For the prophet and the revolutionary alike, the time is always now. Gird up your loins brave heroes, and show your true faith! The signs portend that The Last World Emperor is rising to do battle against the AntiChrist. The time is always now, but in that flat circle of iterative history, no bad idea is really new under the Black Sun—it's just been engineered to go more viral. Our guest today is history professor Thomas Lecaque, who writes about how medieval ethnonationalist holy war is woven into hugely popular video games, right-wing political rhetoric, and even how assault weapons are marketed. Julian talks with him about the Hobbit-fetish of new Italian PM and heir to Mussolini, Giorgia Meloni, as well as the American right’s obsession with the Templar Knights, and the troubling midterm election trend of open White Christian Nationalism. For TWIC, Matthew muses on the overlaps between conspirituality and neo-fascism, but first Derek reports on the battle between testicular cuisine and buttery coffee. Show NotesManclan Episode 1: Liver King vs the Soy Boys Cornell Expert Warns Against Megadosing VitaminsDietary Supplements Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
You can stay up to date with us on most of our social media channels, which Twitter independently we are all on, and they are in the show notes at the bottom now.
You can see all of our handles there.
We were on Instagram, we are at Conspiripod, but Once again, we were taken off of Instagram and we're not sure why, so Matthew's going to talk about that in a moment.
But we are definitely at Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for $5 a month, you can help support us and keep us editorially independent.
And what else, Matthew?
Well, Patreon is very cool.
We've got a lot of things going on there.
And I think more, to be honest, coming up in the future, some more concentrated attention there.
Because, you know, to be honest, it's hard to believe just how cravenly bad meta is.
In like the lazy way and in the predatory way, in terms of how it commands our attention.
I mean, they've deleted our account, no reason given, no customer service, no opportunity to retrieve the IP of about 1,500 posts, which I suppose we should have backed up somewhere else.
But also that page warehoused tens of thousands of comments, often long, And detailed and nuanced and sensitive and all of that labor and effort and emotional engagement is just meaningless to the people who make money off of those interactions.
So, you know, it's little wonder that that conspirituality as a social movement took off as a fever dream on these platforms because the tech is like geared at emotional and labor exploitation.
So that's the end of my rant.
Well, geez, I mean, I guess we've we've joined the ranks of the of the censored martyrs now, right?
We can drive people into our siloed space where they can support us free from the from the overreach of big tech.
I mean, here's the problem with big tech.
It's built incredibly, incredibly effectively to scale in terms of reach and profits, but not in terms of like actually in any kind of customer service.
Yeah, and I'll just add that I had a few conversations ongoing in the Instagram DMs about people with shows I wanted to pursue, and then it was just gone.
So if you happen to hear this, please come over to Conspiripod, DM us there, I'll get back to you.
Or again, Twitter DMs are open for all of us, I believe, so you can always contact us there.
Yeah, and we can receive messages at Patreon.
And you know, now that we've submitted the final version of the book after all of the endless revisions, this is part of why we're going, huh, how do we now make space for perhaps another level of engagement with people who support us?
So that's coming up.
Conspiracuality 124.
No bad idea ever dies with Thomas LeCocq.
For the prophet and the revolutionary alike, the time is always now.
Gird up your loins, brave heroes, and show your true faith.
The signs portend that the last world emperor is rising up to do battle against the Antichrist.
The time is always now.
But in that flat circle of iterative history, no bad idea is really new under the black sun.
It's just been engineered to go more viral.
Our guest today is history professor Thomas Leacock, who writes about how medieval ethno-nationalist holy war is woven into hugely popular video games, as well as right-wing political rhetoric, and even how assault weapons are marketed.
I talked with him about the Hobbit fetish.
Yes, that's right.
Hobbit fetish of new Italian prime minister and heir to Mussolini, Giorgio Maloney, as well as the American rights obsession with the Templar Knights, And the troubling midterm election trend of open white Christian nationalism.
For This Week in Conspirituality, Matthew muses on the overlaps between conspirituality and neo-fascism.
But first, Derek reports for us on the battle between testicular cuisine and buttery coffee.
Liver King here, setting world records today.
Nobody in the history of capsule swallowing has ever had 30 capsules of King down the hatch.
See if you can take 30 capsules of King all in one setting.
And if you can do 31, you're more manly than Liver King.
And how much you want to bet you can't do it?
Here we go.
As Liver King over there, Said he could only take 30 pills.
I was a little surprised because this is 50, including a bunch of organs.
More manly, that's what you said, right, Liver King?
There we go.
That was 50.
I see you're 30.
I see you're 31.
Raise you to 50, Liver King.
Okay, I'm really sorry to open like that.
But listening to Dave Asprey try to outman Liver King is pretty special.
We have to shout out to Mallory DeMille for finding that one for us.
She has an awesome Twitter feed at this underscore is underscore Mallory where she gathers a ton of hot garbage like this.
So thank you, Mallory.
And hold on a second.
Was that unedited that Dave Asprey basically like was speaking and then he shoved 50 pills in his mouth and swallowed them and then continued speaking like a second later?
Okay, no.
So I did edit out actually the pain of having to watch Liver King and Dave Asprey do it.
And it did take Dave Asprey a number of seconds longer than Liver King.
So as much as he's trying to be the man there, it actually took him two sips of water compared to Liver King's one sip.
So this is really important information here that I deleted and I know it.
But we are an audio format and I didn't want to make people hear, and I have misophonia, so I didn't want to have people hear the throat swallowing sounds that I had to endure while cutting that.
You hate this whole podcast actually, Derek.
Every single clip that we do, how do you even manage?
I have so much respect for Mallory, honestly, for being able to source the amount of videos and garbage that she does, because I know from the limited number that I do, how hard it is.
So, mad props there.
I also want to recommend the new QAnon Anonymous series, Man Clan.
Their first episode dropped, and they did a deep dive into Liver King.
We've covered them before, but they really go into it, which I highly recommend checking that out.
Now, here's the thing.
In the obnoxious and dangerous world of conspiritualists, Liver King almost seems quaint and benign, if not cartoonish.
Like we shared recently him going to the Queen's death and being lined up and doing Liver King, right?
It's almost funny.
I mean, I laugh at it.
I mean, he's so out there, you almost think he's more of an aside.
But as QAnon Anonymous reported, his supplements business, Ancestral Supplements, brings in millions of dollars in revenue.
And another supplements company called The Fittest, and I think he owns it, but I can't be sure because there's no actual biographical information on that site, but it does feature him on its site and it has a number of Liver King branded bars and pills.
So, I don't know if he's just an affiliate or he has ownership, but there's a lot going on behind the scenes there.
And either way, like Bulletproof Dave Asprey, Liver King is monetizing the idea that you need pills to optimize and thrive.
Whereas the Bulletproof store sells rather benign-sounding schwag like Stress Gummies and Keto Prime, the pill Liver King is pimping at the beginning of that video called King is made of bovine testicle, heart, liver, and bone marrow.
And special guest, I am so happy.
Look, we criticize people and sometimes they actually live up to it and come on, so here we have Liver King himself reading the marketing copy for us.
Thank you, primals!
Testicles have been on the menu for natives, warriors, gladiators, and Olympians of all ages since the beginning of recorded history.
The eating of testes was believed to contain substances that enhance vigor, vitality, and virility.
Thank you.
Thank you, Brian.
That was, that was so good.
I'm so glad you could stop by to the studio for a moment, but notice in the marketing copy, the believed to, because that hasn't changed since the quote, beginning of recorded history.
So it is ancient.
It is ancient.
That particular move.
One of my favorite texts when I was studying religion was the Epic of Gilgamesh, and I don't remember him chowing down on Humbaba's testicles.
But, you know, Liver King and his team, they're probably expert archaeologists as well as nutritionists, so I'm going to take their word for it.
That said, their like equals like algorithm there of the testicles mean virility, that's the same sort of magical thinking that informed homeopathy, for example.
So, you see it very often, right?
This idea that drinking bee juice will help your blood.
I mean, sometimes the mechanisms are real, but there's always this idea, well, if it's out there, it must be in here.
The walnut looks like your brain.
Eating walnuts is good for your brain.
As above, so below.
What it looks like is what it is.
Exactly.
Root vegetables are great for grounding.
Now, our ancestors really likely did eat organs, and they did leave the less nutrient-dense muscle for scavengers.
You know, Daniel Lieberman's work at Harvard goes into that.
So, many mammals today even begin eating the organs of their prey.
If you follow NatureIsMetal on Instagram, you're going to see that up close and personal.
And if you don't have a strong stomach, don't follow that feed.
And I'll also say that only eating muscle and throwing out organs is a serious waste of resources.
I've never eaten testicles, but liver, tripe, and other organs can be very tasty and they're definitely nutritious.
But it's... Yeah, not everyone agrees.
Tasty?
I don't know.
Liver?
Yeah, no, this is good.
If you soak it in milk for a while, it takes out some of the... Yeah.
Well, I have a Thai wife, and her mother grew up literally in the jungles, and they have to do things with food that we don't really have to think about in America.
And that has taught me a lot.
You'll see the whole anti-insect movement in the wellness industry on the far right.
Two billion people on the planet eat insects.
Like, way early, so that's more what I'm getting at there.
But it's still a huge leap of the imagination to go from nutrient-dense to, I'm more of a man because I eat cow testicles.
Or as this segment is really about, I can swallow more supplement pills than you can.
Now, wouldn't you be more of a cow testicle because you ate cow testicles?
The whole supplement contest thing feels like the bro science version of Nathan's hot dog eating contest on Coney Island, right?
Like, so Joey Chestnut eats 70 plus hot dogs in 10 minutes or something like that.
But they want it to be healthy.
They want to conspicuously consume everything that is good and virtuous.
But, you know, this is supplements.
I think we should also remember that Lion King is legitimately doing a flavor of Raw.
What did I call him?
Lion King.
Oh, Lion King.
You know, we've got the shorthand in our script that just says LK.
Well, I think, what do you think he'd feel about that?
He'd actually probably, he might steal it now.
Probably, yeah.
It might be some, it might be some trademark problems with Disney though.
Right.
I mean, he is, you're talking about supplements, but we have to tell our listeners that he is doing a form of raw mukbang in a lot of videos.
He's actually eating raw liver and testicles and so on.
So the capsules provide a kind of normie version of that experience, I think.
Well, that's where he's making the money, right?
He's actually freeze-drying and then putting the capsules in pill form so that, yeah, maybe you're not going to be able to eat it yourself, but at least you'll get the nutrients.
That's how he's making, again, millions of dollars doing that.
But here's the thing.
Supplements are exactly what they say they are.
They supplement part of your diet to provide minerals and vitamins that your body is lacking.
I take two supplements a day.
I take a B12 and a lysine because I've dealt with canker sores my entire life, and studies are mixed on whether or not B12 and lysine help.
I decided it was worth trying.
