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Baracknophobia and the Paranoid Style: Visions of Obama as the Antichrist on the World Wide Web

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This chapter explores the belief among certain subsets of the US population that Obama is the Antichrist depicted as setting the stage for the end of the world. First, I examine the apocalyptic fears and conspiracies surrounding the presidency of Barack Obama, placing it in historical and religious perspective. Second, I investigate how expressions of apocalypticism and conspiracism surrounding Obama manifest themselves on the Internet.

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NETWORK APOCALYPSE

The Bible in the Modern World, 36

Series Editors

J. Cheryl Exum, Jorunn Økland, Stephen D. Moore

Apocalypse and Popular Culture, 3

Series Editor

John Walliss

NETWORK APOCALYPSE

VISIONS OF THE END

IN AN AGE OF INTERNET MEDIA

edited by

Robert Glenn Howard

SHEFFIELD PHOENIX PRESS

2011

Published by Shefﬁeld Phoenix Press

Department of Biblical Studies, University of Shefﬁeld

45 Victoria Street, Shefﬁeld S3 7QB

www.shefﬁeldphoenix.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information

storage or retrieval system, without the publisher’s permission in writing.

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

Typeset by the HK Scriptorium

Printed by Lightning Source

ISBN 978-1-907534-13-3 (hbk)

ISSN 1747-9630

CONTENTS

List of Contributors vii

INTRODUCTION: VISIONS OF THE END IN AN AGE OF INTERNET MEDIA

Robert Glenn Howard ix

PART I: NETWORK THEORIES OF APOCALYPSE 1

1. ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE NEW GLOBAL VILLAGE:

COMPUTER-MEDIATED PROPHECY AND THE DIGITAL AFTERLIFE

Andrew Fergus Wilson 2

2. FROM PEAK OIL TO THE APOCALYPSE:

CULTURAL MYTHS AND THE PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING

OF SCIENTIFIC MODELS

William A. Stahl 25

3. YOUTUBE AND APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC:

BROADCASTING YOURSELF TO THE ENDS OF THE WORLD

Dennis Beesley 44

4. PROJECTS OF CONTROL AND TERMINATION:

TRANSCENDENCE IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

JL Schatz 74

PART II: DIVERSE CASES OF NETWORK APOCALYPSE 95

5. BARACKNOPHOBIA AND THE PARANOID STYLE:

VISIONS OF OBAMA AS THE ANTICHRIST ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB

Amarnath Amarasingam 96

6. RATIONALIZATION OF THE RAPTURE:

THE CULTURE OF MANAGING RISK ON

THE YOUVEBEENLEFTBEHIND.COM WEB SITE

Salvador Jimenez Murguia 124

vi Network Apocalypse

7. PAN-ISLAMIST NETWORKS OF THE APOCALYPSE:

MOBILIZING DIASPORIC MUSLIM YOUTH ON FACEBOOK

David Drissel 145

8. ‘WE ALL STRAY FROM OUR PATHS SOMETIMES’:

MORALITY AND SURVIVAL IN FALLOUT 3

James Schirmer 183

9. THE MEDIA-SAVVY RITUAL SUICIDES:

HOW THE HEAVEN’S GAT E GROUP CO-OPTED

INSTITUTIONAL MEDIA AND CREATED A NEW TRADITION

Robert Glenn Howard 200

Index of Authors 223

Index of Subjects 225

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Editor and Author

Robert Glenn Howard is Associate Professor of Communication Arts at

the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He is the author of Digital Jesus:

The Making of a New Christian Fundamentalism Community on the Inter-

net (2011) and more than thirty academic articles on everyday communica-

tion online. Currently, he serves as Director of Digital Studies and Associ-

ate Chair of the Folklore Program at Wisconsin, where he teaches courses

on communication technologies, folklore, rhetoric and religion. He may be

contacted by e-mail at rgh@rghoward.com or found on the Web at http://

rghoward.com.

Authors

Amarnath Amarasingam is a doctoral candidate in the Laurier-Waterloo

PhD program in Religious Studies, and holds a Social Sciences and Human-

ities Research Council of Canada doctoral fellowship. He is editor of Reli-

gion and the New Atheism: A Critical Appraisal (2010) and is the author

of eleven academic articles and book chapters. He has presented papers

at numerous national and international conferences, and has contributed to

The Hufﬁngton Post, The Daily Beast and The Toronto Star. He is currently

writing his dissertation, entitled Pain, Pride, and Politics: Sri Lankan Tamil

Nationalism in Canada. He may contacted by e-mail at amarnath0330@

gmail.com.

Dennis Beesley is a doctoral student in the Department of History at Ameri-

can University. Currently, he studies religion, rhetoric and constructions of

race, gender and class in colonial and early American history. He may be

contacted by e-mail at dennisbeesley@gmail.com.

David Drissel is Professor of Social Sciences at Iowa Central Community

College in Fort Dodge, Iowa. He is a two-time Fulbright Scholar, Oxford

Roundtable alumnus, and the author of numerous articles published in aca-

demic journals, including the Cambridge Review of International Affairs,

Asian Journal of Criminology, Global Studies Journal, International

Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, and International Journal

of Diversity in Organizations, Communities, and Nations. Currently, he

teaches a wide variety of courses, including international relations, Ameri-

can government, social problems, Asian history and Middle Eastern history.

He may be contacted by e-mail at drissel@iowacentral.com.

Salvador Jimenez Murguia is Associate Professor of Sociology at Miya-

zaki International College in Japan. Professor Murguia teaches courses on

the sociology of religion, social theory, deviant behavior, globalization and

risk society.

JL Schatz is Associate Professor of English and Feminist Evolutionary

Theory at Binghamton University, where he also serves as the Director of

Speech and Debate. He currently teaches courses on literature and technol-

ogy, media and politics, and argumentative theory. His debate program has

been ranked either ﬁrst or second in the nation for the past ﬁve years in a row.

James Schirmer is Assistant Professor of English at the University of

Michigan—Flint. He is the author of ‘Fostering Meaning and Creativity

through Collaborative Social Media in Writing Courses’, in Teaching Arts

and Science with the New Social Media, edited by Charles Wankel; and

‘The Personal as Public: Identity Construction/Fragmentation Online’, in

The Computer Culture Reader, edited by Judd Ruggill, Ken McAllister and

Joseph R. Chaney. Currently he teaches courses on ﬁrst-year and advanced

composition, technical communication, digital rhetoric and video games.

He may contacted by e-mail at jschirm@umﬂint.edu or found on the Web at

http://betajames.posterous.com.

William A. Stahl is Professor of Sociology at Luther College, Univer-

sity of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. He is author of God and the Chip:

Religion and the Culture of Technology, and co-author of Webs of Reality:

Social Perspectives on Science and Religion. He may contacted by e-mail

at William.Stahl@uregina.ca or found on the Web at http://www.luther

college.edu/university.

Andrew Fergus Wilson is Senior Lecturer at the University of Derby. Cur-

rently, he serves as Assistant Subject Head of Applied Social and Com-

munity Studies at Derby, where he teaches courses on popular culture, the

supernatural, apocalyptic belief and representation. He may contacted by

e-mail at a.f.wilson@derby.ac.uk.

viii Network Apocalypse

5. BARACKNOPHOBIA AND THE PARANOID STYLE:

VISIONS OF OBAMA AS THE ANTICHRIST

ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB

Amarnath Amarasingam

Abstract

This chapter explores the belief among certain subsets of the US

population that Obama is the Antichrist depicted as setting the stage

for the end of the world. First, I examine the apocalyptic fears and

conspiracies surrounding the presidency of Barack Obama, plac-

ing it in historical and religious perspective. Second, I investigate

how expressions of apocalypticism and conspiracism surrounding

Obama manifest themselves on the Internet.

Conspiracism and apocalypticism in the United States do not begin with

President Barack Obama, and they will not end with his administration.

Many scholars have pointed out that these elements are deeply ingrained in

American culture and often cannot be distinguished from each other (Boyer

1992; Lahr 2007; Strozier 1994). As Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons

note, ‘aggressive White supremacy, demagogic appeals, demonization, con-

spiracist scapegoating, anti-Semitism, hatred of the Left, militaristic nation-

alism, an apocalyptic style, and millennialist themes have repeatedly been

at the center of our political conﬂicts, not on the fringe’ (2000: 17). There

have been dozens of books and articles written about black helicopters, the

Federal Reserve, the Illuminati, Y2K, Area 51, and UFOs (Barkun 2003;

Berlet and Lyons 2000: 323-44; Cowan 2003; Goldberg 2001; Tapia 2003;

Wojcik 1997: 175-208). More recently, scores of individuals have come to

doubt seriously the ofﬁcial story about what happened on 9/11 (Dunbar and

Reagan 2005; Fenster 2008: 233-78; Mole 2006; Olmsted 2009: 205-31).

