A throwaway comment by US President Joe Biden MP about a “new world order” has gone viral after being picked up by conspiracy theorists.
Biden made the comment during an address on Tuesday, Australian time, about a “changing world order” amid the Russia-Ukraine war.
The phrase “new world order” is a term regularly used to describe a time of change. It’s also the name of a longstanding conspiracy theory about a global totalitarian government run by shadowy forces like the illuminati or Freemasons. The theory often carries anti-Semitic undertones.
As soon as it was uttered, some expected it would garner some attention. And it did. There were hundreds of posts — many explicitly endorsing conspiracy theories — about about Joe Biden’s comments.
A similar throwaway line made by Australia’s NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant went viral when she was talking about contact-tracing.
“We will be looking at what contact-tracing looks like in the new world order — yes, it will be pubs and clubs, and other things, if we have a positive case there [but] our response may be different if we know people are fully vaccinated,” she said.
The term trended on Twitter in Australia — and then around the world. One version of the video posted by a user on Twitter has gained more than 2.5 million views. Google searches for “new world order” spiked.
Some of the attention came from anti-government conspiracy theorists who said the phrase proved that Australia’s strict COVID-19 public health measures were actually more sinister.
Everyone from anti-vaxxers to QAnon believers to one of the world’s biggest right-wing YouTubers, Steven Crowder, shared it on Facebook, Twitter and Telegram. Many sharers seemed to be sceptical of the conspiracy but were sharing it because they expected it would pique the interest of fringe social media users.
Likewise with Biden’s comment — it was represented as not an innocuous turn of phrase but rather a slip of the tongue that revealed his attempts to create a new world order.
Of course, the use of the phrase wasn’t an announcement by a state’s chief health officer or the US President that they were installing themselves as a global monarch. (If that was the goal, it would be ill-advised to announce it at a press conference or in an interview until power had already been seized.) The idea is ridiculous to anyone not already primed to believe it.
What this saga shows is how easily moments can be cut up, shared, remixed and take on a life of their own. Until recently a comment like this would have got little notice — perhaps a write-up in the traditional media before being quickly forgotten. Now it is likely to live on as part of the corpus of out-of-context moments and events that conspiracists use to reinforce and promote their world views.
More than anything else, these “new world order” comments are perfect grist for the content mill. There are thousands of online influencers and communities who are desperate for some new piece of material to feed to their platforms which will prove their worldview, grow and excite their audience.
Perhaps Rudyk and Chant should have been careful with their words, but there’s always a chance that something said or done (perhaps taken out of context or misleadingly framed) can go viral.
The most people can hope for is that it doesn’t happen to them.
The premier that gave the nation Delta ,Gladys Berejiklian, will no longer stand in front of the residents of New South Wales and voters at any press conference in the future
The Berejiklian message to the diseased the dying the distressed will now be recorded and pumped through chosen media units that act as Coalition mouthpieces
If you vote Berejiklian you vote for crime corruption indifference ruthlessness
Berejiklian is a coward a dissembler a liar and it is to be hoped ICAC will deal with her as they did with Barry O’Farrell
Dan Andrews had the endless haranguing of Peta Credlin for 100+ days in a row without calling time and walking away once.
The excreta is about to hit the health system impeller and she’s run away in anticipation.
Will any neocon cabal survive the next election after such shambolic performances by Berejiklian and Morrison ……or is Rupert Murdoch really still that powerful ?
Berjiklian is a really nasty bit of work, and it’s finally being exposed, now onto ICAC for her and a fate the same as O’Farrell awaits. She, like her counterpart federally, is immoral, not amoral, but by choice immoral.
What was that about the electorate’s 7 second attention span? What will Murdoch rags run the day before and the day of the election?
On the other hand she could have fun with it, dropping secret signifiers in every conference and the subsequent frenzy of the credulous and mentally impaired self-medicating on social media could amuse the rest of us. I have a picture of her in my head jumping up and down and shouting Jehovah, over and over again. Time for a nice piece of halibut…
That would be awesome! Go and buy shares in popcorn now, they will go through the roof 😀
Gristle? Or grist, Cam?
Cheers,
W1
“Sausage machine oop at mill”?
Despite being an inept mangling of a phrase he vaguely recalls hearing, ‘gristle‘ is kinda-sorta correct – something of no value pointlessly gnawed.
Not that Cam could grasp the concept or even know what a mill is, the words that (he thought that) he was clicheing (sic!) are “grist to the mill” – grist being grain separated from its husks prior to being ground into flour by the mill.
Didn’t one of the Presidents Bush suggest that there was new world order after / before / during a military foray into the Middle East?
I vaguely recall the terms ‘New World Order’ appeared about a decade before Bush right after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was used in professional wrestling to describe a new dark era of bad guy wrestlers. Good guy wrestlers suddenly became bad guys. Only the Americans could take something as silly as pro wrestling and project it on to the real world.
The term has been around a lot longer than Bush or pro wrestling.
Why would your Australian doctor use this term if this is all silly? Get educated.
NWO BLM WHO MSM …….simples.
That was Shrub senior after Desert Shield became Desert Storm, 1991.
In the same sentence he also said “We’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome!” … as if that were a thing, even a good thing.
A bit of figure fudging NSW Coalition style and hey presto doesn’t look as bad
active cases have roughly halved to 14,510 after the government seemingly changed the definition
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2021/09/sydneysiders-party-on-the-beach-as-nsw-records-1262-new-covid-cases/
I can’t remember Bush speaking of a ‘New World Order’.
However, around the time, there were many references to the ‘Project for the New American Century’, which seemed to be the neo-conservative manifesto for a unipolar world in which America was alone in projecting its power.
And then there was the quite astonishing moment following the discovery of absolutely no WMD, when the right-wing of the US mainstream announced their departure from the ‘Age of Reason’.
This is what Bush aide, Karl Rove, told New York Times reporter, Ron Suskind:
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Soon after, of course, following the trauma for the Right of a black President, came Trump’s Republicans, a complete and utter repudiation of what Rove mocked as “the reality-based community,” people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.”
Please don’t anybody tell Craig Kelly about this slip of the tongue.
You may have a better impression of Craig Kelly if you watch this video “The Case for Ivermectin in Australia – by the Honourable MP Craig Kelly 22 June 2021 (12 min ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WLYBmq9-tU . It’s a speech to Parliament & it certainly shows that Kelly is both well informed & brave in taking on the lying establisment. All fair minded citizens should see this video & not rely on Medis misrepresentation. Enjoy
I’ve read the clinical studies for ivermectin. They are inconclusive at best, less effect than a placebo, and the one large meta-study was botched leading to claims of clinical incompetence or perhaps fraud, and being taken down from pre-print sites.