Anecdotally, I experience way fewer canker sores when I'm taking those supplements, so apparently my body can use it.
But that's not the type of supplements that we're talking about here.
And once again, An expert who studies this for a living and not someone trying to get you on their downline has found that over-supplementation can be dangerous.
This happens over and over again.
You see these studies come out, and this one is by Ru Hai, who's a professor in the Department of Food Science at Cornell University, and she found that megadosing single-nutrient supplements of multivitamins can have negative effects.
Especially when you're dealing with vitamins A, B6, C, and D. And the reason that many multivitamins generally don't pose a threat is because our bodies excrete excess vitamins and minerals.
So they're probably not going to harm you.
But you're also paying for something that you're literally going to piss away.
We found that both water-soluble and fat-soluble vitamins, that's vitamins either stored in your tissues or stored in fat, can be toxic at higher doses.
And so, you have vitamin C, you know, famously or infamously championed by Linus Pauling, for example.
That can lead to diarrhea, nausea, immune function problems, and GI issues above 90 mg for men and 75 mg for women.
But if you buy Bulletproof's Immune Complex, you're getting 1,000 mg of vitamin C.
Now, yeah.
Now, megadosing C is pretty common when you start feeling ill, and there are mixed results in that.
There could actually be some efficacy for that very short period of time, but again, that's not how Asprey is marketing the supplement.
Yeah, and so of course then you get into this weird thing with these kinds of issues where The supplement you're taking to try to boost your immune system makes you feel really really sick, and then because it makes you feel really really sick, that's probably a healing cleansing response, right?
Yeah, that's kind of the circular illogic that's used.
You know, Asprey markets it as intended for daily use as a powerful immune support.
It's even on his top 10 supplements that everyone should take list along with vitamins A and D, which I flag, which are on Huy's list of dangers for toxicity.
She also notes that hypervitaminosis A, which is excess vitamin A in your body, can even lead to coma or death.
Um, but you know, I will say this, at least the Bulletproof article was written and reviewed by doctors, you know, of course.
Oh, great.
Oh no, wait, it was written.
It was written by a former rugby player and it was, it was reviewed by a naturopath.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Are we discriminating against rugby players?
He could have been a doctor who used to play rugby.
Like I grew up playing rugby.
Okay.
I did check his bio and I didn't see any doctor there.
And he leads with former rugby player as his credentials.
Listen, David Icke was a really good soccer player and now look at him.
He's a really, really good conspiracy theorist.
I just got Gaia's new Alien Civilization promo.
I'm very excited to dive into that next.
That's awesome.
Now, I linked to the article and the study in the show notes if you want to read about the other problems with megadosing vitamins.
And if you're wondering about ancestral supplements, yeah, there's plenty of megadosing vitamin A as well as iron there, but remember, their supplements are all, as I mentioned, dried organs in pill form.
I'm not surprised that these guys would be jumping on this.
The U.S.
dietary supplements market was worth $45.9 billion in 2021.
$45.9 billion in 2021.
The global market is worth $151.9 billion and it's projected to grow 8.9% every year
until at least 2030, which is where that particular study ended.
And you know that Liver King, Asprey, and a whole host of other influencers
are trying to capture as much of that revenue as possible.
$49 billion in the U.S., and the global market is $151.9 billion.
Now, so you say you take B12 and lysine, it's been helpful for canker sores, there might be some benefit to vitamin C, but I mean, somebody would be able to run the numbers and say, okay, out of that $45 billion, X Billion dollars might be spent with some kind of efficacy.
Somebody would be able to do that, right?
And it would probably be a really low number.
Yes, I would imagine it'd be low.
It'd be hard to get an exact number just because you're talking about things that people can pick up at Whole Foods or at their grocery store and they don't ever have to report.
Right.
So I think that would be challenging to actually track.
Because people will take You know, the B-complex vitamins that I take for other reasons, right?
I don't take a complex, actually.
I take a specific B12, but people will buy that as part of a protocol that they're doing for a number of reasons, whereas I do it specifically to target something.
So, that's going to be really hard to assess.
I guess what I'm getting at is I would love to see somebody run the numbers on what is the non-essential or perhaps even useless portion of that $45.9 billion that is just sort of being spent and pissed out by people.
And how does that compare to projects that would be geared towards solving food desert crises?
Do you know what I mean?
Sort of pseudo food-based economy that is spending so much money on something that is absolutely aspirational and potentially absolutely useless.
And it would just be, it would be amazing to, very depressing to see, but I think also maybe effective to see how that compares to what, you know, actual food needs are for people who are living in poverty in the States.
There's an amazing article, the headline on the Washington Post the other day, I was also on Religion News Service, about an organization, a Christian organization, that's spending $100 million in advertising trying to capture Jesus' brand.
Now, specifically, I actually kind of like their approach.
They're more of the multiracial, multiethnic, pro-LGBTQ sort of Jesus, right?
Now, Jesus has had many incarnations, but they're spending specifically $100 million buying billboards and getting into advertising.
And I shared that with a friend and she was like, wouldn't it be amazing if they put that towards building housing?
Yeah, wouldn't it be amazing if they consulted with Jesus on how to use that money?
Exactly, exactly.
So that seems like we spend a lot of money on things that could be useful for a broad number of people, but then we get sucked into these down lines where we just waste money and resources.
Well, and in terms of what you're asking, Matthew, it's even more difficult than that because, you know, just two or three years ago, the study came out that reviewed like many, many, many different supplements and said that not only were like you're saying, okay, let's look at these supplements and how many of them actually have been proven to work and how many of them are actually helping people and how much of it is just, it's just But it's even worse than that because there's a pseudo-scientific positioning that they do around, Hey, we're giving you this special nutrient that we've sourced in this specific way.
And it's this potency and it's this many milligrams.
And what they found is that with the vast majority of the supplements, they didn't have what they claimed to have in them.
It wasn't, if they did have it, it wasn't, it wasn't at any kind of like reliable potency level.
Sometimes it was expired and you know, just not didn't have any activity.
In other words, it's homeopathy all the way down.
Things aren't even actually there.
Yeah, it's like herbs are better than homeopathy because at least that's an active ingredient, but then if you're in an unregulated industry where you're just basically doing a bunch of snake oil tap dancing, it's like, yeah, even though you're providing a study that claims to show that this thing is effective, you don't even know that you're getting the thing.
So, I mean, I just want to say that Derek, you're doing great work continuing to follow how this is developing.
I think we're in a phase now where There's a predictable set of shady monetization strategies that are on the conspiritualist menu, right?
They've gotten this huge audience through the opportunism of the pandemic.
And now they're just like, all right, how do we monetize?
They've been networked for a couple of years now into digital affiliate marketing deals.
And of course, during the pandemic, it was the perfect move to just say, hey, let's do online conferences.
Let's sell information products, write online courses and take advantage that way.
But I've also noticed that lately, Jordan Peterson and Luke Story are running ads for turning your money into gold, which of course is the only reliable currency once the globalist bankers enact their evil plans.
You don't want to have your money in the bank, right?
We've reported on Christiane Northrup, and actually it was the Luke Story episode with her that we're going to talk about another time, where I started really seeing like, wow, there's a lot of ads for gold on here.
She, Northrup, has been shilling a structured water company alongside, of course, her perennial dodgy lady supplements.
Mickey Willis has this Zelenko immunity pills.
These Zelenko immunity pills, which are going to protect you against the next plandemic, which he doesn't believe is really real.
Like how you make sense of that shit, I don't know.
But we're going to talk about how nothing needs to make sense in a little bit.
And Zelenko is guiding him from the great beyond, so there's wisdom coming.
That's right.
We don't know.
We don't know what wisdom there is.
Yeah, so the neo-fascist conspiritualists are now channeling dead Jews in order to talk about it.
It's like, wow!
Dead Jewish doctors, right, yeah.
But of course, with supplements, they're taking a page from the playbook of people like Rogan and Orbi Marcus, but even more so from their true patron saint, who is Alex Jones.
Make your audience terrified and angry about completely made-up nonsense, and then sell them the unregulated pseudoscience solution to their fears and their rage.
So, Jones made a ton of money that way.
An economist testifying at the recent trial for defamation estimated that Jones' net worth was between $135 million and $270 million.
But as the world found out yesterday at his latest Sandy Hook related defamation trial, he's been ordered to pay $965 million in damages.
So, you know, perhaps we should wish our conspiritualists all the success in the world in building their own legal damages nest egg, because it does turn out that even in America, there's a small glimmer of light, the bill eventually comes due on certain kinds of toxic misinformation.
Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes.
Just on Lion King for a moment, I mean Liver King, I think it's important to point out that this like equals like principle is disguised here, or there's something going on here with him naming his capsule after himself.
Because I think if we were all a little bit less repressed, we could think freely about just eating raw Liver King himself.
Even his testicles.
Even his testicles.
But I was thinking just walking up and chomping on a tricep, although that's not organ meat.
Like, you have to get deeper underneath the muscle armor, and maybe that's what the abs are about.
He's protecting his organ meat.
But with the capsules, we can imagine surplus liver king, kind of like surplus labor in a Marxist sense, scraped off his body for packaging and ingestion.
But I also want to just say that from the point of view of Christian theology, especially Catholic, a little bit more seriously here, the Lion King supplement pitch is really a form of Eucharist, actually.
This is my body and blood, given up for your food and drink.
And there's kind of a bypassy aspect here because the specter of vulnerability and death that we get in the Eucharist are just completely scrubbed from that and every other IG feed.
Because, like, all of these guys really want the candy, I think, of spirituality.
They want the symbols, the magic, the incantations.
None of them really want the death part unless they're doing the killing.
Okay, here's what I've got for this week in conspirituality.
Lion King, I mean Liver King, is pulling on some very classic fascist tropes.
Big time hetero virility, physical culture as moral virtue and spiritual imperative, anti-modernity, paranoia about impurities.
It doesn't really get more blood and soil than eating raw organ meat while showing off your arsenal of AR weapons.
And on ManClan that Derek referenced with Annie Kelly and Julian Field, they pointed out that he keeps his politics obscure, and that probably helps with his mainstream appeal, but you can tell that his all-meat farts waft to the right.
And this connects back to our topic from last week, which is our continuing exploration of the links between conspirituality and fascism.
in both structural and sociological terms.
So, you know, we've resurrected this week in conspirituality, but what I'm really doing now is kind of like
this century in conspirituality for this bit.
And for new listeners, and maybe to review for long timers, the lowdown is that we have not seen
a single conspirituality influencer track towards the political left.
Even if they are coming from discourses and values that we might naturally frame in those terms.
Holism, multiculturalism, religious openness, and ecological commitment.
Every last one of them tracks towards the right on a spectrum that runs from medical libertarianism
To sovereign citizen crypto bro science, to anti-intellectual faux populism, to an outright admiration for fascist movements and leaders, including the leader playing the role of primo lady boss at the moment, Georgia Maloney.