The 9/11 Truth movement, as they have been dubbed, is divided into two

camps: those who believe that the Bush administration either ‘let it happen

AMARASINGAM Baracknophobia and the Paranoid Style 97

on purpose’ (LIHOP) or ‘made it happen on purpose’ (MIHOP). A 2006

Zogby poll found that 42 per cent of Americans believe that the US gov-

ernment and the 9/11 Commission concealed or refused to investigate key

pieces of evidence that contradict the ofﬁcial story. An Ohio University sur-

vey similarly found that a third of Americans believe that the government

deliberately carried out the 9/11 attacks or refused to stop them from occur-

ring. Close to ﬁve million Americans (16 per cent) believe that secretly

planted explosives brought down the Twin Towers (Manjoo 2008: 65-66).

Such beliefs are spurred on through the Internet and the work of amateur

ﬁlm makers like Dylon Avery (of Loose Change fame). The Truth move-

ment’s attack on the 9/11 Commission report—written by two governors,

four congressional representatives, three former White House ofﬁcials, and

two special counsels, taking two years to complete at a cost of $15 mil-

lion—reminds us of another report in history that was slowly buried under

an avalanche of absurdity.

When the Warren Commission released its 888-page report (and later,

26 volumes of supporting documents) on 24 September 1964, the number

of people who rejected its ﬁndings was 31.6 per cent. Over one thousand

conspiracy books have since been written on the subject, with some authors

dedicating their entire life to uncovering a conspiracy. It does not seem

to matter that the investigation into the Kennedy assassination was one of

the most extensive and intensive in world history. For example, the FBI’s

investigation into the assassination produced an unprecedented twenty-ﬁve

thousand interviews, and the submission of twenty-three hundred separate

reports. Yet the most recent Gallup Poll, conducted in November 2003,

‘shows that a remarkable 75 percent of the American public reject the ﬁnd-

ings of the Warren Commission and believe there was a conspiracy in the

assassination’ (Bugliosi 2007: xv). The recent documentary by Alex Jones,

The Obama Deception (2009), declares Kennedy to have been our last real

president. His assassination, carried out by the global ﬁnancial elite, effec-

tively transformed the presidency into a ‘puppet post’.

A more recent survey of New Jersey voters showed that 21 per cent did

not believe that Obama was born in the United States, 19 per cent believed

that George W. Bush had prior knowledge of 9/11 and 8 per cent believed

that Obama was the Antichrist. These numbers appear fairly low, but the

results are more interesting when we look speciﬁcally at the interplay

between demographics and beliefs. For example, 40 per cent of liberals,

50 per cent of African Americans, and 33 per cent of 18- to 29-years-olds

thought that Bush had prior knowledge of 9/11. Similarly, 18 per cent of

conservatives, 24 per cent of Hispanics, and 24 per cent of 18- to 29-year-

olds believed Obama to be the Antichrist (see Public Policy Polling 2009

for all results). As comedian Bill Maher, host of Real Time with Bill Maher,

recently complained, ‘Never underestimate the ability of a tiny fringe group

98 Network Apocalypse

of losers to ruin everything . . . because in America, if you don’t immedi-

ately kill errant bullshit, no matter how ridiculous, it can grow and thrive

and eventually take over, like crab grass or Cirque du Soleil’ (YouTube

2009d).

This chapter has a twofold initiative: ﬁrst, it will explore the apocalyptic

fears and conspiracies surrounding the presidency of Barack Obama, plac-

ing it in historical and religious perspective. I show that such anxiety ﬁts

comfortably in the long history of right-wing populism that has long been

an intimate part of American culture. Second, I explore how expressions of

apocalypticism and conspiracism surrounding Obama manifest themselves

on the Internet. For many right-wing populists in the United States, the

Internet functions as a tool to ﬁght back against the global elite and the

forces of evil.

Since it is assumed that the global elite and the forces of evil control the

traditional media, the Internet serves as an alternative avenue for populist

insurgency. As Timothy Melley has argued, the most recent surges in con-

spiracism not only attempt to tackle some speciﬁc political issue, social

organization or historical event; they are better understood as stemming

‘largely from a sense of diminished human agency, a feeling that individu-

als cannot effect meaningful social action and, in extreme cases, may not be

able to control their own behavior’ (2002: 62).

The Internet, as will be elaborated in the conclusion, allows individu-

als some sense of agency outside the reach of government, and outside the

reach of traditional media organizations. It functions as an inexpensive

way for them to expound deeply held beliefs that the mainstream media

tend to marginalize. Additionally, the Internet fosters what Cass Sunstein

(2007: 77) has called ‘enclave deliberation’, in which like-minded individu-

als associate and converse almost solely with one another. I begin with an

exploration of right-wing populism in the United States, before examining

how views of Obama, speciﬁcally, are developing online.

They Got It under Control:

Right-Wing Populism in America

The movements and worldviews discussed below are multifaceted and

evade simple classiﬁcation. They are a cocktail of millennialism, conspir-

acy, patriotism and scapegoating. The search for the Antichrist at times gets

wedded to theories of the Illuminati and the New World Order. At other

times, it remains purely in the realm of religion. For example, one individual

I interviewed dismissed the 9/11 Truth movement and Illuminati conspiracy

theories as products of the irrational mind all the while convinced, based on

ﬂimsy numerological acrobatics, that Obama was the Antichrist. Although

not a perfect term, ‘right-wing populism’ best captures the contours of these

AMARASINGAM Baracknophobia and the Paranoid Style 99

varying worldviews (Berlet and Lyons 2000). Another reason for using the

term is to rectify the common misconception that these worldviews need

not be taken seriously, as they are merely the ‘lunatic fringe’ of society.

As Berlet and Lyons make clear, ‘right-wing populists are dangerous not

because they are crazy irrational zealots—but because they are not. These

people may be our neighbors, our coworkers, and our relatives’ (2000: 3;

see also Boyer 1992).

Populism has been deﬁned in a variety of ways (see, e.g. Canovan 1981),

but it is generally thought to contain at least two core elements: a celebra-

tion of ‘the people’, plus some form of anti-elitism. ‘The people’ are always

viewed as ﬁghting back against the constant onslaught of the elites, who

can varyingly be genuine social structures of oppression or ethereal forces

difﬁcult to pinpoint. As Berlet and Lyons note, right-wing populist move-

ments are generally characterized by resistance to social change, fueled

‘in a central way by fears of the Left and its political gains’ (2000: 5). In

Richard Hofstadter’s seminal examination of the right-wing paranoid style

in America during the 1960s, he similarly noted that there were three dis-

tinguishable fears that plagued many Americans: (1) there is a sustained

conspiracy to undermine free capitalism and install socialism; (2) there

has been a Communist takeover of government that has sold out national

interests; and (3) Communist agents have inﬁltrated education, religion and

the media to make it impossible for loyal Americans to ﬁght back (1966:

25-26). If we attribute the ampliﬁed fear of Communism to the Cold War, it

seems that there may be nothing new under the sun.

Right-wing populism, for the purposes of this paper, will be explored as

a movement that is characterized by conspiracism as well as apocalypticism

and millennialism. For some individuals, the two elements function sepa-

rately, but, for most, they are intimately related, producing an extravagant

anxiety about the one-world government, the Illuminati, Lucifer, the Anti-

christ, and the end times. As Mark Fenster notes, apocalypticism ‘often ech-

oes, and at times explicitly borrows, the theories of more secular right-wing

conspiracy theorists; the lines between popular eschatology and reactionary,

secular conspiracy theories can be blurry indeed’ (2008: 199). However, for

simplicity’s sake, I will introduce them separately. Conspiracism is gener-

ally thought to be a form of scapegoating that ‘frames the enemy as part of

a vast insidious plot against the common good’ (Berlet and Lyons 2000: 9).

As Michael Barkun notes, the essence of a conspiracy theory is a sincere

attempt to understand and explain evil. ‘A conspiracy belief is the belief that

an organization made up of individuals or groups was or is acting covertly

to achieve some malevolent end’ (Barkun 2003: 3). According to conspiracy

theorists, events in the world are governed by design, not randomness. This

emphasis on design, Barkun notes, often manifests itself in three principles

that can be found to be part of all conspiracy theories: nothing happens by

100 Network Apocalypse

accident; nothing is as it seems; and everything is connected (2003: 3-4).

As we will see below, the fears surrounding the rise of Obama are a mixture

of older fears of the Federal Reserve as a cabal of secret bankers, of the Bil-

derberg Group/Trilateral Commission, Bohemian Grove, the Illuminati and

the Freemasons. Obama, some argue, is nothing more than a Trojan horse,

hand-picked by the global elite to enrapture the masses and sedate their

revolutionary anger following the Bush administration.

Few secret societies have aroused as much suspicion as the Freemasons.

