Georgia Guidestones Bombed

All the way back in 2012 I posted an article here on Augoeides about the Georgia Guidestones, a monument erected in rural Georgia by a mysterious rich guy in 1980. The Guidestones have figured prominently in conspiracy theories usually advanced by conservatives about some sort of "New World Order" that apparently made the bizarre decision to post its entire secret agenda on stone tablets for everyone to read.

This sort of paranoid thinking always amazes me - evil villains who are supposed to be so smart that principled Americans stand no chance against them, but so dumb that they give away the plot immediately to anybody who can read letters on a stone monument. And that paranoia now seems to have peaked. Today a bomb was detonated at the Guidestone site, causing significant damage to the monument.

The preliminary information indicates that someone detonated an explosive device at around 4 a.m. on Wednesday, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations.

GBI officials said officials with the Elbert County Sheriff’s Office found the explosion destroyed a large portion of the structure. The Elbert County Sheriff's Office asked the GBI to assist with the investigation.

The guidestones sit on a site 7 miles north of Elberton on Georgia Highway 77 and are often referred to as an American Stonehenge.

In my previous article, I talked about how this whole thing was basically a rich guy posting his ideas on a monument, and that was it. I noted that the statements on the stones range from ridiculous to unworkable to watered-down meaningless platitudes, and wrote up my own set of similarly nonsensical principles. I talked about how conservatives freaking out about the message on the stones was silly, and how paranoia surrounding them was entirely misplaced. But a recent investigation by John Oliver's team at Last Week Tonight set me right. The stones really do have a sinister origin, but not for the reason conservative conspiracy theorists think.

It turns out that the rich guy who built the Guidestones, Dr. Herbert Kersten, was a supporter of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard who was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives in 1988 and launched multiple unsuccessful campaigns for higher office. Basically, the Guidestones don't have anything to do with a progressive "New World Order." Instead, they were built by a white supremacist - and the statements on the stones about reducing population and guiding reproduction all of a sudden take on a much darker meaning once you know their origin.

Oliver devotes much of his segment to fringe Georgia Repbulican gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor, who proclaimed that the stones must be demolished as one of her campaign planks. Of course, she related them to Satanists and progressives and all that, when in fact there's absolutely nothing Satanic or occult (except maybe in the sense that the name of the builder was hidden from the public for years) about the stones. But in a way, Taylor was right for a whole different reason. There's little denying that a white supremacist monument is something that any progressive would be in favor of demolishing as well.

So far, it's not clear who might be behind the bombing and police are investigating. Oliver's segment provides two distinct and entirely contradictory possibilities - a conservative fan of Kandiss Taylor who took her call to demolish the stones seriously, or somebody on the other side of the political aisle who decided to bomb the stones because they were created as a monument to white supremacy. Either option is entirely reasonable, and Olivers segment aired shortly after the gubernatorial primary that Taylor lost. So they pretty much happened at the same time, and either could have influenced the bomber.

So we'll have to see what turns up in the investigation. My guess is that it was more likely a Taylor fan than an Oliver fan, just because there aren't a lot of progressives in rural Georgia, and also it was Taylor who specifically called on them to be demolished. But given their origin that's not the only option, and it's certainly true that white supremacist monuments advocating genocide are precisely the sort of roadside attractions our country will do far better without.