Yeah, absolutely.
And then there's also like this odd combination of what I used to call know-nothing non-dualism from the mouth of Charles Eisenstein.
You'll remember that it wants current ideas and the political players who are enacting them to exist in this kind of splendid idealist void, like an ahistorical, just like, just ideas and just questions and just a vision for the future.
Like who could argue with a more beautiful world that we know is possible?
You know, through this particular angle.
And it's also like a course in miracles.
Like, everything I see only has the meaning my mind has made of it.
And this, I found on social media since Giorgio Meloni was elected, as expressing itself via a kind of mocking of anyone who finds the specific ingredients of fascist discourse alarming.
Whether that comes from Meloni, or Bonn, or Trump, or Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Like, what?
You know, like I guess becoming a mother makes me a fascist too?
Or loving your God and your country and your family?
Or wanting to preserve your cultural heritage?
Oh boy, the snow boy, excuse me, the soy boy snowflake lefties are just triggered by any kind of wholesome and normal values, right?
They want to cancel all of that.
Right, so here are the basic overlaps, I think, between the affects, the ideological commitments, and the leadership ideals that are shared by conspirituality and fascism.
What we can call the ancient authenticity fallacy, looking towards a golden age, looking towards exalted patriarchs with whom we can have mystical communion.
Secondly, the purification fantasy.
Next would be apocalypticism.
Thomas Lecoq is going to be talking about that quite a bit in the next interview segment.
This feeling that everything has to happen now, everything is critical, everything must be successful immediately, or else everything will end very badly.
Then we have this idea that the body is the microcosm of the nation.
And then in leadership terms, the charismatic and authoritarian style is de rigueur, and mesmerism is the primary communication tool.
People going into group trance states, generally led by the leader who can't stop talking.
And this also begins to explain the overlaps in just sort of cultic organization principles between You know, groups like 3HO or Kundalini Yoga and the MAGA movement and how they are run.
And, you know, the corollary to charismatic and authoritarian leadership is that followers are often in the mode of devotion or even bootlicking.
And this means that all of the social attachments are vertical and disorganized because the bonds flip between love and terror.
So this is territory that we've covered, I think.
But I think, additionally, all of this goes beyond themes and obsessions and into the realm of what I just have to call the realm of being, or whether, you know, one is living in a coherent universe, whether one cares about things like basic communication and sense, you know, let alone science and public policy.
And to get at what I'm talking about, I want to paraphrase some questions that really earnest people, I would say normies, ask us about both conspiritualists and fascists.
This is not a word that I'm using in an insulting way.
I'm this way myself.
I can't understand the answer to this question, but I'm working at it.
These questions rhyme, and that's not accidental.
What I mean by Normie is really the person who believes that rational argument in the marketplace of ideas will set matters straight and steer everyone towards sanity.
When they're thinking about conspiritualists, Normies will ask, do they truly believe what they are saying and selling?
And we got that question so often that we had to spend a number of careful pages on it in our book.
And then of fascists, Normies ask, in a similar mode, do they understand their contradictions?
Do they know that they're lying?
Do they care that they're using bigoted or anti-Semitic rhetoric?
And the unfortunate answer, dear Normies, is that you are at a disadvantage simply by asking these questions.
You are bringing butter knives to a gunfight because neither conspiritualists nor fascists understand or they may not care about your reasonable but unenlightened concerns for meaning and communicability.
And the reason is simple, because The questions are questions of democracy.
They're questions of how we make sense together as a society, and conspirituality and fascism are both disciplines that avoid democratic knowledge production at all costs.
Neither of these movements have any interest in democracy or making sense, even internally, even amongst themselves.
You know, Matthew, this is something I've really been grappling with and we've been discussing internally, so I guess we're sort of in that normie camp to some extent, but we're really trying to make progress on understanding this.
One thing I notice is that the right-wing, pro-McCandis in general, are playing exactly this game right now, more than ever.
One of the Steve Bannon clips from his radio show that's been circulated recently Has him talking about winning elections via this new subversion of democracy by a hundred seats and then ruling for a hundred years.
Coming to power and then holding onto it by any means necessary is the singular priority.
Not argumentation, not facts, not making sense in any other coherent way.
There's no attempt to construct and defend any earnest political platform.
It just seems like there are these situational communication
strategies that hit the right faux populist, faux patriotic, neo-fascist notes, and then distort
these incendiary culture war topics to rile up the low information voters.
So much so that I find it really disorienting and overwhelming.
They're continuously accusing Democrats of doing exactly the thing that they're doing,
or people on the left in general, of doing what they're doing.
You're the authoritarians.
You're taking away our freedoms.
You don't care about children.
You're putting democracy in danger.
And the thing is that thinking about this more, it's like, you know, actually the right wing ecosystem of talk radio
and Fox News has been gradually acclimating half of the country
like the proverbial frog in the slowly boiling cooking pot to this kind of fact free, moral panic, brutalist landscape
since Reagan vetoed the Fairness Doctrine in 87.
And we're now, I think, in the next wave of this pure manipulative propaganda strategy.
And of course, what then do they lead with?
Well, you can't trust the mainstream media.
It's all liberal bias.
And George Soros is funding it via some kind of CCP, Chinese Communist Party propaganda machine, which again is insane because Soros spent most of his fortune helping to end Soviet communism and foster democracy through Europe.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense.
Right?
And so then they frame themselves as the scrappy independent rebels, which I talk about with Thomas Lukaku, and we'll hear in a moment, against the woke empire.
They're the ones who really have the power.
Meanwhile, they're all fucking funded by Charles Koch and Dennis Prager and the Wilkes Brothers and a short list of about 20 other uber conservative mega rich foundations that in turn were empowered by the 2010 Citizens United ruling coming down from the Supreme Court that said anyone can contribute as much money as they like to political campaigns.
I listened to the J.P.
Sears interview with Carrie Lake.
Oh yeah.
In good faith.
Because actually it was a different tact for him, which is pretty interesting.
It was, you know, more of the straight ahead pure J.P., not the comedy, because he had a politician and he's been now stumping for different politicians.
I think he did Dan Crenshaw recently.
And watching him, because Carrie Lake used to be a journalist, watching them take this very straight-ahead news approach to this information is actually in some ways the more egregious form of propaganda.
And it really does make me think that JP is going to run at some point in the future.
His JP reacts segments that, you know, he has his comedies, whatever comedy stuff, but then he has some of it reacts, but he also seems to be now crafting this more thoughtful character or caricature to present to the world.
And now that he's working with all these politicians, I can definitely foresee him and I'm sure others that we cover starting to move into local politics because that just seems to be the next step Yeah, and the incoherence that we see in their content now will just sort of translate into the political sphere.
And, you know, last week I quoted Sartre on fascists saying, they are amusing themselves,
for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly since he believes in
words.
So coming back to like lining the conspirituality movement that we've studied along with the
rise of global fascism that so many conspiritualists seem to be just hot for, it's not really that
satisfying to simply say that these two social phenomena are cut from the same cloth, I think.
I've been thinking about going farther.
And exploring a little bit how that cloth is woven, or I guess frayed is the better word, where it comes from and why.
Because I think both conspirituality and fascism become what they are because they share aspects of a particular kind of social and rhetorical breakdown.
So, let's just take conspirituality first.
It is basically a religious orientation towards reality.
Now, if you were in the Skeptical Movement or the New Atheist Movement in the 1990s, it would have been the thing to say that, well, you know, all religions are philosophically and cognitively flawed, and that the distance between, for instance, mainstream Catholicism and conspirituality or, you know, the flying spaghetti monster is actually negligible.
That all religious orientations contain the irrational seeds of their destruction.
And I think that's a really potent argument for people who are trying to disabuse themselves of perhaps an upbringing within a religious context, and they might find some relief from it.
But I also think that it can be a crude view.
Because religious beliefs are also nurtured within communities of practice and care that are variegated, they're diverse, they're politically nuanced, and the people within them often pay little attention to metaphysics.
Real religious community involves bake sales, meal delivery, lots of boring committee meetings.
It involves organizing the paperwork for your charities, raising money, keeping the heat on in the church, repairing the pipes of the pipe organ.
All of these mundane, worldly tasks that lots of different people have to cooperate on.
With the religious belief aspect of the organization, it kind of sometimes hovers in the background as a motto.
Somewhat in the same way that, like, here in Canada, there's a Canadian flag that's hanging in every Legion Hall while the veterans hang out drinking beer.
You missed one though, Matthew.
What?
Which is play.
And it's fresh in my mind because there's a new Netflix series, a six-part series on play with Idris Elba is narrating.
But they talk about all the different ways that people and then communities play.
Yeah.
And what I found fascinating by it is whether they were talking about going to Senegal for this combination wrestling boxing that's very big there, or whether they're in Mexico with the long-distance runners who want to appease the gods by kicking a ball for 50 miles while they run to try to bring the reins.
One thing that happens often is there is, or Sumo wrestler is another example, that there's conflict between communities, but because it's expressed in play, they all hang out afterwards.
And they understand that the greater good is whatever they're asking their deities for, but that there is going to be conflict on the way there, and they try to make it in a way that People could get hurt, but they're not trying to kill each other.
And because it's under this structure, it is very progressive play, and it's very healthy for the community and for the broader communities, not just the tribes that are involved.
So, from my perspective, even being an atheist, I find many good functions of religion and play, I think, is one of the most important.
Yeah, that's really interesting.
I wanted to say too, Matthew, that a lot of what you just described I think is really important and a really faithful description of the milieu in which religion sort of finds itself.
After separation of church and state.
Right.
After it's been sort of defanged from political power, and that's sort of the crisis we find ourselves in right now, which is probably where you're going next.
Well, I wanted to, yeah, go to looking at what is the political version of this normie religious activity?
You know, local politics.
is boring meetings that are run on Robert's rules.
There's a handbook for it and you've got to learn them.
And, you know, it's village election officials mailing out ballots and you go knocking door to door for your candidate who nobody really knows.
And these are all social enterprises that foster and nurture a series of complex and sometimes lifelong relationships.
So it's not fashy conventions and it's not Tulsi Gabbard launching a podcast.
It's not people wondering if Kanye West is going to run for president.
That's not really the root of political culture.
So, what are the steps along the path from normie religious experience and normie political culture to conspirituality and fascism?
This is how I'm thinking about it.
In both of these streams, we see intensifications.
Intensifications of many things that function together.
And pull the person out of boring relational experience into a kind of anxious, idealized, symbolic world in which people are no longer people, or workers, or family members.
They are the folk, or they are lightworkers.
Or they are healers, in which communication is no longer about getting things done, or arriving at consensus.
Communication is about transformation, or the exertion of power, or the blessing vibration of your mantra.
Politics is no longer the frustrating and compromised journey towards the least worst outcome.
