Musk and Trump Resurface Old Fort Knox Conspiracy Tales
Elon Musk and Donald Trump are calling for an audit of gold reserves at Fort Knox. But Dr. Peter Beter went there over 50 years ago.
In 1971, a lawyer named Dr. Peter Beter claimed that the vaults at Fort Knox had been emptied of their gold. Beter, who had run for governor of his home state of West Virginia in 1968 (and lost) said that he had heard this from two British intelligence officers he had encountered after establishing a development corporation in Zaire while on a secret mission for Queen Elizabeth II. Welcome to the strange world of Dr. Peter Beter.
The son of a West Virginia grocery store owner and of Lebanese descent, Beter practiced law in Washington DC from 1951 to 1961. In 1961 John F. Kennedy appointed Beter as counsel to the U.S. Export-Import Bank in return for his work on the Kennedy campaign in West Virginia. Beter later became a Republican after becoming disillusioned over perceived corruption in the Democratic Party. The revelations about Fort Knox further rocked his worldview.
According to The Washington Post, "That revelation would eventually form the foundation for Beter's perception of world events. In the mid-'70s he wrote a book, The Conspiracy Against the Dollar (Braziller), that led to lectures and media appearances during which he charged Ft. Knox had been looted through a series of complex international sales that benefited powerful interests."
So rampant was the speculation about the status of the Fort Knox gold vaults, on Sept. 23, 1974, 120 members of the press, a dozen members of Congress, and representatives of the Mint and Treasury Department descended on the facility. The verdict? The gold was present and accounted for, and indeed, this was the last time the facility was subject to a public audit.
A Treasury press release at the time stated, "The inspection by Members of Congress on September 23, 1974, of U.S. gold stocks stored at the Fort Knox (Ky.) Bullion Depository marks a unique departure from the long standing and rigidly enforced policy of absolutely no visitors." In other words, Beter's baseless conspiracy theory had gained such traction that members of Congress were able to bully their way into a site inspection.
It's not hard to see why conspiracy theories might have proliferated in the wake of the 1971 breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement, which had previously pegged the dollar to gold for international redemptions. Certainly there is no issue with transparency and accountability. But if there are concerns about auditing of our bullion reserves, that should be addressed through legislation or internal controls, not ad-hoc embarrassing spectacles that compromise security and ultimately erode trust in government.
Now Elon Musk, Rand Paul, Donald Trump, and other Republicans want a repeat performance. It's not hard to guess why, either — as we have documented here and at The Washington Spectator, there is a broad swath of factions that would like to replace the dollar with cryptocurrencies and other asset-backed currencies.
A key first step would be to call into question just what reserve assets the US has on hand. Even if, as in 1974, a review showed that everything was as it should be, the very act of calling US treasury reserves into question is an act of information warfare that helps undermine the dollar.
As we wrote back in December:
Multiple sources clearly explain this strategy, including Project Russia, a popular Russian book series that predicts the collapse of the US dollar; BRICS currency architect Sergei Glazyev's The Last World War: The US to Move and Lose; Ron Paul's "North/Paul Strategy"; and Steve Bannon's "The End of the Dollar Empire." All of these texts outline the same idea: to destroy the US dollar in a catastrophic collapse, rebuild using gold and crypto, and radically shrink American power in the world.
Elon Musk calling for a live-streamed tour of Fort Knox is just the kind of spectacle we need to kick off this kind of confidence crisis. No matter the outcome, doubts will be surfaced, and proxies like Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Lex Fridman will lead the charge in "just asking questions" about the status and nature of the dollar's backing.
The federal budget deadline is coming up on March 14, with no real resolution in sight. We are already well into "extraordinary measures" to prevent debt default, as we reached the debt ceiling deadline back in January and have no plan in place; we will default around May if nothing is done. We need to deal with both of these matters urgently. This is no time to be resurfacing old conspiracy tropes from the 1970's.
But assuming Dr. Beter did stumble into some intelligence networks, it's interesting that the narratives he chose to spread were Kremlin-aligned and aimed at destabilizing the United States. In a series of more than 80 "audio letters" distributed via cassette tape (similar in tone to a podcast-as-monologue) from 1975 to 1982, he outlined all manner of bizarre conspiracy claims and introduced audiences to concepts such as covert operations and false flag attacks.
Among Beter's more fanciful assertions (see Letter #50) was that various politicians and public figures including Jimmy Carter, David Rockefeller, and Henry Kissinger had been replaced by "robotoid" mechanical clones, foreshadowing more contemporary stories about body doubles, reptilians, and masks.
Another Dr. Beter special involved "Project Z," a projected war between the United States and Soviet Union. According to Douglas Youvan, a scholar who wrote a paper about Beter's influence, "Beter claimed that in September 1982, the U.S. came within hours of launching a surprise nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. This, he argued, was part of a larger plan by the U.S. military, in collaboration with Israel, to preemptively eliminate Soviet power before it became too strong. Beter alleged that the plan was narrowly averted due to last-minute actions by both the Soviet Union and China, as well as public exposure of the preparations." Just who was Beter talking to? And perhaps Beter was offering early glimpses of our current conflicts.
So while it may seem that Musk and Trump are off on some entirely new and insane tangent, rest assured — Dr. Peter Beter went there over fifty years ago.
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Dave Troy
Dave Troy
Dave Troy
