Gary Allen was fond of boasting that, being a history professor, he didn’t make anything up, that everything he was talking about was right there and freely available in the library. Anybody could have found what he did, had they been so inclined. Again being a history professor, he simply knew where to find it, and was able to piece things together in a way no one had ever done before.
Well, okay, less a professor than a one-time high school history teacher, but we’ll let it slide, as I guess it doesn’t really take away from his library research skills.
Allen was a Southern California native who studied history at Stanford. In the late Fifties, as a conservative in his twenties disillusioned with Establishment politics, he joined the rabidly anti-communist and conspiracy-minded John Birch Society, where his skills as a writer and speaker soon found him appointed the group’s spokesman. He published several articles in ultra-conservative journals and, in 1968 joined a staff that included several Klansmen and Neo-Nazis to become a speechwriter for storied, even Shakespearian Alabama governor George Wallace, then making his second run for the White House.
Wallace, who’d made a failed run as a Democrat in 1964, now found himself shunned by the Democratic Party four years later for his pro-segregationist policies as governor. Declaring there was no major distinction between the two reigning parties anymore, Wallace founded his own American Independent Party, which, among the public and the media, also came to be known as the Segregationist Party. Although everyone, including Wallace, knew he didn’t have a chance in hell of beating either Nixon or Humphrey, his hope was to win enough electoral votes in Southern states to split the vote. If that happened, Wallace would have at least established himself as a political force to be reckoned with.
On the campaign trail Wallace earned a reputation as a wildly entertaining speaker. The speeches Allen wrote for him were packed with calls for states’ rights, denunciations of the evils of forced desegregation, and blistering attacks on the Establishment, which did indeed win him a number of true believers across the South. Those listening closely to the speeches in retrospect might also recognize a number of recurring terms, phrases and ideas Allen would later exploit in his own writing.
While Wallace didn’t quite split the vote in the end (and political scientists still debate how things would have gone if he had), he did come much closer than anyone expected to achieving his goal. Capturing thirteen percent of the vote in ’68 justified another run in ’72 as a Democrat.
Allen, meanwhile, had started releasing books through the small conservative press, Western Islands. His first, released in 1967, claimed student protests were actually a Soviet-backed first stage in a communist revolution in America. He followed that with two books attacking Nixon, particularly the new president’s foreign policy and his apparent coddling of communist Russia and China. His fourth book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, would be his magnum opus, in which he pulled together all his research to present a terrifying vision of the secret and shadowy forces which actually ruled the world.
Co-written with Larry Abraham, None Dare Call it Conspiracy was a distillation of populist Right Wing paranoia, Bircher conspiracies about the ever-present commie threat, a hatred of the IRS, an overwhelming distrust of the intentions of wealthy industrialists, and thinly-veiled anti-Semitism. In pulling all these things together in a seemingly coherent narrative, he marked the next evolutionary phase in the growth and development of post-JFK American conspiracy theory.
His core theory went like this. Our elected officials are mere impotent puppets, the entire federal government a shadowplay directed by a secret cabal of international bankers, industrialists and power brokers he referred to interchangeably as “Globalists,” “elites,” and “insiders.” So, using a number of long standing JBS code words, the villain of Allen’s story turns out to be, yes, the Jews. Citing numerous historical examples, he argues that for decades, even centuries, the Globalists, working through secret societies like the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Federal Reserve and the World Bank, have made it their mission to ensure the social order is in a state of perpetual disruption and unrest, that wars big and small keep popping up, that the national debt and interest rates continue to climb, as these are all situations that will fatten their own bank accounts while keeping the poor poor. This is why the likes of Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and the Rothchilds bankrolled both the communists and the Nazis. Their ultimate goal in all this is what they’ve termed The New World Order (a phrase lifted from Hitler)—namely the destruction of the United States, the dissolution of all national borders, and the installation of a one-world Socialist government that would enslave us all. He points out several things, like the introduction of social security and a federal income tax as evidence the sinister project is well underway.
None Dare Call It Conspiracy hit the bestseller lists in 1972, and sold an estimated four million copies. Given the chaotic state of America and the world at that moment, you can understand why people were desperate and eager to grab hold of some kind of coherent explanation for it all, particularly if it implicated the Jews.
Coinciding with the book’s release, Allen also released an audiotape of a lecture in which he doesn’t read the book aloud, but lays out its arguments in detail. In those pre-YouTube days, the sale of such cassettes through ads in the back pages of specialty magazines was a common practice for conspiracists, evangelicals, racists and other extremist thinkers, as they likely realized their core audience wasn’t exactly in the habit of going to bookstores or reading. Conspiracy theory has always been deeply entrenched in the oral tradition in that way, something that remains true today, with conspiracists much more likely to go on the radio, record a podcast or post a YouTube video than sit down and write a book.
