The Devil Went Down To Georgia

Hey true weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. It was supposed to be the American Stonehenge. That's how grand the idea was. And here's the best part. The dude with that wild vision actually had the money to make it happen. And it did happen. That crazy dream became a reality.

In a cow pasture in the state of Georgia. You know, when something secretive and mysterious takes up residence in their midst, people have a way of becoming irate and suspicious. Some people even started thinking that maybe Satan was afoot. Suspicion soon curdled into fear. And that fear metastasized into rage. And that rage exploded into destruction.

What happened? What really happened? Did the devil go down to Elbert County, Georgia that hot summer morning? Or was the devil already there? True Weird Stuff. A monument considered by some conservative Christians to be satanic was badly damaged by an explosive device. One of the four granite panels on the Georgia Guidestones monument was reduced to rubble.

The attraction was built in 1980 from local granite and commissioned under the name RC Christian. The 19-foot high panels bear a 10-part message in eight languages with guidance for living an age of reason. The so-called American Stonehenge also serves as a sundial and astronomical calendar. The bombing is under investigation.

It all ended with a literal bang. But how did it begin? Elberton, Georgia, bills itself the granite capital of the world. It lies about 105 miles east of Atlanta and only 5,000 or so people call it home. Now, despite its small size, it's got big bragging rights. The little city of Elberton produces more granite monuments than any other town on earth.

If you're ever in the area, take a detour off the interstate and check out Elberton's 20,000-seat granite bowl. Constructed in the 1950s, the stadium is made almost entirely of granite, as in more than 100,000 tons of blue granite. It's the home of the Elbert County Blue Devils, high school football and soccer. And here's a cool fact for college football fans.

Those Elberton high schoolers play under the same scoreboard that once towered over the legendary Sanford Stadium, home of the University of Georgia Bulldogs. Imagine cheering on your team under those iconic Friday night lights. As for why there happens to be so much granite in Elberton, well, you'd have to go back more than 325 million years when an enormous mass of molten magma, that's liquefied rock, erupted from deep beneath the surface of the earth and slowly cooled and became solid.

Our brains are not really wired to comprehend the enormity of deep time, so here's a way to grasp just how long ago that was. The oldest fossil evidence we have for anatomically modern humans dates back just 360,000 years, which tells you that that granite had plenty of time to cool off before we showed up and started chipping away at it.

It was an Italian sculptor named Arthur Beter who carved the very first statue made of Elberton granite. It was 1898 and Beter set about creating a large statue of a Confederate soldier mounted on a granite pedestal in the town square. Beter's work of art was not met with the kind of reverence he'd hoped. The citizens of Elberton were like, oh, why is this Confederate soldier dressed in Yankee clothes?

To be fair, it's said that the sculptor had never laid eyes on a real Confederate soldier and did his best, not realizing the significance of every detail in the figure's dress. And then there was the problem of the statue's face and just, well, its overall appearance. One Elbertonian described it like this, That statue's a strange monster.

It's a cross between a Pennsylvania Dutchman and a hippopotamus. Ouch! Everyone's a critic. And that's how Beter's statue got the nickname Dutchy. Now, not but two years later in 1900, a gang of hooligans lassoed poor Dutchy, toppling him from his pedestal and dragging him to the ground. If you're thinking booze had to be involved, you're right.

The empty whiskey bottles at the scene of the crime told the tale. Apparently, no one was sad about the vandalism. The joke was that Dutchy got so drunk, he fell off all by himself. The townspeople buried the poor thing right where it lay. And that's where Dutchy stayed until 1982. They say time heals all. So I guess 82 years was just about enough time for the people of Elberton to forgive Dutchy for looking so silly.

They unearthed him, all 3,000 pounds of him, took him to the local car wash for a bath, and then placed Dutchy on display at the Elberton Granite Museum. Poor Dutchy has to perch in a cart now, since his legs were detached that terrible night he was toppled. Bless his goofy granite heart. So, as you can see, granite has been serious business in Elberton, Georgia for more than a century, which brings us to June 1979.

A man calling himself Robert C. Christian strolled into the offices of the Elberton Granite Finishing Company. He announced that he represented a small group of loyal Americans, a group with a big budget and an even bigger idea. What Robert C. Christian wanted was a monument, the very thing Elberton was famous for, but not just any monument.

What he had in mind was bigger than any grave marker, bigger even than Dutchy. What Christian's group wanted to commission was more on the order of Stonehenge, that prehistoric enigma that has sat on Salisbury Plain in the UK since the Bronze Age. Robert C. Christian, a pseudonym he chose to protect his privacy, had very specific demands for his American Stonehenge.

The monument, he explained, had a purpose far beyond its own grandeur. His plans called for it to serve as a calendar and a clock and a compass. It was to be constructed of four massive stone blocks, each just over 16 feet tall and each weighing more than 42,000 pounds. These blocks were to be arranged around a center stone of the same height, weighing in at nearly 21,000 pounds.

A 25,000 pound capstone topped it off and there was more. Half dozen support stones, a granite base, a slab of stone designed to explain the purpose and function of the entire monument. All of it built to withstand what Christian called catastrophic events. But wait, there's more. Because the monument also had to serve as a clock, a calendar and an astronomical tool, the four outer stones would have to be aligned according to the path of the sun's annual migration.

The center stone was to have two extra features, a hole through which the North Star could always be observed and an aperture that would line up with sunrise on both the solstice and the equinox. Then on the capstone, a narrow slot was to be cut, allowing a beam of sunlight to blaze through every day at noon. It was quite an ask.

Mr. Christian described this project to the president of the Elberton Granite Finishing Company, Joe Fendley. He claimed its purpose was the potential salvation of civilization. Christian was elegantly and expensively dressed and spoke most persuasively of the concern his group had for humanity. Their goal, he declared, was to create this monument to serve as a sort of guide for a future people ravaged by nuclear war.

He claimed the group he represented had been planning this for two decades. Something that makes tremendous sense when you consider the Cold War, the threat of mutually assured destruction and the doomsday clock creeping ever closer to midnight. And this was all six years before Sting had a chart-topping little bop where he earnestly crooned about hoping the Russians loved their children, too.