The early Freemasons were craftsmen who were adept at carving stones on

buildings such as cathedrals and castles. In order to keep out interlopers,

‘they both guarded trade secrets and (with time) devised conﬁdential verbal

and physical signs that enabled one accredited mason to recognize another’

(Pipes 1997: 59). The reason why non-craftsmen eventually came to join

the Masons remains the subject of scholarly debate. However, it is known

that by 1717 the Masons had founded a Grand Lodge in London, and that

six years later, they had developed a constitution.

After a lodge opened in Paris in 1737, King Louis XV demanded that

his subjects not associate with the group. The Vatican similarly issued sev-

eral papal bulls against the organization. Around this time, the Freemasons

began to splinter. For example, a Scottish Freemasonry developed, and an

individual by the name of Giuseppe Balsamo founded an Egyptian Freema-

sonry, which may have played a role in the French Revolution. It is with this

increasingly decentred chaos that conspiracy theories begin to be associated

with the Freemasons. One argument put forth by some anti-Masons stated

that ‘whatever the innocence of speciﬁc members, the order as a whole

might be guilty of insurgency or sabotage. There could always be a further,

more hidden rank that manipulated all the others’ (Pipes 1997: 61). The

secrecy of the Freemasons began to be linked with other groups, such as the

Knights Templar, the Philosophes, the Rosicrucians and the Jews. To make

matters seem more ominous, conspiracy theorists began to look into the

Bavarian Illuminati, which emerged around the same time.

The Illuminati scare can be traced to its 1776 founding in Bavaria by

law professor Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830). Although completely ceas-

ing to exist by 1787 and counting only three thousand members throughout

its existence, the Illuminati would become the main ingredient of almost

all contemporary conspiracy theories (Pipes 1997: 63). The teachings of

the group, Hofstadter notes, ‘seem to be no more than another version of

Enlightenment rationalism, spiced with an anticlerical animus that seems

an inevitable response to the reactionary-clerical atmosphere of eighteenth-

century Bavaria’ (1966: 10). They were initially suspected of having pen-

etrated into France and causing the Revolution, and some in the United

States feared that their country was next. The 1798 Alien Act, written with

such fears in mind, stated that the president could expel any foreign national

AMARASINGAM Baracknophobia and the Paranoid Style 101

thought to be involved in ‘treasonable or secret machinations against the

government’ (Goldberg 2001: 6). As a secret society, the Illuminati were

characterized by strict rules of membership and a model of governance

whereby the leadership kept secret their purposes from the general mem-

bers. In other words, what some anti-Masonic groups feared about the

Freemasons ‘became a deliberate strategy of Weishaupt’s Illuminati’ (Pipes

1997: 63). The Illuminati were far more inﬂuential after ceasing to exist

than during their brief tenure. Already by 1797, the Illuminati were being

accused of attempting to rule the world. In the United States and Canada,

they were seen to be keen on destroying religion, installing communism and

directing ‘all evil forces’.

Although fear of the Illuminati and the Freemasons was present through-

out the twentieth century, it made headway in the mid-twentieth century

through the famous John Birch Society (JBS). Founded by Robert Welch

in 1959, the members of this group expressed fears that both the United

States and the Soviet Union were controlled by the same global cabal, and

‘if left unexposed, the traitors inside the US government would betray the

country’s sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist new world

order managed by a “one-world socialist government”’ (Berlet and Lyons

2000: 177; see also Goldberg 2001: 37-50). When the Cold War came to a

close, many thought it was simultaneously the death knell of the JBS. How-

ever, the Gulf War, George H.W. Bush’s call for a New World Order, and

the increased right-wing populism of the 1990s, kept the group active. As

will be evident, many of the fears expressed by the JBS are present in the

discourse surrounding the Obama administration.

The second element of right-wing populism is apocalypticism/millennial-

ism (Baumgartner 1999; Fenster 2008: 197-232). As Berlet and Lyons note,

‘The poisoned fruit of conspiracist scapegoating is baked into the Ameri-

can apple pie, and its ingredients include destructive versions of apocalyp-

tic fears and millennialist expectations’ (2000: 11). Apocalypticism is the

belief in an imminent confrontation between the forces of good and evil,

a cataclysmic event that will lead to epochal transformation. Millennial-

ism can be seen to be a form of apocalypticism, in which contemporary

Christians believe that when Jesus returns, he will reign for a period of one

thousand years (a millennium). Millennialism often takes two forms: post-

millennialists, on the one hand, believe that the millennium will be brought

about by humanity, through social reform and the installation of Christian

values in society, all working in accordance with the divine plan. Christ will

return after this slow progression toward goodness and the gradual elimina-

tion of evil. Premillennialists, on the other hand, believe that Christ’s return

will begin the one thousand years of Christian rule. This belief assumes

that humanity cannot save itself, that this ‘inherently sinful world can be

redeemed only through catastrophe and supernatural intervention’ and that

102 Network Apocalypse

leading up to the Second Coming of Christ, ‘humanity will become increas-

ingly evil’ (Wojcik 1997: 35).

Christian apocalypticism and millennialism are based on many biblical

sources, such as the books of Daniel and Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible, and

the Gospel of Mark (ch. 13) and the book of Revelation in the New Testa-

ment. Revelation, however, is by far the most inﬂuential text for apocalyp-

tic and millennialist thinking. As Jonathan Kirsch notes, ‘The idea that the

world will end (and soon)—and the phantasmagoria of words, numbers,

colors, images, and incidents in which the end-times are described in the

book of Revelation—are deeply woven into the fabric of Western civili-

zation, both in high culture and in pop culture’ (2006: 2). Probably writ-

ten toward the end of the ﬁrst century CE by John on the Greek island of

Patmos, Revelation takes the form of a letter that John wrote to a group of

seven Anatolian churches that were being persecuted by the Romans. Rev-

elation is, in a sense, John’s way of offering encouragement and comfort

‘by revealing the blessed future state of Christians who are faithful to the

testimony of Jesus even at the cost of their own lives and by assuring the

readers of the inevitability and imminence of the divine punishment of their

persecutors’ (Aune 2000: 1187).

Many Christians in the United States have found such sentiments rel-

evant for the contemporary world. As Goldberg states, for believers ‘the

nation was created to perform the Lord’s will and surely was chosen as

the site of the Second Coming and God’s future kingdom’ (2001: 66). The

United States, however, was currently awash in sin and ‘had betrayed its

calling and fallen away from the Lord. Its leaders had sacriﬁced national

sovereignty to the Antichrist and sworn allegiance to Satan’s New World

Order’ (Goldberg 2001: 67). In modern America, they argue, the signs of

transgression are many: condom sales, rampant sexuality, pornography,

abortion, Darwinism, popular music, the changing status of women, the

New Age movement, the crime rate, television and homosexuality. Apoca-

lyptic writers also point to the reign of science and the scientiﬁc method as

promoters of ‘the same false message of human self-sufﬁciency’ (Boyer

1992: 236).

Believing that the United States was mired in sin, apocalyptic writers

turned to biblical sources in order to track God’s plan for the future. Above

all, Revelation provided individuals with the most fodder for apocalyptic

speculation:

John writes of an angel who beckoned him to the ‘door’ of heaven to

see ‘things which must be hereafter’. Before him appears a succession of

images of tribulations and calamities in sequences of seven. Earthquakes,

storms, polluted rivers and seas, falling stars, locust, famine, and plague

devastate the faithless but are only a prelude to the ﬁnal battle. Satan con-

fronts God and takes the shape of ‘a great red dragon having seven heads

AMARASINGAM Baracknophobia and the Paranoid Style 103

and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads’. On a base of ten king-

doms, the dark lord elevates his heir, the ‘beast’ or Antichrist: ‘And they

worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they wor-

shipped the beast, saying Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make

war with him?’ Joined by his coconspirator, the false prophet, the Anti-

christ creates an economic system that requires every person to ‘receive a

mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy

or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number

of the beast. . . . Six hundred threescore and six.’ God pours out his wrath

on those who accept the mark, while the faithful suffer through forty-two

months of persecution. The physical return of Jesus brings redemption,

and he leads the heavenly host to victory over the beast and false prophet

(Goldberg 2001: 67-68).

Popularizers of end-time prophecy have been numerous in the United States,

including people such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jack Van Impe and

John Hagee. One of the individuals who ﬁrst put apocalypticism on the

best-seller lists in the United States was a charismatic preacher named Hal

Lindsey (b. 1930). His book The Late, Great Planet Earth was published

in 1970 and has sold over thirty-ﬁve million copies to date. Lindsey’s great

skill was to decipher the bizarre visions recounted in Revelation in a way

that contemporary readers could understand them (Fenster 2008: 209-14).

As Jonathan Kirsch notes, Lindsey’s book, largely a restatement of John

Nelson Darby’s dispensational premillennialism, is distinguished by his

‘undeniable genius for hot-wiring the book of Revelation to the geo-polit-

ical realities of the contemporary world’ (2006: 223; see also Boyer 1992:

80-112; Wojcik 1997: 37-59).

