Despite peaking at number 11 on the US charts in September of 1981, the song seems apropos 40 years after its release, particularly for this moment in American history. Any time mobs take to the streets and start forcing their way to the business district, or in this case muscling past police to get into the House and Senate chambers of the Capitol, one has to wonder where will the fringe stop.
From videos of the Capitol blitz you can easily see that there are numerous members of, let’s call them for what they really are: “the lunatic fringe.” The fringe can turn a demonstration into a protest and then into a riot. If unchecked, the fury of the fringe resorts to its lowest common denominator–witch doctors running around in bear skins, for example. Once it devolves into the mob mentality, the storming the Bastille or the Winter Palace, it can easily turn into rage and full blown revolution.
From videos of the Capitol blitz you can easily see that there are numerous members of, let’s call them for what they really are: “the lunatic fringe.” The fringe can turn a demonstration into a protest and then into a riot. If unchecked, the fury of the fringe resorts to its lowest common denominator–witch doctors running around in bear skins, for example. Once it devolves into the mob mentality, the storming the Bastille or the Winter Palace, it can easily turn into rage and full blown revolution.
Now, I am not using the term “lunatic fringe” as a disparaging remark. It’s a fact, as the song says: there out there. All one has to do is scratch the surface of our history to find it is laced with elements of the lunatic fringe from all over the spectrum. At times it is like kicking over a rotten log in the woods and finding all sorts infestation crawling about. And for the most part that is where they remain. But every now-and-then the fringe, and their conspiracies, scurry out from the dark and manifest themselves as some sort of defenders of the realm, keepers of democracy, protectors of the national identity. It can easily pull in your normal average Joe into the frenzy.
Take our beloved Pilgrims. It could be argued that those purifying Pilgrims who settled on the rocky shores of Massachusetts more than 370 years ago were the lunatic fringe of the Protestant Reformation. They were breaking away from the English Church, which broke away from the Catholic Church. Think about it. You have to be on the fringes of religious fanaticism or sanity to get in a leaky boat for more than a month, on the stormy North Atlantic Ocean and head for a place sight unseen. That is a leap of faith. For the Pilgrims there was no second chance, no buyer’s remorse.
We view the Puritans efforts at settling in the “New World” with historic pride as they tamed the wilderness and ran off the indigenous people. Their religious dedication and hard work is ingrained in our national psyche. They have given us what Max Weber, a German political economist and sociologist, called the Protestant work ethic. This is based on the Calvinist belief that earthly material success and profit was proof of God’s grace bestowed upon an individual, a form of spiritual capitalism. It also set us up for the belief of blaming the victim. If you were not rich or successful then God was not shedding his grace upon you–you must have done something wrong or nothing at all and deserve a life of struggle and woe.
These were the same devoted people who would later hang Quakers and threaten unwanted Catholic priests with death if they happened to show up unannounced for Thanksgiving dinner. And we won’t even go into the witch burning thing.
Throughout our history a lot of the fringe groups represented repressed religious and cultural beliefs. For example, there was always a good Protestant/Catholic hate relationship taking place. This bitter religious divide over the same savior took off in the 1840s when Catholic Irish started washing up on the East Coast causing spiritual and cultural havoc among the predominantly English Protestants. Here come the Papists.
At this time half of the immigrants coming into the US were from Ireland. Rekindling the centuries old Anglo-Irish blood feud, which predates the Pilgrims, but was still in everybody’s collective memory. This wave of Irish immigration gave way to the Know Nothing Party, an anti immigration party in the 1840s that believed that these non-citizens were showing up at the polls in droves to vote–sound familiar: immigrant caravans heading for your town USA. (see June 2016 Know Nothings Ride Again)
And then there is the conspiracy theorists. The United States was practically born with a conspiracy binky stuck in its mouth. The country was barely 10 years old when Jedidiah Morse started spreading an intriguing fantasy of the Illuminati’s attempt at world dominion.
Chances are most of what we know about the Illuminati comes from Dan Brown’s book (and the movie) Angels & Demon. According to danbrown.com his book is about “the resurgence of an ancient secret brotherhood known as the Illuminati… the most powerful underground organization ever to walk the earth…The Illuminati has surfaced from the shadows to carry out the final phase of its legendary vendetta against its most hated enemy… the Catholic Church.” Some of what we read in the paper today about how we are one day away from being dominated by a confederacy of “Satan worshiping pedophiles” is right in line with some of our history’s past conspiracy theories.
