Read on Twitter
Looking at far-right appropriations of the Templars today and while I can find the KKK, Franco, and the Nazis all using crusade imagery and, in the latter's case, the Teutonic Knights, there's surprisingly little use of the Templars by the far-right before c.1980.
While the KKK sometimes claimed descent from chivalric orders, which may have been a reference to the military orders, they don't seem to have adopted them directly. The Nazis, though, did make use of the memory of the Teutonic Knights, particularly in the Eastern Front.
Franco and his supporters in the church did present him as a crusader, but I've yet to find much evidence of them using the military orders. The mural below, in Spain's Valley of the Fallen, is called The Crusaders of the 20th Century.
Yet if you look at far-right imagery now, it's full of Templars, often reusing stills from films like Kingdom of Heaven, Arn, or Ironclad. I think the change happens c.1980, when books like Holy Blood and the Holy Grail create a new wave of interest in the Templars.
The portrayal of these pseudo-histories of the Templars as a secret shadowy group still around today plays into far-right fantasies that they have all the power and they're just waiting to strike (cf. QAnon).
This idea of secret powerbrokers can also lead to darker pseudo-histories, ones that promote ideas of a New World Order, the Illuminati, and antisemitic fantasies of Jewish control. "If the Templars are still there in hiding, who else might be out there?"
Throwaway books that talk about patently false or ridiculous theories, like the Templars secretly living in America or orchestrating the French Revolution, aren't as harmless as some may think.