Politics becomes a destiny, a spiritual mission, a revolutionary recovery of something perfect but now lost.
And so bypassing is the norm.
The talk is always about the great nation or the soul's destiny.
While millions of people die of a pandemic we could have mitigated, Because there is very little ground-level engagement.
No horizontal relationships.
With fascism, all attention flows to the top.
And with the online influencer, all attention flows into the virtual, monetized space.
So, this is a little bit theoretical, but the bottom line is, I'm trying to see how these things are paralleling cultures that move towards their logical endpoints.
And it seems to me that fascism comes out of politics, but it also expresses a kind of end of politics enacted by the authoritarian-minded who are just too bored of consensus-making and who want their power in immediate and abstract terms, while conspirituality comes out of and sometimes retains religious ways of being, but it's also It feels like it's the end of religious culture because it's enacted by those who don't have time to sing in the choir or run food drives.
It's enacted by people who want glory and mysticism without soup kitchens and healthcare.
You know, Derek, what you brought up about play, I think, is really interesting in light of what you just said, Matthew, because if fascism comes out of politics, but it's also the end of politics, It's like they want to win politics, right?
In the same way that apocalyptic religious figures want to win religion.
They want there to be an endpoint.
They want there to be like, okay, now this is the religion to end all religions.
This is the political leader to end all politics.
We don't want to play the game.
Of recycling, like, oh, we go through these cycles, somebody wins, somebody loses, we have peaceful transfer of power, oh, we struggle through our inner lives, we're religious people who know that we're imperfect, and we have this advent calendar, we have all the different things that we do, and that's okay, and then the old priest dies, and the new priest comes along, and it's not the end of the world as we know it, right?
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a good thread. Thanks for that.
I feel like it's a great lead-in to my interview.
The subject matter, as we know, is chilling.
But I have to say that Thomas Lecoq is a delight.
He's quick-witted, he has a fine turn of phrase.
We actually had a lot of fun, believe it or not, tracing the historical threads that meet in our strange political and cultural moment.
It turns out, of course, there's nothing new about political extremists or opportunists seeking to cast themselves as star characters in resurrected mythologies of conspiracy, racial conflict, divine genealogy, and glorious brutality.
But stick around to the end, though, because in addition to knowing your enemy in more detail, I think you'll find that the professor has an inspiring
faith in the arc of the moral universe and our role in bending it toward justice and real freedom.
I'm delighted to have Thomas Lecoq here with me today.
He's an associate professor of history at Grandview University in Des Moines, Iowa.
He's a prolific author and presenter of papers and public essays on apocalypticism, religious violence, and right-wing ideology in video games.
So good to have you here, Professor Lecoq.
Welcome.
Thank you so very much for having me.
You're welcome.
We have so much to talk about.
You know, I've listened to several interviews with you, and you often start by commenting wryly on how, you know, it's never a good sign when scholars of the Crusades become relevant in the present moment.
So, what I want to do is just start by asking you, for my edification and our listeners, what's the quick thumbnail sketch of religious apocalypticism in medieval history?
So, certainly in medieval Europe.
Apocalypticism is part of the foundation of Christianity as a religion, and you can't really pull the two apart, nor should you attempt to.
The Bible itself has a rich amount of apocalyptic thought contained within it.
Books like Daniel, which I think people often think of the prophet Daniel and these kind of adorable children's story of Daniel in the lion's den, which is Simply meant to be a proof text that he's beloved of God, so that when he's giving kind of prophetic accounts of dream visions, you understand that this is someone who is important on a spiritual level.
He has a vision of a statue made of four metals, what we call the Dream of Nebuchadnezzar, that ends up being this important explanation of the successive kingdoms, beginning with Babylon, for kingdoms that will come into the kind of present day.
This idea that there are Periods of political time that have an important sacral meaning to them, that there is a teleological endpoint to time, right?
When you get through the rest of Christian interpretations of the Bible, the Olivet Discourse that Jesus gives in the Synoptic Gospels talking about I think it's the disciples ask Jesus something to the effect of, um, what will be the sign of your coming in the end of the age?
And that there will be, uh, the answer is that there'll be wars and rumors of wars, that there'll be nations rising up against nations, there'll be earthquakes, famines, pestilence, uh, the nebulously described fearful events, all things that are desperately, you know, specific and so of course cannot be applied to literally all of human history.
And then you will get false prophets, apostasy, the persecution of the followers of Jesus, and the spread of Jesus' message around the globe.
And then you get the idea of the abomination of desolation standing where it does not belong, and a time of great tribulation before These apocalyptic sentiments.
The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.
This kind of very apocalyptic thing.
I think it's a quote from the Book of Isaiah.
If I'm remembering correctly, it's used elsewhere.
I think it's in Joel as a sign of the Day of the Lord, right?
And this comes back then in Revelation, the endpoint of the Christian Bible, which is the long-form dream vision of all of the things that will happen at the end.
This desperately apocalyptic vision and all of the horrors, angels breaking seals and sounding trumpets, and all of the things that lead to the Final Judgment.
So this is written into Christianity, and so you have this kind of rich biblical apparatus of events that when you know that there is both a beginning-to-time, Genesis, and an end-to-time, Revelation, you are constantly trying to figure out where you fall on that sacred timeline.
And since the signs that this is the end are earthquakes, famines, pestilences, and wars, which is just history... Yeah, this is the big Barnum statement of prophecy, right?
It could always apply to you, right?
It's like being a Sagittarius.
Yes!
Oh, God!
It's an amazing thing.
And so, generation after generation after generation, because Jesus of Nazareth is effectively preaching an imminent end to the world, which is why he is calling for reform.
People read apocalypticism into every age that they're in.
And there are periods of time when you hit kind of really high notes.
There's this, I'm going to call it biblical fan fiction, but not in a bad way, because there's a lot of fan fiction that gets grafted onto scripture that becomes the rich fabric of Christian understanding and belief.
It's called The Last World Emperor Legend, and it comes about during the conquest of the Islamicate that a Syrian monk under the name of Methodius, we call it the pseudo-Methodius because he's claiming the name of a dead saint as this prophet, And so just to interrupt you really quickly now we're into the medieval era.
Now we're into the medieval era.
So there's this There's a great fear when the forces of Islam begin overwhelming the Byzantine Empire, and all of this Christian territory is being conquered, about what this means on a spiritual level.
Not just a political and military level, but a spiritual level.
Because if the Romans, and then later on the Franks, are God's chosen people, if they're being defeated in battle and they're being conquered, What does this mean?
And so there's this legend that gets developed that we call the Last World Emperor Legend.
The idea that there will be a final, great Roman Emperor who will reunite the Roman Empire, who will defeat the forces of Islam in battle, who will arrive in Jerusalem and lay down his crown and scepter, and Jesus will descend, and they will together win the apocalypse.
It gets translated from Syriac into Greek and then into Latin.
It becomes very popular kind of throughout the broader Mediterranean.
You get another version that begins being written probably in the 10th, 11th century that claims to be a prophecy of the Tibertine Sybil, but which is coming out in this kind of 11th century already rich apocalyptic milieu that makes it a very specifically kind of Frankish and Latin mythology, so very specifically for Western Europe.
At a time when you're already having a kind of perhaps heightened apocalyptic interest.
The German Emperor Otto III seems to play around with this legend around the year 1000.
We can talk about kind of fears of the year 1000.
I think it's easier to talk about the fact that around 1033, there is a massive pilgrimage to Jerusalem, probably in anticipation of, you know, it's been a thousand years since the crucifixion.
Jesus is definitely going to return.
And he doesn't.
We'll see what happens in 2033.
Spoiler alert!
1033 is not the apocalypse.
Well, listen, we've got 11 years to go.
We'll try again then.
I am horrified to imagine how many things we'll have to talk and write about 11 years from now when we hit that part.
It's going to be terrible.
It's going to be absolutely terrible.
These are not things we want.
So, what strikes me is that you're talking about a period in which opportunistic royalty, kind of warlord type figures in that period are eager to cast themselves in the heroic role in these different mythological, these stories that capture the mythological imagination of the people, right?
Absolutely.
And it hits both levels because they are claiming it because it does things specifically for them politically.
I think some of them genuinely believe it as well.
I think we have to be careful about assuming that people cannot be fervent and opportunistic simultaneously.
I think it's both sometimes.
But the legend can go either way.
And so when Otto III begins claiming that he is wearing this mantle of the last world emperor, people who oppose his policies begin writing versions that more or less put him in the role of the Antichrist instead.
And this happens again during the First Crusade, where there are numerous people who seem to grab onto these apocalyptic trappings for why they should be king of Jerusalem, why they're going on crusade.
There's a man named Emiko of Floheim who seems to not only claim the mantle of the last world emperor, but uses it to whip up fervor for massive pogroms in the Rhineland.
Anti-Semitic violence is also at the heart of all of this.
It is the internal purging of Christendom before you wage holy war elsewhere in service to the apocalypse.
It's horrifying, but it's even more horrifying because we're going to keep coming back to this concept as we talk about groups like QAnon.
Nothing ever changes, you just change the language around it.
On the First Crusade, there are people who are using this rhetoric on their way to Jerusalem, but according to one of the Crusade Chronicles, one of the eyewitness accounts of the Crusade, a council of bishops and priests may have asked them not to wear it to take the crown of Jerusalem, because maybe you are this heroic figure, maybe you are humble and good and you are the next David and this is God's plan.
Maybe you are arrogant and violent and drenched in blood and lust for gold and you're the Antichrist instead.
And these legends can go back and forth.
The First Crusade is a great part for this, but these kinds of stories come back over and over and over.
My doctoral advisor, Jay Rubinstein, has a brilliant book called Nebuchadnezzar's Dream that's all about the 12th and 13th century apocalyptic rhetoric, imagery, and theology that goes into crusading.
This carries forth into the late medieval period, and for all that we love, periodization as a concept to help us Break down history into digestible chunks.
The Middle Ages don't magically end and everyone wakes up and is no longer an apocalyptic whack job.
Christopher Columbus, since we're recording this on...
What I hope someday will only be Indigenous Peoples' Day and not a celebration of a genocidal Genoese maniac.
Christopher Columbus writes an entire book of prophecies because he believes that he is also helping to bring about the apocalypse, that he is engaging in these steps, and that Ferdinand and Isabella will be these last world emperor figures, and he is kicking this off.
It doesn't die.
It just carries on in new and progressively weirder versions.
Napoleon III.
...has a circle of people who write a text about him as this kind of last great Catholic emperor that has echoes of the last world emperor legend.
No bad idea ever truly dies, we just throw new words on top of it.
You've written in this excellent journal, which I didn't know about until looking at the stuff that you sent me, Age of Revolutions, about an interesting data point, and I was looking through to see the exact reference, but there were so many articles, but you had this moment where you say that In a certain study, more people said that they'd learned about history from video games than from classes or textbooks.
