No. This isn’t an article about the U.S. Supreme Court allowing Presidents to break the law (you can find my thoughts on that here and here). Nor is it about that cute little town in southern New York. Rather, this is an article about How We Are All Doomed…according to crazy Christian apocalypticists. I’ve been hired to run a fact-check on a “documentary” that came out a couple years before the pandemic, called Babylon USA, by Pastor Steven Anderson. You know. That American antisemitic Holocaust denier who literally wants the state to round up and murder all gay people—and who has been banned from over thirty countries. In this video he avers “the new world order is about to come,” and “all over the world, one government, one religion, one currency, one language is on its way.”

Oh?

If you hadn’t heard this conspiracy theory before, Wikipedia will sort you out. And for the best-ever embedded look at the crazies attached to it (who range from Islamic terrorists and white supremacists to lizard-people conspiracists and Alex Jones), you simply must read (or listen to) Them. But my interest today are the claims of this piece of…art. But I won’t bother critiquing anything sectarian in this video. I do not care about the arguments Christians have against each other, over all the ridiculous minutiae of their theology and doctrine and hermeneutics. I am only concerned about claims to fact that have any possible basis in reality. Not claims about what God wants or what weird ways we are supposed to read Scripture, for example. I will only address Scripture in terms of historical reality—for example, what its various authors likely really understood and meant (as a matter of history), or how the Greek text actually translates (without any invented sectarian rules for reinterpreting ancient languages). And I will only address claims to fact that are testable, such as regarding the likely course of future history, the actual course of past history; and all matters of science and the like.

Okay. Here goes.

This [Is] / [Is Not] Scary (Circle One)

Like most documentaries (which as an entire medium have literally become a joke), this “film” opens with scare clips from dark-skinned people over ominous music that is supposed to frighten you. Like, if you are a racist and an idiot (those strongly overlap in a Venn diagram). It’s not clear to me whether these “documentarians” understood that their opening quote from Barack Obama was a joke delivered in a comedy skit—or even what the joke was…particularly since he was talking about this guy, which seems to cut against the theme of the video (see my recent, and related, article on Debunking John Davidson’s “Pagan” America). It’s also not clear to me whether they then chose a clip from the ultrafascist FOX News pundit Jeanine Pirro because she looks dark skinned and is (at least as they would understand it) an Arab. I can’t find the original context, but she rants about the NWO on almost every issue (from Putin or Soros to immigrants or public schools), so I guess it was just a convenient grab. The doco doesn’t explain which issue she was complaining about in that particular instance. It’s just “scary decontextualized quote and ominous music, go!”

They then give us a Mexican European president, José Manuel Barroso (once Prime Minister of Portugal), complete with scary accent, saying (how dare he!) that “we need a new global financial order.” Imagine Stormtroopers Now … or, just, what he meant, which was international cooperation during a financial crisis against criminal or dangerous actors—not a world “government” of any kind, but in fact a multipolar rather than unilateral world order. The exact opposite of what this documentary is claiming. This also means they deliberately avoided showing first the good Christian and white American George W. Bush on camera saying exactly the same thing. No. It had to be the Mexican Portuguese guy. This tells you all you need to know about the racism, dishonesty, and manipulativeness of this documentary. And we haven’t even gotten to any actual facts yet! This is just the opening credits.

When, still in the credits, they finally get to a Proper White Guy (after priming you with darkies and foreigners), it is of course an evil Democrat, Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland. They kind of hope you don’t notice this was a quote-mined from a speech on the disastrously bad decisions made in prosecuting the second Iraq War under Bush. And they skipped the entire speech to just grab a scare quote at the end of it because it contained those terrifying words, “new world order.” But of course, when you check the context, you get a very different impression of what he was actually talking about (emphasis mine):

In January 1991, on the eve of the first Gulf War, the first President Bush said, and I quote, “What is at stake is more than one small country; it is a big idea, a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind, peace and security, freedom and the rule of law. Such is a world worthy of our struggle and worthy of our children’s future.” I agree. Today we devise a way forward in Iraq—as we devise a way forward in Iraq, I urge the international community to embrace its responsibility for creating that new world order, a new world order based upon collective action by all, and recognize, as Secretary-General Ban stated last week, that, and again I quote, “Iraq is the world’s problem.” Again, I agree. Together, the peace-pursuing nations must do better if peace is the legacy we wish to leave our children.

So, is he talking about an actual world government? No. He is talking about the opposite. He is talking about independent nations making multilateral decisions toward a common cause of ending wars and violent regimes (really, he’s asking that countries other than the United States help pay for it, but he also describes actions they could voluntarily take toward it as well).

Hoyer is basically talking about what Christians mean by morality: there is only one moral truth for all the world. All nations should therefore align themselves with it. This is literally what all conservative Christians want (or at least purport to want). It is not “all over the world, one government, one religion, one currency, one language.” But simply the world’s nations serving common moral cause. The word “order” in these sentences means peace and rule of law in the abstract, through international cooperation, and the multilateral pursuit of what is morally right. It does not mean “a government.” And the word “world” means that the whole planet should enjoy peace and cooperation and moral governments; no one should be left out. And again, that’s governments. Not one moral government. And the word “new” means progress toward that common goal in a time of regression: the chaos of the Iraq war is the old order that must pass away. The new order must be international cooperation to enforce law and justice and peace.

There can be legitimate criticisms of the particulars of what these folks mean (like exactly how and in what ways this cooperation should be implemented). But “they’re talking about one global government, one global religion, one global currency, one global language” isn’t it. No one is talking about that. And literally no movement is occurring in that direction. Indeed, the trends look the other way. No nation is changing its language, while English remains the global lingua franca (so there’s no looming “you will be forced to speak Flemmish in the New World Order”). The U.S. dollar remains the global benchmark, yet no one is replacing their national currencies with it; and there is no call to, anywhere. The “first world” remains predominately Christian, yet is fiercely protective of religious freedom, not religious unanimity. There is no shred of even a prospect that Islam will ever control the planet, much less Wiccans or Buddhists. And almost all atheists are all about liberty. If they ever had a popular global order (and none is looming), you’d get to keep being a Christian, Wiccan, Buddhist, Muslim, Pastafarian, whatever. There will never be any “one religion.” And if ever there is no religion, it will be by every individual’s choice; not the mandate of any global government. While the probability that you or I will be voting for President of the Earth in our lifetime is functionally zero.

So what on Earth are these documentarians scared of? What delusion hath taken them?

What New World Order?

Only after all that do they at last show George W. Bush from the end of his second inaugural address, except they doctor the audio to omit a key bit (here in bold), and again leave out the context:

When our Founders declared a new order of the ages, when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner “Freedom Now”—they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled.

And, of course, they leave out what he immediately then said:

History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty. When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, “It rang as if it meant something.” In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. 

Oh. Right. Bush wasn’t talking about any global government with the phrase “a new order of the ages,” he meant the rise of independent free democracies, the end of slavery, and the triumph of human rights. I thought these Christians were supposed to like those things?

The opening then immediately conflates this, what George Bush was talking about there, with a completely unrelated remark by Democrat Gary Hart on Bush’s response to the 9/11 attack (our generation’s Pearl Harbor). Hart was saying the same thing as Hoyer: that global peace requires more cooperation among independent nations—not the subsuming of those nations under a single government. The “new world order” he’s talking about is not a world government, but a greater sense of cooperation among nations in fighting the enemies of freedom. When Hart says 9/11 was an opportunity for Bush to implement the dream of his father (quoted above), he specifically gives as an example diplomacy with China to recruit their assistance in defeating Al Qaeda. Not absorbing China under One World Government.

Why be afraid of more diplomacy and international cooperation to reduce terrorism and war?

Oh. Right. We’re not supposed to know that’s what Hart was talking about. We’re supposed to be dupes, easy marks, tricked into thinking Hart was talking about “all over the world, one government, one religion, one currency, one language.” But he wasn’t. This documentary is not educating you about any real threat. It’s purely a reality fabrication machine. You’ll discover the same for every ensuing clip.