According to Lindsey, the Antichrist will be a politician who comes to

power in the ‘revived Roman Empire’, the equivalent of today’s European

Union. As we will see, some of those who are convinced that Obama is the

Antichrist point to this ingrained opinion as one of the main reasons why

Obama’s true identity has gone unrecognized. In The Late, Great Planet

Earth, Lindsey predicted that the Rapture would take place in 1981. When

this did not occur, he provided a new prediction in The 1980s: Countdown

to Armageddon (1980). In 1994, he provided yet another prediction in

Planet Earth 2000 A.D. This time, it was not Communism but Islamic fun-

damentalism that would be the ﬁnal adversary of Jesus Christ (for more on

Lindsey’s methods of argumentation, see O’Leary 1994: 134-71).

Apocalypticism entered American politics on the back of an individual

deeply inspired by Lindsey’s Late, Great Planet Earth. Ronald Reagan

was ‘perhaps the ﬁrst national ﬁgure outside of fundamentalist circles to

openly and unapologetically afﬁrm his belief in the imminent fulﬁllment

of Bible prophecy’ (Kirsch 2006: 226). Reagan was accustomed to seeing

cosmic signiﬁcance in worldly events. Following the 1969 Libyan coup by

Muammar al-Gaddaﬁ, Reagan remarked that it was a ‘sign that the day of

104 Network Apocalypse

Armageddon isn’t far off. Everything’s falling into place. It can’t be long

now’ (quoted in Kirsch 2006: 226). Reagan’s secretary of defense, Caspar

Weinberger, and his interior secretary, James Watts, among others, all read

the book of Revelation along with Lindsey’s book and eagerly awaited the

end times. Reagan was so inﬂuenced by Lindsey’s book that he wanted his

military leaders to understand its signiﬁcance fully. With Reagan’s blessing,

Lindsey was invited to brief the Pentagon on the ‘divine implications’ of

their hostilities with the Soviet Union. Similarly, Jerry Falwell was asked to

deliver the same message to the National Security Council. No other presi-

dent in recent history has allied apocalypticism and national security with

such ease or impenitence.

As Paul Boyer has written, ‘The theological foundation for these wide-

ranging reﬂections on contemporary global developments was the doctrine

of Antichrist—the evil ﬁgure who will arise after the Rapture and rule for

seven years (the Tribulation) before his defeat at Armageddon’ (1992:

272). This scenario develops out of a handful of references in the Hebrew

Bible and New Testament. For example, believers point to the book of

Daniel, where there is description of a ‘little horn’ that sprouts from the

Beast, or to Revelation, where in chs. 13 and 17 the Antichrist is thought to

be the beast that arises from the sea. Jesus’ warning about false Christs in

Mk 13.22 and St Paul’s statement about a ‘man of sin’ in 2 Thessalonians

are other examples. However, the actual word ‘Antichrist’ appears in only

four verses of Scripture: 1 Jn 2.18, 22; 4:3; and 2 Jn 1:7 (see Fuller 1995

for discussion). As Boyer notes, ‘From these brief and cryptic references

evolved a vast body of belief and legend that took many forms through-

out Christianity’s two-thousand-year history’ (1992: 273). Many individu-

als have been suspected of being the Antichrist, with popes heading the

list. In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy was also suspected by

some apocalyptic writers. After his death, a few ‘expected Kennedy to rise

from his cofﬁn, fulﬁlling the prophecy in Revelation that the Beast would

miraculously recover from a deadly head wound’ (Boyer 1992: 275). In the

1970s, Henry Kissinger was a suspect, as well as Ayatollah Khomeini (dur-

ing the hostage crisis), Saddam Hussein (during the Gulf War) and Osama

bin Laden (after 9/11).

Baracknophobia Online: Films, Forums and Facebook

Certain elements of the American population have come to distrust deeply

those in power. Since he declared his intention to run for president, Obama

has become the object of much of this suspicion (Friedman 2009). When he

quotes Scripture, they think he is being crafty; when he is photographed in

prayer, they think it political posturing. Such a sustained pessimism cannot

be countered with fact or rational argument (see Stroup and Shuck 2007;

AMARASINGAM Baracknophobia and the Paranoid Style 105

Zeleny 2009). What most take to be his charisma, his sincerity and his genu-

ine concern for the future of America, is, for some individuals, a well-oiled

façade, a sham designed to enrapture and hypnotize the masses, while truly

devious plans are secretly unfolded. Beginning during the 2008 election

cycle, the Internet began teeming with speculation about Obama and the

New World Order, and about Obama and the Antichrist. As Kirsch notes,

speculation about the identity of the Antichrist ‘can be seen as a kind of

Rorschach test for the anxieties of any given age’ (2006: 12). E-mails cir-

culated widely and amateur videos were posted on YouTube proclaiming

strange personality and numerological resemblances between Obama and

biblical statements about the Antichrist. A recent Google search of ‘Obama’

and ‘Antichrist’ yielded 2.4 million results.

Two Facebook searches of the same terms, as well as ‘Obama’ and ‘New

World Order’, indicated the existence of over 200 and 137 Common Inter-

est groups respectively, some with several hundred members. These search

results indicate at the very least that there is a budding interest in the idea

of Obama as the Antichrist. It does not, to be sure, show that millions of

people subscribe to such beliefs. This section of the chapter will explore

the online presence of anti-Obama sentiment in its varying forms. The Web

sites, forums, and ﬁlms discussed below were not chosen randomly but

were selected based on the number of people they attracted, the popularity

of their ideas (i.e. if the same beliefs appeared in several different venues)

and frequency of user activity. In other words, examples were chosen if they

showed some evidence of being a moderately active online community. For

the sake of organization, I have divided the profusion of online content into

two themes: (1) those who believe Obama will pave the way for the Anti-

christ, and (2) those who believe that Obama is the literal Antichrist.

Obama Is Part of the One-World Government

and Will Pave the Way for the Antichrist

Those who believe that Obama is the literal Antichrist (see below) seem to

be smaller in number than those who believe that he is only paving the way

for the end times. Beliefs under this ﬁrst theme vary widely among those

who, for some reason, ﬁnd Obama slightly scary, those who believe that

Obama is a puppet of the New World Order (NWO), and those who believe

that he is working for higher powers than the NWO (namely Lucifer). As

one individual noted in the Backwoods Home Magazine forum discussion,

which is dedicated to the issue of Obama as the Antichrist, there is just

something about Obama that makes her fearful:

The things the man said and his actions I found to be quite unnerving.

Especially his speech in front of the stage with the pillars and the huge

pictures of himself. There was a point during this speech where Obama

106 Network Apocalypse

paused to hear the crowds applaud and chant his name. The stance he took

and the expression on his face were very Hitler like. This speech scared

the hooey out of me when it was so obvious to me that he was so much

absorbing and gaining so much energy off of the crowd’s enthusiasm. It

was truly freaky (BHM Forum 2008).

Following from this, there has been another document circulating around

the Internet entitled, ‘An Examination of Obama’s Use of Hidden Hyp-

nosis Techniques in His Speeches’ (PennyPress n.d.: 1), which argues that

Obama is ‘not just using subliminal messages, but textbook covert hypnosis

and neuro-linguistic programming techniques on audiences that are inten-

tionally designed to sideline rational judgment and implant subconscious

commands to think he is wonderful and elect him President’. Similarly,

YouTube contains many clips attempting to prove that if Obama’s ‘Yes

we can’ speeches are played backwards, it clearly sounds like ‘Thank you

Satan.’ Fortunately, many of the comments following these clips mock the

intention of the creators, asking, for example, why they feel the need to play

the speech backwards at all (YouTube 2009b).

A small poll conducted on Survivalistboards.com shows that while 50

per cent of respondents believe that Obama is not the Antichrist, 12.5 per

cent believe him to be the literal Antichrist, and 37.5 per cent believe that

he is a ‘smaller’ Antichrist. Opinions vary about the nature of Obama. For

example, one commenter stated:

You are giving him way too much credit. His puppet masters are the ones

in power. He appears from nowhere two years ago, is groomed for the

presidential ofﬁce before he completed the ﬁrst term of an unremarkable

couple of years in the senate, then runs a campaign costing hundreds of

millions of dollars, which were certainly not his bucks. He’s a tool for the

power elite to achieve their ends. He’s nobody and certainly not an Anti-

christ (Survivalistboards.com 2008).

As we will see, Obama’s quick rise to power seems to signal different things

to different people. Also, for this individual, Obama is just another puppet

of those who are really running the United States and the world.

