ASSIST Promotes Bizarre “New World Order” Conspiracy Book

Here’s a very strange article from ASSIST Ministries:

One World, said by some to arguably be the best book ever on the New World Order, and until now a trade paperback, has just been released as an eBook and is available worldwide.

“Every important outcome that this book has predicted has come true,” said its author, Tal Brooke, President and Chairman of The Spiritual Counterfeits Project (also known as SCP, Inc.,) an Evangelical Para church organization located in Berkeley, California.

…According to the author, convenient and planned crises and costly wars of occupation have been key gateways to bringing in the New World Order.

…Brooke went on to say, “Consider this piece of shrouded history revealed in One World. Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith leaked the following – that banking insider Bernard Baruch walked Sir Winston Churchill out on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange the very morning of the Great Crash.

“Churchill was brought to witness the crash firsthand on October 24, 1929, because it was desired that he see the power of the banking system at work. This required timing only possible with insider knowledge. Churchill soon after became Prime Minister of Great Britain, having failed on numerous attempts before.”

ASSIST is a bit credulous when it comes to faith healers, and it has on one occasion lapsed into conspiracy-mongering, but this is the first time I’ve seen full-throttle tin-foil hat material on the site.

The main point is so obvious that it’s hardly worth making: Churchill did not become Prime Minister “soon after” 1929 – he became Prime Minister more ten years later, following a series of events that are completely explicable without recourse to a conspiracy theory about Bernard Baruch. Brooke has presumably got his information from Pat Riott’s 1994 book The Greatest Story Never Told: Winston Churchill and the Crash; according to Buckley Barry Barrett’s review in Churchill: a Concise Bibliography, “a great number of people across a wide swath of the political spectrum could consider the work akin to a tabloid and paranoid potboiler of libertarian fundamentalism”.

Brooke is famous for being an ex-follower of Sathya Sai Baba, against whom he went on to write an exposé in 1970s – other works include Harvest, with Chuck Smith. As with Walid Shoebat, it seems that once the novelty value that had brought him to prominence wore off, he maintained his audience with ever-expansive claims to expertise. According to an author blurb on Amazon:

Tal Brooke, today, is the President & Chairman of SCP, Inc, a Berkeley-based research organization and think-tank. A member of the Society of the Cincinnati, he has authored nine books and his work has been recognized in Marquis Who’s Who in the World and Who’s Who in America as well as The International Who’s Who of Authors. He has won three first place EPA awards in a nationwide contest. A graduate of the University of Virginia and Princeton, Tal Brooke has spoken at Cambridge (8 times), Oxford (4 times), Princeton, Sorbonne, Berkeley, the University of Virginia, and the University of Edinburgh.

As a rule, someone who goes on about memberships and entries in directories in lieu of any real academic recognition is a crank.

Brooke is not just a promoter of conspiracies: he’s also the subject of a conspiracy theory himself, concocted by Hindus annoyed by his anti-Sai Baba polemics. It is claimed that his father was a diplomat named Edgar Duffield Brooke, who worked for the US Information Agency in the 1960s, and that this explains Tal Brooke’s writings.