The Video

Pick one video among the thousands of commentaries, decodings, and exegeses: “Ripple XRP/Bearableguy123 Christmas Finally Explained!!” It was created by an account called “프로 리플러: Pro Rippler” (the hangul text before the colon is just a translation of “pro rippler”) (2021) and posted on December 12, 2021; as I write this in March 2023, it has 17,575 views and 102 comments, mostly expressing gratitude and offering additional reflection and analysis. The video is almost seven minutes long, and its subject is a single image.

The image is a rendering from what appears to be MS Paint. It was posted to Twitter on December 19, 2018 by a user named bearableguy123. It is as cryptic and densely coded as an illustration from an alchemical manuscript. The documents of alchemy were populated with glass vessels, furnaces, pregnancies, birds, toads, and flowering trees and saturated with meanings from pagan myth and Christian gospel: wing-footed Mercury, the pelican feeding its brood with its own blood, Saturn consuming his children. Bearableguy123’s images are all set in the medieval milieu of castles, kings, monks in hooded robes, three-masted sailing ships, knights in armor—and, always, a toothily grinning brown bear wearing a domino mask and a hat. Hands hold cards, wands, swords; colors (green, purple, gold) appear on sails, flags, and Christmas stockings; ghostly strings of characters (“PUn4gQznCCnLoK2”) are written on stones. Everything means something, as it does in prophetic speech, Tarot cards, and dream interpretation books.

The image studied in this video by 프로 리플러: Pro Rippler is an interior with a Christmas theme. The bear, seated, points to a whiteboard set up in front of a Christmas tree. The image on the board is a version of a previous bearableguy123 painting. There are gifts under the tree, objects on the mantel, a metal gauntlet on the floor, a knight with a shield by the fireplace, an arm in a business suit reaching in from out of frame to turn the crank of a machine that spits out coins carrying the logos of various cryptocurrency projects, and so on, into minute and inexplicable detail. The work of the video is to walk through this detail. There is no narration, only a soundtrack of dramatic, ominous music. The video zooms in on each component in turn, interspersing details of the painting with screenshots of other images and webpages, with highlights, boxes, and circles for emphasis: news reports, official documents, Wikipedia. Over these is superimposed text that adds up the numerology, fleshes out the explanations, and expresses surprise and excitement (“!?”).

Contained within these symbolic objects is the secret history of the financial present, and a prophecy. Through various codes and allusions, things in the room pertain to subjects including the international interbank settlement system SWIFT, the coat of arms of the House of Rothschild, the International Monetary Fund, Amazon Web Services, the United States Federal Reserve and the European Common Bank, Bitcoin, and the United States dollar. The image also refers to specific individuals, particularly Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of a financial technology and payments company called Ripple, and to Ripple’s cryptocurrency, XRP. What all these objects portend—the marionette with open eyes, the gavel, the double ouroboros—is an imminent apocalypse: next week, next month, before March, by 2025. “Apocalypse” here is meant in its classical Christian sense of revelation rather than destruction. What bearableguy123 communicates, however indirectly, is the disclosure of secret and future things. He offers to open the books, in every sense of that phrase.

This apocalyptic language may seem rather grand for news about a financial sector conspiracy, but consider the nature of the news.¹ Some who analyze the paintings are merely investors. They hold onto the XRP token, which has lost most of its value during ongoing litigation involving Ripple, in the hope that it will be adopted for interbank settlement or as a reserve currency alternative to the dollar and thereby become immensely valuable. In the absence of any real evidence, these investors try to decode the cryptic symbols that promise the revaluation, or “reval,” of these assets and circulate their cryptic reflections in turn (see, for instance, FoJÄÄk 2023). This is a common pattern for near-worthless currencies, including various cryptos, the Iraqi dinar, and Zimbabwe bonds (Dinar Guru 2023; Giles 2021): scrutinizing the media for a “reval event,” when the actions of states, markets, or philanthropists will suddenly make a currency prized and profitable. (Often, these narratives are kept alive by scammers who sell the currency far above its market value and then sell seminars, educational materials, and other follow-on services to their victims.) For many others, however, developments with XRP are the prelude to the transformation of the world and the human condition itself, the birth of a new age.