Apocalyptic paranoia didn't seem all that unhinged in 1979 because it just wasn't. It's not unhinged today, either. Not when you know that in the worst case scenario, an all-out nuclear war, it would take only 70 minutes or so to annihilate five billion people. This was the nightmare outcome that Mr. Christian and his secretive group feared.

Still, Joe Fendley thought this guy had to be at least a little bit nuts. He asked the questions you would ask had you been sitting in his chair that June morning, starting with, Okay, a guide made of granite for survivors of a nuclear apocalypse. But why here? Why place it here in sleepy, sweet, rural, little Elbert County, Georgia?

Mr. Christian had an answer ready. Because the finest granite on earth was quarried in Elberton, and the whole world knew it. Fendley considered the proposal, this wild, out-of-the-blue request, and explained that to execute the job, his company would have to bring in additional stoneworkers and more equipment, and the cost would surely be prohibitive.

Mr. Christian took that in without even blinking. Then, Fendley did the thing many of us do when we'd rather not take on a task. He tried to price himself out of the job. Fendley quoted a number many, many times higher than any project in his company's history. And don't you know that Robert C. Christian didn't flinch? The deal was done.

Christian handed over 10 pages of specs and a scale model. All that was left to do was purchase a five-acre plot of land from a local farmer. Wayne and Mildred Mullenix agreed to the deal, selling off a small hilltop on the northern edge of their Double 7 ranch, holding on to grazing rights for two generations, and generally agreeing to keep an eye on the thing.

Fendley's company got busy hauling and chiseling granite. Less than a year later, on Saturday, March 22, 1980, a crowd of several hundred people gathered for the unveiling of Robert C. Christian's mysterious monument. The day was unseasonably cold and windy. People were visibly shivering. A VIP was brought in for the occasion, Congressman Doug Barnard, who told the assembled audience that the guides, 10 pieces of advice carved into the stones, were a warning that the United States better preserve its resources because society and government are limited.

That was certainly a take, and definitely the take you'd expect from a politician. Because the Georgia Guidestones, as they were called, offered those 10 pieces of advice in eight languages. English, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Swahili. The capstone was inscribed with these words. Let these be guidestones to an age of reason.

That inscription was repeated in classical Greek, Sanskrit, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Babylonian cuneiform. Clearly, the designers were hoping to address more than Elbert County voters, but a politician's always gone politic, right? So what were those 10 pieces of advice etched into that granite in eight languages? One, maintain humanity under 500,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

Two, guide reproduction wisely, improving fitness and diversity. Three, unite humanity with a living new language. Four, rule passion, faith, tradition, and all things with tempered reason. Five, protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts. Six, let all nations rule internally, resolving external disputes in a world court.

Seven, avoid petty laws and useless officials. Eight, balance personal rights with social duties. Nine, prize truth, beauty, love, seeking harmony with the infinite. Ten, be not a cancer on the earth. Leave room for nature. Leave room for nature. President the unveiling was the pastor of the First Methodist Church in Elberton, Dr. Charles Williams.

He told a reporter with the Atlanta Constitution that there had been no public opposition to the stones at all, even though that first inscription made a strong argument for birth control, something he feared might very likely be seen as controversial. Speaking of controversial, the president of the Granite City Bank, Mr. Wyatt Martin, declared that he knew the true identity of the mysterious Robert C. Christian, but intended to take that secret to his grave.

He would reveal only that the man's accent wasn't local and that the group he belonged to were interested in the future of mankind. Martin's meeting ended with the most melodramatic flair. Mr. Christian stood up, announced he was using a fake name, and that Martin would never again lay eyes on him. Folks, that's how you make an exit.

By late 1981, a small fence had been erected around the stones. Gravel covered the raw red Georgia clay and a plaque greeted visitors. We, the sponsors of the Georgia Guidestones, are a small group of Americans who wish to focus attention on problems central to the present quandary of humanity. We have a simple message for other human beings now and in the future.

There are alternatives to Armageddon. They are attainable, but they will not happen without coordinated efforts by millions of dedicated peoples in all nations of the Earth. We have chosen to remain anonymous in order to avoid debate and contention, which might confuse our meaning and which might delay a considered review of our thoughts.

We believe our precepts are sound. They must stand on their own merits. A journalist named Bob Widner, writing for the Tampa Bay Times, paid Alberton a visit to see the strange monument for himself. Arriving before dawn, he described the experience like this. A strong feeling of isolation. A single light in the nearest farmhouse must be a quarter mile away.

Standing here shivering in the windy predawn, overpowered by the massive stones before me, questions come unbidden. What is this strange collection of stones all about? Who did it and why? I look around expecting to see a group of hooded figures, black robes flapping in the wind, trudging across the pasture to assemble for their morning ritual.

But the only dark forms I see are a herd of hungry cows foraging in the sparse pasture. Then things took a turn for the weird. The reporter headed to a nearby cafe for breakfast. He got a warm welcome and an invitation to join a group of regulars at their table. Everyone was friendly and talkative in praise of their town.

How many millions of pounds of granite were mined and shipped each year? The fact that the 38 granite quarries in town employed one in four residents. They were proud of their all granite stadium, proud of Alberton's global reputation. And then came the question. What about that strange monument outside of town? The table fell silent.

The diners looked from one to the other, but not at the stranger. There was a long, uncomfortable pause. Finally, an older man cleared his throat. Well, nobody knows too much about it. Leastwise, nobody talks much about it one way or the other. It was a very peculiar end to what had been such a friendly, gregarious chat over breakfast.

These silent stones will display our ideas now and when we have gone. We hope they merit increasing acceptance and that through their silent persistence, they will hasten in a small degree the coming age of reason. It's true that the Guidestones sparked suspicion and fear right from the very beginning of the project. Bank President Wyatt Martin acknowledged the complaints about the Guidestones.

Some called the stones blasphemous. There was talk of Russian and Chinese subterfuge to undermine American democracy, whispers of satanic influences. But Martin was confident that the drama had died down. Local preachers had shifted from thundering on about pagan rituals at the Guidestones and instead focused their Sunday sermons on blocking beer sales in Elbert County and preventing the godless filth of Playboy magazine from being sold in Elberton's convenience stores.

