HIGHER THAN TRUTH

The Georgia Guidestones Revealed

Joseph Best
17 min readOct 7, 2022

I’m taking a quick break from my longform investigation into the legend of Murphy Ranch to write this little piece which will, I hope, conclusively reveal the person responsible for one of conspiracy theorists’ favorite mysteries: The Georgia Guidestones. Join me, won’t you? —as we reveal the truth behind these Satanic monuments of the leftist agenda for a New World Order.

The Georgia Guidestones. (Source)

On May 2, 2022 Kandiss Taylor, a GOP hopeful in the Georgia governor’s race who dubbed herself “the ONLY candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal,” proposed Executive Order #10, which had one simple purpose: Demolish the Georgia Guidestones.

For decades, the Global Luciferian Regime has seeped its way into our Government. They demoralized us with humiliation rituals as they tore down our historical monuments, persecuted our children, locked us down in our homes, and forced us into becoming walking science experiments through a global vaccination program. They erected statues spelling out the exact plans they had for us, and today we the people of Georgia, say no more. It’s time for us to return the favor. On my first day as Governor of Georgia, I will move to DEMOLISH the Demonic plans of our enemy. The Satanic agenda is NOT welcome in our state. Support my fight by contributing, and watch as I turn the Georgia Guidestones into dust!

Although Taylor lost the primary with only 3.4% of the vote in an election she declared was “rigged,” Executive Order #10 has come to pass. The Georgia Guidestones, a granite monument inscribed with multilingual instructions for the survival of humanity after an impending apocalypse, are gone.

The Georgia Guidestones after they were destroyed. (Source)

At approximately 4am on the morning of July 6, residents of Elberton, Georgia awakened to the sound of a distant explosion rumbling across their pastures. Police would discover that unknown individuals — caught fleeing the scene on CCTV — had detonated a device at the base of the Guidestones’ Swahili/Hindi slab, reducing it to rubble and badly damaging the capstone, an act described by one Georgia prosecutor as “domestic terrorism.” Citing safety concerns, Elberton authorities leveled the site with a backhoe later that same day. In an emailed statement, Kandiss Taylor responded with apparent glee:

Since my election, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of THREE of my main platform issues and executive orders (Jesus, Guns, and Babies), and Just like Religious persecution, Gun Control, and abortion, the Georgia Guidestones, a demonic monument that calls for the depopulation of the earth, as well as for the extermination of 7.5 Billion people, has no place in the Christian state of Georgia, or in America for that matter! This looks like another Act of God to me. Today, it is another defeat of the devil. Never underestimate the power of Prayer!

Kandiss Taylor on Twitter

But what were the Georgia Guidestones? The story goes like this:

In June of 1979, a “neatly dressed, soft spoken” man using the name R.C. Christian walked into the office of Joe Fendley at the Elberton Granite Finishing Company to commission the construction of a massive structure that would be capable of withstanding catastrophic future events. Christian claimed he represented “a small group of loyal Americans” who had been planning the monument’s construction for over 20 years.

R.C. Christian—”A Pseudonym” (Source)

Fendley, believing “I either got a kook on my hands or I got somebody with a lot of money,” quoted a price he thought large enough to scare off the would-be builder of America’s Stonehenge but, much to his surprise Christian accepted and, with the help of Elberton banker Wyatt Martin, the Georgia Guidestones were completed at a cost of over $400,000 today. It would be a moment that, according to one 1986 article, turned “the monument building world on its chips and spauls.”

In the self-published tract, “Common Sense Renewed”, R.C. Christian says the Georgia Guidestones:

…consists of four large upright blocks of granite, each two meters wide and five meters high. They are arranged to mark the limiting positions of the rising and setting sun in summer and winter. They surround a central stone which is oriented north to south. A channel through this stone is aligned with the celestial pole. On its south face is a sundial marking noontime throughout the year on a closed curve figure which reflects the equation of time, correcting the variations between solar time and time as recorded with uniform human hours. The capstone is inscribed with an appeal to reason in four archaic languages….The celestial alignments of the stones symbolize our need to be in harmony with eternal principles manifest in our nature and in the universe around us.

