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Sept. 21, 2023 - Conspirituality
51:40
172: Why Always the Jews? (w/Mike Rothschild)

Who could be a better guide through the fever dream of modern anti-semitism—the socialism of fools—than a scrappy young scion of the House of Rothschild? How has Mike, this mysterious insider—visible on CNN but a seeming ghost in real life—used his inheritance and connections to score book deals with the Fake News Media? Will he redeem his family name? Just joking! Author and friend of the pod Mike Rothschild is no relation to the banking family that has lived rent-free in the minds of antisemites and conspiracy theorists for over two centuries now. He is the author of 2021’s The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything. His new book out less that two years later, is ​​Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories. Mike joins us now from his summer palace in the South of France, um, actually his home office in Los Angeles to discuss the very stupid but dangerous groundswell of Jew hatred now filling our feeds. Go to HelloFresh.com/50conspirituality and use code 50conspirituality for 50% off plus 15% off the next 2 months! Get 50% off up to $20 and zero delivery fees on your first order when you download the DoorDash app and enter code CONSPIRITUALITY Show Notes Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
And I'm Mike Rothschild.
Two-time co-host, welcome back, Mike.
Thank you for having me.
I'm very excited.
We are on Instagram at ConspiratualityPod, and you can access all new episodes ad-free, and our Monday bonus episodes through Patreon, or you can just snag our Monday bonus episodes through Apple subscriptions.
And while we focus on Mike's book this week, we also want to remind you that our book, Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, is now out in print, ebook, and audiobook form, narrated by yours truly.
And if you've read it or listened to it, please review it.
Why always the Jews?
Featuring Mike Rothschild.
Who could be a better guide through the fever dream of modern antisemitism, the socialism of fools, than a scrappy young scion of the House of Rothschild?
How has Mike, this mysterious insider visible on CNN but a seeming ghost in real life, used his inheritance and connections to score book deals with the fake news media?
Will he redeem his family name?
Just kidding.
Author and friend of the pod, Mike Rothschild, is no relation to the banking family that has lived rent-free in the minds of anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists for over two centuries now.
He's the author of 2021's The Storm is Upon Us, how QAnon became a movement, cult, and conspiracy theory of everything.
His new book, out less than two years later, is Jewish Space Lasers, The Rothschilds, and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories.
Mike joins us now from his summer palace in the south of France, actually, his home office in Los Angeles, to discuss the very stupid but dangerous groundswell of Jew hatred now filling our feets.
Wow.
Thank you.
I will hope to live up to that.
I'm a little jealous.
The only family connection I have is bearish drops in Hungary, which are homeopathic.
No relation either, but I don't get nearly the traction you do, Mike, on social media for that particular connection.
Well, I'm sure you'd be a micro-celebrity in Hungary.
And mine is just like the name of a Scotch whiskey, right?
That sounds nice.
Yeah, I'll take whiskey over homeopathic drops.
Mike, what did you think the first time you heard the term Jewish space lasers?
You know, because there was this delay in this Facebook post from Marjorie Taylor Greene becoming public, The directed energy weapon conspiracy theory had already made a couple of cycles, so I was like, okay, whatever.
It didn't really pique my interest much because I'd seen so much stuff like it already, but it took off on Twitter with Hashtags, memes, all this stuff.
And I was like, okay, this is kind of funny, but it's also not particularly funny because it's doing the same thing that so much other antisemitic scapegoating has done, which is blame the Jews for something out of our control that we don't quite understand.
So I saw the humor, but I also saw the danger in that.
Yeah, now my understanding is that she didn't quite use the term directly in that 2018 post, but she alluded, like, incoherently, as she does in her QAnon references to lasers and Rothschild Inc.
as part of this consortium of companies testing, like, some sort of nefarious technology she didn't understand.
So, like, is the phrase actually a paraphrase by her critics?
And does that make a difference, do you think?
Yeah, she doesn't ever use it in the post.
She never says Jewish.
She says Rothschild Inc.
and isn't that interesting, which is the same thing.
Right.
It's just couched ever so slightly.
The term, I think, actually comes from an article by Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine the next day.
Yeah, the headline.
Yeah, the headline is like, Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks a Jewish space laser started the California forest fire.