The people who didn't suspect the communists or Beelzebub were busy giving the side eye to the owners and operators of Elberton's granite quarries. Had they cooked this whole bizarre story up simply to boost their own business? Meanwhile, as word spread of this strange attraction in a cow pasture in Georgia, Elberton found itself the center of some very strange attention.

There were the couples who took their wedding vows in the shadow of the stones. Local Wiccans gathered there for periodic rituals. Lady Galadriel and Lord Athenor, founders of Grove of the Unicorn, came often, believing that the land held spiritual significance. The magazine UFO Report published an article claiming that aliens would use the Georgia Guidestones as a homing beacon when they made their inevitable arrival on our planet.

Joe Fendley, whose company had constructed the odd monument, made the rounds as a speaker, telling the local Kiwanis Club that the enigmatic Robert C. Christian believed that civilization would likely end in the next generation, thanks to a nuclear holocaust started by a third world country. It only got weirder from there.

People became fixated on the importance of the number 7 to the Guidestones, as in the main roads in Elbert County were numbered 17, 72, 77, 79, and 172. The land the monument was erected on used to be part of the Double Seven Ranch. The stone sat 700 feet off Highway 77. It was said that the Guidestones were seven miles from the center of Elberton and seven miles from what the Cherokee Nation called the center of the world.

There was no amount of discussion or argument that budged those believers in the power of seven. Whether by chance or by design, the Georgia Guidestones rose up in that pasture at the same time a phenomenon called the Satanic Panic was sweeping the nation. In a nutshell, the Satanic Panic was a widespread terror and paranoia of sadistic ritual abuses performed in the name of or on behalf of the devil, the dark one, Satan.

It began in the US, but swept the world. It seemed like you couldn't flip on the TV without landing on a story about devil worshipers tormenting children. It began with the publication of a book called Michelle Remembers and Pete, with the lurid coverage of the McMartin Preschool Trial in Los Angeles. The McMartin family operated a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California.

It all began with an accusation in 1983 by a woman named Judy Johnson. She alleged that her young son had been sodomized by her ex-husband, as well as by a teacher at the McMartin Preschool. The subsequent investigation lasted from 1984 to 1987. Trials were underway from 1987 through 1990. It was a seven-year ordeal. There's that number again.

And one that led to zero convictions and all charges being dropped in 1990. When it was all said and done, more than 12,000 accusations of ritual abuse were documented across the U.S. But law enforcement was unable to substantiate a single case of organized ritual abuse. Not even one. It was a wild time to be alive. A social worker named Key McFarlane appeared before a congressional committee warning that there were children being made to eat feces while watching freaky rituals involving the slaughter of animals.

Parents were warned about heavy metal music, about daycare centers and teachers, and about the game Dungeons & Dragons. There was loud, hysterical talk of kids who played D&D being more prone to committing both murder and suicide. There was no evidence to support this. And in fact, data showed that players of games like D&D actually showed significantly lower rates of suicide than the national average.

But that's where the word panic comes in. A panic is irrational and emotional, almost immune to logic or reason. It didn't seem to matter what facts were presented. The satanic panic crowd always had an answer at the ready. Where were all the bodies that were allegedly being piled up by these deadly devil worshipers? Well, the Satanists were in cahoots with morticians and funeral homes to hide the evidence.

Cops were in on it too, and so was the media, of course. Enter Geraldo Rivera with a primetime special on these hidden, violent cults of Lucifer that were apparently everywhere and nowhere. To some, it's a religion. To others, it's the practice of evil in the devil's name. It exists and it's flourishing. Members of our studio audience tonight will attest to that.

They are friends and foes of Satanism, devil worshipers and law enforcers, experts and victims. They'll help us understand this force that exalts evil and darkness. We'll be asking why. Why does it exist? And why does it appeal to so many vulnerable people, especially the young? Now, the very young and the impressionable should definitely not be watching this program tonight.

This is not a Halloween fable. This is a real life horror story and it will give small children bad dreams. As for teenagers and their parents, we hope you are watching because it's teenagers who are most likely to fall under the spell of this jumble of dark, violent emotions called Satanism and in some cases, to be driven into committing terrible deeds.

Whatever the shadowy Robert C. Christian and his group of apocalyptic visionaries had in mind for the Guidestones, it probably didn't include finding their peculiar monument in the direct eye of a conspiratorial hurricane because that's what happened. Starting with Robert C. Christian's name, a pseudonym, if you remember, a name he chose, a name meant to convey something.

But what? The theory that Mr. Christian was a Rosicrucian caught fire. His initials, RC, were a tantalizing clue. The Rosicrucians are a kind of global brotherhood dating back to the 17th century. Their belief system combines the occult with religious teachings from Gnostic Christianity to Jewish mysticism. And real quick, and you'll see the problem right away, the Gnostics believe that the God or divine being who created this material world is not supremely good and also that there are other gods and also that there is like a supreme super boss God who is very separate from the creator God.

Yes, the Gnostics were condemned as heretics. Oh, and wait, there's this other tiny detail. The Gnostic teachings speak of a demiurge, a satanic power that created this world. The result being a complete opposition between this world and God. And now the Rosicrucians have erected a ginormous rock pile in a pasture in solidly Christian Elberton County, Georgia.

That was one theory. The New World Order was another. If you've spent any time on social media in the past 20 years, you've seen this one over and over and over. You know, the whole powerful group of elites banding together to force their twisted globalist ideology on the rest of us with the goal of creating a one world government.

Thanks in large part to both QAnon and COVID, this once fringy theory has now gone much more mainstream. Back in the 1990s, you'd hear murmurings about black helicopters and how the founding fathers sneaked secret symbols of Freemasonry into our currency and our national landmarks and even the layout of the streets in Washington, D.C. Now those murmurs have turned into shouts.

The Illuminati are part of this enormous wide ranging conspiracy and you can tell you've arrived in the neighborhood when you start hearing about Bohemian Grove and Skull and Bones and the John Birch Society and the Council on Foreign Relations. Be on the lookout for the phrases international bankers and the mention of barcodes and microchips and 5G.

If this is your thing and you're now outraged, dude, listen, looky here. I believe in aliens, Bigfoot and the multiverse, reincarnation and even the G-spot. So don't come for me, bro. I'm just offering up some background, OK? Take a breath. You don't want your phone to detect you getting all riled up. They're monitoring.