(Source)

Since their public unveiling by congressman Doug Barnard “to a baffled crowd of 400 people” at a ceremony on March 22, 1980, the mysterious Guidestones have been the objects of speculation and conspiracy theories. Only Fendley and Martin knew Christian’s true identity, and the project’s other financiers chose to remain wholly anonymous, explaining in a prepared statement by master of ceremonies William A. Kelly:

In order to avoid debate, we the sponsors of the Georgia Guidestones have a simple message for human beings, now and for the future. We believe our precepts are sound, and they must stand on their own merits.

The four stones holding the capstone were inscribed with “ten precepts or guides” in eight contemporary languages — English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Traditional Chinese, and Russian — that Christian considered “rational proposals for dealing with the problems that confront us,” which he hoped would, “stimulate discussion and logical, compassionate action.”

These precepts read as follows:

  1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
  2. Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
  3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
  4. Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
  5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
  6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
  7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
  8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
  9. Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
  10. Be not a cancer on the Earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.

In 2012, on the 25th anniversary of the Guidestones’ construction, author John Conner—a pseudonym presumably in reference to the hero of the Terminator films—published a book and website titled The Resistance Manifesto, which argued

…the Guidestones have a deep Satanic origin and message…Through a little research a few things become apparent, and the New World Order is written all over them…The Guidestones should be smashed into a million pieces, and then the rubble used for a construction project.

In 2007, Alex Jones, the right wing conspiracy theorist radio host, produced a film titled Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, in which the Georgia Guidestones are described as just one part of a plan that, according to a review by author Trinie Dalton:

…Posits several theories relating to “the dawn of a new dark age” in which a few elite businessmen are planning to erase global boundaries in order to conglomerate the governance of three disempowered populations: the E.U., the North American Union, and the Asian Union modeled after Communist China. This plan allegedly involves depopulating countries around the world…and forming paramilitary groups to infringe on personal freedoms and privacies.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter post: “Live in studio with Alex Jones, the most cancelled man in America!”

On the same day as the destruction of the Guidestones, Jones’ guest on Infowars was GOP representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who told him the Guidestones’ ten precepts represent an evil plan of “population control” as envisioned by the “hard left.” Jones went on to state that he disagreed with their demolition, “because we need that evil edifice there as a confession letter.”

So who was R.C. Christian, the mysterious man representative of the Luciferian, leftist plot to impose a New World Order?

Numerous theories have been put forth over the years. Some believe that “R.C. Christian” stands for “Christian Rosenkreutz”, founder of Rosicrucianism, a secret order that claims to have its roots,

…in the mystery traditions, philosophy, and myths of ancient Egypt dating back to approximately 1500 BCE. In antiquity the word “mystery” referred to a special gnosis, a secret wisdom.

Secret symbols of the Rosicrucian Order. (Source)

Another theory, put forth by the minister Dr. Reagan R. Davis, posits that the Guidestones, “describe the ten commandments of the Antichrist.”

Davis interpreted these messages as a call for a world government, a policy of state-sponsored eugenics, and the culling of billions of people. This new interpretation elevated the Guidestones from mere local curiosity to the subject of national notoriety among conspiracy theorists and Christian dispensationalists.

The Number of the Beast is 666 by William Blake. (Source)

Yet another theory hypothesizes that R.C. Christian was, in fact, Ted Turner, the Georgia billionaire founder of CNN. As one source notes, like many people at the end of the Cold War, Turner was concerned that an “end of the world scenario” was a genuine possibility, and even went so far as to record The Turner Doomsday Video, which was “intended to be broadcast by CNN at the end of the world.” Additionally:

As for the environmental and reproductive focused contents of the Guidestones, they appear to align with Turner’s own ideologies. In 1990 Turner founded The Turner Foundation (TFI), who’s mission is to “protect and restore the natural systems — air, land, and water — on which all life depends“. And in 1998 Turner donated $1 billion (a third of his wealth) to the United Nations to establish the United Nations Foundation which focuses on global issues that include gender equality and tackling environmental issues and climate change. Among the list of projects the United Nations Foundation has been involved in include Family Planning 2020 and Universal Access Project which focused on sexual health and reproductive health.

Ted Turner launches CNN in 1980. (Source)

Did any of these theories get it right? One documentary claims to have the answer.