There was a belief, according to University of Edinburgh professor, John Robison, who wrote in 1789 that the Illuminati was formed “for the express purpose of rooting out all religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of Europe.” European history is laced with inquisitions and burning heretics at the stake. Just look what happened to the Knights of the Templar. According to History.com “In 1307, King Philip IV of France and Pope Clement V combined to take down the Knights Templar, arresting the grandmaster, Jacques de Molay, on charges of heresy, sacrilege and Satanism. Under torture, Molay and other leading Templars confessed and were eventually burned at the stake. Clement dissolved the Templars in 1312. The modern-day Catholic Church has admitted that the persecution of the Knights Templar was unjustified and claimed that Pope Clement was pressured by secular rulers to dissolve the order.”
Let’s fast forward to the 1700s. Several things happened in the Western world. There were some significant shifts in thinking that took place. Europe moved through a Renaissance to a Protestant Reformation and now it was in a period of Enlightenment. A move from a religious based way of thinking to a more reasoned approach to the world. This continual shift over the centuries in thought from the Dark Ages didn’t come without philosophical, religious, political, economical and cultural costs. By the mid 1700s the English colonies were coming up with their own conspiracy theories that led to serious questions concerning English colonial rule. And if anybody needed any proof of the shifts in political and economic thought just look at the insanity that was taking place in France. France had decapitated its monarchy and was going through its bloody revolution. It was a time that would pit France against most of Europe.
Here, in America the colonies just turned the world upside down and were barely a decade into their new government. Political parties were forming across the new nation as Federalist, under John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, supported Great Britain. They were opposing Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and their Democratic Republicans who were more supportive of France–among other political and economic differences. There was a deep belief that French spies (18th Century bots and hackers) were planting propaganda in American newspapers. This created a parinora among Federalists. Into this changing political climate and cultural unrest, creeps the conspiracy theorist. The rotten log in the forest has been turned over.
But it takes an educated man who sees what others are missing (an opportunity usually). A somebody to “connect the dots” for those who do not understand the crimes of the times. Enter Jedidiah Morse, a Yale educated New England preacher, geographer and father of Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph. He took to the pulpit, a 17th Century social media platform. Morse expounded on Robison theories of Illuminati domination. He believed that an ever expanding brotherhood was slipping up on the shores and developing here in to dominate America. His preaching was able to convince other preachers which convinced Federalist leaders, like Adams, that this was more than a localized Salem witch hunt.
To the Federalist the threat was real. This was a time of political unrest with the Adams’s administration fighting a Quasi War with France on the open seas and Jefferson’s growing Democratic Republican party at home. Adam’s administration began to “connect the dots.” To defend the nation from infidels and heretics they passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Probably the first attempt at a Patriot Act. The act increased from five years to 14 years the time required to become a naturalized citizen. It seems that most of the newly arriving immigrants had favored Jefferson’s Republican party. In case of a war, the act allowed the government to deport non-citizens who could be plotting against the US. And finally, probably the most egregious part of the act, was it allowed the government to jail citizens if they spoke out against Adams and his Federalist officials. Several prominent newspapers editors of the time were jailed for connecting the dots in a non-Federalist way, and now under the new laws, paid the price for their contradictory views.
Now Morse did not create the discordant political environment, the chaos in France, or the Illuminati. He just inspired the fringe element to look for a foreign speaking boogie man or men. His quest for an Illuminati brotherhood was much like searching for Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destructions in Iraq. We know there out there but… It looked and sounded good but yielded no secret societies.
This was only the first conspiracy theory to send America into a frenzy and not the last. Shortly after the Illuminati came and went the Anti-Masonry movement swept the country. Freemasons were taking over the government. There were Southern sympathizing “Copperheads” during the Civil War and several “Red Scares”: one after World War I with socialist lurking everywhere. The next scare was McCarthyism during the Cold War. Since then we have had hippies and yippies supposedly putting LSD into public drinking water, the Carlyle Group, the New World Order and now we have resurgence of old school klu kluckers–again with the Klan–alt right, QAnon, and antifa.
The lunatic fringe is always around. As the song says: You’re in hiding, and you hold your meetings I can hear you coming. But before they come out of hiding they need some sort of influential person: a preacher, several senators or a president to validate their sketchy claims based on foggy logic and fuzzy cause and effect. A credible fear is easy to stoke when an accessible apparition to demonize appears. I can be anything: Illuminati, Catholics, Masons, communists or socialists; an immigrant with a different religion. Once a demon is identified, the fringe conspiracies need a voice to bellow out their theories to induce a mass hysteria. And today pushing half-baked beliefs is so much easier and efficient with social media and the internet. As Mark Twain supposedly said: History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.
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