According to analysis from believers, the new age begins with infrastructure. The blockchain-based, transnational, fraud-proof quantum financial system (QFS)—already in place to secretly secure United States elections from foreign interference—will mediate transactions and settlements. Ripple’s crypto token, XRP, will act as the global interbank settlement currency in place of the worthless dollar. These will be the components of the National Economic Stabilization and Recovery Act (NESARA) and the Global Economic Stabilization and Reformation Act (GESARA). NESARA-GESARA include the elimination of all debt—a jubilee that will cancel mortgages, credit cards, and loans—and the abolition of income tax and the Federal Reserve. (The United States will switch to a sales tax on non-essentials for the government’s revenue and a “rainbow currency” backed by precious metals and issued by the United States Department of the Treasury, not the Federal Reserve, in place of dollars.) NESARA-GESARA will dissolve the existing financial sector, seizing its assets and returning them to the citizenry. It sets intranational and international trade on a “level playing field,” based on an idle remark from an interview with Donald Trump prior to his presidency taken by conspiracy theorists as a signal of a rebalancing of global currencies akin to Bretton Woods (Bonfire Guy 2020). Jobs will return from overseas and industries relocate domestically.

The Act halts United States military presence abroad, ending the wars and occupations at a stroke in a mass withdrawal. It unseals thousands of patents, revealing the technologies suppressed by the current dispensation because they threatened profits: healing machines (“medbeds”), cancer cures, free energy, and anti-gravity devices. These will heal our sicknesses, solve climate change, and provide unlimited power. NESARA-GESARA mandate immediate and comprehensive nuclear disarmament. They mark the beginning of a “golden age of global peace and prosperity” (Herscu n.d.). In some narratives, NESARA-GESARA also has an antithesis for which it is the only alternative: the Great Reset, a project of deliberate impoverishment, famine, plague, and war to produce mass death and total social control in the service of a communist-Satanic aristocracy who will rule the world. All of this starts with a blockchain and a cryptocurrency. It is the promise of the financial millennium.

The Financial Millennium

Norman Cohn’s five criteria for a millenarian movement are simple and clear: the movement’s salvation is collective, terrestrial, imminent, total, and miraculous (1970, 15). Thus, it is here, with one seeming exception.

It is collective, as it will be enjoyed by all in the movement upon its arrival. It will be experienced by virtually everyone on the planet at once, the banked and unbanked alike. Indeed, the QFS has specific blockchain-based functionality for those without existing bank accounts, so they will not be left behind by the new prosperous global order.

It is certainly terrestrial, as it will take place in this world and in this life rather than in another plane of existence or heavenly realm. NESARA-GESARA’s promise is at once transcendental and strikingly mundane and earthly: humanity will live in a planetary paradise of peace and abundance, freed of illness and suffering, but the path there lies through ordinary human bureaucracy. It is a story of documents, legal codes, executive orders, job re-skilling, factory ribbon cuttings, and installing telecommunications infrastructure.

It is imminent: every image, video, and post on relevant Telegram channels is a promise that it will happen soon, with an endlessly receding string of dates often connected with holidays or significant anniversaries. The most advanced form of financial millenarianism holds that it has already happened, with laws passed in secrecy, and is now being enacted. This approach involves close readings of business news for indirect traces of this process, where an oblique remark at an inflation hearing with a European Union central banker tells those in the know that SWIFT is about to be decommissioned and replaced with XRP and the QFS.

