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Georgia v. The Elders of Zion

Georgia v. The Elders of Zion

Last updated on: February 18, 2007 at 5:21 pm by Fred Clark

Georgia v. The Elders of Zion 2007-02-18T17:21:33-05:00 Fred Clark

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I'm usually fond of obsessive old kooks — flat earthers, cryptozoologists, ghost-hunters and the like. There's often something admirably Mulder-esque, or at least Lone-Gunmen-esque, about these determined Cassandras. You want to avoid getting cornered by them at parties or after church, of course, but in small doses in the proper setting — such as listening to their calls on Art Bell's radio show while driving late at night — they can be a source of delight. The world would be a duller place without them and most of them are mostly harmless.

Unfortunately, some of them are not. Harmless. Some of them manage, somehow, to be taken seriously by a larger audience, and their unreal ideas become the basis for decisions in reality, which never works out well. In other cases, the kooks' elaborate theories turn out to be inextricably interwoven with a reflexive, and very dangerous, bigotry. In either instance — or in the worst-case scenario when both of these things are true — these people cease to be merely colorful and amusing. They end up hurting people.

At first glance, Marshall Hall seems like he might be a mostly harmless crank.* The retired schoolteacher from Georgia seems to have self-published more than a dozen titles on a variety of topics, all of which he seems to have desperate, passionate opinions about. Like many cranks of the fundamentalist variety, he speaks with an earnest certainty that expresses itself in a fondness for exclamation points, rampant capitalization and sweeping statements about the revealed truth of God. Ask someone like Hall about the weather and he's liable to respond, "False prophets deceive many with their UNSCRIPTURAL claims of only a 40-percent chance of rain!"

He is especially passionate about another such DECEPTION! that he feels particularly called to address — what he calls the "Copernican Counterfeit" (it's not just inaccurate, it's a deliberate, malevolent lie). Hence the URL for his Web site, "www.fixedearth.com," where he states:

The Earth is not rotating, nor is it going around the sun. The universe is not one ten-trillionth the size we are told. Today's cosmology fulfills an anti-Bible religious plan disguised as "science." The whole scheme from Copernicanism to Big Bangism is a factless lie.

A few commenters to the previous post have noted that there is a sense in which you could argue, due to relative motion and various perspectives, and if you squint a bit, that it's possible to create a geocentric model that's not utter hogwash. All very interesting and well and good, but not what Hall is claiming. He is claiming that the Earth neither revolves nor rotates, that it does not move at all, but sits fixed and still at the center of a very small universe.

Others have wondered if this isn't all some sort of Landover Baptist-style prank. I wondered this too. So did Danny Faulkner of the creationist organization Answers in Genesis,** who in his review of Hall's book argues that it is not:

Hall’s … reasoning is so erroneous at many points that one has to question whether the book was actually intended as some sort of weird parody or satire. Private communications with a few people who have met Hall suggest that this is not the case. It appears that Hall simply failed to understand many of the things that he wrote about.

This seems, as I said, like something merely amusingly kooky — the sort of thing that would make you turn up the volume on Art Bell so you could sit back and savor it's high-grade nuttiness.

Unfortunately, three things prevent me from finding any of this amusing: 1) Hall's pervasive anti-Semitism; 2) a legislative emphasis that seeks to make his goofball ideas the standard curriculum for American schools; and 3) Hall's demonstrated ability to have his theories respectfully heard, approved of and disseminated by actual officials who have the power to legislate No. 1 and No. 2 above.

Let's take these in order. In big red letters at the top of Hall's Web site, he warns against "Kabbala-based Big Bangism!" He uses the word "Kabbalist" a lot in a sweeping way that seems to mean both "Jewish" and "occult." He uses the word "Pharisee" as a synonym for this term as well, and not in the usual sense of "pharisaical" meaning sanctimonious or hypocritical. In his mind "Pharisee" seems to signify "Christ-killer."

Hall believes "Copernican and Darwinian" science is false, so he concludes it must be a deliberate Satanic deception. Who could be carrying out this grand conspiracy of deception as Satan's foot soldiers? Twenty years ago Hall might have said the Communists, but since they're not around anymore, he figures it must be the Jews. His main point is not "Jews are evil," this is just something he assumes is well-accepted.

The idea of an ancient, global, Jewish conspiracy behind all the evils of the world is a common thread among the more dangerous sorts of cranks (see for example). The claim that such a conspiracy exists is nothing unique to Hall who, again, seems to accept its existence as a given. His novel claim is that this occult conspiracy violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. This is what he is so excited about in the memo sent out in Rep. Ben Bridges' name: he wants to take the internationalist Jewish/Kabbalist/Christ-killer/Satanist conspiracy to court, citing Kitzmiller v. Dover as precedent.

This makes Hall's anti-Semitism impossible to minimize or dismiss as only tangential to his larger aim of passing anti-evolution legislation. It is not a separate thing tacked onto his primary agenda, it is a pervasive presence throughout that agenda.