In 2015, writer and director Christian J. Pinto, ”a documentary filmmaker and founder of Adullam Films — a Christian film ministry, dedicated to defending the Gospel of Jesus Christ through film,” produced the documentary, Dark Clouds Over Elberton, to get to the bottom of the mystery behind the Georgia Guidestones.

Dark Clouds Over Elberton by Christian J. Pinto. (Source)

Much of the film goes over the history and hypotheses discussed previously in this article, but there’s a scene late in the film where Pinto interviews Joe Fendley, the man first approached by R.C. Christian to construct the guidestones. By the time of filming, Fendley appears to be in his late 70’s or early 80’s, and he maintains that he kept in touch with Christian over the decades until his death in 2005—but he made a vow to never reveal the man’s true identity.

Pinto ends up convincing Fendley to take him and the film to crew to a shed in Fendley’s back yard where letters from Christian have been stored. Fendley agrees to read the contents of these letters so long as he doesn’t break his promise. Over the course of the interview, Fendley puts down a few of the envelopes from his mysterious penpal, and the film crew takes this opportunity to identify the sender as one Herbert Kersten, of Fort Dodge, Iowa.

Pinto goes on to interview William Sayles Doan, a local historian and author from Fort Dodge who claims to have known Herbert Kersten. By Doan’s account, Kersten was an outspoken racist at the country club where he proudly claimed to be a close friend of William Shockley, the Nobel-prize winning physicist who later devoted his life the study of eugenics and, more specifically, the claim that black people were genetically inferior to whites.

Dark Clouds Over Elberton ends with a few foreboding words about eugenics and the Nazis, then fades to black as the credits start to roll.

It’s certainly an interesting premise, but after spending so much time going over the Georgia Guidestones’ strange history, Pinto doesn’t seem particularly interested in figuring out who Herbert Kersten actually was or even confirming his alleged ties to the New World Order, left-wing Satanists who figure so prominently in the film’s narrative.

Who was Herbert Kersten?

Born on May 7, 1920, Herbert Hinzie Kersten attended the University of Notre Dame and the University of Iowa for undergrad studies. During WWII, Kersten served in the United Staes Army, where he was stationed in both the Philippines and Japan. Upon returning, he attained his medical degree from the University of Iowa School of Medicine and worked as a doctor in Fort Dodge, Iowa for the rest of his life.

The Des Moines Register. April 13, 1941. (Source)

With the help of his father and two brothers, John and Paul, Herbert founded the Kersten Clinic in 1952—it was so successful that it became the Fort Dodge Medical Center in the 1990’s. By the early 60's, Herbert was vice president of the Iowa Academy of Surgery and Paul was chairman of the governor’s committee on mental health. By the late 60’s, Dr. Kersten can be seen taking meetings at the Fort Dodge Country Club to discuss his possible role in building a health science library for the University of Iowa, while his brothers sat on the Executive Board of the National Association of Laymen, a Catholic group supporting the use of birth control for married couples.

By 1971, Dr. Kersten published the first in what would be a series of articles over the decade about his dream of opening a “Prairie Preserve” across thousands of acres of Iowa:

His goal is to re-create for this and future generations a primeval prairie and forest scene populated with the plant, animal, and birdlife our forefathers saw when they first invaded the American prairies more than 150 years ago.

Dr. Kersten went on to explain:

“We are living in a time when increasing population pressures on our natural resources threaten to destroy for all time many beautiful and useful remnants of our past.”

The Courier. November 30, 1971. (Source)

The following year, Dr. Kersten suggested that this project might cost approximately $30,000,000 to achieve, but would include:

…a midwestern entertainment park similar to Disney World, a modern convention center, camping grounds, historical museums, natural history exhibits, Indian villages, living history farm projects, an exhibition center for antique autos, keelboats, barges and steamboats, and agricultural exhibition area, and could be the site for the “continuing world food center” which has been proposed for Iowa. It could provide the setting for movie making, and the site for corporate exhibitions, Kersten added.

His ambitions were nothing if not ambitious, though the editors of The Des Moines Register noted:

We would like the Prairie Park idea better if its sponsors did not try to make it an amusement park and fair. That kind of clutter would diminish the values of a natural wilderness park, preserving a segment of Iowa prairie as it was before the plow tore it up.

