[Video: Ron Paul decries "New World Order" at Nashville rally, Oct. 2007]
Ron Paul already has a considerable track record of actively promoting Patriot-movement "New World Order" conspiracy theories. In recent years, he's even been joined by mainstream right-wing pundits like Glenn Beck.
And while you didn't hear Paul spouting much of this nonsense during his presidential campaign, now that the election is over, he's back to business as usual -- and predictably, he's casting Barack Obama as the new embodiment of the conspiracy.
Paul recently gave an interview to a conspiracy-theory radio program in which he warned against "a cataclysmic shift toward a new world order":
Commenting on the much touted “International crisis” that luminaries such as Colin Powell, Joe Biden and Zbigniew Brzezinski have all guaranteed will occur within weeks of Obama entering the White House, the Congressman stated that he believes it may be a catalyst for a shift toward world government:
“I think it’s going to be an announcement of a new monetary order, and they’ll probably make it sound very limited, they’re not going to say this is world government, even though it is if you control the world’s money and you control the military, which they do indirectly.”
“A world central bank, worldwide regulation and world control of the whole system, of all the commodities and all the natural resources, what else can you call it other than world government?”
“Obama wouldn’t be there if he didn’t toe the line, and when the meeting starts on November 15th for the new monetary system, this could be the beginning of the end of what’s left of our national sovereignty.” Paul said, also warning that the global media are already hailing Obama as the world’s leader.
It has been clear for awhile now that the far right would see an Obama presidency as a pretext for reviving its 1990s-style conspiracy-mongering and scapegoating on a broad scale, and so far that's clearly the case. We saw signs of this before the election with the resurrection of zombie 1990s-style black-helicopter smears of Obama.
And now Ron Paul, who successfully presented himself as a mainstream "libertarian" throughout the campaign -- when the reality is that he is a classic Bircherite -- is advancing "New World Order v.2" for mass consumption.
Boy, we can hardly wait to see what this produces. [/snark] If the 1990s -- when last we endured a wave of paranoid fearmongering like this -- were anything to judge by, it won't be pretty. The next four years or more are as fraught with rightist peril as they are with promise for progressives.