It is, of course, total in both its execution and its outcome. No aspect of any one’s life will be untouched. Contemporary history will be understood as before and after this event. As Cohn (1970) puts it, this total transformation is one that promises “no mere improvement on the present but perfection itself.” Depending on which flavor of NESARA-GESARA one follows, this perfection may encompass the redress of all economic and political injustice, the end of human suffering with the aid of occult super-science, or the admission of alien contact and the entry of humanity into galactic society.

The missing piece here would seem to be Cohn’s fifth criterion, the miraculous: “it is to be accomplished by, or with the help of, supernatural agencies” (1970). It is on the question of the fifth criterion that the rest of this study turns. What I have presented so far about this belief system, however unrealistic, has been thoroughly secular: the mechanisms of the millennium are infrastructural technologies and financial policies, and its agents are bureaucrats, legislators, and tech CEOs. The tools of the perfected world—the free energy machines and medical breakthroughs—are based on images from science fiction and the fantasies of suppressed science that run back through the perpetual motion machines and quack cures of the nineteenth century. Where is the supernatural agency in this?

I would like to convince readers of two related points. The first is that belief systems like NESARA-GESARA—and, as we will discuss later, QAnon and the UFO “full disclosure” movement—have a logic to their development that necessarily tends over time toward the supernatural and, ultimately, the millenarian: they begin technologically and end supernaturally. The increasing role played by supernatural forces in the NESARA-GESARA story will be seen over time. My working term for this ratcheting effect is millennial creep, with reference to the “scope creep” of a project whose remit and goals keep growing larger and less realistic. A prediction, as I demonstrate, becomes a prophecy; an adversary becomes the literal Antichrist.

However, even as the framework, agency, and goals of the belief system become supernatural, the role of technologies persists: blockchains and cryptocurrencies, satellites, the internet and VPNs, and quantum computing, among others. I suggest that these technologies themselves function as miraculous agents. In fact, one can read backwards from the supernatural culmination to see that the technologies were always effectively supernatural in their role—in part through being only poorly understood, if at all, by their believers. What I hope to convince of, then, is that an idiosyncratic and syncretic creation of a kind of spiritual infrastructure can be seen in the NESARA-GESARA belief system.

To present this, I start with the history of NESARA-GESARA as a belief system, its adoption into different conspiratorial communities, the role of its increasingly prophetic interlocutors, and the emergence of its antagonist and antithesis in the Great Reset. Then, once I have laid out the whole of the belief system, I clarify the role of the ratcheting millennial creep and the technological miraculous and close with a reflection on the present and future of the movement.

NESARA-GESARA

The promise of NESARA-GESARA began in the late 1980s as a set of policy proposals for the United States developed by an engineer named Harvey Francis Barnard (Gulyas 2021, 35). Barnard self-published his ideas as a draft bill in pamphlet form in 1996 and mailed them to every sitting congressperson. The proposals at this stage were straightforward: a set of fiscal and monetary reforms to change federal revenue collection from income to consumption and restructure both public and private loans by eliminating compound interest, lowering the annual percentage rate, and applying payments to principal first. The goals and means of this project were entirely terrestrial, but there is still a hint of the millennial in Barnard’s provision of the retroactive application of his loan structure once the bill passed. Homeowners, for instance, who had been paying off a mortgage for decades would have all their payments to date retroactively applied to the principal, rather than the interest. One day, all at once, they would own their homes free and clear—in fact, they might receive money back for overpayment—but the language of this proposal remains diligently mundane about the event: “Immediately their discretionary spending increases” (Barnard 2005).

When nothing was done with his proposals, Barnard made them available online. They were picked up, adapted, and elaborated upon by a remarkable crew of scammers and confidence artists, conspiracy theorists, sovereign citizens, militia groups, and alien contactees, and their transformation into millennial texts began. Barnard had no patience for any of this, fighting an increasingly futile rearguard action against these new interpretations until he himself came to be accused of being subdued by or complicit with the conspiracy against NESARA.

