War Against the Deros?!?!?

Earlier this week, the fever swamps of the lunatic conspiracy theorist fringe were abuzz with one of their more outré tales, a lurid tale of a fake pandemic staged to obfuscate a fight by the heroic US military forces against the sinister forces of the... uhhhhh... US military. Yeah, the COVID-19 pandemic was staged to keep the public sheltered in place while our good GI Joes fought the rogue elements in service to the Illuminati, or the Reptilians, or perhaps just Hillary Clinton in a campaign to save hundreds of thousands of children kept as slaves/cattle by said Illuminati, or Reptilians, or perhaps just Hillary Clinton. This tale of the DUMBs, told by the dumb, was quickly dubbed the 'Mole Children' conspiracy theory by internet wags. Wonkette's Robyn Pennacchia wrote a post about this subject and the QAnon Anonymous crew recorded a podcast about it. Perhaps the yeoman's work of exposing this lunacy was done by the stalwart Twitter conspiracy debunker Poker and Politics, who wrote extensively about this lunacy.

In a nutshell, the Mole Children conspiracy posits that hundreds of thousands of children, many of them bred like livestock, are kept captive in Deep Underground Military Bases to serve the whims of the evil cabal which secretly runs the world... as sex slaves, as foodstuffs, as a source for that sweet, sweet adrenochrome. In their need to see the incompetent Donald Trump as a hero, the True Believers have spun a yarn about a military campaign waged by the Pentagon Pedophile Team

Recent earthquakes are, obviously, the result of nuclear munitions set off by the Pentagon Pedophile Task Force to destroy the underground military bases which were used for the breeding and imprisonment of the Mole Children, many of whom have never seen the sun and some of whom are 'deformed', perhaps even genetically engineered human/other chimerae. The tent village cum field hospital in Central Park was set up for the rehabilitation of the liberated Mole Children. Oddly enough, the very Trump supporters who decry 'political correctness' and wouldn't think twice about using a racial slur are concerned that the term 'Mole Children' is derogatory. Even worse, they are worked up over fake captive children while supporting a guy who is running kiddie concentration camps on our southern border.

This lurid yarn is basically 'Pizzagate' on steroids, involving a much, much bigger basement (there's also a crackpot 'theory' about child prisons under LA's Getty Museum), but it's also much, much more... please, follow me down one of my favorite rabbit holes.

The Mole Children narrative is a modern update of the mid-twentieth century 'Shaver Mystery', a farrago of pulp science fiction stories that ran in Amazing Stories from 1945 to 1948. Beginning with the story I Remember Lemuria (claimed to be a true revelation conveyed to Richard Sharpe Shaver telepathically), Shaver's tales concern a malevolent race of beings, related to humans through descent from ancient superbeings, that live in caverns beneath the Earth, having been driven there by the sun's radiation. These malevolent cousins of humanity, the Deros (short for 'detrimental robots', with robot meaning a creature without true free will rather than a mechanical person), use 'ray technology' inherited from the common ancestors they share with humanity to cause accidents, manipulate human emotions, and otherwise wreak havoc on unsuspecting surface dweller:


"These ignorant people learned to play with these things, but not to renew them; so gradually they were mentally
impregnated with the persistently disintegrative particles. This habituates the creature's mind, its mental movements, to
being overwhelmed by detrimental, evil force flows which in time produce a creature whose every reaction in thought is
dominated by a detrimental will. So it is that these wild people, living in the same rooms with degenerating force
generators, in time become dero, which is short for detrimental energy robot.

"When this process has gone on long enough, a race of dero is produced whose every thought movement is concluded
with the decision to kill. They will instantly kill or torture anyone whom they contact unless they are extremely familiar
with them and fear them. That is why they do not instantly kill each other — because, being raised together, the part of
their bram that functions has learned very early to recognize as friend or heartily to fear the members of their own
group. They recognize no other living thing as friend; to a dero all new things are enemy.

"To define: A dero is a man who responds mentally to dis impulse more readily than to his own impulses. When a dero
has used old. defective apparatus full of dis particle accumulations, they become so degenerate that they are able to
think only when a machine is operating and they are using it; otherwise they are idiot. When they reach this stage they
are known as 'ray' (A Lemurian word not to be confused with ray as it is used in English.) Translated, ray means
'dangerous or detrimental energy animal.' Ray is also used to mean a soldier — one of those who handles beam weapons
(note how the ancient meaning has come into our modern word)."


The Deros would not only plague humanity with these rays, but would abduct humans to be used as playthings in their evil games and foodstuffs in their grisly larders. The stories being Pure Pulp, these victims were usually portrayed as down on their luck showgirls, rather than the children of the current narrative, which is largely informed by the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Scantily clad ladies in distress are better subjects for pulp cover art, and it's all about moving product.

The 'Shaver Mystery' was Amazingly popular throughout it's short run in the 1940s until it was eclipsed, then supplanted, by the Flying Saucer phenomenon. Still, its 'DNA' lives on in UFOlogy, particularly in the abduction/hybridization narrative. Deros or ETs (or fairies, for that matter), what's the difference? The Shaver mystery was lampooned by Harlan Ellison, who thought the whole tawdry business tarnished the reputation of Science Fiction, in his short short story The Elevator People:


"E is for ELEVATOR PEOPLE. They never speak, and they cannot meet your gaze. There are five hundred buildings in the United States whose elevators go deeper than the basement. When you have pressed the basement button and reached the bottom, you must press the basement button twice more. The elevator doors will close and you will hear the sound of special relays being thrown, and the elevator will descend. Into the caverns. Chance has not looked favorably on occasional voyagers in those five hundred cages. They have pressed the wrong button, too many times. They have been seized by those who shuffle through the caverns, and they have been . . . treated. Now they ride the cages. They never speak, and they cannot meet your gaze. They stare up at the numbers as they light and then go off, riding up and down even after night has fallen. Their clothes are clean. There is a special dry cleaner who does the work. Once you saw one of them, and her eyes were filled with screams. London is a city filled with narrow, secure stairways."


John Nebel, a precursor to Art Bell, covered the Shaver Mystery a decade after its heyday in a couple of his radio shows. Sadly, Shaver and his Deros are largely forgotten these days, with memory kept alive only by a select cadre of weirdos such as myself. A good source for all things 'Shaver' is the Shavertron website.

To put it succinctly, the Mole Children kerfuffle is an update of the Shaver Mystery, with that most Dero-esque of men, the Id-ruled Donald J. Trump, improbably cast as a hero, supported by a force of... uhhhhh... digital soldiers who save humanity by... uhhhh, sitting on their asses, shitposting on Twitter. I imagine the bulk of them are unaware that they are tapping into a genuine pop culture phenomenon of the 1940s, but these MAGA types aren't exactly known for their memories.