And you've also done extensive analysis there on how ethno-nationalist holy war ideologies show up in the stories of these very popular video games or computer games, which Distort history or like kind of do weird mashups of history, right?
While purporting to situate themselves in historical periods and events, which the gamers then sort of perhaps implicitly identify with as relating to where we are today.
Talk about this for me a little bit.
What's your best example of this?
How do you see it influencing discourse?
Where did you get that data point about how people learn history?
So it's the American Historical Association did a survey on where people get their history from and video games are thankfully fairly low down the list and unfortunately not quite as low as actual college classes or actual history books written like academic history books.
And I think it's both somewhat depressing but also very interesting because We underestimate the importance of popular culture as the main driver for people's ideas about the past.
And I don't think that should be unexpected, but it means that in order to really be able to shape historical imagination, because that's what we're doing, right?
I mean, the best that we can hope for is to nudge it back on course.
Not everyone is going to take a history class, not everyone is going to pick up an academic monograph.
That's fine.
Well, and this is an interesting thing that I noticed in looking at your work, is that you will get flack from people who think, oh, you're talking about video games, you're such a serious intellectual, and you have a Reddit thread where people were upvoting this discussion about video games, as if that's just trivial.
And it's actually one of the things I really appreciate about your approach is that you see with this sort of broad lens the significance that can be in lots of different places.
Yeah, it's an upvoted Reddit threb about the way that slavery is erased from a video game about 18th century empire building.
You want the general gamer community to have to deal with the fact that these video games are not reflecting real history, and that the things that are being removed from them are really important things.
Talking about the colonization of the Caribbean without talking about plantations?
Right, talking about the Age of Revolutions while eliminating Haiti is a very particular rhetoric that is privileging white comfort.
over actual fact and history and human existence.
And so, I really enjoy engaging with video games because it's not that I don't like playing video games.
It's not that I don't want people to enjoy playing video games.
And I play all of the video games that I perhaps write scathing articles about the things they get wrong.
But it's important to remember that these are fiction that are selling a particular vision of the past You know, whether or not they claim it to be accurate, and that has a real impact.
So I think the one that people know best is, of course, Assassin's Creed, which is researched and beautifully rendered, and you have these lovely landscapes that you get to wander through as you play a story about a secret war waged between the assassins who are Completely removed from their Nizari, Ismaili origins.
They've become this nebulous, secret order of holy warriors without the holiness.
The studio that made them removed the Islam from the order of assassins completely.
And they're fighting a secret war against the Knights Templar.
Who, far from having been destroyed in 1314, live on as a secret underground order forever in the worst history channel vision of the past you can imagine.
And you then take this war through a series of time periods, starting with around the time of the Third Crusade, moving into Renaissance Italy, moving into the Seven Years' War, and then the Golden Age of Piracy, and kind of this continuing progression of these beautifully mapped out historical periods.
And again, I think that most people don't truly believe, like, I don't think people sort of replay these games and think, oh, this is history, you can jump off of 20-story towers and survive as long as you're murdering someone with a knife at the bottom.
But in the absence of history education, and especially in the absence of education about the pre-modern world, pop culture fills in your mental gaps.
Whether or not you mean to, these images that we build of the past fill in the mental landscape for the things you don't know.
And the problem with a thing like Assassin's Creed is that it builds this conspiracy-laden worldview that, as we know, has all kinds of ramifications, right?
If you are taught to see the past as a secret battleground between underground factions, that carries through into the present.
And the idea of the game is that you are a character in the near future who is tapped by the Templar to access blood genealogy memories, which is Gross Nazi- I mean, I say these words and I see your eyes widened, like, this is Nazi stuff, right?
The ideas that fundamentally, like, your blood heritage can be tapped into by this special machine to access your ancestors' memories, that's like...
I understand that you think that this is a fun video game and that this is completely value neutral, and you're wrong!
What you are replicating are these terrible ideas.
So essentially what you have is the invitation to identify as someone in the present who discovers that because of their blood genealogy they actually are destined for religious and political greatness, but it will require doing battle against the evil ones who have always sought to keep us down, right?
And is this QAnon or which of the 16 other present movements?
I mean, right, like, this is the thing.
This is the kind of worldscape of Assassin's Creed.
And I think most people just play it like, all right, I'm now going to assassinate some Templars and they move on.
But it builds a weird world that this is how you access history.
The new Wolfenstein games, which are aggressively anti-Nazi because the whole concept of Wolfenstein is that you shoot Nazis.
In a world where the Nazis win, you are the lone kind of remaining American killing machine and you slaughter the Nazis.
But the new Wolfenstein games posit the idea of Effectively, a secret worldwide Jewish organization with technology unlike anything anyone has ever seen that the Nazis get access to, and this is how they win the war.
And you just wonder, at what point did no one point out, like, it should never be aliens, but this time, couldn't you have made it aliens instead of a secret Jewish underground organization all over the world?
That has space lasers.
That literally has space lasers!
So it's things like this, it's people who just, I think there are a lot of video games that replicate horrific ideologies, not necessarily out of creator malice, but not thinking about what the ramifications are, and do this over and over again.
One of my favorite video games, and my entry point to writing about video games is A game called Skyrim, which takes place in a mythical fantasy world that is this basically fake pseudo-medieval Viking fantasy world where your character at the beginning of the game has been captured by the Empire and is going to be executed because of who you were arrested with, who are these rebels against the Empire who you can run off with.
And if you're not careful, you know, we build this huge mythology of, like, rebels against an empire, like, of course I'm going to side with the rebels.
Well, the rebels want to build an ethno-nationalist state only for Nords and cleanse the homeland of all of the elves who they talk about in racist terms over and over through the game, and effectively every group within the game other than the Empire wants to build an ethno-nationalist enclave.
with mixed degrees of ethnic cleansing as part of their rhetoric.
There's a whole settler-colonial apparatus in the game mythology, and if you play a video game the way normal people play video games, where you are wandering around shooting people with bows and killing monsters and just checking off quests, it's easy to miss the fact that the entire narrative of the game is built on competing ethno-nationalist identities on top of a rich settler-colonial apparatus that celebrates Genocides against the native inhabitants.
Yeah, yeah.
And it just strikes me that that's an aspect of ethnonationalism that sometimes goes overlooked, which is that if we can normalize the idea that every group is fighting in their own best interest to gain dominance over the other groups, that's just human nature, well then we're off to the races, right?
Exactly.
It's not our fault we have to do first before they do to us, because the nerve is, of course, that existence is a zero-sum game.
Which we know it doesn't have to be, but that is the ethno-nationalist logic.
It also, just to sort of bounce out quickly and we'll come back in to what you're talking about, but it makes me think as well of something I'm reflecting on lately, which is how in the age of social media, part of the rise of conservatism amongst a younger demographic is the ability to hijack the notion of who the rebels are, right?
For the 20th century, the rebels were always the progressives.
And now the rebels who are fighting against the tyranny of woke culture and censorship and cancel culture, right, are the young conservatives who don't give a fuck and speak their mind.
Yeah, well, and never mind the fact that they have financial backing that the left could never dream of, that they control the Supreme Court, that they, you know, that the 21st century has been dominated by their presidencies making radical political shifts in the landscape of the entire world.
No, they are the real rebels.
I think there's a lot to this because that rhetoric of being the embattled minority who has to virtuously defeat their enemies is a huge part of the kind of appeal of these fantasy settings and the misunderstanding of these fantasy settings.
We can talk about the specifically Tolkien-esque aspect later, but there's this entire apparatus in contemporary American, really English-language fantasy literature for the last 70-some years that's basically Tolkien-esque fanfiction.
And it is the same story of this embattled group of heroes fighting against an evil empire with this kind of Aggressively Western European sensibility, that like, well, the white people are embattled and they have to win a victorious battle against the enemy who always comes from the East or the South or that point in between.
And I don't... It's an oversimplification of what Tolkien is, but it is something that people tend to run with.
Yeah.
Right?
Whether or not that's really what the core texts are trying to sell to you, it's how they're read.
We are the virtuous rebels.
Please forget about all of the power we wield against you on the day-to-day life.
This is how we feel good about ourselves.
Yeah, yeah, we'll come back around to that because there's an interesting tie-in in a moment.
I wanted to just reflect with you on, you know, in trying to make sense of America over the last few years, which is what we do on this podcast and probably on most of the podcasts you talk to, we could examine QAnon and Trump and the undermining of facts and evidence in favor of this kind of post-truth incendiary propaganda and conspiracism.
But then we pull back and we see, oh wait, this is not just happening in the US, this is Brazil, this is Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Italy, maybe Brexit, the rise of reactionary right-wing movements in countries like France, Belgium, and more recently Sweden.
What do you see?
We talked about apocalypticism and the sort of opportunistic way in which a mythologizing of a political movement can give it sort of this almost, I don't know if metaphysical or supernatural, you know, stamp of authority might be.
What do you see is that So I don't know that I can prove any of this, but for me, I tend to think of it as being kind of three components working together.
So I don't know that I can prove any of this, but for me, I tend to think of it as
being kind of three components working together.
One of them is the end of the Cold War.
We spend a lot of the Cold War, and by we I mean the United States government, propping
up right-wing military dictatorships around the world as long as they will murder the
communists or leftists in general in their country.
And I think the United States has a rich tradition of intervening in other people's countries, overthrowing democratically organized governments, putting in place incredibly violent, repressive regimes, and then being desperately confused when that has repercussions 20, 30 years down the road.
And I think that we have not done a very good job of really dealing with the legacy of everything
that NATO was willing to do across Latin America, Africa, Asia, at home.
All the things that we were willing and happy to do in the name of defeating communism has
repercussions.
Right?
History is iterative.
And so you do these things and then they don't simply go away.
The forces you've unleashed don't simply disappear.
And so these kind of regressive, right-wing, reactionary, ultra-traditionalist, sometimes
ultra-nationalist movements that we empower around the world, as long as they are aggressively
anti-communist, don't die.
Those forces have been unleashed and they exist and they continue to exist.
And so there's so many examples of this, but the one that comes to mind as somewhat unique in terms of the popular sense of recent history would be in Afghanistan.
Right, that if we can arm these jihadis, I forget, what was the name of the Mujahideen?
If we can arm the Mujahideen and lionize them as these heroic figures fighting against Soviet Communism, look out.
Yeah, well I tend to think in Iran, which we should be paying attention to because of the massive women-led protests in Iran right now against the morality policing oppressive regime, how do you get to the revolution?
Well, we launch a military coup against Mosaddegh's government and re-empower the Shah, train and arm and fund his secret police and leads to a deeply repressive government as long as he will allow British Petroleum to maintain their oil fields and
will maintain an alliance with us.
And it's the same kind of thing that we do over and over and over again, that we are willing to
inflict huge amounts of harms to population as long as we keep allies in power.