• That bit from Charlie Rose? He’s just talking about global changes in alliances and balances of power, not any trend toward global government; changes that America needs to adjust its foreign policy to.
• That bit from Chuck Hagel? Same. In fact, he is saying this happened before, when a “new world order” arose after WW2 because of all the change and upheaval that war caused. He doesn’t mean a global government. He means changes in alliances, borders, nations, balances of power. He’s referring to a multilateral reality, not some new unilateral reality.
• That new bit from Barack Obama? He doesn’t even say the words “new world order.” He refers to the “international order” of today, meaning human rights and democracy, and (though they won’t show you this bit) he specifically contrasts that with “an older, more traditional view of power” whereby “ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs” and “that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign.” In other words, by “international order” Obama meant the opposite of what this documentary means by “New World Order.”
• That bit from John Kerry? Again, no reference to any world order. They are really stretching now. Now we are supposed to assume his phrase “global vision” means “one world government,” when even in the context they show he obviously means in contradistinction to isolationism, i.e., ignoring other nations and global events, and thus getting economically clobbered by them rather than keeping ahead. Which rational people would simply call “common sense.” Not something to be spooked by.
• That bit from Biden? Same thing as Obama and Kerry. As the Colorado Gazette correctly describes it, “Biden described the new order as a world that seeks human rights, free trade and an end to poverty and oppression,” and not by forming any kind of world government, but, Biden said, “by rebuilding America’s foundations, our economic foundations, our moral and strategic foundations,” because “if America isn’t on the field, the vacuum will be filled” by some other nation (exactly what Kerry said). No NWO here.

So, now that we know these documentarians are just full-on lying, we can ask, instead, what do they want us to think is really happening? We know it isn’t happening. They are full of shit. But we can still study what their con is. What are they trying to dupe their marks into believing?

After all this scaremongering with out-of-context clips and frightening music and title hit, we finally get the propagandist himself, Steven Anderson, explaining what he wants you to be afraid of (in the middle of minute three). His explanation is laughable:

What we’re talking about is a one-world government, a one world religion, and a one world financial system.

Now, the reason why people refer to this as the New World Order is because, if we think about it, the current world order—meaning the way things are in the world right now—is that we have separate nations, don’t we? We have about two hundred separate nations that are sovereign. They have power over their own affairs. They’re not all united under one government. And when we think about the current religious state, we have a multitude of religions in this world. We have Christianity and all of its various facets and denominations; but we also have religions like Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. And these religions are definitely not united. They’re separate religions.

That’s the current order of things. Not only that, but we have different financial systems. Here we use the dollar. If we went to Mexico, we’re using pesos. If we go to Canada, we’re gonna be on a different dollar, a Canadian dollar. All over the world there are all these different currencies. So when we talk about the New World Order we’re talking about a world in which there’s one government, where there’s one religion, and one financial system.

This doesn’t exist and isn’t happening.

The manipulation here includes visuals overlapping his remarks that touch on various bogus conspiracy theories.

First is a zoom on the exterior of the United Nations. But the UN is not a government. It’s a treaty organization, like NATO or Five Eyes. It was founded with a single purpose: to facilitate the negotiating of conflicts between nations and thus prevent world wars. All membership is voluntary. And even its edicts, orders, and resolutions are non-binding. Each nation must individually legislate or otherwise agree with any compliance; they therefore remain independent sovereign nations. All the things the UN does that resemble government (legislation, adjudication, warfare) are not only subject to the consent of the governed, but are unilaterally subject to the consent of the governed. The equivalent condition would be if, comparing nations to citizens, every individual American citizen could, on their own, simply “decide” which laws to follow and which public endeavors to fund.

That is exactly the opposite of the imagined NWO. The UN exists specifically to maintain multilateral sovereignty, not end it; and indeed all of its endeavors are necessary to that end. For example, the UN court only has jurisdiction where no nation already does, and thus some court is needed. Such as when two nations are disputing, and thus no higher court exists to resolve their dispute. The UN court is then necessary to prevent war being the only recourse left. And even then both nations must already have agreed to the UN’s jurisdiction over that matter (or all matters of interstate conflict). It is therefore a treaty agreement, not a subversion or absorption of sovereignty. It does not rule over anyone. The UN is unlikely to ever be an actual world government. And there are no meaningful efforts underway to make it one.

Second is a zoom on a religious dialogue conference that shows a lot of Muslim women in headdress. Cue the Islamophobia (we get the same kind of fear-manipulation in a later, unrelated shot of differing world currencies, where near center-screen is a face of the Iranian Ayatollah). But if you look closely at this image of the audience at that conference, there’s an Orthodox Christian standing right in there. But the clip flies by too fast for most, who will panic at All The Muslims overlapping Anderson’s words “one world religion.” It’s as if to imply that, somehow, we’re on track to force the entire globe to adopt Islam as its One Religion. So, “one religion” we now know is code for “Muslim” (and You Might Be an Islamophobe If…). You now have my permission to roll on the floor laughing. Needless to say, not even Christianity is on track to become the lone global religion, much less Islam. Statistical projections reveal that the future looks largely the same as the past.

I should also note that the only religious stance that is actually growing (as in, gaining in converts) in the developed world, and even much of the developing world, is no religion, otherwise known as atheism—and that’s neither a religion nor associated in the developed world with suppressing religion. It is, rather, predominately associated with principles of religious freedom and diversity of conscience. A lot of Christians are switching denominations all over the world, but aren’t winning many new converts to Christianity. Growth is mainly by birth rate. Likewise Islam, and mostly only in the third world. There is no wave of Muslim conversion in the Western hemisphere, or, really, anywhere. There is increased immigration, but that simply moves already-existing Muslims from one place to another. It doesn’t increase their number.

Let’s be clear here. Muslims will never even come close to a majority force in any Western democracy—not only because there are too few of them (There Are No Muslim “No Go” Zones), but also because of the three generation rule: by the third generation, any immigrating family will have largely abandoned its first generation religion and values in conformity with their new local demographics. In other words, if America remains 30% “nonreligious” and 60% “Christian”, then the third generation of any immigrating Muslim family (in other words, kids born in America to kids themselves born in America who were in turn the kids of immigrants) will be heading toward 30% nonreligious and 60% Christian. Islam will melt into the static background, as it has always done, for centuries. Meanwhile, Muslim nations mostly hate each other and are constantly in actual or proxy wars with each other, hot or cold, and so there are no effective Muslim unions anywhere. OPEC isn’t distinctively Muslim, and is purely an economic scheme anyway; while the Arab League (which already excludes most of the world’s Muslims) is aptly described as enjoying “a relatively low level of cooperation throughout its history.” So, no Islamic World Government is coming. Sorry.

Then over Anderson’s mention of “one world financial system,” the video throws an image from FOX News (like, gag me with a spoon) fearmongering over a story about the “U.N. Increasingly Calling for One World Currency.” Which the U.N. never did. This was a typical conspiracy-freak-out low-information panic-mode over a completely different suggestion one U.N. committee made, which was exactly the opposite of “one” world currency: a new international currency backed by all national currencies. In other words, it would replace no one’s currency. It would just be another currency available to all, that international exchanges and banking could then use. Which was also just a suggestion. And it was rejected globally as an overall bad idea, and no one ever did anything about it. There is no movement toward it. It’s a dead concept. Even now, with a global bitcoin fad exploding that would make it easy to implement, not a single nation has any interest whatever in adopting any such currency. Sorry bitcoin bros.

This also set off an immediate alarm for me because “financial system” and “currency” do not mean the same thing. So it is not clear anywhere in this film whether Anderson even understands what a financial “system” is or if he really just thinks it means “a currency,” or whether he can tell the two apart, or has anything sophisticated to say about the thousand different things that fall under the rubric of a financial “system.” It would be nonsensical to complain about an international financial system in general, because without that, nations could not trade. How, exactly, do you think you can buy stuff from China or even Mexico without some international system making the necessary monetary exchanges possible? There is a lot more than that going on that wouldn’t be possible without such a system, too. So what exactly does Anderson wish to complain about here? Spoiler! We’ll never find out.

Howsa What Now?

Okay. That’s just the set-up; the thesis statement, as it were. Then we get into the supposed evidence portion, starting near the end of minute four. Now it’s boring talking heads making stuff up—and more out-of-context clips that don’t evince anything they are saying, which just replicate the same tricks I already debunked. We don’t get to anything that can be described as both “a point” and as “new” until quite a ways in.

Before that:

We get to hear Chuck Baldwin make a bunch of the same shit up (in minute six). “Obviously,” he says, all the people in the edited clips “are talking about globalization” (not really) and “about the merging of nations” (no they aren’t) “and of continents” (some sort of terraforming program?) “under an economic system, under a military system, and a governmental system all of which” under some shadowy elite control (also not happening). If you weren’t aware, this is the official pastor of the Oath Keepers (eesh) and is so right wing that he is even to the right of Donald Trump (whom he antisemitically denounces as a “Zionist puppet”) and still supports the Confederacy’s right to have defended slavery. Oh, and he has exactly zero qualifications in anything (not even one real college degree—all his many claimed degrees are fake).

