I came across a quote the other day: “I need new conspiracy theories. All my old ones are coming true.” I had to laugh because it sure seems to be right on.

When I was twelve or thirteen, I discovered the book, The Annotated Alice, which decoded the puzzles, wordplay and obscure Victorian references in both The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Around the same time, I discovered The Annotated Mother Goose, which gave the hidden truths behind familiar nursery rhymes. It astonished and delighted me to discover that there were secrets not commonly known to everyone, and that led me to a lifetime of trying to discover more secrets hidden in books.

My first discoveries were rather unimportant in the long run, such as the idea that the continents were all one land mass. At the time I found this theory, it was still controversial and ridiculed by scientists. Years later, in a science book I was reading, I came across the same idea, though by then, it was not a theory but an accepted fact. Shocked me, for sure! That, I think was my first acquaintance with a so-called “conspiracy theory” coming true.

As I discovered, there were — and are — many conspiracies in the world that form our lives. These aren’t theories so much as things “important” people do and enact without our knowledge. Sometimes the acts are benign, sometimes not. To keep the non-benign conspiracies from coming to light, people who find hints of these conspiracies are called “conspiracy theorists,” which is — in the minds of the conspirators — a way of diminishing the conspiracy hunters.

During research on such behind-the-scenes machinations, I saw the phrase “The New World Order” — the idea that an elite group was trying to steer the world toward a one-world economy, ideology, and ultimately government. Those words have been around for centuries (I came across the phrase in financial histories of the 1600s when the first central bank was established), but it was always a hush-hush idea, one that was consistently denigrated and denied. Denied, that is, until George W. Bush actually used the phrase in a speech. Shocked the heck out of me because I wasn’t sure I believed anything I’d read about that theory, but still, it was another example of a “conspiracy theory” coming true. (Despite Bush’s use of the phrase, “new world order” still seems to have connotations of conspiracy theory, though the term “world order” is commonly used now, which should tell us something.)

Sometimes those conspiracy writers are not at all the fringe lunatics they are portrayed to be. In fact, Antony C. Sutton, one of the first in modern times (if the 1970s are still considered modern times rather than ancient history) to write about those secret machinations was a graduate of the University of London, a well-respected economist, an Assistant Professor of Economics at California State College, and later a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, at Stanford University. Some people think his books about the international corporate elites that were behind much of the events of the cold war were well researched, but scholars never went for the books because they didn’t believe his idea of a global plot by a rich few; to them, it seemed his books were geared too much to the conspiracy crowd. And yet, here we are today, with words like “globalism,” “global elite,” and “the agenda of the liberal globalists” being bandied about as if they were sweets for the children. Shocking, but another conspiracy theory coming real.

It’s no secret anymore that world players have probably always used the world as their playground, but there are still some things that mystify me, such as the following:

In a single decade, 1861 to 1871, the United States fought the Civil War, the serfs were emancipated in Russia, Italy was unified, Canada was unified, the German Empire was proclaimed, the Austria-Hungary Dual Monarchy was established, Thailand was reorganized, the Meiji Restoration in Japan gave power to a western oligarchy, and Das Kapital, a philosophy for the New World Order, was published. It seems too much of a coincidence that global movements of such magnitude would rise independently of one another. Did someone, or a group of someones, rebuild Europe along with large chunks of the rest of the world? Could there be some sort of elite group that’s above even the globalists of today, someone or some assembly that they get their orders from? Now I’m being silly. Or am I?

With all the conspiracy theories coming true, why not this one, too.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.