Right.
So it really took off from there.
So it's one of those things where It's like, beam me up, Scotty.
It was never actually said, even though it's completely part of that same zeitgeist.
Right.
Okay.
Well, we've got the title out of the way.
I have, like, a big zoomed out question to start, which is... Sure.
You know, basically, capitalism is a very dirty, very violent, cruel enterprise, and a lot of that is hidden by the obscure mechanisms of finance as the dominant, like, enterprise and paradigm.
So it's almost impossible, at least for individuals to imagine, functioning outside of capitalist logic.
And, you know, in order to rationalize the project and self-soothe, you know, and exonerate themselves from obvious cruelties, I think that capitalists have to imagine that it's not their system that is corrupt, but like a select group of villains within it.
Like people who are usurping the system, they're cheating, they never deserve to be there.
Like capitalism needs a scapegoat group to exonerate itself from its own shame.
And historically, Jews are that group.
Is that fair?
And is that like a core theme of this book, do you think?
Yeah, it really is fair.
And Jews in general, Particularly when it comes to wealth, make such a good scapegoat for so many different aspects of it.
You can scapegoat them when it goes wrong, when the train crashes, when the banks fail.
Well, you know, the Jews are too represented in the banks.
They own too many of the railroad lines.
But the Jews are also a good scapegoat for your own personal failures.
Your business failed.
You had to lay off employees.
Things just didn't work out the way you wanted them to.
It's never your fault.
It was never something you did.
That would require looking inward.
That would require taking stock of your own bad decisions or just writing it off to bad luck or bad timing.
It has to be somebody else's fault.
And in so many cases, as we see, that somebody else is the Jews.
Right.
I grew up living paradoxically with this idea of the Jews, like so many people have.
I grew up in a very Jewish area of New Jersey.
And on one hand, I used to open pools for a summer on a road called On Golden Pond that everyone kind of knew was Jewish.
But on the other hand, we had, oh, if you pick up a penny You're a Jew.
That was something that the kids would say.
So you address this in the books, this paradox of being uber wealthy and yet very cheap.
And one thing I really appreciated was the history of sort of the biblical times of Jews and how these tropes got put into circulation.
Can you give like a 101 overview of this notion dating back from them of how these paradoxes started and then how they proliferated?
In – particularly in the Middle Ages, Jews were restricted from a number of professions, and in particular, they were restricted from owning land.
Well, the biggest profession then was tenant farming.
So Jews were not able to own land and were not able to be farmers, so they had to do something else.
And you also had in Judaism an emphasis on literacy.
Adult males had to be able to read the Torah at age 13.
So Jews were very literate, Jews were very good with math, and Jews had access to each other's wealth and were allowed to lend it at interest because there were canon law prohibitions on what was deemed usury.
Now, that term is basically sort of a catch-all for lending money at too high of an interest rate.
And the people who decide what is too high are the Christians in the community.
So, they need the money.
You know, the rulers, the royalty, they need the money for their palaces, for their castles.
I mean, we've seen these giant castles.
They're not cheap.
They need money to equip their armies to go march to war.
They don't have that money.
They need to borrow it from somebody.
And the person lending it wants to make a little bit of money off of that.
So it seems like a very natural transaction, one that European royalty had no problem indulging in, but they had to have some sort of biblical get-out-of-jail-free card.
Like, we're doing this, but it's bad, but we still need to do it.
So that kind of paradox of lending money at interest if you're doing it the right way is okay.
Usury is literally the worst thing you can do.
It's worse than murder.
But whoever decides that line is basically just whoever the local ruler is.
Did you come across a reasonable sort of legal debates over that line?
Like, was it something that people focused on or was it just, I don't know, was it just made up on the fly?
It was made up on the fly.
They would have a council and they would declare that metal cannot beget metal.
And so doing this is a heinous crime.
But we want to build a new palace.
So, you know, what are you going to do?
Yeah, we want to do what they do.
Right.
But we don't want to feel bad about it.
Right.
But we want to absolve ourselves.
Yeah.
So it's their fault.
But, you know, we still indulge in it.
All right.
So moving on to the Rothschilds, I'm wondering if anyone ever had a clear and accurate understanding of who the family was.