The central problem faced by the adopters of NESARA cut across their various beliefs and agendas, from the scammers selling seminars and fraudulent tax advice to the UFO communicators and healers. The following points lay out the logical steps of its adopters:

1. NESARA is an obviously, objectively, and self-evidently positive program. It will provide good things: prosperity, stability, and wealth. Why, then, has it not happened? Why is it not happening now?

2. There must therefore be opposition to NESARA. There must be adversaries standing in the way. They must be powerful because they can resist this program and prevent its realization. They must also have interests in the present order remaining in place; it must benefit them in some way. What is their agenda? Do they have an alternative program—perhaps an antithesis to the NESARA project?

3. If the opponents of NESARA are so powerful, why has the program not been wholly defeated? How have we come to learn about it? There must be advocates in positions of power who are fighting for it on our behalf. They need our support, and their struggle is taking place right now.

4. Given that this struggle is underway between advocates and adversaries, why do we not see more evidence of it in the press and the public sphere? The information is being suppressed, but we who know can discern the signs of the battle for NESARA.

I want to draw readers’ attention to the appearance of the adversary in this story. At the earliest stages of the NESARA proposal, the opposition was merely inertia, institutional sluggishness, and the direct interests of those businesses who exploit the current, broken system for their profit—usurious banks, payday lenders, repossession agencies, and so on. As the program’s promised goods got bigger, though, the adversaries necessarily grew in capacity and strength to prevent their realization, and these adversaries diversified in direct proportion to the diversity of belief systems adopting NESARA as a component. A few examples will suffice.

The Prophets

I could continue, but the point has been made. NESARA has become a kind of flexible document adopted by various movements and incorporated into their belief systems and eschatologies. These adoptions have all involved the same characteristics. There is a promise to be fulfilled, one relevant to their community: freedom, the disclosure of secrets, the release of suppressed science or stolen wealth. This promise would necessarily involve the transformation of society or, in some cases, the world—nothing would be the same afterwards. There is an adversary in the way of the promise who grew proportionally to it: from shortsighted politicians to rapacious alien serpent-men. There is a force for good on whom the realization of the promise depended. Finally, there is a messenger—or, in some cases, a prophet—who is able to provide news about this secret war and act as an interpreter of events for their public. The messengers have had various claims to authority, again depending on the nature of the community they are addressing on behalf of NESARA.

Some messengers have drawn on the authority of first-hand experience, such as recovered memory: many leaders of the UFO “full disclosure” community claim to have been abducted to live on other planets or in deep space for years or decades and then de-aged, their memories expunged, and returned to their ordinary lives on Earth. In therapy or under hypnosis, they recover their off-planet lives and speak on that basis (see, for example, Rodrigues 2021). Other NESARA messengers draw on a kind of parallel-universe version of worldly expertise, like the sovereign citizen “lawyers” who promote an analogue to legal training and recognition as the basis for the plausibility of their explanations of the NESARA future (Moore 2022). Still others have authorities speak through them, “channeling” the spirits of various superhuman beings, angels, aliens, ancient god-kings, and ascended masters, who can address the NESARA program with an authority that supersedes anything terrestrial.

Finally, a small but extremely influential group—perhaps the most important—speak as insiders, addressing their audience as public-spirited agents directly involved in this secret war. This last group includes Shaini Goodwin, under her working moniker of “the Dove of Oneness,” who claimed to be personally connected to “very important people whose responsibilities require their presence in the most secret and most important activities of this country and all the major countries in the world” (Gulyas 2021, 38). This group also counts as a member bearableguy123, the painter described at the beginning of this article. The brief text documents bearableguy123 has written to accompany their paintings are presented in a casual, first-name, in-joke register to imply that they are a high-level colleague of the cryptocurrency developers instrumental to the financial millennium.