Discussions of the NWO exist in both apocalyptic literature and secular

conspiracy theories. Peter Knight, for example, rightly points out that indi-

vidualism is one of the main reasons why such fears are so prevalent in the

United States. As he argues,

In part, the United States is a nation of conspiracy theorists because the

inﬂuence of larger social and economic forces in determining the lives of

individuals is often regarded as a paranoia-inducing encroachment on the

self-reliance of individuals. So, for example, where other people might

conceivably view the daily involvement of ‘big government’ in the lives of

its citizens as the caring embrace of the welfare state, many Americans see

AMARASINGAM Baracknophobia and the Paranoid Style 107

only surveillance, conspiratorial interference, and an erosion of individual

autonomy (2002: 7).

Alternatively, this obsession with the one-world government is indeed

closely tied to apocalypticism and millennialism. Apocalyptic writers,

through a reading of the book of Daniel (ch. 7) and Revelation, have been

mining geopolitical events looking for signs of the one-world government,

and they have found many candidates. As Daniel Wojcik notes, the postwar

system of international ﬁnance and commerce, the emerging global econ-

omy, the League of Nations, the United Nations, the International Mon-

etary Fund, the World Bank and the Bilderberg Group have all ‘been closely

monitored by premillennialists and regarded by some as evidence of the

coming of the Antichrist’s one-world economy and one-world government’

(1997: 16).

Such religious and secular reactions to the threat of the New World Order

are at times indistinguishable. For some individuals, the attitudes are inti-

mately intertwined. For example, a popular report written by Mel Sanger,

an author and researcher of the end times, argues that Obama

does not qualify as the Antichrist because his lineage is not of Jewish

descent as is required not only from a biblical perspective but also his

bloodline and lineage is not consistent with the Masonic Jews requirement

for a ﬁnal messiah who will head a world government and convince even

Orthodox Jews that he is a descendant of the line of David. . . . However

what is clear, is that Barack Obama will be another pawn in the global

government agenda since as president of the United States he will facili-

tate policies that will move the world closer to global government (2008:

14).

As another individual commented on the Kitco Forums, Obama’s presi-

dency

must happen to set the stage for a total collapse of our monetary system. In

turn we will be sold out into the one world government and our Constitu-

tion will be thrown out with last night’s trash. . . . We will be broke, along

with the rest of the world, and the people will welcome with open arms

the Antichrist who will rise up out of the ashes of despair to be our savior.

. . . Then for a short time things will be pretty good, then shift big time like

we have never seen before or ever again. I believe Obama is key to all this

being able to happen in the coming years (Kitco Forums 2008).

One of the most extensive anti-Obama Web sites is an elaborate, ram-

bling, inconsistent, and disorganized blog run by an individual named

MoniQue, containing links to documentaries, Illuminati conspiracy theo-

ries, 2012 predictions (the end date of the Mayan long count calendar), the

Birther movement, as well as information about Obama as the Antichrist. It

would require several weeks adequately to peruse this site, so let us focus

108 Network Apocalypse

on only a few key themes. Although I have placed this site under the ﬁrst

theme, it is in fact a medley of all of these subjects plus a dozen more.

On her Web site, MoniQue scolds those who believe Obama to be just

another puppet of the NWO. She argues that the hierarchy places Lucifer

at the top, followed by the Illuminati, and then the New World Order. She

pleads, ‘Don’t be a fool. Do not underestimate Obama, as if he is just a typi-

cal puppet of the now . . . Lucifer has big plans for Obama’ (MoniQue). She

goes on to note that Obama is in fact part of the Illuminati, but is planning

to overthrow them. Obama secretly despises the Illuminati, made up of rich

and powerful white men, because of his narcissism and megalomania. The

site also argues that Obama is a member of the Boule, an African-American

counterpart to Yale University’s secretive Skull and Bones fraternity, as

well as a member of the Prince Hall Freemasons, a black counterpart to the

Freemasons (YouTube 2007). MoniQue goes on to argue that ‘men like Far-

rakhan, who is said to be a 4-letter Mason and . . . Rev. Wright, a 33 degree

Prince Hall Mason, and Boule members Rev. Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and

others . . . are in ecstasy waiting’ for Obama’s coup. They know not, accord-

ing to MoniQue and her fans, that Obama, with the help of Lucifer, is plan-

ning a total takeover.

Of all the sources discussed thus far, however, The Obama Deception,

a 2009 documentary by talk radio host and darling of the conspiracy com-

munity Alex Jones, has been the most inﬂuential. As of this writing, it has

been viewed over four million times on YouTube, is also available on Goog-

leVideo and is recommended on most of the Web sites and forums discussed

in this chapter. The Obama Deception has garnered over ninety thousand

viewer comments on YouTube, and over thirty thousand ratings, giving it

an average rating of four and a half out of ﬁve stars. The ﬁlm begins with

Alex Jones setting the stage for the rise of Obama: ‘America, in 2009, was

desperate for change. The past eight years had been a disaster . . . the elite

were in trouble. The people were beginning to see through their façade, past

their front man, and to the ruling elite behind the throne. . . . And then on to

the scene came a man who promised change’ (YouTube 2009c). However,

the ﬁlm argues, change is not possible in the United States, as the presi-

dency is nothing more than a ‘puppet post’ behind which stand the global

power elite.

The Bilderberg Group, frequently attacked by conspiracy theorists (with

some dedicating part of their lives to following the group’s every move),

is again singled out in the documentary as responsible for rising oil prices

and the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market. Another entity targeted

is the Trilateral Commission, which supposedly executes the plans of the

Bilderbergs through regional groups around the world. The regional assem-

blage that manages the United States is, according to the ﬁlm, the Council

on Foreign Relations. Under such conditions, ‘even if Barack Obama was

AMARASINGAM Baracknophobia and the Paranoid Style 109

the most wonderful person in the world, he was groomed and brought to

power by the global elite to carry out their agenda’ (YouTube 2009c).

According to Jones and others in the ﬁlm, the objective of the global

elite had been hampered by the ‘disastrous’ Bush administration. Ameri-

cans had been on the verge of revolution, dissatisﬁed with their government

and ready for change. The global elite had to rectify the situation, and they

found in Obama the perfect tool. He had the ability to placate the masses

once again; his charisma and his words would anesthetize feelings of anger

and frustration. As the ﬁlm states, ‘Obama is the perfect Trojan Horse. He

makes the people feel like they ﬁnally have a place at the table, even as he

betrays them’ (YouTube 2009c). The paranoia in the ﬁlm often reaches new

levels of absurdity. For example, the ﬁlm points to Obama’s transition Web

site and interprets his plan to ‘require 50 hours of community service in

middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in col-

lege every year’ not as Obama’s attempt to engage the youth or foster social

capital, but as a fascistic plan to conscript all 18- to 24-year-olds in America

into ‘a paramilitary, domestic security force’ (YouTube 2009c).

Obama Is the Literal Antichrist

As discussed above, the quest to discover the identity of the Antichrist has

a long history. The belief that Barack Obama might be the Antichrist is very

difﬁcult to trace to any single source. The Web site About.com traces one

of the origins of this belief to an e-mail circulated in early 2008. The e-mail

reads:

According to The Book of Revelations the Antichrist will be a man, in his

40s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive

language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal . . . the prophecy says

that people will ﬂock to him and he will promise false hope and world

peace, and when he is in power, will destroy everything. Is it OBAMA??

I STRONGLY URGE each one of you to repost this as many times as you

can! Each opportunity that you have to send it to a friend or media outlet

. . . do it! (Emery 2008 [emphasis original]).

If this relatively innocuous e-mail message is in fact the root of such beliefs,

it has successfully engendered a cottage industry of speculation and para-

noia on the Internet.

YouTube has become home to many amateur videos proclaiming (or

mocking) the idea that Obama is the Antichrist. A search for ‘Obama’ and

‘Antichrist’ yielded about ﬁfteen thousand videos, attempting to relate

Obama to, among other things, the Bible Code, the book of Revelation,

the Illuminati, the New World Order, and the year 2012. One of the most

popular videos propounding that Obama is the Antichrist is entitled ‘Jesus

Gave Us the Name of the Antichrist’ (YouTube 2009a), which has, as of this

110 Network Apocalypse

writing, been viewed over six hundred thousand times and is referenced in

dozens of other Web sites. The narrator of the video points to Lk. 10.18,

which states, ‘And he said unto them, I saw Satan as lightning falling from

the heights (or heavens).’

The video notes that Jesus probably spoke Aramaic, and since Aramaic

is the ‘most ancient form of Hebrew’ (which is false), it holds that we can

translate the key terms in this verse into Hebrew to see what they really

mean. The narrator notes that, according to the Strong Hebrew Dictionary,

the word for lightning is ‘baraq’. Similarly, the word for heights is ‘bamah’.

The narrator then points out that the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet,

waw, is often transliterated as a u or o and is mostly used as a conjunction.

Thus, ‘I saw Satan as lightning falling from the heights’ (Lk. 10.18) would,

in Hebrew, be ‘I saw Satan as baraq o’bamah’. The video contains a dis-

claimer at the end stating that the narrator is simply pointing to the facts,

not declaring that Obama is the Antichrist (for a thorough treatment and

debunking of this popular viral video, see Heiser 2009).