Before the spectacle of, you know, their machinations and wealth made them the symbolic scapegoats of capitalism.
When the Rothschilds first really started to assert themselves, you know, in the early decades of the 1800s, they were looked at with a kind of awe and a sort of grudging acceptance.
You would have cartoons that would sort of parody them a little bit.
They would be mentioned in some of the novels of the time.
It wasn't particularly anti-Semitic.
It was much more, these people are incredibly rich and, you know, can sort of do whatever they want with their money.
So there was the perception that the Rothschilds have this kind of innate wisdom and the ability to sort of conjure money out of thin air.
So early on, you would get some of these stories like the Hebrew talisman, which is an anonymous story
from the 1830s that said Nathan Rothschild had this magical amulet that he was able to use
to turn things into gold.
And it was sort of outlandish stories that weren't particularly anti-Semitic.
That came a little bit later when you started to get into the rise of socialism
and leading into the revolutions of 1848.
It's amazing because even there, there's an offloading of the strange magic of alchemy
onto the out group, right?
Because Christians are doing alchemy too, right?
Or, I don't know, borderline Christians, post-Christians, whatever.
There's some kind of deal with the devil.
It's sort of, you know, Robert Johnson at the crossroads.
Except this time it's Nathan Rothschild with his magic amulet.
Yeah, so the Christians might be, you know, trying to do alchemy, but the Jews are succeeding, right?
Yeah, there's some kind of nefarious reason why this is all happening.
So you do a really good job at explaining the Rothschilds in Europe, and then you write one of my favorite lines in the entire book, because I think it unpacks the American mindset or circumstance so well.
You write, the Rothschilds may not have understood the United States But the United States truly believed it understood the Rothschilds.
And that seems pretty consistent with Americans right through to social media now.
So how prominent do you think this trait of thinking you know something that you don't is in conspiracy thinking in general?
Oh, it's huge.
I mean, the internet now and the pamphlets of cranks back then were full of people who had the secret knowledge, who understood things in a way that other people don't.
You know, that's really what the idea of doing your research is about.
It's like, I know something you don't know.
And in the case of something like the Rothschilds, Particularly in 1800s America, you know, they were very inscrutable.
There weren't any Rothschilds in America.
You just had the stories.
Many of the stories were brought over from the diaspora.
So Jews fleeing Europe would come to America and they'd talk about the Rothschilds.
And then Gentiles here would go, oh, that sounds a little too rich for me.
They sound like they're a little too powerful.
Of course, this is America where you can never be too rich or too powerful, except if you're Jewish.
Right.
Well, but there are things that people know that we cannot know, or that common people cannot know, and there's something here in the understanding of the creation of the Rothschild myth that, you know, sort of gels with my own baffledness when it comes to understanding the basic mechanics of modern banking, right?
Like, I can't Understand bonds, for instance.
Like, you probably, if I word-searched your digital arc for the word bonds, it'd probably come up like 120 times, and I could probably read each sentence and try, like, I would blank out.
I'd glaze over.
It's like math or something.
So the Rothschilds, more than any other group of folks, arguably invent or popularize, or they really sort of capitalize upon these financialization techniques.
And I think their impenetrability, the fact that we can't know what's actually going on and their books are closed, makes them akin to wizards for many working people.
Do you think that's fair?
Absolutely.
The Rothschilds made a huge amount of money very quickly in the early 1800s.
You know, Mayer was a prosperous Banker and loanmaker and dealer and, you know, coins and metals and stuff.
Nathan, his son, dies in 1836.
He's the richest man in the world.
The family suddenly has palaces everywhere.
They have massive art collections.
And it happened very quickly.
And it happened in a way that involves a lot of smuggling and hiding of wealth.
There were sort of codes and secret diaries written in this sort of arcane How did they do this?
that was totally impenetrable to outsiders.
You know, a lot of that stuff was kept private.
They didn't keep particularly good records at the time.
So they just all of a sudden had this huge amount of money.
And you go, I've never heard of these people until last year.
And now they own three palaces in my country.
How did they do this?
It must have been Satan.
Very interesting.
Yeah, it's like, well, how did this happen so quickly?
We need to make up a reason because the actual reason is either hidden or it's so complicated that nobody can understand it.