This last category of messengers, the purported insiders, also includes the “Q Clearance Patriot” of QAnon. The original Q’s very choice of moniker expresses this insider authority—Q is a United States Department of Energy security clearance related to nuclear weapons—and the premise of their materials is that they are an agent within the small team at the highest level of military intelligence and the executive branch who were about to reveal the crimes and criminals of the Deep State cabal and destroy them. Over the years of its development, QAnon has come to share with NESARA-GESARA the quality of being additive rather than exclusive (Tian 2021). It could host coexisting and sometimes contradictory claims and concepts, and it was inevitable that these two frameworks would start to overlap and blur together, picking up supporters in common—particularly once Q themselves began going quiet for longer and longer periods, leaving empty time to fill with other theories.

Two of these prominent insider-messengers, Goodwin and bearableguy123, neatly bookend the evolution of the purported bill from national to global, NESARA to GESARA. In the absence of any visible action, the prophesied transformation continued to grow in scope. NESARA had not taken place because it could not be done in one country alone, even one as powerful as the United States; it had to involve a transnational attack on the existing order. In the early 2010s, theorists from various currents of the movement began to narrate a new set of documents that promised a more comprehensive event and entailed yet more comprehensive adversaries.

As a theory, NESARA-GESARA has had a ratcheting logic of escalation—something else it shares with QAnon—which could only expand and never contract. This logic has enabled it to keep folding in new groups of believers and events: cryptocurrencies, blockchains, the popularization of universal basic income models and quantum computers, COVID-19. However, as the promised events have become more and more extravagant, more millennial, the adversaries keeping it from fulfillment and realization have become likewise more potent and diabolical. Once the program had grown to its current scale, incorporating hopes and desires ranging from currency and land reform to the restoration of the Chinese monarchy, disclosure of the hidden discoveries of Nikola Tesla, and the cancellation of all debts, its believers looked for an appropriately logical antagonist—an antithesis—which they found in the Great Reset.

The Great Reset

In the Great Reset was an ideal mirror image that could, in its way, substantiate the logic of NESARA-GESARA’s claims by providing a similarly scaled alternative—one with actual evidence of its existence. As the story of NESARA-GESARA evolved, the explanation for the lack of activity became a claim that the world’s great powers had their own version that they were attempting to advance in its place. As in medieval millennialism, signs of the Second Coming can be found in the actions of both parties: unity and peace among Christians, for instance, point to the imminent golden age, but so do the marshaled forces of evil led by the Antichrist.

In June 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdowns, then Prince Charles and Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum and its gathering at Davos, co-founded an initiative to use the momentum of the pandemic and its disruptions as an opportunity to reform the global economy. It was the perfect example of a Davos initiative: top-down, well meaning in a liberal noblesse oblige way, hortatory but toothless, revolutionary without proposing anything disruptive or discomfiting for its audience, and sweeping in its implications (labor, energy, security, technology, you name it) but thin on any concrete details or specific actions. It was also remarkably tone-deaf, one of the iconic twenty-first century failures to read the room. The real impact and consequence came not among its primary recipients, the boardroom and ministry types eating canapés at Davos, but from its secondary reception among the population at large alongside global pandemic shock and restrictions, lost jobs, panic buying and hoarding, and the fear of death by plague (and later, hesitancy, distrust, anxiety, and anger about mandated vaccines) (Christensen and Au 2023).