Anderson then shows up (in minute seven) to complain about Bush-the-first “really” meaning by “new world order” global American hegemony (now that the “second” superpower, the USSR, had collapsed). That isn’t exactly what he meant. Bush was selling an idea of global cooperation among nations, and thus a rising say and influence for other nations, who would become increasingly free under American hegemony. But one can argue that, really, just American hegemony is what he wanted. It has always been, after all, the American conservative dream; it’s the entire foreign policy platform of MAGA. But that’s still not a “world” government. America is not absorbing other nations, granting them statehood and Senate seats. The UN doesn’t have any military of its own, only loaned mixed units from independent sovereign nations (no different from WW2). And the world’s economic system is quite dispersed, not at all centralized. No single nation, much less person or committee, controls all of it. Just look at how much teeth-pulling it took to sanction Russia, and still half the world balked, while the rest had to be persuaded to volunteer any commitment; the result is piecemeal, slipshod, and precarious. No puppet. No master.

They then burn clock showing All the People admitting America is now the only superpower (all the way to minute nine). Which required no proof (it’s well obvious), and isn’t the same thing as actually ruling the entire Earth. “America is the only global superpower” (at least until China maybe changes that state of affairs) is not a “New World Order” in their sense (of “all over the world, one government, one religion, one currency, one language”). It’s only been a “new world order” since 1990 and for the far less ominous reason everyone actually explains in all the speeches they quote-mined clips from (as we saw above): the old order changed with the collapsed Soviet Union. It was simply a change of global politics. It is not a single united government ruling over the planet. It’s just a prettier way of saying “the Cold War is over” (and the inevitable consequences thereof). It bespeaks nothing else.

Then we get G. Edward Griffin (a stock loon) making the harebrained argument that “for the first time in history we have seen a movement, a political and social movement, that is truly global in nature,” so “it’s not just a new order, it’s a new world order, and in that sense that’s quite accurate, because this is new in history.” And a basketball is a ball because it’s round. But even as a vacuous tautology his claim is false. This isn’t new. Globalization in the sense he is describing began with WW1 and WW2 (the first global wars). These led to the UN being founded in 1945, the WTO in 1947, NATO in 1949, and so on. That’s almost a hundred years ago. Check every category of globalization (economic, cultural, political, military): its overall history goes even farther back than that.

So there isn’t anything new about this. What everyone is actually talking about in those clips are changes in the alignments and mechanisms of globalization, not the “rise” of globalization. This is not the first time in history we’ve had a “political and social movement that is truly global in nature.” That’s been a going thing for over a century. And lo, we’ve not found ourselves in any “one government, one religion, one currency, one language” in all those hundred years (so, clearly, “globalization” has no such tendency), and there are still no visible trends toward any such outcome. Needless to say, Griffin also has no relevant qualifications. Just a BA in “speech and communications,” not even a Ph.D. in anything, much less in “economics” or “political science” or “modern history.” And his ignorance in these subjects shows.

By minute ten we’re on to burning clock complaining about how many wars America gets itself into. A complaint which most Americans share. But it’s never explained how that is relevant to anything they are supposed to be proving here. If this were a documentary on how we could dial back on our warmongering, maybe they’d be getting to something worth watching. But so, far, I don’t get it. “America wars a lot, therefore we’re in danger of a single world government forcing us to follow a single world religion and speak a single world language and use a single world currency” is a wild non sequitur, right up there with “Hilary Clinton must be Jewish because she’s a lizard person and everyone knows lizard people are all secretly Jewish.”

Nevertheless, that’s what we get from (the now late) Joyce Riley here (another crank with no relevant qualifications; even her nursing degree went for nothing, because she spent her career shilling products and medical disinformation). Like Griffin, she claims this militaristic American foreign policy is new; in fact, we’ve been at it for hundreds of years. Even during our supposed, and brief, isolationist period we had numerous Mexican–American Wars, the Opium War in China, the actually original Korean War, the Egyptian War, the Civil War, and, obviously, countless American Indian Wars. Still no NWO.

Oh, the Bible (Cue Eyeroll)

In minute 11 we get the real pitch, which is that the Bible predicted all this stuff that didn’t happen.

Oh?

Anderson says it’s all in Revelation 13. That’s the chapter that describes a bunch of Hellraiser monsters (that would terrify even The Thing) going all Godzilla on Tokyo, and starting some bizarre new religion where the world is forced to worship a hologram of one of these horrific monsters, the one that was mutilated (Pinhead?), rather than the actual monster it was a hologram of (despite the actual one still being around…confused yet?), and indeed, rather than the other monster who is actually ruling over the Earth (who, apparently, despite being in charge, doesn’t want to be worshipped?). That’s the monster who organizes a “one world government, one world religion, one world language, and one world financial system.”

But, to be clear, neither of these two monsters is the same thing as the dragon. Yes, there’s a dragon. And to be doubly clear, that’s not the monster with seven heads, or the one with lamb’s horns, and not the one worshipped or in charge during the ensuing world government. This dragon (so, technically, a third monster) is apparently still hanging around all through this and the next six eps, but not up to much. Toking a bong or something? Dunno. He hangs around idle until episode 20 when he’s suddenly boxed for a thousand years, and then inexplicably escapes to organize another world government (yes, another one) to lay a siege upon a city that fails spectacularly, and then he gets fire-laked (and why he wasn’t fire-laked back at the top of episode 13, I cannot fathom; this book’s writers were worse at emplotment than the showrunners for Lost).

Okay. Got that? So, amidst all of this, on the first go-around, we see the dragon get worshipped and admired, but that falls out of fashion, as the first beast organizes the first world government (he gains “power to wage war” and “conquer” everyone “and was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation”), but then sits back and lounges while the second beast takes over, but still gets all the worship royalties through his hologram. One of these two guys (it is never explained which) eventually gets a codename, which was either 666 or 616 (yes, the manuscripts don’t agree and experts can’t decide). That’s in the episode finale, right after the handsome horny beast (since his only monstrosity appears to be a couple of lamb’s horns) “forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark,” which was that codename.

Okay. Has any of this happened? No. Is there any evidence it’s about to? No. There is no dragon or seven headed monster or its worshipped hologram or its lambhorned sorcerer’s apprentice. Nor any on the horizon. Of course this is all supposed to be code for something else. But it’s all obviously code for things going on two thousand years ago, not now, and the code is compatible with many different things (and you’ll find countless proposals in the expert literature). But for the simplest example: seven heads sounds like the famed seven hills of Rome; the healed wound sounds like a survived civil war (either the big one or the little one, which included Nero’s infamous self-inflicted wound); rising from the sea sounds like the spread of the Roman Empire across the Mediterranean; worshipping an image of a past ruler sounds like the Imperial Cult; causing fire to fall from the sky sounds like the impressive incendiary artillery warfare the Romans perfected (and used on Masada). Revelation 13 is simply demonizing the Roman Empire and its paganism. And doing it safely, in code, so as not to be prosecuted for treason. That is why such obscure symbolism is used.

That leaves only the question of what all this business about marks on hands and foreheads was about. And that requires understanding a crucial point of context: that line quotes the Greek text describing tefillin in the Septuagint edition of Deuteronomy 11:18, “Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads,” referring to God’s command not to worship idols. The Greek phrase “on your hands” (ἐπὶ τῆς χειρὸς ὑμῶν) is identical to Revelation’s “on their hands” (ἐπὶ τῆς χειρὸς  αὐτῶν), and in each case probably meant upper arm (the actual location of such tefillin today; though they may have once been worn on the wrist). Likewise, “forehead” (μέτωπον, lit. meta-op, “between the eyes”) means the same thing as “before the eyes” (πρὸ ὀφθαλμῶν). Revelation swaps “sign” (σημεῖον) with “mark” (χαράγμα), words that commonly overlap in meaning, specifically to capture the sense of idolatry (it’s the same word in Acts 17:29).

These tefillin were little boxes, sometimes called phylacteries (referred to in Matthew 23:5), in which bits of Scripture would be placed and strapped to one arm and the forehead, to signify how close to God and his Law the wearer was. The symbolism intended in Revelation is then clear: just as dragon and beast and seven heads and open wounds and holograms and magical firestorms and all that crazy stuff cannot be meant literally (otherwise Anderson may as well pack it in), so this cannot be meant literally, either. The author is not talking about any literal actual mark being placed on wrist and forehead. They are speaking in symbols. They mean people will not be allowed to buy and sell unless they give obeisance to the imperial cult, and therefore they will be forced to replace God in their deeds and minds with the Emperor. It’s a reference to replacing God with loyalty to a pagan empire. The forehead symbolizes the mind; the wrist, heart and deed. Putting God in both places is a sin that leads to doom (hence the allusion to Deuteronomy 11 making exactly this point).