We know. Anywho, the Georgia Guidestones slot it very neatly into the New World Order conspiracy theory. It was super easy to interpret the 10 pieces of advice carved into that granite as a kind of anti-Christianity, a kind of anti-Christian take on the Ten Commandments, beginning with the exhortation to keep the world's population at 500 million.

That's population control right there. There are well over 8 billion people on Earth now. New World Order conspiracists point to manufactured anxiety over climate change and overpopulation as proof that the plan to kill us off is underway. Loop in engineered plagues and artificial manipulation of the weather. And now you have to wonder just what Robert C. Christian was really up to.

Those are just the highlights. The spark notes. You could spend the rest of your life learning all the intricacies of the New World Order conspiracy and you'd never run out of material because this is one huge, complex and ever-involving beast of a theory. And from what I see online, it just keeps finding both new recruits and new plots to unravel.

And it's something to take seriously. A researcher with the Anti-Defamation League, Katie McCarthy, pointed out that the principles laid out on the guidestones advocate for things like depopulation, eugenics, a global government, and that these ideas play into conspiracy theories about a New World Order. It's proof to those who endorse that theory that the global elite is plotting to kill off humanity.

Which circles us right back to the Georgia Guidestones. A monument designed to survive a nuclear holocaust turned out to be no match for the conspiracists. Who found the guidestones? Thanks to the internet. It was the internet that turned an obscure oddity in a remote field into a bona fide roadside attraction. It was online that wild theories about the monument's origins grew and multiplied, where suggestions began morphing into givens, and givens soon transformed into facts.

Dark, perplexing, sinister facts. Let's jump ahead to 2008. The guidestones have been standing silent watch in their little corner of the pasture in Elberton County for 28 years at that point, but never peacefully. The guidestones were a magnet for the curious, the kooky, and the vandals. People would mark up the stones with magic markers and worse.

A masked man calling himself an American patriot said he defaced the stones as a warning to the global elite. 2009 brought graffiti reading death to the new world order. It got so bad that the sheriff's office installed surveillance gear. In 2016, someone got hold of a can of spray paint and left the words you won't win on the granite.

Stuff like that. Pranks. In some ways, the guidestones did make the perfect target, since no one really had any idea why they'd been created or who was behind it all. It was easy to project whatever you wanted onto their massive surfaces. Anti-globalists pointed to the eight plus languages the messages were inscribed in.

The satanic panic crowd saw the whole thing as a leering affront to Christianity. Only the devil himself would call for the extermination of most of the world's population. A pastor in a neighboring county railed against the guidestones, arguing that the monument was nothing more than a billboard for genocide and abortion.

Elected officials in Elberton County were like, hey, maybe calm down. It's a tourist attraction. Don't you want people to pull off the road for a look and then spend some money at our local businesses? So what if this is how some eccentric rich guy decided he wanted to spend his money? It's just a lot of nonsense and nothing to get so worked up over.

But worked up is exactly how people got it. It all came to head during an election cycle. Doesn't it feel like that's how every damn thing goes now? It's just exhausting. It was the Georgia governor's race in 2022. The incumbent, Brian Kemp, was facing a candidate named Kandiss Taylor in the Republican primary. Taylor was a long shot, whose campaign slogan was Jesus, guns, babies.

No, really. It was simple, memorable, and widely mocked by what looks to be pretty much everyone. But let me tell you a little something about Kandiss Taylor. She was tenacious. Buddy, did she ever hate the Guidestones? She made a campaign promise that once elected governor, she would have that satanic abomination destroyed.

Taylor was good at working the press and her banging on about the demonic Guidestones gained traction on social media. That odd tourist attraction in Elbert County was suddenly the focus of a whole lot of negative attention online. Taylor may have lost the primary race to Kemp, but her promise to topple the Guidestones ended up being a keeper.

Even if Kandiss Taylor wasn't the one who made it happen. Because someone did. It was early in the morning, July 6th, 2022. A unique Georgia attraction that stood for nearly four decades is destroyed. And now the GBI needs your help to find who did it. The GBI released video showing the moment an explosion tore into the Georgia Guidestones in Elbert County.

You can see that car leaving the scene. That was just moments after the blast. Authorities say it happened Wednesday morning about four. Crew spent Wednesday tearing down what remained of that mysterious structure. The monument often called America's Stonehenge. The stones were inscribed with 10 guiding principles, each etched in stone using languages from around the world.

The meaning behind those monoliths had been unclear since the structure was built in 1980. In the interest of fairness, let me state right here and now that Kandiss Taylor hopped on Twitter just a few hours after the explosion and credited God with striking down the satanic Guidestones, then released a video later that same night, stating that she was not associated with anything of an illegal nature.

But the damage was done and the damage was significant. As for the surveillance equipment, it captured the explosion along with a person running to and from the monument, as well as what appeared to be a silver colored car speeding away from the scene. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the shock of the moment, the mayor of Elberton, Daniel Graves, vowed that the Guidestones would be rebuilt.

That wasn't to be. Instead, the very next day, the entire structure was demolished. The stated reason was public safety. Crews spent Wednesday tearing down what remained of that mysterious structure, the monument often called America's Stonehenge. The stones were inscribed with 10 guiding principles, each etched in stone using languages from around the world.

The meaning behind those monoliths had been unclear since the structure was built in 1980. The rubble remains of the Georgia Guidestones were donated to the Elberton Granite Association. The land it had sat upon for 42 years was returned to its original owners. Cows were once again free to graze, were the colossal mystery and once loomed.

This strange and unsettling chapter in the history of Elbert County wasn't closed though. The Georgia Bureau of Investigations took on the case. Days and weeks turned into months without a single suspect being named, much less an arrest. That's still true today. The investigation is ongoing. I'm not sure anyone expects the case to ever, ever be solved.

When the Georgia Guidestones were blown to smithereens, they didn't disappear. The Guidestones found a new home, rent-free, in the minds of those convinced that an evil cabal bent on world domination and depopulation slithers unseen in the corridors of power. Government, industry, media, no place is safe. Not even the church.

Kidding. The church is generally safe unless of course it's the Catholic church. The Vatican figures prominently in the New World Order conspiracy, which, let's be so real, kind of cultivated its own mystique with all those centuries of ritual and literal miles of secret archives at the Vatican in Rome. The Executive Vice President of the Elbert Granite Association really summed it up.