Dr. Kersten pursued his “prairie park idea” for decades, and as late as 1987 he can be seen proposing it to the public yet again—this time it would be 40,000 acres.

The Des Moines Register. October 11, 1987. (Source)

Just as passionate was Dr. Kersten’s concern with overpopulation. In 1990, he wrote a letter to the editor arguing against immigration:

We are already exceeding the capacity of our resource base to sustain our present population and living standards on a perpetual basis…Rather than regarding mindless population increases as a blessing, every nation on Earth should strive to establish a sustainable balance between its resources and its citizens. Rational planning of human reproduction is becoming increasingly essential.

This sounds almost identical to the suggestions given in R.C. Christian’s Common Sense Renewed, where he says on pages 10–11:

Each nation must consider the present and future availability of all resources required for its long, continuing survival…A few generations of single child families will make possible dramatic improvements of living standards in even the most impoverished countries

…Irresponsible child bearing should be discouraged by legal and social pressures. Couples who cannot provide a decent home and support for a child should not produce children to be a burden for their neighbors. Bringing unneeded children into an overcrowded lifeboat is evil.

Common Sense Renewed. (Source)

One of the accusations made in Dark Clouds Over Elberton is that Dr. Kersten claimed a friendship with William Shockley. In 1967, Shockley himself had proposed a “baby rationing plan” which would:

…Let the Census Bureau determine how many children each couple could have and still keep within the prescribed national growth rate. Certificates would be issued to all married couples. All girls would be temporarily sterilized by time-capsule contraceptives. When a woman and her husband wanted to have a child, the contraceptive would be removed and they would turn in the certificate.

The “lifeboat” metaphor used in Common Sense Renewed, meanwhile, is directly taken from a 1968 article titled The Tragedy of the Commons, written by ecologist Garrett Hardin about the problems of overpopulation.

[Hardin] singled out refugees in a number of his writings, portraying them as greedy freeloaders. One of his favorite rhetorical tactics was to describe nations as lifeboats, each with severely limited resources. Because of these limitations, it was morally acceptable to forbid any more people from boarding a lifeboat that was close to capacity, and in some cases it would even be acceptable to throw existing residents “overboard.” In his controversial 1974 essay, “Living on a Lifeboat,” Hardin portrayed refugees as cynically choosing to “fall out of their lifeboats and swim for a while in the water outside, hoping to be admitted to a rich lifeboat, or in some other way to benefit from the ‘goodies’ on board.”

Fort Dodge historian William Sayles Doan makes the claim that Dr. Kersten was a well-known racist, but might Kersten’s echoing of Shockley and Hardin have been born simply out of a concern for the environment? Was there any evidence to back up the claims of racism?

Both Shockley and Hardin were financially supported by The Pioneer Fund, a non-profit organization started in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, a wealthy eugenicist and segregationist. According to author Angela Saini, one of The Pioneer Fund’s earliest projects was the distribution of a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics to American churches and schools. And legal historian Paul A. Lombardo states:

The year after the Pioneer Fund was chartered, Earnest Cox
sent a copy of his book White America, printed with a secret Draper
subsidy, to Nazi Reichsminister Frick. Cox’s role in distributing
hate literature paid for by Wickliffe Draper to Nazi officials never
appears in the official Pioneer history.

In 1977, The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa published an expose titled Private Trust Funds “Racial” Researchers, saying:

A private trust fund based in New York has for more than twenty years supported highly controversial research by a dozen scientists who believe blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites. One of the researchers to benefit from The Pioneer Fund, a tax-exempt foundation incorporated in 1937 for the express purpose of “racial betterment” is Dr. Ralph Scott, a professor at the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls.

…Professor Scott used some of the money not only for research but for anti-busing, [and] anti-school-integration seminars…

A month long study of The Pioneer Fund activities…shows it has given at least $179,000 over the last ten years to Dr. William B. Shockley, a leading proponent of the theory that whites are more intelligent than blacks.

Another major beneficiary is Dr. Arthur R. Jensen, an educational psychologist at the University of California, whose article in 1969 theorizing that intelligence was hereditary touched off a furor over the value of compensatory education for disadvantaged black students.