The “not buying or selling” reference is also not likely meant literally, as no such law was ever passed or likely to be. It’s possible the author of Revelation was another panicked conspiracy nut who, like Anderson, naively thought something like this would happen. But it’s just as possible the author is referring to the Fiscus Judaicus, a redirection of the Jewish temple tax to support Roman state religion, imposed by Vespasian as a punishment for the Jewish rebellion, and replacing the then-defunct treaty of the Jews with Rome. This penalty was expanded and made even harsher by Domitian, under (and against) whom Revelation is often believed to have been written. It is worth noting here that Revelation was written by Jews (Torah-observant Christians). So the sense is not likely that of a hypothetical future law that literally bans commerce, but the actual current law that required symbolic paying in to the imperial cult lest you be executed, dispossessed, or exiled—or you abandon all cult allegiance to the Jews. Because commerce entailed a currency exchange which entailed imperial notice of an ability to pay a tax. To avoid the penalty (and remain faithfully Jewish), therefore, you had to avoid any commerce that could gain attention to your having money.

Needless to say, none of this has any connection to modern reality. So I won’t waste any time analyzing the stream of biblethumpers Anderson treads out here to read the text (which go on to include even—I kid you not—Kent Hovind, in minute 14; and another infamous kill-the-gays pastor Roger Jimenez, in minute 12). They literally do not know what they are talking about. What you never get is any commentary from actual experts on this text, like Pagels or Koester or Aune. Just barely educated pulpit pounders.

The authors of Revelation had no conception of what was in the world even in their own day. They were oblivious to the entire existence of half of it; and actually thought the Roman Empire ruled nearly all of it. They were oblivious to the scale of the Persian empire at the time, or even the existence of the Indian and Chinese Empires, much less the Mayan or Japanese. Its description of international commerce is laughable by modern standards. They could not even imagine modern globalism, with its air forces, railroads, container ships, and telecommunications; nor any kind of modern political order. An organization like the UN, where all nations could come to negotiate and work out conflicts without submitting to any unifying ruler, was inconceivable; or even NATO, where nations fight together in common cause without giving up their sovereignty and becoming a single nation; or even democracy, where there is no longer any such thing as one all-powerful ruler. Revelation, in short, is so woefully out of touch that nothing it says anticipates the modern world we live in.

And that’s before we even get to the fact that even if we interpreted the text as they do, that entails it has failed as prophecy, and therefore was written by a false prophet. None of the one world government it describes has ever happened, nor is on track to happen. The best you can get is Donald Trump, who is, indeed, a monster worshiped as a God and misleading Christians into sin. There is no other person on Earth who comes anywhere nearer to what Revelation describes as the beasts. But he’s not even remotely on track to conquer and rule the entire Earth, and end all commerce on Earth not exchanged with the American dollar, and abolish Christianity and demand his statues be worshiped instead. Nor are any of his cronies, predecessors, or successors.

That’s all as likely to happen now as lizard people invading from Alpha Centauri. At least then we’d have the dragon angle. But nothing else lines up. Which beast is Trump? The first or the second? And who, then, is the other one? Who is the dragon? Where are the magical spellcasting statues of Donald Trump? Or if Trump is the second beast, the one who will make those statues, who are those statues of? The text says the statues will be of the first beast, the one that will then be worshiped by all the peoples of Earth. Which is still not the dragon. Yet the narrative says the world (all the world) will first worship the “the dragon because he had given authority to the [first] beast” (where is that happening?) and then also worship that beast because they will marvel, “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?” (where is that happening?). And that’s the one with seven heads and an open wound—but who fits that bill? And then the second beast (who is not the one with seven heads and an open wound) will stand up and they alone will be the one to rain fire from the sky, before only then making the world worship only statues of the first beast. So who could possibly correspond to that figure?

Revelation 13 is a crazy narrative that maps onto no modern events. You need a first beast with seven heads and an open wound, plus a dragon that makes him Ruler of Earth, and a second beast who only later summons fire and builds the magical statues of the first, only then commanding the world to worship that one new god. Good luck fitting that narrative to any three people on the planet today. The ancient context fits more intelligibly. The authors are “reinterpreting” the apocalyptic narratives of Daniel to fit recent events of Roman history (Pagels, Revelations, pp. 30–32).

The dragon does little because they are not a real operator on Earth, but the celestial Satan influencing events from outer space. The first beast is not an individual, but the Roman Empire altogether—hence its seven heads are later explained to be seven successive rulers, and hence the empire’s seven official emperors from Augustus to Titus. The one wounded was thus Nero, whose death was never confirmed; and (like Hitler) many believed he hid away and would one day return (or might even be resurrected by the Devil). So, the second beast may or may not be Nero returned, but regardless is meant to be Domitian (an eighth ruler in succession according to Revelation, who was often then compared to Nero; the text says he comes “from,” ek, the seven because he is literally the son of one of them).

At a close read, you’ll notice the first beast only heals/returns as a statue in the narrative. He isn’t the second beast or even a person present then at all. Why? It helps to know that the Flavian emperors who succeeded Nero (Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian) had statues of Nero recut to look like themselves. The author is thus again symbolically alluding to this fact: that many imperial-cult statues are statues of its worst emperor, Nero (just subject to some plastic surgery). And people are thus—really, underneath it all—being ordered to prove their loyalty to the state by paying obeisance “to Nero” (or else pay the “Jew tax” that exempted them from such performances).

We can also tell from all this and a remark in Revelation 17:9-11 that the author is pretending to write under Vespasian (the fifth emperor). Revelation 13:5-7 refers to him at the reins of the beast for the short period of the Jewish War in which Jerusalem is destroyed (another event not modernly happening, but that fits exactly into Revelation’s timeline as actually composed). He then says the sixth emperor will live only a short while, which reveals that the author knows Titus would only reign a couple of years. The prophecy then claims (Rev. 14–20) that it will all come to an end in the reign of the eighth emperor, Domitian, as an alliance of ten kings tears apart the Roman Empire and burns it down. Which didn’t happen. So, the author knows how unusually soon Titus died, but does not know what happened after the reign of Domitian. That means the author was writing during that reign (just the same way we can date the similar book of Daniel: see How We Know Daniel Is a Forgery).

Cue: Bullshit

Let’s compare how well that all fits the actual text and context of Revelation’s authors, with what Steven Anderson wants us to force a fit to instead—his square peg to their round hole.

Minute 13: “We see,” in Revelation’s prophecy, he says, “people from all over the world—all nations, all languages—worshipping this man, and proclaiming him to be basically God in the flesh. We’re already seeing it today, even before this happens, where religions are starting to merge, in a sense, and talk about putting aside their differences.”

Wait.

What?

• First, “putting aside their differences” is not “merging” (the overlaying video is of a multi-religion service attended by the Pope—as if the Pope was now worshiping Allah and embracing the Eightfold Way). And neither of those things is “worshiping a man as God in the flesh.” So, Anderson has literally no evidence to cite. His conclusion isn’t even in the same galaxy as his premises.
• Second, what man is Anderson talking about? No one. There is no man he can point to. Hardly anyone worldwide is worshiping any man as “basically God in the flesh.” And there is no indication the world is heading toward any such thing, either. There are no candidates for this. So it’s either a failed prophecy or a really long way off, right?
• Third, Anderson has not connected anything he just claimed to any of the prophetic text. Which man does he mean—the dragon, the first beast, the second beast, or the first beast’s statue? Where are the crowns, horns, wound, the chronology, the fire from heaven, the mark? Revelation 13 does not say “diverse religions will continue in peace.” It says everyone will be compelled to worship the magical statue of a recent human. The thing it says is the very thing that isn’t happening. “Religions are getting along; therefore everyone is worshiping a man in the flesh” is quite literally bullshit.

Minute 14: Anderson lets the phenomenal fraud, literal felon, convicted wife-beater, and professional idiot Kent Hovind (yes, the great economist, Kent Hovind) speak about the “one financial system” thing. And what he says is so phenomenally stupid I had to pause the video a minute to control my laughter. First, he says Revelation predicts that “nobody can buy or sell, you can’t buy without his permission, so there’s a financial control of the world, one world currency.” Revelation 13 doesn’t say anything about one world currency (or currency at all). It also doesn’t speak of a financial “system” (these guys really don’t know what that is). All it speaks of is permission to buy or sell, not what with; and it assigns that permission to those who carry the right signs (on the arm or forehead, literally or figuratively), not the right money.

So we are off the rails with non sequiturs already. But it gets so much worse. Hovind goes on to say this future “one world currency” will “probably” be “electronic,” because “we already have paper dollars, which are worthless, except for the cost of the paper—well, if it’s electronic, now you even save the cost of the paper.”