Where the NESARA-GESARA movement promises global prosperity and wealth (everyone will wake up with a fortune in their bank accounts, freed of their debts), they explain the Great Reset as an act of global impoverishment: asset seizures, deliberate hyperinflation and collapse of currency, the weaponization of debt, and, ultimately, the abolition or seizure of private property. NESARA-GESARA removes laws that give the state control over identities, movements, property, and bodies; the Great Reset is a lockdown that never ends, with mandated mask wearing and vaccine passports as the prelude to total control of people’s movements and activities. Where NESARA-GESARA promises economic growth and the limitless, clean potential of breakthrough technologies, the Great Reset is a “degrowth” project (Masterson 2022) in which poverty, malnutrition and starvation, engineered disease, and the hoarding of scientific and technological innovation by the elite will lead to mass death and the reset of the world to a sparse population of cowed, technologically subdued peasants laboring on the behalf of a small, global, Satanic aristocracy. Eschatological change is not only possible, but inevitable, as the onset of the Great Reset (here understood to include lockdowns and vaccine mandates) makes clear; the only way to prevent it is not to fight for the status quo—which will be destroyed by the very people in charge of it—but to serve the right side in the final battle between the Great Reset and the Global Currency Reset, its alternative. “There are two Resets squaring off against each other” (Benzow 2022), as one supporter put it; “The Great Currency Reset (GCR) of NESARA-GESARA, not the black hat’s Great Reset of the World Economic Forum, looks to be inching closer and closer to activation” (NallyBud 2022), another promised.

I use the word “Satanic” advisedly because it is here that the antithesis meets the Antichrist. In the next section, I answer a question the reader may now be asking: if the alternative to the Global Currency Reset is the Great Reset, and the Great Reset is being advanced by the world’s richest, most powerful, and most evil people, who, or what, is on the side of the financial millennium? How could they possibly win?

The Technological Miraculous

A consequence of the ratcheting logic of certain conspiracies—including QAnon and NESARA-GESARA—is that they eventually escalate out of the human sphere entirely. As new actions and events get added, the burden of proof, or the pressure of its absence, becomes too great to be sustained by human actors. Even if a relatively reasonable and realistic version of NESARA-GESARA were considered, a commonsense objection is that it is difficult to imagine pushing this giant reform program through all at once—especially one that would immediately alter the whole financial sector beyond all recognition. This commonsense feeling of dubiousness worsens as the program grows: the project is being kept secret, by tens of thousands of people, and will have transformative effects on every industry and every aspect of life, all at once. Even the most favorable imaginings of administrators and executives, civil and military, strain at this idea. The longer the situation continues without evidence, the larger the problem of its absence grows.

The initial framework of the QAnon movement, with its explanation of an incorruptible team of specialists with military precision, gradually had recourse to secret supercomputers and time travel to explain how they would prevail. As the movement fragmented, many of its factions arrived at an explicitly Christian eschatology: the “Deep State” was no longer just corrupt pedophiles but Satanists practicing human sacrifice, and the QAnon project was aided by God’s intercession. Its imagined leaders became Christian super-soldiers in the service of the “Great Awakening,” a project as much about religious revival as the revelation of secrets (Springs 2021).

Likewise, NESARA-GESARA—which has absorbed many “anons” from the QAnon movement—has turned from the promise of human economists and central bankers to extraterrestrials and superhuman spiritual entities like the Comte de Saint-Germain. This last figure is a telling example. Saint-Germain was an eighteenth-century aristocrat of dubious origins—“king of quacks and impostors,” as Casanova dubbed him, or “the Wonder-Man,” in Voltaire’s sarcastic phrase—who parlayed his gift of gab and skill navigating the culture of secret societies and lodges into positions at court (Patai 1994, 463–79). In various accounts, he claimed to be centuries old, to have discovered the alchemical philosopher’s stone, and to perform miraculous material transformations. After his death (itself disputed by occultists), he became a figure in theosophical literature and was either spiritually contacted or met in person by various esotericists into the twentieth century. He reappears in the communications of Shaini Goodwin in the early 2000s, as she popularized NESARA; she would at times communicate on his behalf to explain the cosmic battle underway in the American financial system amidst calls for prayer on behalf of the White Knights. As NESARA became GESARA, Saint-Germain’s presence evolved into an institution, the Saint Germain World Trust, a secret bank holding an effectively supernatural, inconceivable fortune (a quattuordecillion United States dollars—that is, a one followed by forty-five zeroes in the US, or eighty-four zeroes in the UK) that will be used to cancel all debt, public and private, and “buy out” entire industries like banking and pharmaceuticals: the financial motor for the world transformation (Gulyas 2021, 161). (That number itself is a nice example of the ratchet effect, since the secret funds to be unlocked by NESARA-GESARA had to grow by orders of magnitude in every retelling to account for the expanding role of the program—billions, trillions, quadrillions, and now a number so massive that it far exceeds all the money ever circulated in human history.)