His name is Christopher Kubas and he lamented the loss of Elbert County's most famous attraction. There are people that think that just because they don't like it, that nobody should have the opportunity to see it or experience it. So they're going to destroy it for everybody else. And you know what? Those people were and are gleeful about the destruction of the Guidestones.

A pastor at the Elberton Church of God declared that the reference to the unity of the world on the stones was about the Antichrist and how the Antichrist would unite the governments of the world. So, you know, he was pleased to see the Guidestones go boom. Just last year, a newspaper in Iowa interviewed a woman who said she was part of a group that had prayed for the stones to be destroyed.

And when it happened, she gave God the glory for sending his people in with the dynamite. Raymond Wiley, who describes himself as a Southern evangelical, co-wrote the book The Georgia Guidestones, America's Most Mysterious Monument. Wiley wasn't happy the stones were destroyed, but he also wasn't even a little bit surprised.

He said there was just too much superstition swirling around the Guidestones, too much fear and distrust. It was bound to come to some flavor of a bad end. Wiley said the stones may have been built to withstand nuclear war, but they were no match for Southern culture. I will politely disagree about the Southern part. The stones were no match for this American cultural moment, which feels some days like an arson party racing to a kindling convention.

Robert C. Christian and his mysterious group didn't foresee the violent end that awaited their monument to humanity's future. They thought the stones would outlast civilization. They thought the stones could someday be a marker of hope in a ruined world. They wanted to send a message to the annihilated future because they were convinced that the bomb was inevitable.

And it turns out they were right. They just planned for the wrong bomb. The Georgia Guidestones get the last word, taken from the plaque that used to rest in its shadow. We leave the monument in the safekeeping of the people of Elbert County, Georgia. If our inscribed words are dimmed by the wearer of wind and sun and time, we ask that you will cut them deeper.

If the stone should fall or if they be scattered by people of little understanding, we ask that you raise them up again. We invite our fellow human beings in all nations to reflect on our simple message. When these goals are someday sought by the generality of mankind, a rational world order shall be achieved for all.

Next time on True Weird Stuff. As a little boy, he could see the future and as a grown man, he was a priest in a magical sex temple of the occult. And today, we send rockets to the moon because of him. The true tale of Jack Parsons on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents, Kevin Nash, Lamar Richardson, Kary "Doc" Bowser, Stuart Watson and Don Morgan.

Sherry, this story, when you were telling this story, I was not familiar with it at all. I mean, I've hiked on trails or granite in eastern Georgia and some of those areas are like you're walking on the moon. It's crazy. It's kind of unexpected. But that's the only connection I had to the story whatsoever. This sounds like a fable you would tell to children about something that was made and people hung whatever their belief was on it and made it a cause.

Do you know what I mean? I mean, and in the end, it was destroyed. It just sounds like a fable. I mean, you just nailed it. Thanks for coming, folks. I mean, you know what I kept thinking of while I was on? I've been fascinated by the Georgia Guidestones for a very, very long time because, you know, of course I would be right.

But what I kept thinking about while I was writing it was the scene in the beginning of the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey where the monolith is there and the apes are shaking bones at it. It had that kind of feeling for me. And, you know, timing is everything. And the Guidestones were strange. I mean, it couldn't have been stranger.

The anonymous group, the Ten Commandments, the way it was constructed, where it was placed. Every aspect of it, you're right, lent itself to the tragic outcome that we ultimately found. It's a crazy story, isn't it? It's hard to believe it's true and that it just happened. This is one of those things where, oh, this wasn't 100 years ago.

This thing blew up two years ago in the summer of 2022. This is new. And, you know, this satanic panic was a real thing. I mean, it was a real thing and it showed up in lots of trials. I'm listening to a podcast about a cold case where two men were just exonerated who were convicted as teenagers of a murder. And this satanic panic played a part in the conviction that they ended up having.

And it was, people really went nuts with this. And then the thing with the school where the children, the McMartin, there was another one that was near us. I think it was the name of it was Little Rascals. In Edenton, North Carolina. And it turned out that all of that was false. And people had conjured this. They had made this into something that it really was not.

And it just, it lets you know the kind of crazy that some people will sell in order to bond people to them. Do you know what I mean? Whether it's in religion or any kind of a belief like that. I think it's easy to look at religious people with that. But there's people, there's other people that do that as well. People that were all in on the satanic panic, which I must remind you or maybe you don't realize is bubbling up again for its comeback.

I'm seeing more and more and more satanic panic content on the social media sites. And it's really fascinating how little time it took for that to cycle back. Everything old is new again. But the people that are really in on satanic panic will not hear you or believe you when you tell them that law enforcement was unable to document a single instance.

There were no convictions. There were no arrests. There was no successful like judge banging the gavel and yelling guilty. 12,000 plus accusations of ritual abuse in the United States and not one substantiated. When you tell people that are all in on that, they won't hear it. Because it's such a, like I said in the episode, a panic is kind of immune to reason.

That's why we call it a panic. If you've ever had a panic attack, I'm here to tell you you can't be reasoned with when you're in the midst of it. Your body is reacting as though there's a five alarm fire and no amount of rational talk changes that for you. So the satanic panic is that for sure. And that's coming back around.

There are a lot of things about the new world or the one world government theory and the globalist panic, which is also tied to Satan. You've seen stuff online about powerful elite people in politics and show business abusing children and drinking their blood. You've seen this, right? I mean, it's hard to do even a casual drive by social media and not pick up some of this.

These are all the descendants of the satanic panic. And people are very, very, very deeply committed. I can't tell you the number of listeners to our radio show who will send me these horrifying videos through Facebook Messenger to try to persuade me to see the light that there is a network of underground tunnels where children are being sent back and forth to be ritually abused.

And oh my gosh, it's just it's so, so, so much. So that hasn't really gone away. It's just evolved and transformed. Thanks to social media, it proliferates in a very different way than it did during the days of the McMartin preschool trials and the little rascals. Very different and faster and more toxic than was possible pre-internet.