During the 1970’s then, with money from The Pioneer Fund, William Shockley toured the country offering opinions like: “If those Negroes with the fewest Caucasian genes are in fact the most prolific and also the least intelligent, then genetic enslavement will be the destiny of their next generation,” while Arthur Jensen prolifically published in a Nazi journal called Neue Anthropologie; Garrett Hardin, “praised China’s one-child policy and suggested that forcible sterilization was a viable option,” and Iowa professor Ralph Scott ran for the Senate under a platform opposing pro-left media bias before he was appointed in 1985 to the Iowa Advisory Commission on Civil Rights:

Scott’s appointment was part of the Reagan administration “shakeup” of the Civil Rights Commission in 1985–87, which included closing seven out of its ten regional offices and replacing the heads of most state commissions with white males.

And over the years, Herbert Kersten’s many letters to the editors endorse these viewpoints time and time again. In 1981:

I consider myself to be a conservative…America should now begin to direct the attention of the world to solving the fundamental problems which threaten to engulf all of humanity in social and economic catastrophe. I refer to the uncontrolled reproduction of our species, which has already caused human numbers to far exceed the level which our planet can support in decency. Even the United States is overpopulated in terms of a permanent balance with our resources.

In 1987:

Many years ago I became disturbed at the low rate of high school graduation among our local blacks…We taxpayers in Iowa have no obligation to provide subsidized education for minority students from other states.

In 1992, he comes to the defense of Patrick Buchanan and David Duke, who both ran Republican presidential campaigns that year. Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, eventually conceded, and Buchanan would go on to endorse George Bush at the Republican National Convention in a speech titled, Culture War. Buchanan ran again in 1996, this time with one of David Duke’s state chairmen on his team. Said Kersten:

Unfortunately, Pat Buchanan and David Duke are among the few public figures who speak for American interests in this new era of internationalism…We should continue to help others help themselves, especially in the area of population control.

Former KKK Leader David Duke Calls On Followers to Attend “Unite the Right” Rally in Charlottesville. (Source)

Over the years, Kersten would endorse abolishing the minimum wage, support for limited government, opposed universal healthcare, and in his waning years wrote a $1000 check for Lamar Alexander’s brief campaign for the White House.

As Joe Fendley noted about his friend R.C. Christian, Herbert Kersten died in 2005 after a full and active life. Kersten’s obituary notes:

Dr. Kersten had many hobbies: woodworking, oil and water painting, bridge, The Republican Party, physics, livestock and grain farming and music. He was a naturalist who was very involved in environmental and world population issues.

Dr. Kersten held a broad-world vision of humanity and myriad of personal and academic interests…

Dr. Herbert Kersten—whose letters appear in the hands of Joe Fendley, whose beliefs align with those of both the Georgia Guidestones as well as the ecological, eugenic, and racial beliefs of Garrett Hardin and William Shockley—was R.C. Christian. There can be no doubt.

For decades, the conspiracy theorists and researchers have hypothesized that the Georgia Guidestones were the work of an evil left-wing cabal of Satanists, but the truth is that R.C. Christian was a conservative, a registered Republican, a veteran, and a Christian.

Should one attempt to visit www.TheResistanceManifesto.com, the website which claimed the Guidestones were Satanic, one is instead redirected to a site belonging to John Conner’s real identity, conservative conspiracy theorist Mark Dice — and it now sells “Let’s Go Brandon” and “I ♥ Global Warming” T-shirts.

Alex Jones, who warned the Guidestones were built by New Age leftists who would take over the country by paramilitary force in defense of the elites, marched next to paramilitary groups like The Proudboys and OathKeepers to install a billionaire elitist as president in defiance of a fair election. Jones ran a multi-million dollar conspiracy empire for years, drumming up fear of “the hard left”, yet he couldn’t be bothered to do even the most basic research that I found in an afternoon. Is he lazy, or just a liar?

In the Georgia Guidestones the conspiracy theorists saw what they wanted to see, and they pushed that story with no interest in the truth. Because R.C. Christian wasn’t the boogeyman they wanted him to be—he was one of their own.

(Source)

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Joseph Best

Deep dives into the conspiracies, mysteries, and urban legends behind the philosophical fringe history of the alt-right.