The NESARA Scam: White Knights, Dark Forces and Endless Prosperity

A few weeks ago, I wrote an in-depth post on the Iraqi dinar revalue scam. The “RV” is a fraudulent investment that shills worthless (yet extremely expensive) Iraqi currency based on the vain hope that the US Government/IMF/Globalist Controllers will magically revalue it back to its Saddam-era value of over $3 to the dinar �" or even more. The theory is that revaluing would make the scam victims who hold millions of dinars rich, ushering in a more equal and just society. Or something.

Researching the dinar scam took me on a number of entertaining tangents that weren’t germane to the initial blog post, but were interesting all the same. One was a scam with the same mountains of gibberish, the same promises of prosperity and the same stalling when said prosperity fails to appear.

It’s called NESARA, and one might see it as the forerunner to the RV scam. Both have a dense, complex mythology, but in the end are based on getting money from people in exchange for a piece of the vast riches that are coming ANY DAY NOW!! NESARA blends new age hokum, alien mythology, sovereign citizen nonsense, prosperity gospel and 9/11 trutherism to create a dense web of weirdness. And true to form with most conspiracy theories, it’s based on a real thing, but taken in a direction far from what that thing actually is.

In the real world, NESARA stood for “National Economic Security and Recovery Act.” It’s a set of monetary reforms and tax law restructuring written by engineer and teacher Harvey Francis Barnard in the 1980’s, and printed in his book Draining the Swamp. Barnard imagined a massively overhauled US financial system that would abolish the Federal Reserve, ban interest on compound loans, forgive consumer debt, re-peg the dollar to the gold standard and remove the current income tax in favor of a national sales tax. This would revitalize our economy, double our standard of living and free people from the burden of debt, which Barnard considered to be the greatest of all social ills.

Barnard printed 1,000 copies of his proposal and sent them to every member of Congress, believing it would quickly be passed into law. It was not, and has never even been introduced into any legislative session. After about a decade of trying, Barnard published the text online for free in the public domain.

Of course, this isn’t the NESARA that conspiracy theorists have latched on to.

When Barnard made NESARA freely available in 2000, it became an instant hit with the nascent internet conspiracy movement. One of the people who became enraptured was Shaini Goodwin, herself a victim of a scam called the Omega Trust. Omega was a scheme put together by grifter Clyde Hood, selling “prime European bank notes” repackaged as “Omega Units.” One Unit could be bought for as little as $100 and return a profit of up 12 million dollars after it “rolled over.” Incidentally, these are the same ludicrous returns promised by the Iraqi dinar scam.

Needless to say, none of the gibberish Hood invented actually existed, and by 2000, the Federal government was closing in on him and his scheme. In the meantime, Hood's followers were getting desperate for information on their prosperity units. So into this money-shaped hole stepped Shaini Goodwin, an Omega “investor” with a complex personal history of bankruptcies, unpaid taxes (owing to the IRS being an illegal scheme) and New Age beliefs. Goodwin didn’t just sink money into Omega, she became its head cheerleader, propaganda minister and chief evangelist.

Under the screen name “Dove of Oneness” she posted an unstoppable flow of Omega updates, promising investors that their “deliveries” would be happening any time. When they didn’t, she stalled with pronouncements of a conspiracy, a gag order, mysterious deaths and infighting at the highest levels of global control. She pitched a vision of the world where heroic “White Knights” were battling a “dark cabal” of banksters, with Omega and prosperity for all hanging in the balance. Again, almost exactly the same gibberish as the dinar scam.

Finally, in late 2000, Omega crumbled and Hood pled guilty to numerous federal indictments, going to prison for 12 years. Sure enough, Goodwin had already shifted the subject of her news updates. She claimed Omega had been sunk by the same cabal keeping down another prosperity law, one that would usher in peace, wealth and power for the people who’d been kept down for so long.