And being so complicated, it's also running the rest of our world that we can't understand increasingly.
Right.
And so part of what you see is that a group of people who've been victimized, who've therefore had to use all sorts of modes of deception in order to survive, can then have the evidence of that kind of secrecy and deceptiveness turned against them as seeming to be nefarious.
Their secrecy and their keeping their wealth in their own community is seen as kabbalistic, almost.
You're huddling together and you're keeping everybody out.
Well, they had to do that.
They had to do that because they kept getting expelled and they kept having pogroms and they kept running afoul of local authorities.
You do that to protect yourself and to protect what you've built in the world.
You know, I want to dig back into the kind of projective shame dynamic, and I'm thinking about Henry Ford, who you write about really well in the book.
He's one of the most ruthless tycoons in American history.
He accelerates capitalistic profiteering through the, like, complete dehumanization of the human worker on the assembly line in order to maximize profit.
And then he also, like, industrializes the publication of anti-Semitism by spreading the protocols globally through his international Jew newspaper, and then he provides moral and intellectual support to Hitler.
So, does Ford kind of, like, set the mold?
Is he a good archetype for the Gentile tycoon who dumps all over Jews for allegedly doing what he's absolutely guilty of?
Yeah, he really is.
I think Ford is a very instructive model for how anti-Semitism took off between the wars.
It was very much rooted in the fear of another war.
It was very much rooted in the idea that they are so incredibly rich.
This cannot be legitimate.
They have to have secrets.
And then you find something like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and it convincingly lays out all of these secrets.
It convincingly tells the story of how they were able to do this.
How did they become so powerful?
Well, they get together in a room and they have these rules and they talk about what they're going to do to the Gentiles.
And it's very alluring if you feel like this is competition for you.
You want the level of wealth that these people have, but you also just don't like these people.
You don't trust them.
And so it becomes very easy to take out your own neuroses on this group of people.
Just in case listeners don't know where the protocols come from, can you explain?
Sure.
So the protocols of the Elders of Zion were a forgery that emerged out of Russia in the early 1900s.
And there's a number of theories For who wrote them, nobody quite knows for sure.
One of the prevailing theories is that it was the Russian secret police, but now there's some scholarly thinking that that's not quite true.
There's a newspaper editor who's really bound up in them who may have, who isn't the first to print them in Russia, but he may or may not have been involved.
It's a whole long academic thing and I don't fully understand it.
But the protocols start to migrate their way to the West in the early 1920s.
They're printed in England in 1920.
They're printed in the United States.
They're first printed not by Ford, but Ford is the one who popularizes them in his paper, The Dearborn Independent, publishes them as this series called The International Jew, The World's Foremost Problem.
He's not straight up printing the protocols, but he's kind of laundering them, almost straight up printing them.
He'll sort of add in his own commentary there.
And it becomes very popular.
He's putting copies of this paper in every glove compartment of every Ford.
You mean as they come off the assembly line?
Yeah, every Ford comes with a copy of the Dearborn Independent.
It's like the Gideon Bible, but really bad.
Really bad.
Yeah, you don't get a nice hotel stay out of it.
More bad.
So what happens when the Jewish car purchaser buys the car, they find this thing?
Well, there was a boycott.
There was a boycott against Ford.
I don't get too much into this in the book.
It just strays a little bit too far afield.
But there was a concerted effort by the ADL at that point, which had only been around maybe a decade or so, to boycott Ford.
And Ford eventually is sued over the protocols, and he issues this very unconvincing apology and stops printing them.
But, you know, the damage had been done.
So what does Elon Musk put in the glove compartments these days?
I don't even want to know.
Oh, God.
I've been saying on Twitter that I think we are getting closer and closer to Musk, not like telling his people, his fans to like go read the protocols, but somebody is going to post something and he's going to go.
Interesting or like one of those like eyes open emojis and, you know, looking into it or disturbing.
And it's going to be, you know, the protocols or, you know, the Holocaust never happened or the Rothschild Rockefeller Alliance rules the world.
You know, one of those very classic anti-Semitic tropes.
And that's not going to be good.
We're going to talk about how the Rothschilds elide into or sort of morph into the Soros
panic, but this is the last Musk tweet that you actually reference in this regard.