And that doesn't... the forces you unleash don't simply go away.
The second strand, I'd say, is the war, quote-unquote, war on terror,
which again, we get into this because of the things we've done in the Cold War. So it's,
again, they're not really separate strands. All of them are desperately interrelated.
But the rhetoric that we build of a crusade, right?
We build a rhetoric of crusading.
Whether or not it is embodied in every word said by the American president, we still build a narrative of Christian war against Islam.
That comes about in our pop culture, that comes about in some of the actual language used by the U.S.
State Department, that builds this narrative of a conflict of civilizations that spreads far beyond the fact that we invade Afghanistan and then we invade Iraq into a broader narrative of cultural difference and violence between the two.
What you start to see with a Reagan and then with a Bush Junior, perhaps Bush Senior too, is this idea that we are the good guys, fighting in the name of democracy, protecting people who are seeking freedom from oppressive governments, but that somehow that's related to, or maybe it's a proxy for some kind of sense of Christian nobility, right?
Yes, absolutely.
If you look into Doug Mastriano, for example, the GOP gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania, who is a very active Christian nationalist, his military service, if I remember correctly, includes time in Iraq.
His dissertation is on the first Iraq war.
His kind of anti-Muslim sentiment is a very rich part of his identity.
Even leading into the 2000s.
If I remember correctly, Matt Shea, who was a former representative in Washington, who was known for having the biblical basis of warfare pamphlet, but also links to a huge number of far-right groups, be it the Brady family or the Oath Keepers.
His men's pastor at his current church, the men's pastor's sons were both arrested in Coeur d'Alene with Patriot Front.
Over the summer, right?
I mean, like, the links are huge.
His military service had been, if I remember correctly, in Kuwait, in Kosovo, and in Iraq as well in the 90s.
And so it is a longer-form thing, and I think you can look at people like Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin or Lieutenant General Alan West, who also play around with these kind of militant Christian overtones tactics, both of which have claimed to be members of the military orders, Alan West as a Templar, and Jerry Boykin
as a hospitaler, if I remember correctly. They both serve in the 2000s in the Middle East,
and they're relatively high-level members of the Bush administration doing this. How do you
resolve the equation of the more cynical, neoconservative kind of agenda, right, and the Bush
doctrine, and this idea that we can justify imperialism through these various
ideological postures, with the idea that after Carter, the Republicans had to
figure out how to get the evangelicals back in their camp, or swing them over to their camp and
make an argument for why they were the moral majority, they were the party of family
values, et cetera?
There's a way in which this then seems to empower some of the people like the generals who you were just listing, who have these fervent, really I would say conspiritualist religious beliefs about their own identity and the role they're playing in the world.
It just seems like there are some players who are just cynical manipulators who want power and want to usher in a new American century.
And then you have these other figures that become their strange bedfellows who, you know, like a Mike Flynn, where it's just like, these people are not just sociopathic, they also happen to be psychotic.
Well, I think for the longest time, your kind of traditional neoconservatives think that these are an unpleasant partner who drums up votes and as long as they occasionally throw meat to the base, they will vote in line and they can continue doing the serious business of empire building, Cold War era, kind of your big business.
Big foreign policy, kind of traditional Cold Warrior aspect.
And the end of the Cold War leads to kind of a more nebulous foreign policy, that when you reemerge in the War on Terror, suddenly the Christian Nationalist aspect of it is supercharged, because you are building a narrative of a clash of civilizations that doesn't exist outside of this mindset, but allows them to put themselves in this Fervent apocalyptic role.
Do you remember the Left Behind series from the 90s?
Oh yeah.
Yeah, in the worst possible way.
Huge.
All of a sudden you can get yourself deployed to the Middle East and call yourself a holy warrior.
And I don't mean this as most of the people who sign up and deploy think of themselves this way, because I think after 9-11 there is a huge swell of Patriotism in this country.
There's also a huge swell of anti-Muslim violence in this country that also lends itself to anti-Sikh violence.
And we should never forget when people talk about the come-together like after 9-11 who came together and what they meant by that.
But I think a lot of people join the military in this kind of fervent sense of America has been attacked.
But you have plenty of people who do in fact end up in the Middle East and see themselves in the guise of a Christian warrior in enemy land.
And some of those people have become very important in far-right spaces, and your Mike Flynn is one of these examples.
So I think the War on Terror brings this kind of very specific militant Christianity back into the forefront, but also makes it part of a popular discourse that spreads beyond kind of just your traditional military or political circles, because, listen, Fox News runs War on Terror stories for years in this kind of aggressively anti-Muslim rhetoric, You can't be surprised that then people who are either being force-fed or force-feeding themselves a steady diet of this really believe it.
So I think the ramifications of what we do in the Cold War, the ramifications of what we do in War on Terror, and then the fact that what we hope is late-stage capitalism, because I think that calling it late-stage capitalism is fundamentally hopeful, that maybe capitalism will die and we'll get something that is not built quite so thoroughly on the oppression of the workers.
I think that, you know, the recession after recession, after stagnated living conditions, after the death of the dream of future generations living a more prosperous life than their parents, that's where we are right now.
That is a worldwide phenomenon, and it allows far-right movements to hijack this moment and make the claim that, no, it's not capitalism doing it, it's—and then you just enter whoever the enemy is—it's the immigrants.
Right, it's people of color, it's Muslims who won't assimilate into French culture because how dare they wear a hijab, pay no attention to the nuns who cover their hair as well.
I mean, I'm a dual citizen with France, I will mock France for the things it does wrong as much as possible, but that's one of these kind of particularly horrific examples where, you know, naïcité means Catholic atheism and nothing will ever convince me otherwise.
It's the idea that it's the woke agenda that is destroying your life, not the fact that you cannot get a job that will allow you to buy a house in a city you want to live in, even on two incomes, because housing prices have skyrocketed so far because corporations have bought them all up as rental properties.
You can hijack this conversation away from a real discourse on the state of our society into Look at this oppressed group.
They're not the oppressed ones, they're the oppressors.
Why can you not afford to live like your parents?
It's because trans people don't want to be murdered.
Obviously that's not the way they phrase it, but I see no reason to give them credit for their nonsense.
This is effectively their argument.
How do we solve the problems in your life?
Well, we create a system so oppressive that we skyrocket the suicide rate of trans youths, and that's somehow saving the American dream.
This is the kind of nonsense that they're spinning out, but it's the argument that Society's problems aren't structural, it's the woke agenda, it's the left, it's the immigrants, it's these groups who you can vilify are keeping you from achieving your dreams.
Pay no attention to the fact that they are completely disconnected.
Yeah, and not only that, it seems to me that then what goes along with that is they're the ones that are stopping you from living your dreams.
And the reason for that is, is that they have destabilized the correct order of how society is supposed to be, what it means to be a man, to be a woman, to have a family, to be a Christian, to be patriotic.
All of that is under attack by the creeping menace of woke kind of neo-Marxism that really wants to destroy everything.
Yes.
So speaking of all of that, Giorgia Maloney was just elected Prime Minister of Italy and she had come to speak at CPAC in Florida, I think it was last year or early this year, and the illustrious kind of company of people like Victor Orban.
This is an international phenomenon that's going on.
One of the things that I notice is that a lot of the right-wing propaganda that spreads through social media from the United States ends up coming out of the mouths of people like Maloney and Orban as if it's like part of what's happening in their culture too and we're all in this big conservative club which of course Steve Bannon loves to Encourage these people to see it as.
It's a global movement.
And with Meloni, she's heir, of course, to the original, literal fascist party, which she's rebranded as the Brotherhood of Italy, while also resurrecting herself, the tricolor Eternal Flame, as the flag, as the logo that burns in Mussolini's tomb.
She also uses, and this is where I jumped in here, the classic fascist appeal to defending God, Fatherland and family.
So it's like, here she is, the blonde buxom strongman, or the representative of that kind of enclave.
It's all very masculine, despite her being a woman, and it harkens back to this strongman, kind of blood and soil aesthetic.
I wanted to read to you from this article in the New York Times by Jason Horowitz, and you referenced Tolkien earlier, so here's the tie-in to that.
Horowitz writes, Rome, this is before she was elected, Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader who's likely to be the next Prime Minister of Italy, used to dress up as a hobbit.
As a youth activist in the post-fascist Italian social movement, she and her fellowship of militants with nicknames like Frodo and Hobbit revered The Lord of the Rings and other works by British writer J.R.R.
Tolkien.
They visited schools in character, they gathered at the sounding of the horn of Boromir for cultural chats.
She attended Hobbit camp and sang songs along with the extremist folk band Campania dell'Agnello, or Fellowship of the Ring.
All of that might seem like some youthful infatuation we're back right to, like video games are just harmless fun, right?
With a work usually associated with fantasy fiction and big-budget epics rather than political militancy.
But in Italy...
The Lord of the Rings has for a half-century been a central pillar upon which descendants of post-fascism reconstructed a hard-right identity, looking to a traditionalist mythic age for symbols, heroes, and creation myths free of fascist taboos or associations, right?
I think, she says, Maloney, I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in.
So, more than just her favorite book series, The Lord of the Rings, says Maloney, is a sacred text.
I don't consider The Lord of the Rings to just be fantasy, she said.
So, tell me what you think about all of this.
Well, I think this is unfortunately common reaction among far-right groups to take on fantasy literature as being an avatar of a mythological past that never existed.
Mary Rambram Olm has a piece in Religion Dispatches from mid-September that is a tongue-in-cheek letter to the people mad about the Rings of Power TV series that Amazon is making because You know, this kind of mass backlash to the idea that you could have a black dwarven princess, that you could have black hobbits, that you could have a black elf.
People are really up in arms about the fact not that there are hobbits or elves, but that there are black hobbits or elves.
How dare you sully my immortal beings who can go super-saiyan at the right time to challenge super-ghosts?
Evil super-ghosts, right?
I mean, this is the nonsense of this, right?
Well, when you make them black, you're not being realistic, right?
Yeah, I mean, like, listen, having pointy ears and living forever, totally realistic, but black and having pointy ears and living forever, whoa.
And you can't even make the argument that they're violating the text because these are fabricated characters for this TV show.
And you can point out the fact that there are plenty of examples in Tolkien's work about talking about different skin colors, but it's this notion of fantasy races that I think is already part of this idea.
The idea that race is real.
Right, that it is not a social construct, that actually these are different and separate groups.
Right, and that some are good, and the good ones are virtuous and beautiful, right?
Your elves are your ultimate good race, and they are tall and statuesque and beautiful and ethereal in their beauty.
And your orcs are fundamentally flawed and corrupt and are selling this Victorian-era narrative of degeneracy, that they are corrupted by the dark angel Sauron, because that's effectively what he is, and you can see in their physical characteristics, right?
I completely understand why the far right finds this an appealing narrative, and for all that I don't think that J.R.R.