Another popular video, viewed over two hundred thousand times, is enti-

tled ‘Is OBAMA the ANTICHRIST?—12 of 19 Characteristics Are Met!’

(YouTube 2008). The video explores 19 supposed characteristics of the

Antichrist and argues that Obama met 12 of them even before taking ofﬁce.

The video is ﬁlled with vague associations, misinformation and simplis-

tic analysis. To take just three examples, the video proclaims (with refer-

ence to biblical verses) that the Antichrist will be: (1) a ‘stern-faced’ king

(Dan. 8.23) (according to the video, many have commented that Obama

has a somber, stern face); (2) a ‘lawless one’ or ‘rebel’ (2 Thess. 2.3) (the

video notes that the Secret Service has given Obama the codename The

Renegade); (3) seen ‘standing in the Holy Place’ just before he takes ofﬁce

(Matthew 24) (the video shows pictures of Obama at the Western Wall as

evidence). The video concludes by stating that it is ‘too early to tell’ for

certain whether Obama is the Antichrist.

The quest to discover the identity of the Antichrist is matched in dedica-

tion by the effort to identify the ‘Beast’ whose name is symbolized by the

number 666 (Kirsch 2006: 82-84). A clip posted on Dailymotion.com, a

video hosting service based in France, has attempted to crack this code and

has been growing in popularity (Dailymotion 2009). It approaches the issue

through the use of numerology and Gematria (the Hebrew system of assign-

ing numerical value to words and phrases). The video points to ‘7 Strange

Coincidences’ related to Obama, which are, as the video notes, likely to

be mere coincidences, but factual nonetheless. I will recount two of these

here: (1) Barack Hussein Obama, according to the video, has a Gematria

value of 501, which is the ‘same value for Judgment and End of Days’.

Barack in Arabic means ‘blessed’; Hussein in Arabic means ‘handsome’;

and Obama is an African word meaning ‘leaning’. The video notes that

AMARASINGAM Baracknophobia and the Paranoid Style 111

when the Gematria values of blessed (246), handsome (268) and leaning

(152) are added together, the sum is 666. (2) Obama’s name is indeed found

in the Bible Codes, which are ‘equal-distance-letter-spacing sequences’ that

look for patterns of letters within the Bible text (Dailymotion 2009). When

the name ‘Obama’ is placed in the Bible Code using the text of the King

James Bible, his name supposedly appears in the text of Rev. 13.1, one of

the most prominent verses dealing with the Antichrist.

One of the most frequented Web sites arguing that Obama is the Anti-

christ is run by Kenneth Alex Randolf, a ﬁfty-six-year-old former lawyer

living in Seattle. Randolf’s blog has been featured on CNN, and his other

Web site is extremely popular among those concerned with the issue of

Obama as the Antichrist (Randolf 2008). His Web site recounts the idea,

discussed above, that Obama’s name adds up to 666, and he believes that

Obama is ‘the prophesied political leader that will bring Tribulation (God’s

trial of humanity) that ends with Armageddon (World War III)’ (Randolf,

personal communication, 10 September 2009). Randolf notes that he has

taken a serious look at other political leaders in the past, but none has ﬁt his

beliefs about the Antichrist prophecy until Obama came on the scene. One

of the main factors leading him to believe that Obama is the Antichrist is

the fact that none of the ‘experts’ in the area (i.e. Hal Lindsey, John Hagee,

Oral Roberts et al.) believe this to be the case. According to Randolf, these

experts, and nearly all millennial dispensationalists, are under the false

impression that the Antichrist will ‘hail from the former Roman Empire

(Western Europe) and will lead a coalition of European nation states’ (Ran-

dolf, personal communication, 10 September 2009).

This, according to him, is the main reason why Obama has not been rec-

ognized as the Antichrist. Unlike many others discussed in this chapter, Ran-

dolf does not believe that Obama is deliberately leading the world toward

destruction. As he told me, ‘I don’t believe that the Antichrist believes he’s

the Antichrist because he does not believe in the concept or in the religion

that produced the concept.’ Just as Jesus did not become Christ until after

‘his forty days in the desert and his contest with temptation . . . Obama will

not become the Antichrist until he faces and fails the modern day equivalent

of the forty days and temptation by evil’ (Randolf, personal communication,

10 September 2009).

Randolf also adheres to the belief that the rise of Obama is related to the

McNaught comet of 2007. The McNaught comet was the brightest comet

seen from Earth in forty years, and it reached its perihelion (brightest phase)

on 12 January 2007, ‘close to’ the time that Obama announced his candi-

dacy for president (10 February 2007). Some believe that the McNaught

comet is in fact the Mabus comet prophesied by Nostradamus (1503–1566)

and thought to herald the advent of the so-called third Antichrist. John

Hogue, the preeminent world expert on Nostradamus, wrote that many of

112 Network Apocalypse

his fans have asked him to write about the relationship between Obama

and the Antichrist. Hogue, who calls himself a rogue scholar, is the author

of over fourteen best-selling books on the prophecies of Nostradamus. As

he writes in his new online book Nostradamus and the Antichrist: Code

Named MABUS (2008: 9), Nostradamus believed that there were three Anti-

christs, not one. The ﬁrst two are likely Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hit-

ler (2008: 18-54). Nostradamus gave a code name for the third Antichrist:

Mabus (2008: 55-66). As Hogue writes,

Though his true name is occulted, his destiny is made clear. World War III

begins when Mabus dies an untimely death. The passing of this man will

unite a hundred nations in a war against what Nostradamus calls the East-

ern kings secretly allied in opposition to the West. They would use piracy

(hijacking?), ambush and subterfuge to wage war. Know the war has

begun when hollow mountains of a great New City (yet to be built in Nos-

tradamus’ day) at latitude 4455 in an unborn country he called Americh

or Amorica, will be attacked by a ﬁre in the sky. The hollow mountains

crafted by man will be seized and plunged into the boiling cauldron of

their own debris clouds. After this happens we will be living in the days of

the last Antichrist (2008: 13-14).

Although the precise identity of the Antichrist is not known, one thing is

clear: Mabus does not live through the world war he ignites, a conﬂict that

will last twenty-seven years. For Hogue, many individuals in the twenty-

ﬁrst century come close to qualifying as the third Antichrist—Osama bin

Laden, George W. Bush et al.—and he is ultimately unsure whether Obama

ﬁts the bill. He begins the chapter on Obama by stating that, although he

does not believe Obama to be the third Antichrist, he must explore it as a

scholarly endeavor. He writes: ‘Don’t blame me, my readers made me do

it. They badgered me in hundreds of letters trying to perform anagrammatic

acts of “lexicon-striction” thrusting the surname of Barack Hussein Obama

down an anagramming veggie blender to slurry up an Obama “Mabus”’.

(2008: 190). One of these attempts, also found on Randolf’s Web site,

argues that Mabus may be an anagram of Obama’s full name with ‘literary

symmetry’. The ﬁrst letter of his ﬁrst name is B, the second and third letters

of his middle name are US, the fourth and ﬁfth letters of his last name are

MA. Putting these letters together produces BUSMA, which is a simple ana-

gram of MABUS. This kind of mix-and-match millennialism, what Barkun

(2003: 18) calls ‘improvisational millennialism’, is characterized not by an

adherence to secular or religious worldviews but by a ‘relentless and seem-

ingly indiscriminate borrowing’. Thus, the simultaneous use of astronomy,

Nostradamus, and the New Testament produces not dissonance but a sense

of holistic truth with multiple sources pointing to the same reality.

By far the most vitriolic anti-Obama Web site is beastobama.com, run

by the notorious Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), an independent Baptist

AMARASINGAM Baracknophobia and the Paranoid Style 113

church in Topeka, Kansas. The WBC Web site derides Obama as a ‘fag

enabler in chief’, as ‘worse than a Dateline pedophile’ who had an ‘atheist

whore’ for a mother and a ‘deadbeat Muslim’ for a father. The WBC, run

by Pastor Fred Phelps (famous for coining the protest slogan ‘God Hates

Fags’), has long been monitored by the Anti-Defamation League and other

groups for hate speech as well as for their picketing of military funerals.

Beastobama.com presents a 30-minute documentary putting forth a ‘Bible-

based’ argument why Obama is the Antichrist. In the documentary, one indi-

vidual at a WBC protest states, ‘God hates fags, God hates fag-enablers, and

God hates baby killers. Therefore, God hates Antichrist Obama’ (beasto-

bama.com). For the WBC, Obama’s unwillingness to decry the ‘fag agenda’

or to put a stop to abortion means that he is working against Christ (literally,

anti-Christ). The media love affair with Obama, they argue, keeps the nation

enthralled and blind to reality. As one individual states in the ﬁlm:

Satan is energizing the fag juggernaut that we know as the international

media and entertainment industry to present a sparkling, sanitized corona-

tion of his son the Antichrist. . . . To the men of the world, the Antichrist

isn’t some ﬁre breathing, ugly monster. To the men of the world, the anti-

Christ is beautiful; the anti-Christ is clever, brilliant, a smooth orator. The

Antichrist is a friend of the world (beastobama.com).