You say, or he, Musk writes, the Soros organization appears to want nothing less than the destruction of Western civilization.
Yeah.
Right.
And you're like, yeah, it's getting closer to that.
It's getting closer to the glove compartment, but actually it's Twitter.
Critical mass.
Right.
And there's nothing new or edgy about that.
You know, that could fit into a David Icke book saying the Trilateral Commission wants nothing less than the destruction of Western civilization.
The Rothschild family, the Warburgs, you know, the Hidden Hand, the Club of the Isles, you know, whatever your secret society of the moment is, that's responsible for wanting to destroy Western Christendom, you know.
Musk and his people and his, you know, his fan base, they think they are so edgy and so like, oh, we say the things that people, other people only think about.
No, people have been saying that for a while.
Get in line.
Right.
You know, maybe this is as obscure or hidden as the Rothschilds' books, but one of the things that I kept wondering about reading through your account was their religious commitments.
What did you come away with about the secularity or religiousness of Mayer and his sons?
And as a follow-up, I'm wondering If the perception is that this is more of a secular Jewish family, does that make them more untrustworthy than the religious Jew in the evolution of anti-Semitism?
Yeah, it's interesting.
You know, very early on, Meir lived in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt.
So they were very observant, very orthodox.
Every generation, I feel like, becomes a little bit less observant.
But they never fully assimilated.
They never converted.
They never changed their name.
They continued to donate very handsomely to Jewish philanthropic causes.
So they never completely gave up their Judaism.
It just became Less and less a part of their identity as they became wealthier and wealthier.
And now, of course, the Rothschilds are so spread out, they're so disparate, that it's really not even helpful to talk about what the family is today, because the family is all over the place.
One of them married Nikki Hilton.
One of them is dating Angelina Jolie.
Not the same one.
You know, they are just sort of baked into the fabric of old world elegance and wealth.
Judaism is part of that, but there are many other parts that are on an equal par with that.
There's a secularization process, and that's part of the story.
But what about medicine?
Because the Rothschild name is thrown around during the pandemic, the current pandemic, in relation to the supposed oppressions of public health policy.
But there is one reference to anti-vax conspiracy theories directed at the family back in the 1930s.
You explained that in Cold War Soviet Union, Stalin became a fan of the Doctor's Plot, which was a conspiracy theory that mainly targeted Jews.
So is there some kind of overlap or resonance between the Jew as an evil banker and the Jew as an evil doctor?
Oh, sure.
It absolutely fits together.
You know, it's just another part of Jewish infiltration.
Well, they've taken over banking.
Sure, they'll take over medicine.
Why are there so many Jewish doctors?
The Jewish plague is seen as polluting the bloodline of Christendom, and a lot of that gets into very weird quasi-medical concepts like eugenics and phrenology and all this other stuff
that we sort of make fun of on the internet.
But this was all very popular at a certain point.
And Jews were seen as advancing the elimination of Christians,
whether you're going to do it through breeding them out, whether you're going to do it through tainted vaccines.
It all kind of comes back to this, how do we rule the world?
Well, it's not just one way.
It's not just through money.
We also do it through pornographic entertainment.
We also do it through addicting you to vaccines and drugs and chemicals.
So it's all part of the same thing.
It's all really maddening too, right?
Because...
If you scratch the surface, there are so many groups involved in PACs and dark money and stacking the Supreme Court and funding these right-wing propaganda media outfits.
There's so much huge money actually exerting immense influence on our cultural and political discourse and on systems of power.
It seems like having a convenient scapegoat that you can just sort of connect the dots in a vague, paranoid way is a powerful distraction from actually digging into that actual research, right?
Sure.
And so much of the conspiracy theory world is busy work.
You know, is kind of interpreting things and decoding things and putting together the connections and like, ooh, doing more research.
But of course, it always comes back to, here are the string pullers, here's what they're doing to you.
And of course, the people who believe in this stuff are also being manipulated.
They're being fleeced.
They're being told what to think, who to hate.
They just don't want to see it that way.
It's also vibes all the way down, right?
It's not actual research.
No, it's not.
It's nothing.
It's not research.
It's just I have a vague, sinister feeling about things, and oh, here's this speech from Bill Gates 10 years ago.