To get a sense of the book’s reach, five years after Allen published None Dare Call It Conspiracy, Sidney Lumet directed the Oscar-winning dark comedy, Network, from a Paddy Chayevsky script. About three-quarters through the film, Ned Beatty, as the CEO of an international conglomerate which owns, among other things, a television network, gives a brilliant monologue in which he lays out Allen’s entire argument, but from the enemy’s perspective (“There are no nations. There are no peoples.”) He’s the Globalist Satan of Allen’s most paranoid nightmares, an embodiment of the evil that secretly rules the world. What follows the monologue is yet more proof Chayevsky was quite familiar with Allen’s book.
Allen, meanwhile, continued to publish books and articles in which he railed against Globalists and the New World Order until his death in 1986 at age fifty.
Two significant things occurred in the few short years immediately following Allen’s death. First, in 1989 newly-elected President George H.W. Bush began publicly touting the promise and virtues of “The New World Order.” Even without knowing anything about Allen, the American public and the world news media alike reacted with some shock and dismay at Bush’s adoption of a term with such overt National Socialist connotations. But I always suspected Bush knew exactly what he was talking about, being as he was such a textbook example of an Allenian villain. I mean, a Texas millionaire who’d been in Skull & Bones and headed both the CIA and NSA? How much more of an evil secret Globalist could he be?
The other significant thing that happened was a teenaged Alex Jones came across None Dare Call It Conspiracy on his father’s bookshelf, and it changed his life. While in community college in Texas, Jones hosted a conspiracy-themed cable access show where it became apparent he had fully digested Allen’s teachings. All of Allen’s trademark rhetoric was there—“Globalists,” “elites,” “insiders,” “New World Order,” along with accusations lobbed against The Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Federal Reserve.
After moving his show onto radio, he took another lead from Allen. While Allen catered to his less than literate fans by releasing lectures on audiocassette, in the late Nineties Jones began producing his own documentaries about the sinister intentions of the Bilderbergs and other Allenian bugaboos, releasing them on DVD and selling them online.
Even after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, when Jones came to prominence by being among the first and loudest to declare it had been an inside job, he remained (like Allen) an independent Libertarian who distrusted Republicans, Democrats and all establishment politicians equally, claiming they were all puppets of the Global Elites. That politocal independence would evaporate in about fifteen years.
Then there was the case of Jim Marrs. Marrs was a Texas-based journalist who, like so many others, became a bit obsessed with the Kennedy assassination, particularly after the release of the Warren Commission report. In the early Seventies he began teaching the world’s first college course about JFK assassination conspiracies. Then in 1989 he published Crossfire. Late as it was to the game, the book is still regarded the best and most accurately researched overview of all the countering theories at play—the Mob, the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, etc. The book catapulted him to prominence both as a media figure and within conspiracy circles, and inspired the Olover Stone comedy.
After that, however, he began slipping into zanier conspiratorial territory: UFOs, ancient astronauts, pyramid power, ancient secret societies, chemtrails and the like. But following 9/11. He suddenly began aping both Jones and Allen himself, by blaming Globalists, elites, insiders, the Council on Foreign Relations, The Federal Reserve, all the usual suspects for everything from the economic collapse of 2008 to a deliberate plan to depopulate the world by poisoning the air, food, water and vaccines.
You almost get the sense that, after spending a decade lurking around the crazier fringes of the conspiratorial underground, he noted Jones’ sudden prominence and decided to jump on that bandwagon. More people seemed to listen when you talked about Globalists than when you railed about UFOs and chemtrails. “Global elite fascists” people could comprehend, especially when they were blamed for real world problems like autistic kids and the unemployment rate.
Like Allen and Jones, Marrs presented himself as a Libertarian, hurling as much invective at George W. Bush for installing a police state as he did at Obama for, well, everything.
Then in 2015 along came a presidential candidate who, despite being a corrupt real estate billionaire with strong ties to an international cabal of bankers and financiers, nevertheless co-opted Allen’s language as he ran on a conspiratorial platform while launching endless attacks on the Global elite.
Marrs died around this time, so there’s no saying how he might have reacted to the Trump presidency. Jones, however, who himself had been slipping into looney-tunes territory with his fear mongering over the arrival of clockwork elves from another dimension and his claims the Sandy Hook massacre was a Democratic hoax, saw an opportunity to legitimize himself. He suddenly became a Republican, latched on to the Trump wagon, and, for awhile there, became the new president’s Minister of Propaganda. Until the social media platforms that unified and strengthen his base came crashing down on him, Jones and the president seemed to spend their days repeating what the other had said the previous day.
Now with Jones media empire reduced to a website and radio show, he no longer seems to have the presidents ear. But the psychic damage has been done, with Allen’s paranoid rhetoric permeating the culture, from the highest office in the land to Fox News to MAGA-hatted yahoos and QAnon.
In a not terribly surprising move, when George H. W. Bush died at the end of 2018, Jones celebrated his death, calling Bush”anti-American,” hailing the event as “the end of the New World Order.”
You have to wonder. If Allen was still alive would he see it as a validation, or merely the latest cruel joke on the parr of the council on Foreign Relations?
by Jim Knipfel