Tolkien meant it this way, he's also an aristocratic British man writing in the first half of the 20th century, and the society at the time does not intensely lend itself to perhaps better narratives.
There's also the kind of richness of the noble remnants of fallen empire, right?
You get to Gondor and if you're excited about being summoned to the call of the Horn of Boromir, the noble stewards of this great falling ancient empire, is fascism, right?
You can absolutely see how the heirs of Mussolini would love this image, where you have this kind of last magical decaying city that you're part of to resurrect the glory of Gondor.
This is the entire Neo-Roman propaganda right there, if you choose to see it that way, as opposed to a narrative about the horrors of warfare.
And about, you know, yeomen from the British countryside thrown into a war they cannot possibly understand, engaging as much heroism as they can while desperately wishing they could just go home and curl back into bed with comfort and friendship, but you can never really go home because everyone who comes back to the Shire has horrific PTSD afterwards.
Okay, fine.
Skip the World War I lesson from all of this.
Decide to just delve into your personal interpretation.
It doesn't matter whether or not the author intended it that way, because it is a fertile landscape for people to impress their own And so much of the fantasy written since then is effectively cheap knockoffs of Tolkien.
I don't mean that in a bad way, because writing is really hard, and this is a rich tapestry of a very traditional set of European stories.
This is the Arthurian legend.
The old wizard shows up to tell the young boy about his secret heritage to help him save the world.
I get it.
But what they've done is they've taken the kind of most reactionary vision of this possible and spun it into this neo-fascist fantasy.
And this happens throughout fantasy literature, it happens throughout video games, and film, and novels, where whether or not that's what's intended, reselling the same narrative that the orcs are dark of skin and monstrous of features and can only be evil, and the elves are tall and light-skinned and primordially good, lends itself to races, being like, yep, races are real, and these are the characteristics that we go with.
So much of the kind of broader fantasy apparatus replicates this kind of thing.
It makes me think about what I think of as sort of transitive properties between apocalypticism as we've discussed in the medieval period and then like the great awakening movements of the 18th and 19th centuries in the US.
And then what we see with QAnon, as you've touched on already, the return of these tropes of the antisemitic blood libel, the protocols of the elders of Zion, combined then with Knights Templar stuff, which we're going to talk about in a minute, and then more of the New Age Notions, right?
That it's like, wait, this is just the same stuff dressed in, like, science fiction clothing.
That you have these channeled aliens from other dimensions who are telling you that you need to, like, storm the Capitol.
And that when we do, we're going to transition into fifth dimensional consciousness where there will only be love and light for the chosen ones.
So, like, how do you think about the way this stuff fits together?
I mean, you've already said that it's impossible to stop these bad ideas.
They just keep coming back.
So I think at their core, the unending apocalyptic fantasies are a dream of a golden age to come.
that things now are bad and that you want to hit this mythical after the fact where you live in the kingdom of heaven or the golden age of peace on earth or you get beamed up to the mothership or whichever narrative sells you this notion of the peace that comes on the other side.
The problem is that so much of the rhetoric that goes into how you achieve this is not Um, reform and peace and making hard sacrifices on Earth, so much of it gets brought to these kind of neo-crusading ideas that the solution is killing your enemies.
You have to purge the Earth.
You don't have to purify yourself, you have to purge the Earth.
Right?
Is it by, you know, violence against Jews in Europe?
Is it the forcible conversion of Muslims in Spain?
Is it the, um, Is it the occupation of indigenous lands and the forcible conversion or death of entire ethno-linguistic families across the Americas?
Is it purging the Catholics from the British colonies and waging war against those servants of the Antichrist, the Catholic French, and their Native American allies in the 18th century?
Is it the mass murder of your political enemies who happen to all be Satan-worshipping Pedophiles who inject themselves with adrenochrome taken from the glands of tortured children.
I mean, I say these words out loud, and I think that's the correct term, that's the QAnon fantasy, but it's so insane that it's hard even to say, right?
All of this is, of course, absurd and evil.
But it's a series of rhetorics that allow you to think that you're living in an apocalyptic time, right?
You have an enemy, and that enemy is so bad that they are no longer human.
They are monstrous.
They are servants of the devil in some way, shape, or form, and that justifies so many atrocities against them.
If you can just kill enough of them, you can bring about a golden age.
And it brings together a lot of really, really dangerous strands, but however much you keep changing the language, the fact that these conspiracy theories keep insisting that the correct aspect is whatever language of otherness you put on your enemies, most of which feels like it's basically just bad recycling of medieval blood libel legends, right?
I mean, QAnon is so unoriginal in the way that it's just anti-Semitic blood libel thrown onto a thin layer of pizza gate and kicked out the door with some satanic panic thrown onto the back side of it.
This is still the kind of thing.
How do you make your enemies as villainous as possible and embrace a narrative that the correct solution is sacral violence against them?
You are God's chosen warrior.
Go engage in holy violence.
This is how I started doing all of this work.
It's just, it feels like the Crusades.
And I don't want it to feel like the Crusades, because it's 2022 and I'm tired of people being so monstrous, and yet human history seems to suggest that this is just a wrinkle within human consciousness that doesn't go away.
Yeah, we had our jewels on the floor right before the end of 2020, so after the election but before the insurrection, There is a channeler, someone who claims to be a New Age influencer who claims to be channeling aliens.
Of course, if you go back through her history, she's channeled all sorts of different forms of spiritual wisdom.
She's talked about topics as banal as living your best life and cleansing and what kind of diet to have, et cetera,
how to set your goals and accomplish them and get past your sort of inner critic.
But by the time we're deep enough into 2020, she's channeling the Galactic Federation
who are telling her that Trump is a light worker and that all light workers,
but when we get to this moment towards the end of the year, all light workers need to understand
that any squeamishness they may have had about fighting the forces of darkness
needs to be set aside now because it's time to rise up.
And this is actually ten days before the Capitol insurrection, and you can hear that she's following All of the propaganda and the planning, and she's saying, this is our time because the cabal, the Illuminati, she says, whatever you want to call them, who've ruled over us for thousands of years, are finally being challenged, and this is our moment to rise up.
And in a sense, it's New Age Jihad, which, you know, it's the first instance of it that we've tracked.
It's like, wow, there it is.
Oh, and again, I wish I were surprised.
It's amazing how many religious movements can recreate this same narrative over and over again.
I suppose you give a new religious movement enough time and they'll get there too.
Incredible.
So, I mean, it raises questions for me from a sort of, I don't know, archetypal, psychological angle of like, what is this thing in the collective psyche that, as you said, give it enough time, eventually it gets here.
And so how to overcome that, I mean, I don't think we'll solve that today.
I want to say, because we're now very firmly in the present with all of, you know, the The eternal themes of very bad ideas running through it, perhaps more virulently than they had been for a few decades.
You first came to my attention in this June 7th article that you penned for Religion Dispatches, and it was a powerful moment because you're writing about this tweet from a gun manufacturer called Daniel Defense, and this is in the aftermath of the terrible Evaldi mass shooting.
We talked about this article on the podcast in the context of an episode that we named The Temple of the Gun, and we were looking at the intersections of right-wing politics, gun culture, and Christianity.
And the tweet, well, why don't you tell me, because you wrote the article, what did you see in the tweet, what made you want to write about it, what was your analysis of the context?
So the picture which they took down after the fact, because it became this huge deal because of the Uvalde shooting, it's a child sitting on the floor, he's wearing a t-shirt that says Rascal on it, he's cross-legged, and he's holding an AR-15 style rifle on his lap with a magazine at his feet, and the top of the tweet says, train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
And that's Proverbs 22.6.
Proverbs 22.6 is this idea that Christian family raising is a firearm family raising
event.
The idea that the correct biblical way to raise a child is to teach children to load an AR-15.
That you should have them in your house, that this is just a purely normative aspect.
That you should have this gun and your children should know how to use them.
That weapons of war are family-friendly.
And I wish that this were unique to this one ad, but this idea of the kind of the biblical verse selling firearms has just a powerful and gross lineage in American culture, and it's particularly prevalent right now.
And so this specific image was not alone, and if I remember at the time, there were several other places that had done similar things, right?
Daniel Defense was in the media at the time because the Uvalde shooter had purchased his weapons from Daniel Defense, but this was not just them that had this kind of guns and family go together in this specific, like, train your children to use weapons of war.
And the only other thing to add to that is that there is an arm coming into the photograph pointing at the little boy with the gun in his lap as if to say, this biblical verse, here's an example of this biblical verse bearing its fruit.
Well, and it's the father instructing his... I mean, like, the kid's what?
Five?
Right?
This is a young child.
Instructing his three-year-old how to properly clean and load the AR-15.
And you can see there's bullets in the magazine.
You can see that it's a loaded magazine, right?
It is this very specific staging that, you know, it's just this small snapshot.
It is a single image with a single line above it that says so much about the idea of Christian masculinity.
Right.
This is, you know, Christian Dumas' Jesus and John Wayne is a book that I think people should very much read.
But this idea of this toxic Christian masculinity, this is a toxic Christian masculinity right there.
How do you raise a child?
You raise him to be religious and carrying an assault rifle.
And this is virtuous Christian fatherhood.
Wow.
Wow.
And so you said there were other examples happening at that time.
Yeah.
So I wish I could remember where the other images with children,
but for me, the part that I immediately came back to and when I wrote about this was the,
the Dale Defense was the hook, but the one that really got me
to write this is a gun maker in Florida called Spikes Tactical that makes a series of effectively emblazoned AR-15s.
They have a long line of them with special names and then symbols put onto the receiver.
And one of them is an AR-15 style rifle they call the Crusader.
So this of course immediately draws my attention because I'm a crusade historian and this is what I write
about.
Their website describes it as Spike's Tactical created a balanced, reliable rifle that would bring an excellent fighting rifle to people of all abilities and resources.
The Everyman Fighting Rifle.
Why do people of all abilities and resources need an excellent fighting rifle?
Well, they tell you.
We named it Crusader and engraved Psalm 144.1 on the lower receiver to hoist the flag of our faith and to make a statement reminding our customers that we are with you.
The war is here.
We have a duty to defend our homeland and our way of life.
That is the official company website for it.
Psalm 144.1 reads, "'Praise be to the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.
He is my loving God in my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield in whom I take refuge, who subdues people under me.'"
That's on one side of the rifle.
On the opposite side is an engraved Templar shield logo.
And then it has the three settings on it.
On one side it's Safety, Single Fire, and Semi-Auto, and on the other side it's Pax Pacis, Bellum, and Deus Vulum, Peace, War, and God Wills It, the First Crusade battle cry that is popular among contemporary white supremacists.
Meaning that God wills it would be the setting on which you can create maximum carnage.
Yes.
The company spoke to him in 2015 when they first released the rifle, because this is
a long history, this just came back into prominence because it became very popular with far-right
figures, said, this ensures that no Muslim terrorist will ever pick up this weapon and
use it to bring harm against another person.