Let's take it out of context again, and it's the same stuff over and over.
You know, I'm realizing now, listening to you, that this quality of, well, their books were closed.
We didn't realize how they made the money.
We couldn't figure it out.
Capitalism is a black box that way.
I don't know.
You can't really see into the mystery.
That leaves the name sort of open as a blank slate.
Because they are both private but also obscure, they really can become anything.
Yeah, yeah, it's you make it your own conspiracy.
And you know, we've seen with things like QAnon, where the just the blank slate of, you know, here's what's going on, but fill in all the details, because we don't know the rest of it.
You know, the Rothschilds were very opaque about a lot of things, but they were everywhere.
So you make up your own story.
And if you are very prolific at it, and you can print it in a pamphlet, or you can write it in a book, So you just said pamphlet and you've mentioned before you write about the pamphlet wars.
you know, it already ties into the things they already believe.
You're just adding more specificity and more details.
So you just said pamphlet and you've mentioned before you write about the
pamphlet wars, you know, that really started around the time of Martin Luther when
printing became widely available.
Sure.
And then it continues, you know, we talked about protocols and Ford and then we get Hollywood films, of course, then we're up to the internet.
I always wonder about how speed plays a role when you're saying do your own research because
traditionally doing your own research would be a laborious, time-consuming process with
hundreds or thousands of footnotes at the end of a process that you then present to
the world, which is not what we have.
From your research, but also from you being very prolific on ex-Twitter and getting pushback
from people like Jordan Peterson, what does this do to a brain, comparatively having to
wait a week until a pamphlet was printed to find out the next episode as compared to the
speed at which social media travels?
There's a lot of research that shows we are not more conspiratorial as a society than
we were in maybe the 50s or whenever.
But this stuff now travels much faster, and there is no barrier to entry anymore.
And conspiracy theorists have always been excellent at adopting new technology.
You know, we saw that with the printing press.
We saw that with the duplication of color photos, duplication and creation of VCR tapes.
All the way up to the earliest parts of the internet.
Conspiracy theories took off on the internet before most people even had an email address.
So they adopt to new technology that makes things easier to spread, faster, and reduces any kind of real effort that you need to put into anything.
You can now create a conspiracy theory On Twitter, and if you just do it well enough, and if you sort of hit the right notes at the right time, you can kind of become an influencer very quickly.
You don't even need to wait for your pamphlets to come back from the printer.
So, what it does to the brain is it just continuously primes you for more.
More details, more twists and turns, more villains, more content.
These people put out a gigantic amount of stuff.
You know, these big video creators.
You know, they're doing two or three videos a day.
They've got, you know, two or three podcasts they do a day.
It's constant.
There is never time to breathe.
There's never time to think about anything.
And there's never time to stop and say, that thing, I don't, I don't think that particular aspect is true.
I'm going to go investigate that.
It's just more, more, more.
And, you know, we saw it early on with some of this stuff and it's, it's just, it's gotten much faster now.
Yeah, we saw it early on with, like, Loose Change and Zeitgeist and those early internet sort of agitprop movies that were so... they fed exactly that thing you're talking about, where it's fast food, artificial creating of meaning and insight, right?
Yeah, it is a constant junk.
And it's, you know, I liken it a lot to like a slot machine.
You know, the buzzers are going, the bells are going, the videos are playing.
It's exciting.
It's cool.
You might get something great out of it at the end, like, you know, Hillary Clinton being hanged at dawn at Gitmo.
You know, you just got to keep feeding your money in.
It's just like gambling.
I want to skip ahead to the 1980s.
Well, I guess we're going back now because we were just discussing socials.
But in that era, the Rothschilds pop up in reference to a disaster we've given a lot of coverage to, which is the Satanic Panic.
You write that, quote, when evangelical Christianity began promoting a countrywide satanic panic with its witches, demons, and secret messages hidden on Led Zeppelin, ACDC, and Black Sabbath albums, Rothschild conspiracy theories came along with it because what's better than the Rothschilds financially ruling nations and partnering with Satan?
The Rothschilds ruling with druid witches is better, as one 2007 blog post claims.
So, is this the first really solid implication that the Rothschilds are sexual deviants as well, or they're interested in deviants?