Holy balls.

Okay.

• First. Electronic currencies are more expensive to field than paper and metal. In fact, digital currency costs a lot more. Bitcoin alone grinds up over twice as much money to field per year than the entirety of the American paper-and-coin currency system, despite that also circulating twice as much volume.
• Second, Hovind has no conception of rudimentary economic concepts like fiduciary value. Even gold is worthless but for that: if people didn’t care about it, it would have little value. Dollars are no more worthless than a baseball card. By itself, it’s just kindling. But some cards have a lot of value simply because people want them, and there is a limited supply. That’s what dollars are: trading cards, whose value is entirely determined by the aggregate public desire to have them, modulated by supply. Any currency derives its value the same way. That is in fact the entire point of currency.
• And third: there is literally zero evidence that any nation at all (much less all of them) have any interest in switching to electronic currency—at all, much less a global common currency. It isn’t happening. And there is no indication it ever will anytime soon. We’ll more likely be living inside virtual universes before we adopt a single global e-currency. And I’ll be happy if these nutters don’t join us there, so their being afraid of it will be a good thing (unless they go all eco-terrorist and try destroying them, but by then I’m confident our Jewish space lasers will sort them out).

Okay. So, reality checked. And…um. No evidence was presented. I don’t know if you missed that. But Hovind just rambled this nonsense, and that’s it. He never explains why anyone should think there is any indication of the world’s nations moving toward a universal currency. He just drunk-uncled his way through it. And none of the others gave us anything either.

The Inevitable Carousel of Pseudohistory

That’s basically it. Their argument is done by the end of minute 15. They don’t even attempt a non sequitur for there being any pursuit of “one world language” (in case you hadn’t noticed, that’s also not a thing). While the rest of the video is just cascading nonsense. But let’s slog through.

The first useless bit is some long dull rigmarole about “Babylon” in the Bible, as a real place, and as a myth (though they regard nothing of it a myth), and as a symbol that gets mapped onto other disliked nations (like Rome). The gist is that “Babylon” symbolizes godlessness and hubris in various respects. None of this is interesting or useful. And none of it has any relevance to the video’s thesis. For the actual history, mythology, or typology of Biblical Babylon, I recommend simply consulting real peer-reviewed literature on whichever subject.

When they segue this into “interpreting” the book of Daniel (in minute 18) to get “America” out of it somehow, it’s the same kind of thing. Mostly confused or made-up. You’ll do better consulting people who actually know what they are talking about (no one interviewed here has any relevant degrees—not even Anderson himself—except a few clips they throw in from professors who don’t say anything supporting their thesis).

For just some examples:

• On reading Daniel’s prophecy of the four kingdoms, see my previous comments. The sequence Daniel’s authors intended (even though it garbled history a bit) can only have been Nebuchadnezzar, Darius the “Mede,” Cyrus the Persian, and Alexander the Great. Nothing else fits what they describe; certainly not the Romans. For example, Daniel 2 says the fourth empire remains divided, doesn’t last long, and falls apart (under the division of the Greek successor kings to Alexander, as Daniel 7 says); and is immediately followed by the end of the world and God’s eternal messianic rule (as Daniel 2, 7, and 9–12 all say). The authors of Daniel thus falsely predicted the end of the world in the 2nd century B.C.
• The prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem in Daniel 9 didn’t happen on Daniel’s timeline. Indeed the world was supposed to end seven years later (so even Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem fails to fit). And everything spelled out at the end of Daniel 11 and into 12 failed to happen (see How We Know Daniel Is a Forgery). So the authors of Daniel were predicting this should have happened long before Romans were even there, much less “the Americans.”
• The pundits keep saying things like “Alexander conquered the known world,” as if China, India, Eurasia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas didn’t exist. The “known” world is a dumb phrase, implying the people in those places somehow didn’t know they existed. The authors of Daniel did not know the world was so big and had so many empires and civilizations in it, and so when they fabricated a prophecy that Alexander would conquer “the whole Earth” (as would, they thought, Persia, the third kingdom) they were only revealing their ignorance, not any inspiration from an all-knowing God.
• And then Joel Lampe shows up. It claims he was one of the curators of the Bible Museum in D.C. (I could not verify this), whom the video assigns a Ph.D., though I couldn’t locate any peer reviewed paper of his, or any discussion of what his degree is in, though I did find a self-bio that fails to mention any college at all, an article linking him to a fraudulent manuscript industry, and a slideshow by a Young Earth Creationist of the exact same name. Make of that what you will. But this is the guy who claims (in minute 19) that for “every culture” Alexander the Great “conquered, he made it quite simple, ‘you’re going to do it the Greek way; you’re going to learn Greek; if you want to be educated, you’re going to learn Aristotle’s science and astronomy; and you’re going to do it our way, and if you don’t, well, then, we’ll just kill you.” That never happened. No such cultural policy existed. For a more correct account see Alexander to Actium.

And so on. This section of the video pretty much just drones on about dubious Christian apologetical reinterpretations of verses in Revelations.

• For instance (in minute 22), the figurative Babylon that sits by “many waters” is supposed to “not” mean the Roman Empire, even though the Roman Empire controlled four seas (the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Black Sea, and the Euroatlantic Sea, bordering Spain, West Africa, and the northern Roman provinces) and Rome itself sat on three rivers (and more, if you count its famed canals, aqueducts, and sewers). Sounds aptly described to me.
• Likewise, the idea that any powerful nation that doesn’t kowtow to Israel’s God can be called “Babylon” doesn’t really connect with their thesis of “one world government, religion, and currency.” It’s just a tautological way of saying “governments we don’t like.” Rome was never such a government as they are afraid of, nor was Persia, or any empire since. No NWOs, not a one of them. The greatest world empires have always been ecumenical and diverse (with no single religion or currency), have never controlled even a third of the world, much less all of it, and have always eventually collapsed under single rule. That’s why we have democracies now, while tyrannical regimes degrade on every metric (economic to military), rather than ending up The Dread NWO.

At least at this point Anderson admits he doesn’t believe the Vatican secretly rules the world (minute 23). But he can’t identify anyone who does, or is even on trend to. They resolve to insist it’s “Washington, D.C.” but can’t produce any reason to believe that. The U.S. isn’t running China or Europe or Canada or Brazil. Our dollar is influential but hasn’t replaced any other national currency, and has competition even internationally; and no one is working to change this state of affairs. There’s no “one religion” even in America itself, much less globally. And no government is on track to make there ever be one, least of all the U.S. So where is this ominous NWO? Simply complaining that America has a lot of money and pushes countries around with military and economic policy simply doesn’t cut it. There isn’t anything about that in Revelation. And it’s not all that different from what Britain and Russia once did and China is now building up to do. How many Babylons can there be? And why complain about the one that actually protects religious and economic freedoms?

After this nothingburger we get to long dull rigmarole about how America is too much into “perpetual war” (starting in minute 25 with a stream of irrelevant footage of the 9/11 attacks). Which, again, most Americans agree with. But…so? This is still not “one world government,” much less “one world religion” or “one world currency.” Another nothingburger. It’s all the more embarrassing for them that just a few years after this video tried scaremongering about “perpetual war,” America has ended all its foreign war operations (Afghanistan, Iraq, and the War on Terror are all officially over), and gone back to its usual background hum of quiet wall-guarding and minor saber-rattling. We’re back where we were in 1992. No apocalyptic escalation. Not even recent upsets like the Ukraine or Gaza wars have drawn us in. We supply some arms, take some defensive actions, and that’s it. Evidently there is no death spiral. It’s just the same S.O.P. of our last three hundred years.

We’re somehow supposed to believe, for example, that the second Iraq war was the U.S. “trying to create a world government” (minute 29). But we aren’t governing Iraq. We never even tried to. We left them sovereign. They govern themselves now. China owns more oil contracts in Iraq than the U.S. And Russia remains a trade partner despite our wishes. So much for the NWO. Have we aligned Iraq or ourselves to a singular religion? No. A singular currency? No. A single government? No. All this NWO stuff that’s supposed to be going on, and that the Iraq war is supposed to demonstrate, literally does not exist. We are not doing in Iraq what the Romans or Greeks or Babylonians did—utterly dispelling the analogy Baldwin attempts in minute 29.