So the other thing I want to say about and this is just probably going to really piss some of y'all off, but let me just put it out there. The idea that these global elites are trying to, you know, have a one world government where we all speak one language and we all are kind of one people. Wasn't that like what the paradise of humanity was before the Tower of Babel?

Right? Can't you argue this in the opposite direction using the same kind of scriptural references? And here's what I think. Here's what I think. I think that unity, and I am in no way advocating for here come the black helicopters and the United Nations and one world government, whatever, right? But let me just say, unity is a tricky thing to monetize.

If you want to make some money off folks, you need to divide them into tribes and make them fear and despise each other. That's where the dollars are. Oh, amen. There's the very thing that I was going to say. Do you know, I was doing some volunteer work and, you know, I was raised Catholic. Sometimes I think being Catholic and being raised Catholic is more of a cultural thing than it is a religion.

You know what I mean? I mean, I may sometimes practicing Catholic and the thing about it is, but I consider myself Catholic. So I was doing some volunteer work with some people who asked me about Catholicism. And one of the things that they asked me was, well, do you take your orders from a foreign government? It's like, what?

I'm like, what are you talking about? I said, I'm an American. They said, no, it's from the Vatican. And that the Vatican's idea was to take over the world and make it one world government and that it was anti-American. What was going on with that? And I, and then they said, are Catholics even Christians? And I was like, I said to them, I said to them straight faced Catholics were very early to the Jesus party.

But the idea that somebody is preaching this to them, somebody is telling them that this as fact under the guise of religious guidance from God. It's appalling, isn't it? It's so divisive. It is. But it keeps the money flowing. And that, and I'm sorry to upset anyone. But that is, it is a business and we just can't make money off of Kumbaya.

We can only make money off of fear and strife and division. And as far as that, are Catholics even Christians? I, not but two months ago, I have a friend who's a very, very devout Catholic. Like her kids went to Catholic school. They don't eat meat on Friday. They are very devout Catholics. And a woman, a mutual acquaintance that we know said to her, oh, I didn't realize you were Catholic.

Of course, we're Christians. And my friend was like, yeah, us too. And this, this woman was agog at the idea that a Catholic might also be a Christian. So there's just a lot of fomenting of tribalism and divisiveness and hate. And it's because it's profitable. I'm sorry to say it, but it's just, it's profitable. And there's no scriptural, there's no, there's no scripture that backs that up.

People can warp. They can take scripture and interpret it in one various way or another. But there's nothing in the Bible that says, yay, America, boo, China. Like there's nothing in the Bible to back that up. I think it's much easier to motivate people by fear than by love. I mean, it just, it just is. And you were talking about it before because the economic, I understand that.

But it really is because we see that time and time again, especially with something like this. Isn't it interesting that this, and I've looked at this, what was the monument? So I've looked at it and it's kind of interesting that this becomes a flashpoint for politicians of, we're going to get rid of this. I'm like, well, what about, what about roads and schools and people and health and public services and social services and all that other stuff?

Well, isn't that just the fact? There's so much more work to be done. And yet the work that needs to be done is difficult and takes place over such a long time scale that no single elected official can possibly be around long enough to take credit for it. But you can blow the guidestones up and get credit for being anti-devil in a way that you can't fix the roads and the schools and the correction system and the infrastructure as quickly as you can throw some dynamite at a goofy roadside attraction in a cow pasture.

And I got the idea that the local government wanted to rebuild it because it was a tourist attraction and tourist attractions bring in money for local businesses. But I think that they understood that it was such a divisive thing that somebody might end up getting killed or hurt or something else. And I think they decided just let it go.

Well, and you know, it did stand for 42 years. It wasn't like, well, they put it up and then people were like, it's the Antichrist and they blew it up. I mean, it really got caught in a moment. It became symbolic of a bunch of different kind of conspiracies and ideologies that all coalesced around it. And the pastor that we talked about in this episode, who was like, it's a symbol of the Antichrist and that the Antichrist is going to unite the governments of the world.

Well, I mean, not for nothing. And again, like you, I went to Catholic school and apparently, you know, that's just like, you know, the waiting room of the devil. But one of the things that I learned at the hands of my priest and nun teachers was that part of the problem with this world is that we were so disunited, right?

And that we couldn't speak to each other. We couldn't communicate. That we're so different that all we did was fear and attack. So again, like I'm not over here advocating for the one world government, but I thought it was interesting that this one preacher was banging on about the Antichrist will unite us. Oh, don't threaten me with a good time.

The thing that we suffer from the most is how separated we are from each other and from our own humanity. And this is one of those, you know, you're so right when you said in the beginning that the Guidestones just became sort of like a screen that you could project almost anything on. Anything that you say about this so pisses someone off to the point of committing violence that you literally can't win.

If you say it was just a tourist attraction, like let it be, then you're in league with the devil. If you say what I'm saying, which is, I don't know, like maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing if we all didn't hate each other so much, then you're team Antichrist. Like it's the most perfect cipher. It was a perfect enigmatic, mysterious cipher to attract whatever you had to sell.

It's an amazing story, really. But that's true with any major story that happens, because anybody that has some little, I want to say a viewpoint on something, but they take it as their ornament to hang on to the tree. Do you know what I mean? Whatever the event is. The thing that's interesting to me is about the man who created it.

And did he know that this would be the outcome? Did he plan that? Because it seems like it's possible if he had that much vision, he could see what was going to happen. You know, it is possible, and if that is the case with Robert C. Christian and his mysterious group, they certainly were playing the long game. Because Christian was, by all accounts, a middle-aged man when they struck this deal to build this.

And then it stood for 42 years before being destroyed. It's unknown if Robert C. Christian was even alive on July 6, 2022, when the Guidestones were bombed. And when I look at, so like if you're kind of, if your history buff tends toward like atomic age, Cold War, post-war America, Christian's group is so interesting because they really, you know, in the aftermath of World War II, when the Red Menace was sweeping the globe, you know, you had the Soviet Union and the United States building up their nuclear stockpiles.

And, you know, the idea of mutually assured destruction, the world came very close to the brink of nuclear apocalypse during the Kennedy administration in the Bay of Pigs. You can see how people who came of age during that would have this intense nuclear apocalypse paranoia that Christian's group did. Like you can see it.