And is that sort of thing open the door to the conflation of the Rothschild surrealist ball in 1972 with Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
And then of course there's Epstein and I'm wondering if his own Jewishness sort of like retroactively confirms all of that.
You have some references in Nazi propaganda to the Rothschilds paying for the mongrelizing of the white bloodline.
Right.
But the the satanic panic really sort of focuses all of that and takes the current panic that's going on and marries it to the classic old school panic of what the wealthy Jews are doing to Christian society.
So it's taking these these one thing that's been around for a while and the hot new thing merging them all together and getting a whole new avalanche of content.
out of that. And of course, you know, it's not really clear what the Rothschilds know
about any of this. And then they have their 1972 party, which people didn't really know
about until much later. Those photos that have gone around, you know, the woman with
the big deer head and all that stuff. I mean, you see this stuff all over the place in conspiracy
theory world and they call it, oh, the Rothschild Illuminati ball.
It was held at this mansion in France that had actually been rebuilt after the Nazis took it over.
This was in 1972.
The family gave it away three years later.
They don't even, they haven't owned that property since the mid-70s.
But those photos didn't become popular until well after that.
And of course, you know, Kubrick gets involved in this sort of orgy scene with eyes wide shut.
And he's not satirizing any one particular family or one particular person.
This is just sort of, this is a representation of what rich weirdos do.
It's not, it's not about the Rothschilds, it's just about here are the deprivations of people who live in a strata of society that you'll never be in.
Right.
And it's again, it's taking a bunch of different things and putting them all together and twisting them into a theory that revolves around what the Jews are doing.
Yeah, I couldn't help but giggle there at the idea of Led Zeppelin, ACDC, and Black Sabbath as these famous Jewish rock and roll acts.
Right, sure, sure.
Sure, well, there's constant conspiracy theories about what the Rothschilds are funding.
And actually, that same guy who was involved in a lot of the satanic panic stuff, John Todd, he also had a theory that Philippe Rothschild, who there wasn't one, there was a Philippe de Rothschild, it was the French wine heir.
Uh, had financed the writing of Atlas Shrugged.
I mean, of all of the, like, of all of the books.
So it just, it makes, it makes no sense whatsoever, but it's so rich in weird details that for a certain type of person, that becomes a very alluring story.
Your book includes, as we've been covering, this deeply researched history of antisemitism and of the Rothschild family.
But I want to bring us now a little closer to the present and to home.
You touch on the actual big money Donald Trump and Paul Manafort connections.
To Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska, who essentially alongside Putin is the actual puppet master behind Manafort pitching himself to manage the Trump campaign for a salary of exactly zero dollars, right?
But that aside, you recount a fascinating through line in which Trump is actually financially involved with the Rothschilds starting back in 1990.
And here we see the Donald's failing hotel casino bailed out by Rothschild Inc.
And then later Nat Rothschild is at the very least privy to various political influence campaigns cooked up by Manafort and Deripaska, which then includes his actually being investigated as part of the Russia probe.
But it still strikes me that this conspiracy fantasy, the scapegoat projection, the mirror world alternate reality is absolutely unperturbed by Trump's connection to this supposedly diabolical Jewish banking family at the heart of the cabal against which Trump Is supposedly in a battle of cosmic importance.
So what do you want to tell us about any of that?
Yeah, it was actually really surprising when I discovered the connection between Rothschild Inc bailing out the Taj through Wilbur Ross.
And then, of course, Wilbur Ross getting a cabinet appointment from Trump.
I think he's one of the only cabinet members who somehow made it through those four years without being fired or resigning.
Yeah.
And I really didn't know that.
And I follow the minutia of Trump world as much as a lot of other people do.
But I never really made that connection that Trump's sort of business was saved by Rothschild.
And then you've got the Rothschild connections with Manafort and Deripaska.
It's not stuff that his inner circle ever brings up.
And you would think, well, they, you know, they're all, you know, a lot of these people are really anti-Semitic and, you know, they don't want people talking about this stuff.
But I think with Trump, and we've seen this over and over and over, there is this constant get out of jail free card with Trump, that the things that that these people excoriate any other political candidate for, well, it's fine because Trump's doing it.
And he, you know, he has a reason and he he needs to do it his way.
