A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

evolutionary nomenclature of the committed socialist, calling on the faithful to battle greed,
unbridled competition and Mammon. His description of the Christian Commonwealth as a
“National Intentional Community” anticipated the 1960s counterculture’s later adoption of the
same term as an alternative to “commune.” This odd amalgam recalled nothing so much as
American Populism with its tendency to shuttle between the espousal of radical democracy and
anti-corporate capitalism and a rhetoric of provincialism, race hatred and exclusion. Of course
one primary difference between the two is that ascended masters, whom he referred to as
Mentors, dictated Pelley’s politics via “mental radio.”
Pelley would go on over the next ten years, in a varied and proliferating number of
periodicals, to sell his occult vision of Christian Patriotism and his increasingly shrill message of
anti-Semitism. Anticipating the targets of later American extreme right wing organizations,
Pelley attacked the ACLU, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the American Medical
Association and, of course, Hollywood. As an example of the particularly Semitic evil of the
latter, Pelley recalled his efforts to mirror Christ’s feeding of the multitudes in the screenplay for
Torment! and the “typically” offensive response from the studio thusly:
Ve ain’t makin’ it moom-pitchers about your bastard Christ nor his loafs and fishes. Vat
ve vant in it moom-pitchers is legs. Understand me?…legs!…Vimin’s legs! Ven ve get
done vid you Christians, I guess you find out vy ve got it control of movies and it ain’t to
preach no sermon in a church. I’m telling you! Better ve should put every goy girl in a
whorehouse, and by gott you’ll like it! 168
Pelley, along with making the question of race more prominent in his version of the displaced
utopian imaginary, also brought to bear the rhetoric of conspiracy theory—the above quote
having shameless recourse to the trope of Womanhood’s corruption by predatory cliques—
rhetoric that would continue to haunt the alien-human nexus. Pelley would go on to run for
President in 1936 as representative of the "Christian Party" promising to "make it impossible for
168 Ribuffo, 58.
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