And if you were a kid or a teenager in the 1980s when Sting was singing about nuclear winter and that was a hit on the radio, just so that we're all clear that this wasn't that long ago. Like this just, this is very recent contemporary history. So you can see how Christian's group, they were fully convinced that nuclear apocalypse would come, if not in their lifetime, in the next generation.

That was their conviction. And they felt like we've got the money and the vision. We need to leave a marker behind for the people yet to come. And maybe by doing so, we can save them some of the mistakes of rebuilding civilization. It seems to me that it was as benign and simple as that. But then again, the identities of the people who fund it, the Georgia Guidestones, are unknown.

And for fans of True Crime Podcast, you won't be surprised to know that the GBI, the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, hasn't made any headway in the case. Looking at you fans of Sean Kipe shows and Poppin Vanished. So it's such a mystery, isn't it? It truly is. I'm just fascinated with whoever had the idea, the guy who had the idea in the first place.

There's a certain irony to this. And that is, it was to be there to withstand a nuclear blast, and yet it couldn't survive the humanity of today. I mean, don't you think that's kind of funny? It's so darkly, tragically hilarious that that's what I said. They built it for the bomb. They just planned for the wrong bomb.

They didn't foresee. And I'll go out on a limb and say that I don't think they foresaw this moment, this modern moment. That this, the return of almost medieval levels of darkness and superstition. I don't think they foresaw that. I'm not sure any of us did, if we're being super honest. And let me say this about the New World Order conspiracy, because it's just so fascinating.

You could lose yourself in it for days. The reason that a conspiracy theory like that takes root is because you can find so many factual pieces of evidence to support it. And you'll see that next week's episode too, about Jack Parsons. So the New World Order theory, it touches on everything from, as you heard, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, the Illuminati.

But those symbols are on our currency and in our halls of government. So it's very easy to make those interpretations. In next week's episode, you will see how a secret society that was loosely tied to European Freemasonry is deeply embedded in the history of the American space program. So if you believe that these things are happening behind the scenes, these wheels are turning, you can find things to point to to make your case.

And that's what makes these conspiracies so sticky and compelling and robust. It's because you can find those pieces of evidence, which is delicious if you're into that sort of thing. The number seven. Then, I mean, the number that, that whole like fixation on the number seven, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't go anywhere, but people point to it.

You can make, you can make all sorts of weird conspiracies out of anything, as you said. A great example of this is all the people try to take the Kennedy assassination and the Lincoln assassination and all the, you know, all the incredible coincidences between the two. But when you tear it apart, there really aren't that many coincidences.

It's really fun to skate along, atop the surface of a story or an historical event. Because if you just skate atop the surface, you can make all sorts of connections that are really compelling that sell books and TV shows on cable and YouTube channels and podcasts, right? You really can make all of that come together if you're a gifted storyteller and you're able to pull all these threads into a coherent narrative.

And the New World Order conspiracy, because it's so, it has as its, its base DNA, such a broad foundation that it's really easy to layer and layer and layer upon it. I reached a point in like 2018 where I told my husband, if I hear the name George Soros one more time on Twitter, I'm jumping off the roof. I couldn't pick George Soros out of a lineup.

And yet every third tweet that was coming through my timeline, you know, had made some dark reference to George Soros, who for all I know is a complete asshole. I got nothing. I don't, I know nothing about George Soros. But the, the Pizzagate conspiracy falls in. You can make Pizzagate like a cousin of all of this. The, the, the raccoon eyed, panda eyed kids is part of this.

There's room at the table of the New World Order for pretty much everything. You can make it make sense. And, and I will say that I think people gravitate toward that because the world is chaotic and terrifying. And we're also overwhelmed and we're being ground into the dust by rising prices and shrinking wages and our inability to provide our kids with an education.

The inability of people coming out of school now to be able to afford a home on the kind of job that their grandparents had a house and a beach house and a pool, you know, like I understand the fear and the despair and the exhaustion that leads people to these various tables. I get it. I so get it. And, and don't judge it.

You know, I really don't judge it. You just have to watch because it's easy. It's easy to like poke your head in and have a look around. And then before you know it, you're just in so deep. We saw so many people being radicalized by QAnon in the last, what is this 2024? Over the last eight years, seven, eight years. And it really accelerated, I think in the last six years, you know, people like, like your grandmother's friend that she used to go to bingo with is now deeply into Q. People look for meaning, you know, they want the world to make sense because for most of us, lying awake in bed at night and feeling like the shit is all just random and chaotic.

And we're just balls being ricocheted from one end of the game to the next. That's unbearable. I think it's a lot of people grinding about a bunch of stuff that they can't do anything about. And they, and they grind about this and they create this in their mind and they fancy that things are happening that really aren't happening.

Meanwhile, the real work of your life is sitting in front of you being ignored. Oh my gosh. Yes. So true. But you see this, this is another thing you'll see a lot on social if you're in the right places and paying attention. And this is always heartbreaking to me. The number of adults who are anywhere from 25 to 55 who feel completely adrift from their parents and families of origin.

Because they've watched their parents and their siblings and their aunts and uncles get vacuumed up into these conspiracy cults. Which to your point, Max, managed to fill your hours without feeding your soul or making any meaningful difference in your life. But don't you see how this particular historical moment has made us all vulnerable to that?

And this isn't the first time. If you, there's an entire, like historical cycle of wild ass conspiracy theories, like popping up like a fire and consuming people and then dying down. And there's a period of time where, oh my God, can you believe people used to do that? And then here it comes again. It's just sort of maybe part of being human.

You know that we respond to the unknown and the scary and the unknowable. We try to fill in those holes in the puzzle. I don't know. I just, I'm so sad about the Georgia Guidestones for a lot of reasons, not least of which is it did drive tourism to Elbert County. Which, you know, honestly, if you're ever in Atlanta headed toward Macon, you're not too far.

You know, you're not too far and you could go see the Granite Stadium, which is really spectacular and it's a charming little town. But until they blew those Guidestones up, especially after the rise of the Internet, when people learned about them, you know, folks were spending money at gas stations and restaurants. And bringing, you know, dollars to the people in that town, in that county, who rely on that to feed their families.