The age of empires is dead and gone. The British Empire was the last cinder. Now it’s a free commonwealth. Exactly the opposite of the Roman Empire. America used to do this stuff—but pretty much only at home. We are the only empire from the age of empires to still have most of its empire intact—we just called it manifest destiny, and accomplished it with genocide. But that’s over now, too. We aren’t conquering Canada or Mexico or anyone else. We’re done with that. The NWO is a bygone dream. Even Russia failed to revive the idea. It’s own early 20th century expanse has since fallen apart. All its satellite nations (like Cuba or Vietnam or North Korea or Venezuela) remain independent sovereign states. And it’s being outgunned on every metric by its closest rival, China. It can’t even defeat the tiny border state of Ukraine despite massive numerical superiority.

Imperialism has entirely changed now. It’s economic and cultural, with militaries no longer used as conquering forces but as mere influencers, “politics by other means.” There is no One Great Leader, but a congeries of competing corporate interests with no direct hand on the levers of power, and thus who have to engage in shaky and convoluted operations to control it. Even each individual corporation rarely has One Great Leader, but a fluid board of directors answerable to constantly shifting plutocratic shareholders. As awful as he is, Elon Musk is not the antichrist. Despite being among the richest men on Earth, his power is remarkably limited and lame. American and other national Presidents and Prime Ministers come and go, and with them entire policy regimes. The few Iron Men still lingering (like Putin or Assad or Kim) are pathetic by global standards. Even Xi Jinping is not looking that great in the big picture.

Whatever is going on in the world today, even just at the hands of the United States, it looks nothing at all like any ancient empire, Roman or otherwise. What it looks like was beyond the comprehension of the authors of Revelation. Modern fundamentals of power—without which the current world order cannot at all be understood—like democracy, multilateral treaties, mega-corporations, soft power, black ops, trade unions, monetary policy, human-rights NGOs, high technologies, universal literacy, hybrid socialism, growth capitalism, even religious freedom—were all completely alien and unpredictable to those authors. That’s why they nowhere anticipate any of them in their long, colorful rant. And that’s why Revelation simply will never fit any description of any world order now—whether across this century, the last century, or the next.

So, hey, kudos to them for including much of the apt speech of Ron Paul against the disaster that is American foreign policy (minute 30 to 32). But it just doesn’t support their thesis in any intelligible way. And kudos for reminding us of the problems entailed by the military industrial complex (minute 32 to 40, including the entire key portion of Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address). But that’s simply not “one world government,” nor anything to do with religion, language, or global currency policy—nor anything anticipated in Revelation. So why is it relevant? Did I miss the biblical verses warning us against collusion between corporations, legislatures, and military leaders, or how this could fuel a needless war policy? Did I overlook the chapter comparing different dispositions among nations along that axis and warning us to follow the Swedish, Costa Rican, or Japanese models instead of the American, Russian, or Chinese models? Is there any sound advice in there about how to liberate legislatures from corporate influence? Does the book of Revelation signal any real knowledge of what a corporation or a legislature even is?

Notably, in these sections they do finally have real experts substantively weighing in (albeit mixed in with the cranks). It’s just not on anything to do with the video’s thesis. Remember, that’s “all over the world, one government, one religion, one currency, one language is on its way.” We are forty minutes in and still no evidence has been presented of any one of those things.

Donald J. Trump, Satanic Freemason

Minute 42 introduces Donald Trump. Cue all the next disparate out-of-context clips using the phrase “new world order.” You can check if you care to, but trust me, none of the people quoted, in context, are talking about “all over the world, one government, one religion, one currency, one language.” So, again, it’s all just word-games and dishonest scaremongering. That’s all we get. All they have after that are complaints about America’s internal politics. Nothing to do with a world government, or with the world being compelled to one religion or language or currency. Instead they segue into a long boring montage about Assad and American Syria policy. Nothing to do with their NWO thesis. And nothing explored significantly enough even to be useful on the subject of Syria, either. It’s just shallow manipulation by clip juxtaposition. Low information. Nothing insightful.

The only positive thing I can say is that their montage here is deliberately unflattering to Donald Trump. By minute 47 they are portraying Trump as literally an ominous harbinger of evil, a sellout to greed and globalism. They even claim literal demons are controlling him. Yet I’m flabbergasted they missed the chance here to peg Trump as the worshiped beast, since he’s as close to that casting call as one could get. But, nope. Instead we get vague handwaving, like in minute 50 where Anderson loudly insists “there are demons that are behind these leaders; there are devils that are actually calling the shots.” He ominously warns that the Washington obelisk was erected to the evil demon that controls Trump. No, seriously. He says that with a straight face. “Washington, D.C.” is “a world that’s built for Satan.” Tailor-made apparently. (Dear me. Don’t tell them about the Paris pyramid or London needle or any of the modern world’s actual pagan temples.)

Then we learn about this dark, evil group called The Freemasons (minute 52). Oh dear. There’s standard manipulation here, too. For instance, they show a mason saying “in order to be a freemason, one must not belong to any particular religion, but he must believe in the Supreme Being in some form” and thus imply that he means Freemasons are required to renounce all religions but the Freemason one—but that is not what he meant. Anyone who knows anything (or even just how to use the internet) knows that Freemasons do not require renouncing any religion and in fact allow every member to retain any religion they show up with. What the man in the video meant was that Freemasons are not required to have any particular religion, as long as whatever religion they do have acknowledges a “Supreme Being in some form.” In other words, exactly the opposite of the video’s thesis: they are against “one world religion” and not in any way encouraging one.

They also don’t rule the world. We do not live in a Dan Brown novel. (Yes, this video is using Dan Brown as a history book.) Freemasonry has long been in decline (study, study, study) and has never showed any significant impact on world events. It has also never called for “all over the world, one government, one religion, one currency, one language.” So its existence isn’t even in principle relevant to this video’s thesis. Instead we get a bunch of laughable hand-wringing over pentagrams in the layout of Washington, D.C. They obviously don’t know that that’s actually a Christian symbol and was at the time always associated with the good; or that it’s subsequent use in the occult has been as a ward against evil forces; or that the idea that when upside down it then did the opposite and “attracted” evil was invented a lifetime after D.C. was built, by a Catholic nutter who literally just made it up. Even then it was still not associated with Satan. That idea was invented (again just made up) by counter-culturalist Aleister Crowley in the 1960s.

It is hilarious to watch these documentarians freak out about a symbol of Satan underlying D.C. when the idea of it symbolizing Satan didn’t even exist at the time but only a hundred years later. For what it’s actually doing there, try reading an account by someone who isn’t an idiot. By contrast, Anderson “does his own research” by checking Google Earth. Yeah. That’ll tell ya! And yes. To the right is a clip from the video. They didn’t even try to fix the missing piece or the distortion in the pentacle, much less explain them. Aren’t they curious how this actually came about? Don’t they know Google Earth is not a history book? There are tons of other “pagan” symbols in D.C. and various state capitols they freak out about, but like this one, they never do anything resembling “history” to determine why they are there or what they meant at the time.

It only gets full-on hilarious when they have Category 5 Loon Texe Marrs claim that the lady holding a torch in the Columbia Pictures logo is celebrating Satan, because that’s “the great torch, the torch of knowledge of light, because Satan comes as an Angel of Light—that’s his light; she’s his goddess!” and therefore (!?) the District of “Columbia” is named after Satan (minute 56). Exactly the kind of the crazy you expect from a literal flat-earther. In case you didn’t know, (a) the Columbia Pictures logo is a deliberate lift of The Statue of Liberty (the company literally calls the woman in their logo “Lady Liberty” for that reason, and its earlier versions have the matching headdress, which evolved in later decades into rays from the light, and she’s literally draped in an American flag, which evolved in later decades into just a blue drape); (b) the light is called Liberty Enlightening the World (the Statue of Liberty is, if you hadn’t noticed, literally a lighthouse), not Columbia Worshiping Satan; and (c) Columbia has long been the personification of the United States (being the feminine form of Columbus…get it?), not Satan or any of his minions. And that is why she was chosen to name the Capitol and for the title and logo of the film company (which is why the studio rendered her like the Statue of Liberty and literally wrapped her in an American flag).

The pandering patriotism, and the pun between the wholesome Light of Liberty and the projector light of a movie studio and the idea of films “enlightening the masses,” was all surely the studio’s point. Not “Behold, Satan!!” Likewise the naming of D.C. Anderson then tries to claim (in minute 57) that the Statue of Liberty (which is in New York, not D.C.) is actually “a man” and is secretly a statue of Prometheus (it’s not). Why does he need her to be Prometheus? Because he’s the pagan “light-bringer,” ergo Lucifer (which literally means “light-bringer”), a.k.a. Satan. Which to be fair is an idea as old as the Bible itself: the pre-Christian Book of Enoch replicates the Promethean rebellion, bringing knowledge to men, with the rebellion of Samyaza (later identified as Satan), bringing knowledge to men. I’ve written of this before (on Prometheus functionally becoming Satan: The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, pp. 392–93; and similarly transformed myths: pp. 483–44). Early Christians twisted these stories to denigrate knowledge as evil, coopting pagan myths promoting knowledge as good into myths promoting knowledge as bad. Stock anti-intellectualism. Which tells us a lot about Anderson’s fear of knowledge, but nothing about any looming NWO—or even the Statue of Liberty for that matter.