That's actually my favorite part of the rifle.
And as one of my followers on Twitter put it, like, does he think that Muslims are vampires?
Right?
You put some Latin on the gun and Muslims can't pick it up because it's like garlic?
It'll burn their skin.
Right, it's gonna burn their skin on contact because you put a Bible verse negating the fact that of course, you know, Muslims are familiar with the Bible and Jesus is a major prophet in Islam and that's not how words work, but okay, fine.
That idea of, I'm going to emblazon this with the name Crusader and put a Templar shield on it and Muslims will be unable to pick it up.
This is holy war.
This is Christian nationalist violence.
Nothing has changed.
Hoist the flag of our faith and make a statement.
The war is here.
We have a duty to defend our homeland and our way of life.
This says much more than the actual importance of the gun itself.
It's why they decided to name this gun this way.
And who they're selling it to.
And who they're selling it to.
And then included in that is the biblical justification for supremacy.
Yes.
Absolutely.
And it's not the only part, right?
I mean, the problem is that this is just the most prevalent example.
When I saw this the first time, what my head immediately went to is the guns used by the Christchurch mosque shooter.
who took these assault-style weapons and wrote violent language all over them, specifically anti-Muslim and white supremacist names, just covering his weapons, you know, very specifically to kind of link himself to this broader lineage of holy war, and then also just like white supremacist violence on his magazines on the gun itself.
Yeah, same with the Buffalo Shooter.
Yeah, right, so there's this very specific set of ideologies that go into this that, whether or not the company knows how far the ramifications go, Spikes Tactical very clearly knows what it is they're selling.
And they're doing so very deliberately.
Those statements cannot be turned into some warm and fuzzy, we just thought it was a cool image.
This is a real thing that a company makes and a company is selling, and it's just the most visible example.
What are all the things that we don't know?
And this was kind of the idea of pointing this out, is that, you know, this is something that you can see, and this is something that you can look at this very specific moment of it, and then you have to deal with the fact that this is a much larger conversation, right?
You have Jerry Boykin, who I've mentioned before, Talking about the AR-15 as the weapon of the apocalypse, that when Jesus returns he will be carrying an AR-15 with him.
Which again, sounds crazy!
And whether or not he actually means this literally, you know, God only knows.
I, you know, I thankfully have no insight into the mind of Jerry Boykin.
That sounds like a terrifying place, I'd like to stay out of it.
But this kind of violent apocalyptic rhetoric doesn't surprise me at all.
It's scary and it's real and it's something that we have to engage with.
The fact that there is a offshoot of the Unification Church, that are popularly known as the Moonies after their founder, the pastor Moon, led by his younger son, Sean Moon, that we usually talk about as Rod of Iron Ministries, because their big innovation is that they decided that the Rod of Iron in Psalms and Revelation is in fact the AR-15.
And shortly after the Parkland shooting, they staged a mass group wedding where people marched
in in white liturgical, white and purple liturgical grounds with a crown on their heads carrying
AR-15s in this liturgical ceremony.
And since then they've expanded this imagery, this AR-15 imagery.
The crowns are now the kinds of bullets that are used in the AR-15.
Pastor Sean Moon keeps a gold-plated AR-15 on his desk when he gives his chats that he puts on social media.
He also has a Templar statue on there, which at some point I really just need to delve into the iconography of his room, because that by itself is an article.
This kind of idea that the AR-15 is not just a holy weapon but an apocalyptic weapon exists.
It's a real line of thought that stretches further out than just one particular church.
You just have a couple that are very easy to identify with.
So we have, as everybody knows, the midterms coming up, described often as the most significant midterms we've ever had, which, you know, politicians have cried wolf enough times that a lot of people tune out when they hear that, but it might actually be true this time.
They're coming up in just a few weeks.
What's your sense of how this stuff It animates where we're at right now in terms of the political stage and the stakes that we face, where we might, you know, imagine ourselves to be, you know, just in like a month's time.
I think the most honestly, I'm terrified.
I think it's important to be honest that I'm really scared about the results, right?
Because so many of the people running are terrifying.
There are enough prominent figures in the races that we're paying attention to who embrace far-right ideologies, some Christian Nationalists, some QAnon-inflected, some mixing and matching from everywhere you could want, in these big races, these House of Representatives, gubernatorial, Senate races, that there are enough people running who terrify me that I sometimes forget about them, and when I'm reminded, I'm scared all over again.
We're in the state of Arizona.
My God, the state of Arizona alone, Doug Mastriano, oh, Carrie Lake and Blake Masters, Doug Mastriano, you know, I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and all these kind of big names that we know and are scared of, they're all the Secretary of State races, where you have people who very clearly don't believe in democracy and have these QAnon-inflected ideas about overthrowing the government effectively by taking control of this.
I mean, like, even just on the surface, like, this is an incredibly consequential election, and they're all consequential elections, But there are people running who genuinely terrify me, and there are so many of them running that genuinely terrify me that my anxiety when I think about the midterms is quite high.
At the same time, I think in the aftermath of January 6th, in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, I think people are paying attention to how high The stakes really are.
How, I mean, how elevated the threat really is.
I don't think that the depths of kind of the danger of either Christian nationalists or conspiratorial thinking among government officials, I don't think it's quite permeated the popular consciousness just how scary some of these people are, but I think enough of it has come out through major news that people know that this
matters a great deal.
That some of these races have apocalyptic possibilities on the other side, even if they're
just on a state-by-state level.
And I want to be hopeful that people are paying attention enough that they show up in enough
numbers to overcome some of the structural advantages that have been put into place for
far-right figures.
I don't want to predict, I don't want to think about what happens if we lose this election
because I already sleep badly enough, but a lot rides on people deciding that this is
worth fighting for.
And the problem is the other side is incredibly motivated to keep fighting.
Yeah, and then, you know, the other scenario is we do really well in some of these areas where the craziest candidates are, and they refuse to accept the results, and then we have standoffs at the different state capitals.
I mean, it's not... Yeah, I don't want to negatively impact your sleep any more than it already is.
No, I guarantee that'll happen.
I guarantee that'll happen.
The best case scenario is that they do that as the losers.
Because we already know plenty of them don't believe that they can lose.
And this was true the last set of elections, too.
We already know plenty of people believe that if they don't win, that it must be fraud and we'll treat it as such.
Which is why they need to lose badly enough that it is clear to most people that they've lost.
Because I still think that there are plenty of people who are simply going to punch the ticket for the party that they traditionally vote for, no matter who is running.
But I also think that those people are not going to show up in mobs outside the capital if their character is slapped down, if their particular candidate is slapped down.
The key is to beat them badly enough that people stay home, because it's clear that they lost and whatever conspiracies they spill are only followed by that most hardcore fringe support group.
Yeah, and a lot of analysts say that the more that that happens, The more we face domestic terror threats, because it's the remaining hardcore extremists who are the ones that are the most dangerous.
Yeah, well, you know, I've been paying attention to the bomb threats that have been called at the Boston Children's Hospital because of, you know, stochastic terrorist networks organized by people like Matt Walsh and Libs of TikTok and these Far-right figures who routinely call for violence, and of course wash their hands of it, will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?
I didn't ask you to do anything, I just made a statement in the air.
But that's effectively what they're doing, and then you get bomb threats, you get threats made against doctors, you get attacks on transgender individuals, you get attacks on- I mean, this is the anti-abortion movement, and the bombings and burnings and murders that took place in that.
I unfortunately anticipate violence after this election.
I hope it's small-scale.
I hope it's isolated.
Most importantly, I hope I'm wrong.
I love being wrong when I'm talking about contemporary politics because usually my vision of the future is so bleak that every time I'm wrong it's a blessed relief.
I'd like more of that.
Are there historical and mythological counter-narratives that you're aware of or that you would like to sow the seeds of right now that lead us in a different direction?
Okay, so when I do podcasts, because of the things I'm usually asked about, I am always saying incredibly bleak things.
It's what I work on, I do this to myself, but I am not without hope.
When things are at their darkest, that's when hope is most important.
And I think that as you look through history, every time you have the rise of far-right, fascist, violent movements, you have people who call them out in the public square, at great personal cost to themselves, but you have people who push back.
There is no period of history where the forces of, quite frankly, evil are so overwhelming that no one is willing to stand up and cry out against them.
And they may die, but their voices are heard.
Right.
American history has plenty of examples of horrific moments when we have engaged in stunning brutality against huge numbers of groups.
And there are always examples of people who are willing to stand up and say that what you are doing is wrong.
You know, Columbus lands on Hispaniola in 1492 and within short order begins the brutal enslavement and murder of the Taino people.
And it's 1511 when Antonio de Montesilvos preaches on Christmas Eve on Hispaniola that no Spanish colonists on the island can be saved as a result of their treatment of Native Americans.
It takes 20 years and you have someone preaching in front of Diego Columbus that you are all damned for what you are doing.
And in short order, Bartolomeo de las Casas is converted to this way of thinking and begins writing letters back to the crown about the abominable treatment of indigenous people and the need to do something about this, right?
You have laws in the books as early as, I think, 1652 in Rhode Island banning chattel slavery.
Right, you have a Quaker former plantation owner who is writing letters to people like Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson in the 1770s before the Revolution, decrying slavery as an abominable institution to the point that he wins the intellectual argument with Patrick Henry, who will not free the enslaved people on his plantation, but acknowledges that he has no intellectual grounds to keep it going.
Right, you have Unitarian ministers like Theodore Parker who organize committees of resistance in Boston to help enslaved people escape from slave catchers coming up the coast, and then funds John Brown's raid as one of the Secret Six, and defends John Brown's actions after the fact.
You always find people who, when they see evil, stand up and call down the public square at great personal risk to themselves, and you find people who hear them and listen and take action.
I am not so naive as to think that all humans are fundamentally good, but I am not a Hobbesian.
Humans are not monsters held in check by a thin veneer of society and culture.
When people commit unspeakable wrongs, there are always people who are willing to stand up and say that this is wrong and then fight back.
And we should never be hopeless, because becoming hopeless is how that you simply accept all the things that are happening to you and allow them to wash over you without question and without struggle.
You keep fighting.
If there is a moral arc to the universe, we bend it.
It will not bend itself.
We will bend it.
And you don't do it as this is a one-time thing.
You don't stand up once and say, this is wrong, and nudge it a little bit and hope that's enough.
You keep fighting over and over again, generation after generation after generation, in hopes of creating a better world.
And I hope that we will continue to fight generation after generation in hopes of creating that better world for all of us.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality Podcast.
We appreciate your feedback and your enthusiasm.
Next week, we'll pick up on that upward arc that Thomas has left us with.
The episode is called Doing Good in Impossible Times, and it features some top historians looking at creative streams of resistance to fascism during its last cursed global surge a century ago.
