Rest in peace to the Georgia Guidestones, a bizarre monument that has been a lightning rod for conspiratorial weirdos since the 1980s. The granite slabs, which somewhat mysteriously appeared in Elbert County, Georgia, more than 40 years ago, were bombed on Wednesday night, causing severe damage. Law enforcement ultimately demolished what remained of the statue Thursday morning, putting an end to the rocks for good.
It’s a fitting end for the Guidestones, which seemed to primarily drive conservative conspiracy theorists into fits of rage and fanaticism. The monument, commissioned by a man who used the pseudonym Robert C. Christian, was installed in 1980. Designed to be some sort of guide for civilization, the granite structure has 10 principles engraved on it that seem to be meant to serve as direction for the governments of the world. They contain some simple but meaningful concepts like “Balance personal rights with social duties,” and some weird, eugenics-sounding stuff like “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.” But hey, it’s hard to come up with 10 good rules and nine just feels incomplete so, population control made the list.
On top of the 10 guiding principles for society, the stone structure was also supposedly built to serve as a compass, calendar, and clock. It was also meant to be able to withstand “catastrophic events” but appears to have been taken out by some small explosives so, if the rocks were humanity’s best bet, we were probably doomed anyway.
The Guidestones are undoubtedly bizarre — made even stranger by the fact that no one seems quite sure who made them or how they got there. But instead of letting something weird just be weird all on its own, conspiracy theorists have taken to applying all sorts of incoherent nonsense to the tablets. Because of the tablets’ message of a unified world and references to population control, some have associated it with the “New World Order,” a conspiracy that imagines a singular, totalitarian government. Others, like failed Republican gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor, believe the rocks were Satanic in origin. (No like, literally; The Daily Beast notes that a conspiracy theorist named Mark Dice said the stones were “Satanic” in 2018, and Taylor said she’d stand up to the “Luciferian cabal” if elected.) You might ask why Satan, with the power to conjure something on Earth, would construct a shoddy imitation of Stonehenge? Good question. Maybe he’s just phoning it in at this point.
Regardless, folks have been upset about the existence of the Guidestones basically since the moment they were installed. The monument has been defaced and vandalized by conspiracy theorists who think the rocks are somehow going to bring about the end of the world. Now, they’re finally destroyed. So everything will be great now because the very big devil rocks have been taken down ... right?