Anyway. They wrap up the Fear of Freemasons segment with a declaration from Marrs that all statues and obelisks and pyramids are symbols of Satan (from minute 58 through 1:05). Aw. Sure they are, dearie. They go on with other nonsense, like that the eye above the pyramid on American dollars is the eye of Horus (it’s not). Or that its motto e pluribus unum, one from many, refers to the looming one world government, religion, and currency (it doesn’t). They even include an interview with some unnamed nutter describing the claims of a bonkers book of legends by a dubious grifter alleging the Freemasons founded America for a dark secret purpose (they didn’t). No evidence is presented for any of these claims. And none of these claims is evidence of a looming “one world government, religion, currency, and language.” We’ve literally just wasted half an hour.

So Do Tell! How Does It End?

Their last section is on the end times. This is where they predict the world will end any day now (like these yokels have been claiming for thousands of years…which should give you a clue as to how bad at this they are). Minute 5 of hour 2 now opens with Anderson claiming Revelation cannot mean by “Babylon” the actual Babylon because the real one is an uninhabited ruin (cue photos of ruins). But wait. Babylon was flourishing when Revelation was written. This is such a face-palm moment because his conclusion is correct—everyone knows Revelation is using Babylon as a code, and that nothing in that book is intended literally. So why did he need such a bogus premise to get there? That it is a ruin now is a non sequitur. He hasn’t established that Revelation is speaking of the present century and not of its own actual time (the first century). The confusing logic is backwards and circular: Revelation cannot be false prophecy; all the things it says would happen didn’t happen then; therefore (gigantic unexplained leap) it must mean they would happen now; behold, if I strain hard enough, I can make some current events fit what Revelation says, sort of (ish); therefore Revelation cannot be a false prophecy.

Cue again the bible-thumpers with no college degrees: we get now Pastor David Berzins (another kill-the-gays advocate, alongside Jimenez and Anderson) claiming (in 1:07) that he knows what Revelation means. But Anderson cuts in a minute later and claims, yeah, well, we all know the beast with seven heads in Revelation meant ancient Rome, but “I think that they’re missing something” and it somehow also means something else (cue: no evidence whatsoever). Why? Because “seven hills” surely means (handwave handwave) “seven kingdoms.” But it doesn’t: the text explicitly says there are seven kings in succession over one kingdom, followed by an eighth (the last, ending the world); and that it is the later ten kings, represented by the ten crowns, who will work in unison to ravage that kingdom.

But never mind. Anderson is going to make less sense than even that, and list the succeeding “kingdoms” he imagines here as “Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, New World Order.” Wait. What? How did we skip a bazillion kingdoms in between Rome and today? Honestly, you’d think the Holy Roman Empire or the British Empire would at least get an honorable mention. The Spanish and Russian Empires were pretty impressive, too. And I’m still wondering how the Chinese Empire fits in here, since it has technically never collapsed in over two thousand years. Did God forget about them? And what about the Gupta or Japanese or Aztec Empires? And why did we drop the Persian Empire? It was still around after the rise of Rome, continuing as the Parthian Empire, and even outlasted Rome as the Sasanian Empire. And where do the various Islamic Empires fit in? Or the Ottoman Empire? Or the Mongol Empire? And what happened to the eighth king—who is supposed to be the one who actually creates the alleged NWO? Remember? The one who compels the one world religion and the mark of the beast for buying and selling is the second beast, who is explicitly called the eighth king in Revelation. If these are kingdoms, and not kings, as Anderson now insists, then America cannot be the one that forms the NWO; that has to be the feat of some other future kingdom, when the United States no longer exists. Anderson’s entire theory contradicts the text and even itself!

Needless to say, it is in no way the case that America conquered the Roman Empire. Anderson has skipped over a thousand years of empires. Sorry. Not in the text, pal. Anyway, Anderson goes on to claim the eighth king/kingdom (he starts confusing the two) will really be the seventh king but as a Satan-possessed vampire (I’m not kidding: “the eighth will come, who is of the seven—because it’s basically that guy—whether it’s, you know, just Satan possessing his body, or, you know, we don’t know exact details, but we know he dies and comes back somehow, whether he’s alive or undead, you know, whatever,” 1:10). This is kind of a garbled retelling of the Nero Redivivus myth that might (?) be underlying the text of Revelation here (scholars debate that, not just whether Nero is meant at all, but also, even if he is, in what way Nero is meant; see my remarks earlier). But there is no intelligible way to map this onto current events. Anderson said the kings are kingdoms, so it’s not a vampire man but a kingdom—some new nation, perhaps resurrected from the ashes of a fallen United States. But that isn’t what Anderson is claiming (and we’re already standing on a mountain of non sequiturs even to get there).

Anderson wraps this confused, mixed-up, and barely intelligible read of the Revelation text by telling his audience, “You see how this scripture becomes clear, once you see that?” Um. No. It doesn’t. Even your made-up story failed to be clear; but the text of Revelation now is even less so. The audience nods anyway. They don’t know what the text says or even what he just said. But like all flocks of sheep, they are confident that it must be as correct as he can confidently assert it to be. Damn whether it actually made any sense or fits the text, or even reality!

Anderson’s emotional rhetorical tactics like this keep snowing the audience when he jokes about the ten united kings in Revelation: “Have you ever found ten kings, or ten world leaders, who all have one mind, they all agree on something?” The audience laughs. But…um…that’s actually common. So common, in fact, that Wikipedia’s list of international agreements had to set the minimum count to “170” nations (a far sight more than “10”), lest its list of examples approach 100. Altogether, over 500 multilateral treaties have been deposited with the UN Secretary General alone, and that’s still not a complete count of all multilateral treaties. But it’s especially funny to see Anderson say this when talking about the United States (13 “kings” agreed on something there) while right across the pond is now the European Union (by last count, 27 “kings” agreed on something there) and the African Union (not as impressive, but still, that’s at 55 member states now, and it already has a functioning army and its own financial system and is on track to have an AU currency analogous to the U.S. dollar).

I’m sure Anderson would go all Chicken Little over this (“New World Order!”) but these are sovereign unions, not a one of them pursuing global conquest. This is not “one” world government. It’s not even on track to be. Nor do any of these unions have or even want “one” religion. And we’re the only one with “one” language (and only by default; it isn’t mandated by legislation), while the world having half a dozen national-union currencies amidst hundreds of other national currencies is not “one world currency.” Eye on the ball here. These are the things they are supposed to be proving and they not only haven’t, they are just futzing around over weirdo interpretations of an ancient crank-tract here. They are not even trying to prove any NWO trends are actually in play.

I should also add that they have also never even tried to prove their mere assumption that what they mean by a New World Order would even necessarily have to be bad. But I’ll set that aside. Because everyone agrees only a narrow array of conceivable world governments would actually work, and debating that is a purely philosophical exercise. All we can say for sure is that a functional world government would be enforcing religious freedom, not religious unity, and it would be a democracy, not a “kingdom,” and while it could conceivably evolve naturally into simply having one currency and language, no one would be complaining about that. It’s not actually scary—any more than Americans should be terrified that they can’t buy a soda with Klingon darseks or don’t have to be bilingual to chat with their neighbor. (Yes, I noticed the irony that all these Anderson types are usually terrified of having to be bilingual to chat with their neighbor. But like McDurmon, I have to give due: Anderson actually stands up for immigrants. Christians sometimes surprise you.)

Anyway, Anderson says (at 1:12) that because there are countless examples of international summits and multilateral treaties, that Revelation is therefore talking about some future such thing, where ten nations (which ten, or how any ten nations will already control the other two hundred, he skips right over) are “gonna get together and they’re gonna decide to basically, just, hand all the power over to the Antichrist—just hand it all over to one guy.” He notes the text also says they will then ravage the beast’s kingdom. They will hate and burn “the great city that rules over the kings of the earth” and devour it and bring it to ruin, and lament what they’d done; and then the world ends.

