The most immediate advantage for New World Order ideas of being placed in a UFO context has been a reduction in stigma. Although UFO ideas have often been the target of ridicule, the enormous size of the UFO-accepting public has made it impossible to stigmatize UFO beliefs so completely that they are banned from public discussion. Far from it: UFO ideas have ready access to such avenues of distribution as cable television, mainstream bookstores, and magazine publishers. They fall into the realm of stigmatized knowledge in that they are rejected by science, universities, and government, but the level of stigmatization has not been so great as to exclude them from popular culture.
By contrast, the views of the radical right have been so excluded, through an unstated yet powerful pattern of self-censorship on the part of the mainstream. This voluntary silence has denied access to beliefs deemed racist, bigoted, completely unfounded, or likely to justify or promote violence. Tales of secret Illuminati conspiracies, imminent UN invasions, and Jewish, Masonic, or Jesuit plots, for example, have been informally banned from media, classrooms, and other mechanisms of knowledge distribution. Unlike beliefs about flying saucers, considered eccentric but socially harmless, many conspiracy ideas deemed both false and dangerous have been banished from the mainstream discourse.
The linkage of New World Order ideas with UFOs gave the former a bridge to the territory of semirespectable beliefs. Ufology became, as it were, the vehicle for the New World Order to reach audiences otherwise unavailable to it. To be sure, New World Order ideas occasionally reached mass audiences, as the examples of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan have shown. In both cases, however, the conspiracies were presented in highly diluted versions; and in Robertson’s case, even his weak version produced significant political problems.
The story of the New World Order – UFO connection is one of ideas moving in two directions, not one. In the initial movement, New World Order beliefs became entwined with UFO beliefs. A second migration followed in the 1990s, in which New World Order ideas, with their new UFO add-ons, returned to the right-wing milieu in which they had first developed. In that milieu, the combination led to the development of two diametrically opposed syntheses. In one, exemplified by British writer and lecturer David Icke, the human conspirators feared by the radical right are actually doing the bidding of malevolent extraterrestrial forces whose ultimate aim is control of the earth. In the other, epitomized by the views of Milton William Cooper at the end of his life (addressed later in this chapter), there are in fact no aliens at all. The appearance of an alien assault on the earth is being manufactured by human conspirators to provide a pretext for the assumption of global dictatorial powers.
The first movement, when New World Order ideas left the hermetic world of the extreme right and began to seep into ufology, is the more significant of the two. As the preceding discussion suggests, there were factors in ufology that made this penetration seem logical, but it was not inevitable. It does not seem to have been consciously undertaken by conspiracists or done for opportunistic reasons, even though in the end it provided a large new audience. Rather, it began in a disorganized, piecemeal fashion, and it provides a case study in the migration of deviant ideas.
– A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (2013), pp. 84-5
The more widely the New World Order conspiracy theory has diffused, the harder it is to generalize about its racist propensities. In at least some of the venues where it appears (e.g., in John Birch Society material), it is devoid of anti-Semitism and racism. In other cases (e.g., Pat Robertson’s book The New World Order), there is no overt anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitic motifs are clearly evident. Much New World Order material pays little attention to nonwhites, as its focus is on an all-powerful elite that allegedly manipulates nations. Because New World Order adherents can either ignore or adopt racist and anti-Semitic ideas, their constructs have spread rapidly; they may be “sanitized” or not, according to the preference of the believer. Hence they can be presented to new audiences in ways that make them less offensive. As New World Order materials passed into the UFO subculture, however, matters took an odd turn.
Some New World Order ideas in ufology have been free of any overt racial or religious bias, but a surprising amount has not. UFO conspiracists often reproduce the biases of nineteenth-century American nativism, concentrating on the malevolence of the three groups that obsessed nativists in that century: Catholics, Freemasons, and Jews. There is no immediately evident reason for these groups to gain so prominent a place in the literature of space aliens. Before that question can be addressed, it is necessary to discuss the place Catholics, Freemasons, and Jews occupied in nativist thought, and the role they play in contemporary ufology.
– Ibid., p. 126
This preference for conspiracist explanations has been both a cause and an effect of group marginalization. By violating the norms of American democratic pluralism in their search for scapegoats, these groups guaranteed their exile to the political wilderness. At the same time, their exclusion, lack of sympathetic media coverage, and absence of large followings could be explained not by their own shortcomings but by the conspiracy’s alleged machinations.
As long as conspiracy theories, such as those that posit a New World Order plot, were strongly linked to antigovernment militants, anti-Semites, and neo-Nazis, the audience for conspiracism was limited. This was true even though conspiracism has also found a niche among religious fundamentalists as part of Antichrist theology. This political exile, however, now seems to be over, thanks to the incorporation of New World Order conspiracy into UFO beliefs.
The result of that incorporation has been a repositioning of conspiracism. Instead of being primarily associated with anti-Semites, racists, and antigovernment protesters, it now cohabits with Atlantis believers, alien channelers, and others who have no obvious political identity. More explicitly, conspiracism has now been placed squarely within the domain of stigmatized knowledge, where it shares attention with alternative cancer cures, free energy panaceas, and lore about the Great Pyramid.
These associations are not entirely new, of course. The cultic-milieu sympathies of those on the extreme right have long been evident in their support of alternative healing, natural foods, and revisionist history. Nonetheless, to the extent that conspiracism had its primary home among white racists and other outré political groups, the secondary associations with apolitical stigmatized knowledge offered little protective coloration. Conspiracism was doubly tainted, first as part of the stigmatized knowledge domain, and then through its links with particularly stigmatized political organizations.
[…]
Diffusion of New World Order ideas into ufology still left it in a fringe cultural location, associated with yet another set of deviant beliefs, albeit a less tainted one. Nevertheless, this association proved to be a highly beneficial one for conspiracism. In the first place, ufology constituted a vast new potential audience. As pointed out in chapter 5, survey data over more than half a century has demonstrated consistently high levels of public awareness and acceptance of UFO and alien-visitation beliefs. So New World Order ideas now were linked to motifs regarded sympathetically by tens of millions of Americans. Second, the repositioning process just described resulted in a sanitized conspiracism, less clearly associated with anti-Semitism and racism and benefiting from its new proximity to such subjects as ancient civilizations and alternative healing. Finally, the migration of conspiracism into ufology just preceded the rise of the Internet, so that when Web-based communication began to surge in the early and mid-1990s, UFO conspiracism was in a position to take full advantage of the new medium. Strictly speaking, these developments did not amount to full mainstreaming; even so, they brought New World Order beliefs to a vastly larger audience.
– Ibid., pp. 228-30