Commented on 9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style
  Did I say "all channels for response" are paranoid? I don't think so... The concern is that the conspiracy theories actually divert energy and resources away from a range of possible political responses....
• Commented on 9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style
  One of the Nation of Islam's foundational documents, OUR SAVIOR HAS ARRIVED by Elijah Muhammad, teaches that "The white race is not equal with darker people because the white race was not created by the God of Righteousness. . ....
• Commented on 9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style
  I read the interview, both on the site you suggested and in a few other places. There are subtle differences from version to version. In one of them, he says (or maybe it's the third person omniscient narrator) that at...
• Commented on 9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style
  Weirdly enough, Paul Krugman's NY Times column today quotes this same Hofstadter essay too--"Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay titled, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which reads as if it were based on today’s headlines:...
• Commented on 9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style
  I agree that the frame of reference is missing from many of these "skeptic" (is that more PC than Truther? it seems like a bit of a misnomer) anecdotes. Witnesses report odd sounds and see anomalous things--but the city was...
• Commented on 9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style
  "lie about it and use the terror to ram in freedom-destroying legislation, engage in two wars (one of which has killed 1,300,000 Iraqis and tens of thousands of Americans), turn this country into a Police State and feed the Military-Industrial...
• Posted 9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style to Boing Boing
  Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books. (CC-licensed photo on Flickr by 911conspiracy) Forty-five years ago, Harpers magazine published Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." The occasion for the piece was the revenant conservatism that had driven Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign (the magazine hit the newsstands the month of the Johnson/Goldwater election), but it remains astonishingly apt. I cannot recommend it enough for anyone who wants to understand the mentalités of fringe political movements in the United States--from the Anti-Masons and Know Nothings in the first half of the 1800s, to McCarthyism, the Nation of Islam, and the Weathermen in the last century, to the Birthers and Truthers today....
• Commented on Freemasonry, Dan Brown, and the New New Age
  You're welcome. If you scroll up, you'll see that Boing Boing made the requested change. As I said earlier, I'm not a Mason and "I can't claim to speak with unshakeable authority" on that or any other subject. Some posters...
• Commented on Freemasonry, Dan Brown, and the New New Age
  I’ve asked Boing Boing to rephrase the offensive line as follows (I can’t go in and change it myself): “Historically, the Masons have stood for the spirit of free inquiry and, setting aside the heartily reciprocated detestation of Roman Catholicism...
• Commented on Cult scene: New Zealand and Africa
  I literally picked two cults out of a hat to write about. Destiny had been in the headlines, as had the unnamed African cult. I was disturbed that I didn't know about the The Movement for the Restoration of the...