Like the beast rising out of the sea in the book of Revelation (13.1), the

Web site notes that Obama has risen from the sea of ‘troubled humanity’

and has captured their imagination: ‘Barack Obama is the Antichrist, and is

leading doomed America to her ﬁnal destruction and the destruction of the

world! We’re not talking some vague, nebulous postulation; we’re talking

plain, straight Bible talk backed up by an overwhelming amount of real

evidence’ (beastobama.com). As Kirsch notes, such rhetoric is reﬂective of

the ways in which the book of Revelation is being read in the contemporary

world, and used as a ‘potent rhetorical weapon in a certain kind of culture

war, a war of contesting values and aspirations’ (2006: 17).

Conclusion: Why the Internet Matters

There has been much hype surrounding the social signiﬁcance of the Inter-

net. Scholars have looked to cyberspace as a haven for ﬁnding new ways

in which individual identity, community and ritual are expressed and expe-

rienced in the contemporary world. Apparently, on the Internet we can be

different people, experience things we could never hope to experience in

real life, help in the creation and perfection of collaborative knowledge and

engage in participatory media. Scholars have however tended to get car-

ried away when discussing the utter uniqueness of the Internet. As Doug-

las Cowan has noted, often what we think of as virtual reality is nothing

114 Network Apocalypse

more than an electronic version of real life: ‘Shopping online is not a visit

to a “virtual store,” but represents little more than choices made from a

catalogue one accesses electronically’ (2005: 258). In other words, not all

online activity is unique and worthy of being studied as if it is so. For exam-

ple, virtually no Muslims, one would presume, would declare themselves a

hajji after completing a virtual hajj (Bunt 2000). Similarly, the experience

of watching a lecture or a sermon online is relatively indistinguishable from

watching one on television.

Such critiques are indeed signiﬁcant for our current purposes: right-wing

populism is obviously not a product of the Internet. However, cyberspace

has become enormously important, practically and symbolically, for con-

temporary right-wing populists. The relationship between the Internet and

the persistence of right-wing populism can be understood in two ways: ﬁrst,

the ease with which blogs, forums and Web sites are created has given rise

to an alternative media, existing outside traditional sources of information,

and varying in size and reliability (Atton 2004; Dartnell 2006). This alter-

native media gives voice to individuals who feel left out of the dominant

media discourse. In this way, the Internet comes to have great symbolic sig-

niﬁcance. Second, since the online presence of individuals is largely driven

by choice, the information and communities with which they interact tend

to be less varied (Slevin 2000: 90-117; Manjoo 2008). Individuals, in other

words, are more able to interact with people who share their ideological or

sociopolitical worldviews instead of just spatial propinquity. The Internet

simultaneously enables and fosters the development of networks among

individuals separated by vast physical distance but connected by ideologi-

cal proximity (see Sunstein 2007). Such interaction, combined with their

activities in alternative media platforms, has the potential to foster a sub-

cultural communal identity. Let us deal with both of these elements in turn.

As alluded to in the introduction, right-wing populism is best understood

as a symptom ‘of a larger and more mainstream set of anxieties about human

agency’ (Melley 2002: 58). As social reality only increases in complexity,

conspiracy theories and apocalypticism tend to offer a strange kind of com-

fort, drawing in disparate social events under a grand ‘master narrative’ that

the believer has succeeded in deciphering. Understanding the intricacies

of this world system is necessary, as people are all merely characters in a

much larger stage play, the plot of which very few comprehend. As dis-

cussed above, fears of such large-scale control are characteristic of modern

conspiracy theories and apocalyptic beliefs. Disparate threads—the book

of Daniel, Revelation, the Illuminati, Freemasonry, Nostradamus, etc.—are

seamlessly and effortlessly woven together into an elaborate tapestry of

paranoia that is nearly impossible to disprove.

Melley (2002: 60) and others have pointed to three characteristics of

recent right-wing populism that allow us better to understand such beliefs

AMARASINGAM Baracknophobia and the Paranoid Style 115

while also providing some hints about why the Internet has been partic-

ularly signiﬁcant for these movements. First, conspiracies are viewed as

enormously difﬁcult to detect and ‘marvelously efﬁcient’. Indeed, the per-

petrators of this grand deception are often seen to have supernatural capa-

bilities. Second, conspiracy theories allow individuals easily to conceive

of the relationship between themselves and the larger world. Following

from this, the third characteristic understands conspiracy as a ‘structure that

curtails individuality, or that is antithetical to individualism itself’ (Mel-

ley 2002: 60). The second and third elements are most signiﬁcant for our

purposes. Right-wing populism, rising out of a sense that the individual is

under attack, is deeply concerned with self-protection, with guarding the

agency of the individual against the onslaught of the social order. As Mel-

ley argues, ‘by making diverse social and technological systems enemies of

“the self”, the conspiratorial views function less as a defense of some clear

political position than as a defense of individualism, abstractly conceived’

(2002: 61).

This agency panic is closely tied to issues of trust, authority, and epis-

temology. Far from being the product of clinical paranoia, right-wing pop-

ulism expresses a fundamental distrust of those who produce knowledge

and ‘develops from the refusal to accept someone else’s deﬁnition of a

universal social good or an ofﬁcially sanctioned truth’ (Melley 2002: 64).

Much of right-wing populist identity comes from this belief that they are

privy to certain kinds of knowledge that the rest of society is unable or

unwilling to see. They are the embattled vanguards of a ﬁght that the rest of

the world does not even realize is taking place. They consider themselves

to be the protectors and purveyors of what Barkun has called ‘stigmatized

knowledge’, which are ‘claims to truth that the claimants regard as veriﬁed

despite the marginalization of those claims by the institutions that conven-

tionally distinguish between knowledge and error’ (2003: 26). For many

right-wing populists, stigmatized knowledge has a hint of truth by the very

fact of its stigmatization. In other words, it is believed that the conspirators

have used their power to ensure that such information is kept hidden from

the public.

It is when examining issues of agency panic and stigmatized knowledge,

that the signiﬁcance of the Internet can be fully grasped. As Robert Camp-

bell notes, ‘The Internet is a medium ideally suited in some regards to the

populist, emotional, eclectic, and assertive style of the American tradition

of apocalyptic prophecy’ (2004: 242). Cyberspace is also the quintessential

form of participatory media, where any individual, regardless of education

or expertise, can create Web sites, dialogue with others in forums or mes-

sage boards, and produce viral video clips that may be viewed by millions of

people (Keen 2007; Burgess and Green 2009). The Internet holds symbolic

value for right-wing populists because it lacks gatekeepers and is free of

116 Network Apocalypse

the checks and balances that these individuals view as diminishing an indi-

vidual’s autonomy. As Alex Jones states in The Obama Deception, the global

elite ‘are bringing in classical, hardcore tyranny in the US, but we have the

Internet, we’ve grown our numbers, the alternative media has exploded—

that’s why they are trying to move in, and shut down, and regulate, and tax

the web. But, it’s too late for them’ (YouTube 2009c [emphasis added]).

According to Jones, the alternative media have allowed them to organize

under the radar of the global elite and mobilize a grassroots resistance.

For right-wing populists and other social movements, the Internet is

invaluable as a resource for disseminating views, bonding like-minded indi-

viduals and fostering a sense that they are part of a subcultural resistance

movement ﬁghting a war on behalf of an unaware public. As Laura Stein

has noted, ‘The mainstream media often systematically distort, negatively

cast or ignore social movement viewpoints’ (2009: 750). These movements

are often denied access to the mainstream media, as their perspectives are

considered part of the irrational ‘fringe’. Alternatively, when they are given

access, the message frames used are such that they undermine or mock the

message of the movement. The Internet, then, allows social movements to

bypass media gatekeepers and communicate directly with their constitu-

ency. According to Alex Jones and others, the Internet ‘levels the playing

ﬁeld’ between themselves and the resource-rich media conglomerates, by

allowing them ‘greater speed, lesser expense, further geographical reach

and relatively unlimited content capacity’ (Stein 2009: 750). As Kenneth

Randolf notes,

There is no doubt in my mind that the spread of messages that would

otherwise be rejected and ridiculed by mainstream media is a fundamental

Internet function. The subject of Obama as Antichrist is a prime example

of just such a message. The Internet is full of Obama as Antichrist mes-

sages, information, Web sites, and blog sites, while the mainstream media

is relatively silent on the subject and treat it much as they would an uncor-

roborated report that Martians have landed in Brooklyn (Randolf, personal

communication, 11 September 2009).