That’s a reasonable read. But there is no logical line from “there are lots of international summits and multilateral treaties” to “therefore one of them will somehow (?) conquer the whole world and somehow (?) compel everyone to follow a single new religion and somehow (?) only allow declared patriots to engage in commerce and somehow (?) also get them all to speak a single language and then for some reason (?) burn their own empire to the ground.” In short, “Revelation says a union of kings will be empowered by a guy to destroy his own kingdom” no more refers to any current events as to any “national collapse” event ever in human history, past or future. This is the problem with oracles. Can we peg anyone today as any of these kings or that guy? No. Can we peg any current trends to this self-devouring collapse narrative? No. Where is the evidence that any of this is happening or about to happen? They don’t have any. Just handwaving. Literally…

At this point (around 1:14) Anderson goes on a political rant about how the world uses us like a whore (we give them money and fight their wars) and hates us for it—just like (?) the “whore” of Babylon. But that’s an eye-rollingly shallow analysis. He doesn’t get into why other nations hate us (trust me, it’s not for giving them money and fighting their wars) or why helping other people is “being a whore” (rather than, say, a good friend and ally). Anderson’s rant also makes illogical hash out of the teachings of Jesus (“Oh gross, look at all the rich people giving to the poor—those whores!”). I thought Jesus was all about helping others? So it can’t be our helping others that makes us a whore; hence our being a whore of any variety can’t be why people hate us. Whores by definition are the ones who get paid. (Pro tip: we’re hated for being a dick, not a whore.) So this rant is just a pointless drunk uncle moment.

We now segue into an illogical prediction (around 1:15) that the antichrist needs to take over the American government to have its military and economic might in order to control the world (bringing us, presumably, that “one government, one religion, one currency, one language” we keep hearing about), but once he has that, he will voluntarily destroy it all. Um. Why? Then he won’t have the military and economic might to control the world with. Anderson is making no sense of the motives of this hypothetical future world leader. Compare this nonsense with literally any intelligent expert exploration of possible future outcomes (globally or domestically), by actual political scientists, journalists, and historians. Anderson can’t point to anyone who fits his description. He can’t explain any intelligible motive for him, or anyone who follows him. Why is China going along with this? Will it have two Senate seats? I just can’t fathom what on Earth Anderson thinks he is predicting.

Needless to say, we are hella gone now from anything resembling the presenting of evidence for the actual thesis of this video. For example, Anderson suddenly jumps into claiming abortion will bring literal hellfire on America (1:17); an issue nowhere mentioned in Revelation, nor logically connectable to any NWO trend, and not meaningfully particular to America. Abortion is freer and easier almost everywhere else on the planet. But America gets the hellfire? Why not Finland? Or New Zealand? I’m not following his logic here. For another example, he rightly complains about how our excess use of military action and drone strikes will have negative consequences—and then leaps straight to Hellfire from God (“there is a physical destruction that is going to come upon our nation, in the United States of America; even in this lifetime it could happen”). But a sober political analyst will point out a far more likely consequence is what has already happened: terrorism, instability, and ill will. Good enough reasons to condemn our policies. But he’s not showing any looming hellfire here. I don’t think Iraq is going to invade and conquer the United States. My bet is on Ecuador getting to it first. And maybe Russia or China will foolishly nuke us someday—but then, that would mean there was no world government when that happened. So much for Revelation’s narrative!

If this was just “Hey, we should stop being dicks to other nations, or we’ll rue the day,” I’d have no disagreement. His politics on this one point are not wrong. But the point here is that they are supposed to be laying out evidence of a looming “one world government.” Somehow they’ve drunkenly stumbled over to a completely different thesis about the collapse of the United States, without any “one world government,” but somehow still following a specific timeline spelled out in the book of Revelation. And they aren’t presenting any evidence of even that. No causal-probability analysis of any specific political candidate or world events. Nothing. This doom is also supposed to happen after the NWO thing—and they’ve gotten nowhere on the NWO thing. Not a shred of evidence it’s even likely to happen in this century, much less our lifetime. Yet they are already claiming to predict what follows that, a thing nowhere on the horizon as likely. It’s just gobbledygook.

By 1:19 they are arguing, “Who else could Revelation mean but the U.S.?” But they seem to have forgotten where we started: that the authors of Revelation were talking about the Roman Empire. That’s the “who else.” So the non sequitur here is “Look at how the U.S. is a morally compromised superpower—that must be Babylon!” When, in fact, the only economy Revelation describes is not ours but the Roman Empire’s—that’s the only morally compromised superpower it knew, and ever intended to rant about. In the empire it describes there’s no vital satellite economics, no internet, no air cargo, no computers, no appliances, no trucks or railways, no paper or digital wealth, not even manufactured goods (other than horse-drawn carriages). To their eye, millstones are the most advanced machinery one might notice the absence of. They’re describing Rome. Not America.

One might try to say, well, okay, then maybe Revelation’s political theory about morally compromised superpowers could be applicable today. But Revelation’s political theory about morally compromised superpowers is that magical warrior beasts will invade from outer space and melt them. Which didn’t happen. So, clearly, political science is not Revelation’s strong suit. Even if we ignore that bit and focus on the vaguely correct thesis that “autocrats might make bad political appointments that collapse their nations with civil wars,” we don’t need Revelation’s simplistic warnings; we have fully developed empirical theoretics about that now. And the solutions aren’t in Revelation. Not a peep about democracy, equality of law, human rights, balance of powers, consent of the governed, or even how to build peaceful systems of conflict revolution. Revelation is useless.

The same error occurs when Anderson tries to claim that Revelation 8 and 18 are describing nuclear warfare (starting at 1:24). Perhaps he does not know that, in fact, it is describing destruction by volcano—because the details match those well known by then from accounts of the eruption of Vesuvius just a decade earlier (Pliny, Epistles 6.16 and 6.20). The authors of Revelation are saying the same catastrophe will strike Rome. They had no conception of volcanology, so they didn’t know there could be no comparable volcanic events there, but of course God could do anything (they would suppose). In any event, there is nothing in Revelation distinctive of nuclear warfare. No missiles or bombers are mentioned. No blinding light. No effects of radiation fallout.

Nor does the text even mention the “destroying wind” Anderson tries to offer as evidence. If you don’t pay close attention, you might miss the fact that that is not in Revelation. Its seers didn’t “see” any such wind. Anderson just pulls that in from a different text, Jeremiah 51, which is about a different situation, written centuries before. Worse, Anderson gets his wording from the King James translation of Jeremiah (because Anderson is a King James Only guy), but here that betrays him. The NIV more plausibly renders the Hebrew as “a destroying spirit,” i.e. a spirit of destruction—an abstract concept, not a physical entity. That’s why the passage goes on to describe an army killing the people of Babylon, not a lethal wind (much less heat or fire, or mushroom clouds or fallout). The reference is most likely to a hoped-for sack of Babylon by “the Medes” (it would be the Persians). Most recent translations agree. Jeremiah also overstretched, since he predicted the end result would be the eternal obliteration of Babylon, which didn’t happen.

There is another goof in the video at this point, as it forgot it included Anderson admitting Jeremiah 51 was about the actual Babylon of his time—but then they keep switching inexplicably to claiming it’s about modern America, and that it’s referring to the same future event as Revelation. Both can’t be true. And the latter is in every way implausible, and supported by no evidence. It is true that the authors of Revelation turned to Jeremiah for literary inspiration, but that does not mean they were talking about the same events—as if Jeremiah was wildly confused, but God snickered, and let him go anyway to rant at the walls of the ancient city of Babylon, knowing He didn’t mean that city, but some whole continent on the other side of the planet that Jeremiah had never heard of, and two thousand years later, rather than being the imminent vengeance for Babylon’s attacks on Israel that God told Jeremiah it would be. So, either God is a dirty and pathetic liar who made a sad fool out of Jeremiah or…this wasn’t a prophecy about America, or at all what Revelation was talking about.

Conclusion

And that’s it. From 1:30 on, the rest of the video is just a stock You Need Jesus gospel sales pitch (including an extremely eye-rolling hellfire sermon after the credits). It’s all just “be scared; you’re doomed; turn to Jesus.” Nothing about history or world events. They drop their thesis entirely.

This video claimed it would prove that “all over the world, one government, one religion, one currency, one language is on its way.” After almost two insufferable hours, it didn’t present any pertinent evidence for any one of those things being on the way. It created the appearance or “feeling” that such evidence had been presented (manipulated video clips; unevidenced assertions; rhetoric), but it never was. Even its biblical interpretations were inexpert, confused, and contradictory—and never actually connected to any current events at all. No relevant experts ever appeared. No economists, political scientists, even journalists or historians. When it ever had real ones (like a smattering of historians), they only spoke of mundane points inessential to the video’s thesis. Whereas anyone who did make supporting assertions was some extremist loon or other, with zero credentials, and they either had no evidence to present, or got even basic facts wrong.

Grade: F.