Did Anyone Catch That Bit About NESARA?
As usual, Trump was out-weirded by his fans.
On Saturday, Donald Trump spoke to a packed house at the Alaskan Airlines Center during the “Save America” rally in Anchorage. The turnout included lunatic pillow magnate Mike Lindell, the “Blacks For Trump” guy, and a sprightly contingent of QAnon supporters.
While the rally was getting underway, fringe reporters roamed the grounds, looking to find out what attendees hoped to hear about. Asked by a Right Side Broadcasting reporter what issues most concerned her as an Alaskan, one Trump hardliner offered up a confusing list: “QR [codes] killing, support of our veterans, the healing—”
“Trafficking,” another broke in.
“Specifically, what kind of trafficking?” the reporter asked.
“Human trafficking.”
“Are you worried about the southern border?”
“Yes—everything,” the woman responded, somewhat insouciantly.
Then she added: “I think eventually they’ll end up going back to their own countries with NESARA/GESARA kicking in.”
This qualification might have sounded like gibberish to some viewers outside the terrarium of right-wing conspiracy media. Now, in fairness, I am making an assumption about this woman’s beliefs based on the setting: when someone in a Trump hat, whose chief concern is human trafficking, claims (at an event for two extremist candidates) that NESARA is about to kick in, I assume that person is at least a QAnon sympathizer, if not an outright believer.
QAnon owes much of its lore to preceding conspiracy theories and investment frauds, including one based around the National Economic Security and Recovery Act (NESARA). In recent years, the two have overlapped.
NESARA1 was conceived in the mid-1990s as a policy proposal by Harvey Francis Barnard, an engineering consultant-cum-amateur-economic-advisor, who sent his plan (titled, of all things, Draining the Swamp) to members of Congress, who ignored him. Among other things, NESARA called for abolishing the income tax and compound interest on loans, as well as a return to a currency backed by gold and silver. Having failed to make any real progress in the corridors of power, in 2000 Barnard made the bill available on his website, where it was discovered by a New Age scam artist who breathed new life into it.2
Shaini Goodwin, known to her followers as the “Dove of Oneness,” devoted herself to revealing the truth about NESARA to the world. She claimed that the bill had actually been signed into law, but President George W. Bush and the Supreme Court, in combination with the Illuminati, were suppressing it. Fortunately, a group of insiders known as “White Knights” were battling these forces in secret. In Goodwin’s version, NESARA—which now stood for National Economic Security and Reformation Act—had much more ambitious and far-reaching goals, such as credit card and mortgage debt forgiveness, abolishing the IRS, and world peace.
Eventually, the Dove of Oneness turned on Barnard, alleging that his website had been hijacked by the Bush administration, and that he had turned to the “dark agenda” and could not be trusted—just as many Q apostates now claim that the movement has been “compromised.”
Her tactics were also far more damaging, as many NESARA believers had previously been involved in another scam: the Omega Trust. Omega was the brainchild of Clyde Hood of Mattoon, Illinois, a man who swindled thousands of people out of more than $20 million in exchange for “prime bank notes” known only to Hood and a handful of insiders. Hood pleaded guilty to multiple counts of fraud and was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison.3 Before that, however, Goodwin told fleeced “investors” in the Omega Trust (who now subscribed to her newsletter) not to seek restitution from Hood, “[s]ince the whole court thing in Illinois was always part of the dark agenda opposition”—and they would lose their last chance at a big payout if they played along with the government’s plan.4
Unsurprisingly, though, she did ask them for donations to keep her operation afloat, and many were happy to oblige. One San Francisco woman in her sixties gave at least $10,000 to the cause. According to her children, the real figure is likely “in the hundreds of thousands.”5
Goodwin attracted thousands of followers willing to go to great lengths to spread her message. They wrote letters to members of Congress and the Supreme Court, and most absurd of all, they inundated the International Court of Justice with emails. Some even turned up at The Hague to plant signs and petition court officers and judges. They had been told that the World Court was holding private hearings on NESARA. (That is, they believed that an international court was deciding how to implement an economic reform package in the United States.)