Two significant dynamics can be discerned in this syncretic blend of occultism, conspiracy, and Christianity, which circle back to bearableguy123 and the role of blockchains in this emergent theology. One of these dynamics is more general and the other specific.

Conclusion: Signs and Portents

As I was working on this article, more schisms in NESARA-GESARA began. “Juan O’Savin,” the pseudonym of QAnon influencer Wayne Willott, announced that NESARA-GESARA would not happen—or that perhaps it would but in a different, more America-first form (Veniamin 2021). (The conceit of his interview style is that he never shows his face, using the front-facing camera on his phone for video calls, yielding hours of monologues during which one watches a hand gesturing in front of a restaurant table or the dashboard of a car driving aimlessly from parking lot to parking lot.) Other QAnon activists identified GESARA as the necessary step in the war with Satanic powers, aided by God and angelic intercessors through Donald Trump—indeed, as the fulfillment of the jubilee in Leviticus 25:9 (May 2021). The prophets and messengers continue to promise the arrival, imminent as ever, of the financial millennium—and to sell equipment, guides, seminars, and merchandise. In the absence of any concrete developments, the believers scrutinize the media landscape for signs and secret messages. They read the tweets of Elon Musk—in this case, in his role as the CEO of Starlink—for allusions to the coming transition; they analyze the stock photographs used in banal financial press releases, perform crude numerology on timestamps and prices, and study public remarks by Trump and a galaxy of obscure banking officials for portents and proof. And, of course, they look at the paintings and posts of bearableguy123.

The clues he embeds in dense allegories and cryptic letters continue to point to the end of the SWIFT system and the adoption of the XRP cryptocurrency in its place: the first step towards the financial millennium, the fall of evil powers, and the advent of the new age. Alongside interpretations of these images, his followers post anti-vaccine claims, various flavors of political conspiracy, materials related to the blood-drinking fantasy of “adrenochrome”—a staple of QAnon belief—and long YouTube videos explaining the QFS and NESARA-GESARA to newcomers. They await the technological miracle that will satisfy goals profane and sacred and remake this corrupt world: “XRP Ripple is without question unequivocally and irrevocably the global reset on financial system,” one influencer writes, opening a description of QFS, NESARA-GESARA, and the rest of the package (qfs1776 nd).

Meanwhile, the years go by. “A couple of Christmases ago,” bearableguy123 (2019) posts, “I told you that some great things were coming. Can you hear me now when I say that there are plans, within plans, within plans?” That was four years ago. Four days ago, as I write this, a Reddit user (MissionContext6434 2023) posted a question. The post is in a thread specific to XRP’s current situation, but I think it nicely expresses a sentiment underlying all the analysis, fantasy, and promise of the financial millennium. It is the question behind them all. The phrasing is as I found it: “until when we will suffer?”

On that note of waiting for the promised event—whether financial, political, spiritual, or all three—I conclude this study. I hope it has demonstrated three things: the development of a contemporary, apocalyptic, economic-financial belief system that matches all of Cohn’s criteria for a millenarian movement; the logic particular to such a system, which necessarily ratchets in a millennial creep from the terrestrial to the supernatural; and the role played by technology in such a system, where it becomes a surrogate, and sometimes a vehicle, for the miraculous. If one accepts these three conclusions, then they may share my confidence in making a prediction: the NESARA-GESARA movement is not going away, and there will more like it, movements that take technology as the miraculous agency by which millenarian promise and prophecy will be fulfilled on Earth.