In addition to alleviating some of the agency panic that characterizes

contemporary right-wing populism, the Internet also fosters ideologi-

cal or sociopolitical networks—a kind of closed ‘community’ reinforcing

their own beliefs and biases. Craig Calhoun notes that, inter alia, the Web

facilitates the development of cultural and sociopolitical enclaves, where

individuals, more than is possible in their real-life neighborhoods, migrate

toward people and information with which they have an ideological similar-

ity. He writes:

What computer-mediated communication adds is a greater capacity to

avoid public interaction of the kind that would pull one beyond one’s

immediate personal choices of taste and culture. Discussion groups may

AMARASINGAM Baracknophobia and the Paranoid Style 117

transcend the spatial community, thus, but they do so precisely by linking

people with similar interests, not by forging links among people sharply

different from one another (1998: 385).

Farhad Manjoo concurs: ‘Instead of getting together with people who are

close to us physically, now we can get together with people who are close to

us ideologically, psychically, emotionally, aesthetically’ (2008: 54; see also

Sunstein 2007: 46-96 on ‘enclave deliberations’). Thus, in addition to its inte-

gral religious and conspiratorial roots, the Internet must be viewed as one of

the main social forces contributing to the persistence of right-wing populism.

As Blanchard and Horan (1998) point out, virtual communities are not

uniform. They distinguish between what they call a physically based vir-

tual community and virtual communities of interest. The former, as the term

suggests, is a more traditional physically based community that merely

provides electronic resources for its members. For example, a group dedi-

cated to combatting alcoholism, while meeting regularly in person, may

also decide to maintain an online forum, a mailing list or a bulletin board

for its members. The second type of virtual community ‘is geographically

dispersed with members participating due to their shared interests in a

topic and not their shared locations. . . . The members of these communi-

ties might never meet each other, and their interactions might be limited to

just that topic or community of interest’ (Blanchard and Horan 1998: 295).

Participating in this second type of online community—posting on forums

and message boards, creating viral videos, responding to comments, blog-

ging and the like—tends to foster an increased connection to other members

of the online community while also solidifying one’s membership in it. As

Barkun notes, ‘The validation that comes from seeing one’s beliefs echoed

by others provides a sense of connection for otherwise isolated individuals’

(2003: 20).

It should be evident however that the nature of these virtual communi-

ties of interest casts doubt on the potential of the Internet to rectify fully the

agency panic felt by many right-wing populists. Although the Internet has

allowed many individuals to express their views and acquire somewhat of

an online following, at the group level they are fully conscious of the fact

that they hold worldviews that are not a part of the mainstream. In other

words, as a group, they are still very much a subcultural movement seeking

a voice in mainstream politics. We must bring to mind what Richard Hof-

stadter said long ago:

The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular

political interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealiz-

able nature of their demands—cannot make themselves felt in the political

process. Feeling that they have no access to political bargaining or the

making of decisions, they ﬁnd their original conception of the world of

power as omnipotent, sinister, and malicious fully conﬁrmed (1966: 39).

118 Network Apocalypse

The potential of the Internet, then, may be limited to disseminating infor-

mation, providing a venue for the marginalized to have a voice (which may

then be largely ignored or ridiculed), alleviating some agency panic at the

individual level and fostering or enhancing a subcultural group identity

(Mitra 2001; Mitra and Watts 2002; Smith 1998; Sunstein 2007).

Aside from these important contributions, the Internet has proven that it

increases the ease with which grassroots organizing can take place, allow-

ing for the logistical coordination of geographically dispersed groups and

individuals (see, e.g. Shirky 2008). However, with the notable exceptions of

Alex Jones and the Westboro Baptist Church, many of the individuals and

online communities who propound apocalyptic beliefs about Obama do not

take their ﬁght to the street. For them, the Internet allows some alleviation

of agency panic through their part-time, after-work, leisurely interaction

with viral videos, forums, message boards, and blogs. It is evident, as Cal-

houn has written, that social movements existing entirely on the Internet

encounter very little success; ‘the Internet matters much more as a supple-

ment to face-to-face community organization and movement activity than

as a substitute for it’ (1998: 382). Kenneth Randolf, for example, admitted

as much when he mentioned to me that many people, inﬂuenced by his Web

site and blog, have contacted him with the question, ‘What do we do now?’

Thus, the Internet can be enormously inﬂuential in disseminating infor-

mation nationally and globally, but, as Calhoun states, the Web ‘is most

empowering when it adds to the capacities of people organized outside it’

(1998: 382). However, when I asked Randolf whether he planned to take

his views ‘onto the streets’, he argued that the streets of the twenty-ﬁrst

century are on the Internet: ‘if done properly and if the circumstances are

just right, it’s clearly possible to reach hundreds of millions of people on

those “streets”. In terms of cost-effectiveness, time consumption, overcom-

ing language and cultural and national barriers, there are no better “streets”

to be active on’ (Randolf, personal communication, 13 September 2009).

Randolf is optimistic, but it remains to be seen whether the rallying cries

and slogans of socioreligious movements can be heard when shouted solely,

or even primarily, from within the dark alleys of cyberspace.

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Theoretical Themes in Social Media

Chapter

Nov 2022

Laszlo Hubbes

Today, in the era of the World Wide Web and globalisation, apocalypticism and millennialism are by definition ‘social media apocalypticism and millennialism’—in their form, in their content, and in their working alike. Just like any other cultural elements, apocalyptic and millenarian ideas are highly dependent on media; they spread and act through mediatisation. Being mediated messages, not only the form but also the content of apocalyptic discourse and—implicitly—millennialism are shaped by the media technologies used (McLuhan 1964), just as these messages themselves contribute in turn to shaping these media. A major technological breakthrough came with the emergence of the electronic global media of the post-Gutenberg galaxy (Harnad 1991) and, with it, social media, which has created an entirely new environment for apocalyptic and millenarian ideas.

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Dec 1998

Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric

Article

Mar 1995

Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America

Book

Jan 2001

Robert Alan Goldberg

Confronting the Failed Failure: Y2K and Evangelical Eschatology in Light of the Passed Millennium

Article

Nov 2003

Douglas E. Cowan

If the Y2K "bug" entered the collective consciousness of evangelical Christians, two principal patterns of response emerged: either evangelicals acknowledged Y2K as a problem that required the readiness and reply of Christians, but rejected it as a component of prophetic fulfillment; or they interpreted it in some measure as a fulfillment of prophecy and a part of God'splan to facilitate the endtime. For those who believed Y2K to be a part of the eschatological schema, its status as a non-event required a variety of dissonance management techniques. This article explores the methods deployed by dispensationalist Christians to manage the cognitive dissonance generated by Y2K's "failed failure." Following a brief summary of evangelical predictions regarding Y2K, I offer a typology of responses ranging from denial that Y2K had ever been a problem to declaration that the Y2K problem occurred exactly as predicted. In each response, the central organizing principles of evangelical dispensationalism hold firm, and the cognitive dissonance created by the "failed failure" is successfully managed.

Marginal Voices in Cyberspace

Article

Mar 2001

Ananda Mitra

This article examines the process of expressing oneself in cyberspace through the metaphor of `voice', by drawing a similarity between the process of speaking and the presentation of the self in cyberspace. The metaphor of voice allows the examination of expressions in cyberspace in a dialogic manner and demonstrates a unique voice that can be produced with the technology of cyberspace. This is a voice that is heteroglossic and hyperconnected, and in the case of the marginalized, this voice has the potential of producing a call that the dominant has a moral obligation to acknowledge. Consequently, the metaphor of voice in cyberspace problematizes the relation between the marginal and the dominant by initiating a crisis of acknowledgment on the part of the dominant. Ultimately, this approach allows for the re-examination and re-invention of the notion of cyber communities and their role in the public sphere. These issues are developed by using Indian diasporic websites as evidence to support the arguments.

Technomillennialism: A Subcultural Response to the Technological Threat of Y2K

Article

Oct 2003

Andrea Tapia

The year 2000 (Y2K) computer software problem is framed as a technological boundary and cultural object. The author documents and analyses three subcultures' constructions of Y2K. The three subcultures are millennial (Evangelical-Charismatic-Pentecostal) Christians, militia-patriot survivalists, and computer professionals. Each subculture interpreted, received, comprehended, and explained the cultural object of Y2K. Combining the data from content analysis and interviews, the author creates a detailed picture of each subculture's response to Y2K. She compares and contrasts the three subcultures. Each subculture created a subcultural filter based on previously held value and belief systems, attitudes toward technology and computers, and interpretations of social environments to create a unique picture of Y2K. She examines how each of the subcultures framed technology through the framing of it as a technological object. Each response was located within the technological determinism versus social determinism debate and juxtaposed with its place in the technology as utopian or dystopian.

Baracknophobia and the Paranoid Style: Visions of Obama as the Antichrist on the World Wide Web

Abstract

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