Goodwin kept her subscribers apprised of NESARA developments through email reports, prefiguring the cryptic Q “drops” that would appear on message boards more than a decade later. Naturally, the plan was going to be realized any day now. Major events—like the secret hearing at The Hague—kept getting pushed back. Another “BIG action” with “high-level officials” was seemingly always in the works.
The changes she predicted alternated between grandiose and inscrutable: an increase in Social Security benefits, harsher penalties for uninsured drivers, a ban on sonar technology to save the whales, a cure for cancer.
Shaini Goodwin died in 2010, but the NESARA scam has proved to have a remarkable half-life. Promises of debt forgiveness, overnight prosperity, and a massive “reset” of international relations crop up during periods of economic turmoil, and, according to Nick Backovic and Joe Ondrak, have been updated since the pandemic to accommodate “a new era of gold-backed cryptocurrency to be ushered in by Donald Trump.” In a report published by Logically, Backovic and Ondrak write:
An analysis of NESARA and GESARA posts on Facebook over the past 12 months [September 2019 to September 2020] shows a significant jump in their number and interactions with them, peaking at 85.2k interactions at the end of May this year. The graph also shows a general increase in posts around the theory since the time lockdowns and furlough schemes were implemented around the world.
Early posts were from a curious mix of New Age mysticism, pro-Trump, NESARA groups, and UFOlogy pages - groups that are now finding unlikely common ground under the QAnon banner. . . .
For some, these groups had become entwined even earlier. One QAnon defector came to NESARA through the same New Age channels by which she discovered Q. She told the journalist Mike Rothschild, who refers to her only as “Bea,” that by early 2020, “I was in three different groups with the NESARA thing on Telegram: the main New Age group; a group that received daily updates on the status of NESARA; and then another one that was more focused on New Age beliefs and aliens.”6 For people like Bea, the sense of community that Q engenders is further strengthened when these networks overlap and feed into one another. Their members tend to migrate from Facebook and YouTube to less strictly moderated platforms, such as Telegram.
What is remarkable, quite apart from the political valence of QAnon over time, is the way in which these earlier theories and schemes have been incorporated into Q mythology—and ultraconservative propaganda generally. Goodwin peddled her recycled program to the victims of a known con man. In his day, Harvey Barnard was only the latest in a long line of gold-obsessed cranks offering economic remedies despite having no background in economics.7 Somehow, this bizarre adaptation of a pet project has survived into the 2022 election cycle—and even remains at the forefront of some voters’ minds—without so much as a name change. It’s unclear exactly how it relates to an exodus of Latin American immigrants from the U.S. (Perhaps to some Trump supporters, that means the same thing as world peace.)
Whatever the connection, these theories are not going away. They represent the prospect of change—imminent, total change—for which some are willing to hold out a long time.
Today it is typically referred to as NESARA/GESARA (‘G’ for Global), as in the exchange from Saturday’s rally.
Mike Rothschild, The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything (New York: Melville House Publishing, 2021), 58-59.
Steve Bauer, “Two receive lower prison sentences in Omega scam,” The News-Gazette, February 16, 2006, https://www.news-gazette.com/news/two-receive-lower-prison-sentences-in-omega-scam/article_826285bb-85ef-5812-a2fd-e4c75b187c41.html. See also “Omega scam conspirator resentenced to 188 months in prison,” Daily Journal, updated October 14, 2013, https://www.daily-journal.com/news/state/omega-scam-conspirator-resentenced-to-188-months-in-prison/article_6bfe0dac-094b-5302-9b06-387f1fc246be.html.
Sean Robinson, “Up against ‘the dark agenda,’” The News Tribune, updated July 17, 2013, https://amp.thenewstribune.com/news/special-reports/article25855078.html.
Sean Robinson, “Some lucrative ‘New Age hooey,’” The News Tribune, accessed July 12, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20080906035304/http://dwb.thenewstribune.com/news/crime/story/5835335p-5196095c.html.
Rothschild, The Storm is Upon Us, 231.
See, e.g., Richard Hofstadter, “Free Silver and the Mind of ‘Coin’ Harvey,” in Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 2008).