Remember that Hall came to our attention because his wife, Bonnie Hall, is the campaign manager for Republican Georgia State House Rep. Ben Bridges. Set aside, for the moment, all of the "fixed earth" nonsense and just consider this: Bridges' campaign manager is married to someone promoting virulently anti-Semitic ideas on the Web and through his self-published books. This isn't some intern or lower-tier staffer, and it's not just a matter of some salty language directed toward the consequences of some church teaching. Bridges' campaign manager is married to an anti-Semite.

That's a big problem.

(Hall promotes his ideas through something called the "Fair Education Foundation." I wonder who might be on the board of that nonprofit.)

Neither Bridges nor his campaign manager seems to think Marshall Hall is loony. That's also a big problem, because none of what he argues makes any sense unless you accept his premise about an evil Jewish conspiracy.

Even if Hall only had a 30-second conversation with his wife's boss, that conspiracy would have been part of his quick pitch for the legislative strategy he sought Bridges' permission to promote under auspices of the legislator's office in a memo under Bridges' own name. That pitch, roughly, is this: The courts have said that teaching creationism is illegal because it's religious. Well, that means teaching evolution should be illegal too because it's based on Jewish religious teaching from the Kabbala.

Bridges' response to this was not to say, "Wait, what? You're claiming that evolutionism is Jewish?" Instead, his response was apparently that this sounded like a good legislative/legal strategy and that if Hall wanted to recommend this approach to Republican lawmakers in other states he should feel free to do so using Bridges' name.

Here is the memo. It was written by Marshall Hall, but begins, "MEMO FROM: Representative Ben Bridges" and uses the first-person throughout, as in the memo's first paragraph:

As Georgia's 5th [sic] term State Representative from the 10th District, I, like others, have made several attempts to challenge the evolution monopoly in the schools. These attempts have all been in vain for basically the same reason you and I and all others have encountered. … The Courts have ruled that "creation science" (& "ID") has a religious agenda and thus is in violation of the "Establishment Clause" of the U.S. Constitution. "Evolution science," on the other hand, has been viewed by the Courts as "secular science" with no religious agenda and therefore has been deemed lawful under the Constitution.

Texas State Representative Warren Chisum received this memo from Bridges and passed it along to colleagues. Later Chisum "expressed chagrin that he didn't vet the material more carefully."

My guess is that Chisum stopped reading after that first paragraph, assuming he knew what followed. After all, it sounds like just another example of the generic "secularism is sectarian" argument popular ever since the publication of Richard John Neuhaus' The Naked Public Square. (Neuhaus knows a thing or two about such nakedness, since his argument reveals him to be wearing the emperor's new clothes — but that's a subject for a separate post.) So he passed the memo along to his fellow Texas Republicans who, like him, could be assumed to agree with Bridges anti-evolution agenda.

Had Chisum continued reading, however, the goofy, geocentric and anti-Semitic nature of the Hall/Bridges memo would have quickly become apparent.

"All of that can now be changed!" Hall writes, launching into the hard-sell sales pitch that constitutes the remainder of the memo. You can read it yourself, but here's a summary of the remaining paragraphs:

1. My Web site explains the "Rabbinic … Pharisee Religion … Kabbala" roots of evolutionism, so go to my Web site and have a look.

2. Here's the link to part of my Web site, www.fixedearth.com, which you really need to go read.

3. Here's the link to another part of my Web site, www.fixedearth.com.

4. Here's yet another link to another part of my Web site, www.fixedearth.com.

5. Please join me in this effort, described at my Web site, www.fixedearth.com.

Read the memo. It's that transparent and that aggressive. The anti-Semitism and geocentric nuttiness are explicit and they eclipse (sorry) whatever else the memo may have to say.

This was sent by a Republican state representative in Georgia. It was passed along by another Republican state representative in Texas. None of the dozens of other Republican officials — legislators in "Texas, California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio" — who received this memo have seen fit to denounce its bigotry or to challenge its insanity.

My own state representative is a Pennsylvania Republican, I intend to ask him about this.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* I'm using "kook" and "crank" here a bit more interchangeably than I probably should for two words that have, to me, different sets of connotations. "Kook" seems to me to indicate an eccentricity with a lighter touch. A "crank," on the other hand, seems angrier. Generally speaking, whether in AM talk radio or the blogosphere, I prefer kooks to cranks. Hall seems like a crank to me, both because he is relentlessly cranky, and because he endlessly cranks out more and more of this stuff.

** The problem here, of course, is that the reasoning of Answers in Genesis "is so erroneous at many points" that one has to question whether that group is "actually intended as some sort of weird parody or satire." In this particular instance, however, on the very specific question of whether or not Hall is for real, I'm willing to trust their conclusion. Hall's lengthy response to their book review is here. Reading it tends to buttress the conclusion that, in this instance, AinG is the more rational party.

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