And it's sad that it's gone. And it's sad that something that really should have been pretty benign, you know, was imbued with all this evil. And let me just say that although it was built to be a calendar and a clock and an astronomical tool, one of the professors at the University of Georgia, Go Dawgs, who has studied the Georgia Guidestones, said that in truth, Christians group who made the design, they really didn't, they didn't really know what they were doing.

Because Stonehenge does, in England, does serve as a clock and a calendar and as an astronomical tool. But the one prophet at the University of Georgia said that compared to Stonehenge, the Georgia Guidestones were basically like a primitive abacus compared to Stonehenge's computer. So Christians group had like very lofty ambitions for it.

But they fell super short on that side of it, right? On the science side of what the monument could do. And then they overachieved on the fear and suspicion and paranoia side of what the monument could do. Sherry, I'm just upset that I never got a chance to see it. Because this is a true roadside curiosity that I've missed out on.

Max, for years, for years, I was like, we need to go see that. I want to go to the Georgia Guidestones. I want to go to the Georgia Guidestones. It's a pretty fair distance for me. It's like a whole day's drive, a whole day's drive back. And I was a single parent with kids who were, one was a dancer, the other played volleyball.

And I kept saying, you know what? We didn't get to it. But next summer, next summer, next summer, during the COVID lockdowns, my husband and I were like, we need to go to the Georgia Guidestones. But at that point, we were trying to figure out how to do a radio show that's carried around the world out of our houses and working seven days a week.

And we just kept kicking the can, kicking the can. And we were planning to go in July of 2022. Oh, wow. You just missed it. And we just missed it. They blew it up on July 6th. I think they were planning to blow it up on July 4th. But, you know, in order to dynamite a monument, you need a couple of things. One of them is darkness and the other one is privacy.

And I think that the 6th is just when they had their chance to do it. My guess is they were hoping to make a big patriotic show of it on July 4th. So and the very next day, the very next day, they demolished the whole thing. So I took a shot at the Georgia Bureau of Investigations and I'm coming back around to take another one.

So brace yourself. Here we go. It was a crime scene. On the morning of July 6th, 2022, the explosion at the Georgia Guidestones was an active crime scene. And I can't think of very many times when law enforcement destroys an active crime scene 24 hours later. Can you? Unless they felt, unless they felt that it was best if it was gone as to not have any more violence or people hurt, which I could understand as well.

I hear what you're saying about the GBI wanting to keep additional acts of vandalism or violence from happening to protect the community. I completely hear you. But there's another way they could have done that. They could have done that with a 24-hour patrol, like stationed at the site. This was a crime scene and they eradicated any evidence at an active crime scene less than 24 hours after the crime was committed.

And I just have to, I'm just, and again, now here I go with the tinfoil hat conspiracies. I just have to ask why? What law enforcement principle was being followed in doing that? I've just never seen it. I've never seen an active crime scene eradicated less than 24 hours after the crime was committed. I don't know how to understand that and I'm hoping that you have a theory or maybe somebody listening knows the answer.

Help me understand that because it just feels like one more, Sean Kipe, it just feels like one more corrupt, inexplicable behavior on the part of the GBI. What you got for me? Yeah, I mean, I do understand that as well. So I've got, I don't have any further explanation on that. I really don't. If we were the kind of podcast that, and I don't know, honest to God, I'm in awe of these people who were like, hi, my name is Sherry and I saw the GBI do something shady.

So I abandoned my life and investigated and here's the answer. I got kids, I gotta do laundry, I gotta go to work tomorrow morning. I'm with you. I don't know how they're able to do that because we're struggling just to do this. That, you know. Yeah, I mean, listen, y'all, there is nothing I would like better than to pack my bag and head to Elbert County, Georgia to investigate the GBI.

There's nothing I would like better. But I gotta go to work tomorrow morning. So does Max. So I'm just curious about that. That's all. And maybe somebody listening works in law enforcement and can tell me some rational explanation as to why they would do that because they had surveillance video. They had, which meant they may have had some forensic evidence, right?

Everything from footprints to tire tracks to bits and pieces of the bomb. You know, I've watched some Dateline. I've read some books. I know that law enforcement can painstakingly piece together a story of how a crime was committed just by what remnants of the homemade bomb are left behind at the blast site. You know, could there have been?

We don't know. Did they dust for prints? There would have been a million prints at the Georgia Guidestones. But maybe since this had been a crime, we could have gone ahead and done a little bit of, I believe it's called investigating before we wiped it off the face of the earth. Like of all the conspiracies that circulate around the Georgia Guidestones, the most compelling one for me involves the GBI.

You know, because I can't prove that the black helicopters are coming or that the Antichrist wants to unite all the world's governments or that 5G is pulsing through your veins right now. But I can prove that the GBI erased that crime scene less than 24 hours after that crime happened. That's the conspiracy theory I'm curious about.

That's the one I tried and could not. I mean, I went deep and could not come up with anything worth telling. More than more curious than the curiosity of the Georgia Guidestones. So if you're out there and you know something, even if it's a secret and you just want to get it off your chest, you'll keep it. Max and I will keep your secret.

Please do tell it and we'll keep your secret. We'll keep your secret. And I'm not impugning the integrity and skill of individual members of the Georgia Bureau of Investigations. I'm just saying that that was weird and I would love to know. I think everybody who knows the story of the Georgia Guidestones would love to know.

Let's thank all of our voice talent because we had a lot of help today. We want to thank Lamar Richardson for being the voice of Elberton. He's the guy that talked to us about Dutchy and about the... He was in the restaurant. Want to shout out Kevin Nash for playing Christopher Kubas, the executive VP of the Elberton Granite Association.

Don Morgan for being the voice of the plaque. Of the Guidestones. Who better than Don Morgan to be, to embody the Georgia Guidestones for Beyond the Grave. Kary "Doc" Bowser for being a voice. For doing the commandments. So that wraps us up for this one. On the next episode, we got a little more of some secret societies going on and we have just an absolutely wild and I think mostly unknown corner of the history of the American space program that involves, wait for it, Alistair Crawley, a sex cult, and L. Ron Hubbard.

I mean, people, why did they even bother to teach us stuff in school? They didn't teach us any of the good stuff. Thank you for listening to this episode of True Weird Stuff. We'll see you next time. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered.

And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website, trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything True Weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production.

Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash.

Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2024 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.