Converging Fascism
Looking at the history of the extreme antisemitic right, two movements seem to converge: Christian Identity and the Silver Shirt Legion.
The Silver Shirts and Christian Identity are different. The Silver Shirts were a mix of Theosophy and Spiritism. Although founder William Dudley Pelley claimed to be a Christian, his ideas more closely resemble New Age. When he was arrested, the Silver Shirts were taken over by Guy and Edna Ballard, and converted into the I AM theosophy of the St. Germain Society (1). William Dudley Pelley was a militant antisemite. His hatred of Jews developed when he witnessed the civil war in Russia. I suspect some Royalists of the Black Hundred verity sold him on the Jews being behind the war. As I have explained in my first segment of “Where have all the Nazis gone?”, this was a popular position among royalists. Pelley purposely modelled his Silver Shirt Legion on fascist movements in Europe (2).
Pelley had a belief that humanity was the result of aliens coming from the Sirius system to earth. Some of them mated with the local inferior creatures, creating the current human race which lacked the psychic powers of their alien progenitors. This is likely one of the main starting points for the incorperation of UAPs into religious practice.
Christian Identity, however, budded and germinated in an unambiguously evangelical environment. Wesley Swift appears to have gotten his start in the Four Square denomination founded by Aimee Semple MacPherson. It was an offshoot of the British Israelite movement, which says that Britain and America are part of the “lost tribes of Israel”. Identity developed this strange but popular strain of thought in Protestantism further by saying that Jewish people were part of a tainted bloodline that goes all the way back to Satan. (3)
Besides having worldviews which place the cause of “evil” to be miscegenation, (and an obsession with UAPS and pyramids) they both have some interesting links historically. The first is Gerald L. K. Smith. Smith was one of the greatest proponents of antisemitism of the 20th century. Smith was a Protestant who was also a Silver Shirt, and went on to create most of the infrastructure the Christian Identity preacher Wesley Swift would use to popularize the ideas.
The second is Posse Comitatus, the brainchild of Christian Identity Preacher William Potter Gale. It developed a militia group based around Gale’s ideas that was used to enforce white supremacy across rural America. In many ways it functioned like the KKK, but it took it a step further, targeting government officials. It also promulgated a series of word salad legal theories members used to perform “paper terrorism” against government officials by flooding them with invalid legal papers.
Gale was its creator, but it was former Silver Shirt leader Henry “Mike” Beach that really turned it into a multistate movement. This was not a consensual operation. Beach basically plagiarized Gale word for word. But to say that this means they had incompatible or opposing ideologies misses the point. Beach found Gale’s teachings attractive. His followers did too. The Silver Shirts had been one of the first movements to start paramilitary groups. They had the will and the means to make Gale’s vision a reality (4).
These are images of the content of the handbook he developed by plagiarizing Gale’s work. You can see the absolutely absurd interpretation of the law that it is the County Sheriff that holds the seat of power in their jurisdiction. It was really just an excuse to form paramilitary groups to commit terrorism against Black people, immigrants and government officials. It was a fig leaf to cover up their sedition by giving them bogus authority.
The point I am trying to make is differentiating between esoteric faiths and Christianity when studying extremism is a bit of a fools errand. There have been extreme versions of both faith groupings since the beginning of the 20th century. They have more in common with each other than they do with mainstream religion, and still work together extensively. Qanon is a perfect example of simultaneously targeting Christian and Esoteric communities towards a common goal of radicalizing them.
However, their similarities with mainstream religion keeps them open for recruitment into a more extreme version of their faith. Every charismatic prayer circle has the person who is really concerned about giant angel hybrids (an Identity obsession). Every yoga group has the person who is really worried about reptilian human hybrids (this comes more out of the theosophical world). The danger of radicalization is present in both circles.
The thing that is worrying about the extremes of both religions is that this is the type of theology that motivates paramilitaries to form. If the US will be torn apart, it will be by irregular guerilla warfare perpetrated by people radicalized by these extreme version of religion. It will be an ugly, horrific type of warfare that is only possible for people who believe their opponents aren’t human, but are reptilians or fallen angels.
Religious leaders are the people who can stop this. They *need* to speak out about extremists like Mike Flynn who borrow Identity by calling their enemies demons or people like David Icke who call their enemies reptiles, which is really the same thing (the dragon in Revelation is often related to the reptilians). People are people, worthy of dignity.
Addressing this starts by stopping dehumanizing each other. Let’s be honest, this rhetoric is coming from the Esoteric and Christian camps. It has a long history. It’s just not helpful at a time we are trying to stop fascism. It always seems to have an antisemitic overtone on both sides as well. If we reject antisemitism, we should also reject the antisemitic sounding conspiracy theories we have about each other.
(1) Psychic Dictatorship in America, Gerald Bryan https://books.google.ca/books/about/Psychic_Dictatorship_in_America.html?id=brU0AAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y
(2)William Dudley Pelley: a Life of Right Wing Extremism and Occultism by Scott Beekman
(3)Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement by Michael Barkun
(4) The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and The Radical Right, by Daniel Levitas