It was NESARA. And, according to the Dove of Oneness, it had been passed in secret in 2000 by Bill Clinton, with a gag order promising death to anyone who spoke publicly of it. Dove’s version of Harvey Barnard’s pie-in-the-sky economic proposal was much weirder than the original, with all debt being cancelled out, new money being printed, universal peace being declared, taxes being outlawed and prosperity packets being given to all. Prayers were needed to make the law public �" and, naturally, donations to the Dove would help greatly as well.

For much of 2001, Barnard and Dove sparred over NESARA, with Dove claiming Barnard was part of the cabal and Barnard claiming Dove was a deluded scam artist. Then, on September 11th, 2001, shortly after the worst attack on American soil, Dove posted what became her signature message:

"The three targets today were ALL connected to NESARA and the banking changes. I just learned that at 9:00 a.m. in New York this morning, there was an IMPORTANT banking activity set to be activated in the IMF international banking computer center in the World Trade Center! This was obviously WHY the World Trade Center was attacked TODAY at just before and after 9:00 a.m.! [...] The orders for these plane attacks came from U.S. citizens who are trying to stop our deliveries/funding and NESARA."

Dove’s readership skyrocketed, and soon she had as many as 15,000 victims sending money to a drop box with her name on it. None of the people paying her for information on NESARA saw her as anything other than a high-level insider with a “special status” as a sovereign citizen, leading the White Knights in a battle against the dark forces. She was none of these things, but it didn’t matter. The money came pouring in from desperate people looking for someone, anyone, to lead them out of financial darkness. If exposing NESARA and making its prosperity public would do the trick, so be it.

The next few years were busy for the Dove of Oneness. She got a business license. She begged for money. She did radio interviews about NESARA. She begged for money. She dolled out a bizarre mythology involving false flag attacks, the Illuminati, a flying saucer fleet, various aliens and astral planes. She begged for money. She orchestrated a letter writing campaign to the Supreme Court demanding “NESARA Now!” She bought rolling mobile billboards and had them drive around Washington proclaiming the virtue of NESARA. And she begged for money.

During the bulk of the Bush years, Dove’s updates, warnings and pleas for support kept coming. Even after 2004, when Seattle reporter Sean Robertson blew the lid off Dove’s history and penchant for making it up as she went along, the scam prospered. NESARA had never been passed and never would be passed, but still, the mythology grew, becoming so thick with nonsense that it’s almost impossible to summarize.

Just like the dinar RV, NESARA prosperity was always just about to happen, and always held up by an unforeseen delay or element of the conspiracy. Dove’s readership was small but vocal, and with the help of a few acolytes, she turned NESARA into a lucrative moneymaking scheme �" doing so even after its creator died in 2005.

Then, just like Omega before it, the complaints started coming. In 2007, Dove was investigated by the IRS and state of Washington for defrauding an elderly woman in San Francisco of “at least” $10,000. Other complaints were filed. NESARA began to fade away as other scams rose up to take its place.

Finally, in 2010, still fighting liens from the IRS and living in her mother’s mobile home, Shaini Goodwin passed from this earthly plane, more or less ending the NESARA scam. It still lives on in scattered blog postings, but all most the truest of believers have moved on. Dove's website went down, and most of the postings and articles about NESARA are buried in dark corners of the internet wayback machine.

The lesson I took from all of this is that, to paraphrase Led Zeppelin, the scam remains the same. Clyde Hood died in prison in 2012, and Goodwin two years before, but their work lives on. Though Omega, NESARA and the RV are different in their contexts, they’re exactly alike in what they seek to do: trade small amounts of money now for vast amounts of money later. Of course, “later” never comes, but through constant shilling, fake updates and proselytizing, hope stays alive. It will be the same with whatever scam takes the place of the dinar, and whatever comes after that, and after that. There’s always going to be someone offering something for nothing, and there are always going to be eager to grab hold of that nothing, even if it costs them everything.

The final sentence of the internet posting announcing Shaini Goodwin’s death says as much in far fewer words:

“[I]nvestors can still go to goldfornesara@verizon.net for a chance to invest in the very special trades that Shaini Goodwin set up, delivering more than favorable returns. All contacts are still viable.”