And we just don't understand it.
It's unbelievable the pass that Trump has gotten for stuff that any other politician would be just raked over the coals for.
And of course, some people didn't give him a pass.
If you read like David Icke's books, you know, Icke hates Trump as much as he hates Obama, as much as he hates Biden.
But that's pretty rare.
A lot of the big Trump world influencers just completely glossed this over.
As if it just wasn't real.
I mean, Ike's market, I think, demands that he doubt everybody.
Right.
That he's not going to back any single figure like that.
But yeah, I mean, from our demographic that we study, the Teflon nature of Trump's personality that way is framed as, you know, he has some kind of spiritual role to play in the world.
He's some kind of trickster.
He is beyond the sort of machinations of these low-level politics because he has a larger view.
So, yeah, very weird person to attribute all of that stuff to.
Totally.
Totally.
Yeah, it's like he has, his intentions are beyond reproach.
Right.
He's saving the world.
So we touched on it briefly, but a moment ago, but you observe that this persistent bogeyman presence of the Rothschilds started increasingly to morph Into an obsession with George Soros around the time of Obama and the rise of the Tea Party.
And again, there's this bizarre set of disconnects that have to be there for the diabolical fantasy to stay alive, right?
Soros is a fan of Reagan, it turns out.
He helped hasten the end of the USSR.
He's a mega capitalist, top of the food chain, opportunistic investor.
He's a self-made man.
Of course, these are all things that fit anti-Semitic tropes, but they're also like, you know, capitalist values of the right.
Prior to the Iraq War, his foundations and donations were mostly dedicated towards supporting the spread of democracy and capitalism in former communist states.
Yet somehow this is the Jew behind the Great Replacement Plan and the woke Marxist agenda that, amongst other things, is supposedly now weaponizing the justice system against Trump and his allies.
In the fever dream of Alex Jones and David Icke and Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly and Steve Bannon, how did George Soros and his open society's foundations become the new Rothschilds so quickly?
You know, Soros really fills that role really well.
He's very old.
He's very rich.
He kind of speaks with this really thick accent, and he sometimes says things that are really easy to take out of context.
And he was, you know, he was a Reagan Republican, basically, and he's fighting communism.
He's trying to sort of open up these post-totalitarian societies.
You'd think this would be something that, like, red meat Republicans would be all over, that they would love this guy.
But he got into American politics at a very particular time, which was 2004.
And everybody is just drunk on post-911 malignant patriotism.
This is the time of you're with us or you're with the terrorists.
This is the time of Freedom Fries.
And Soros really opposed the Iraq War.
And this was this point where if you oppose this war for any reason, you are like Al Qaeda.
And so it was very easy for these far-right influencers, you know, the Glenn Becks, the Bill O'Reilly's, to suddenly cast enormous suspicion on this guy.
And then they start looking into some of these other things he's given to.
He's given to expanding voting rights.
Well, we can't have that.
He's given to expanding, you know, abortion rights.
He's drug legalization, prison reform, you know, all of these things that are very classically progressive.
But he's also, like, really capitalist and really anti-communist.
So he's this really weird paradox, but they focus on the opposition to Bush, the opposition to the Iraq War, and that very quickly makes him public enemy number one.
And then, of course, he's, you know, giving to Obama and all this other stuff.
Then he gets rolled into Acorn and all this other nonsense.
And within a couple of years, he's just everywhere as the puppet master of puppet masters.
It seems like it's also part of the phenomenon of what's going on
with cable news and the early days of the internet there.
And you talk about this acceleration where something that may have taken a hundred years in terms of the Rothschilds gaining infamy in this way amongst conspiracy theorists happens in very short order for someone like George Soros.
Yeah, and they, these cable networks have an enormous amount of time to fill up.
They have these huge audiences that are desperate for more enemies to fight and more books to buy.
And it really makes sense that they would find this old progressive Jewish guy who hates George W. Bush and wants to get John Kerry into office and now suddenly he's talking about how great Obama is and how we need to legalize marijuana.
and all these other horrible things, and you apply all of those tropes
that you've been applying to the Rothschilds, they very easily transfer to Soros
for an audience that is very, very hungry for a constant stream of content.
The same way we were talking about earlier.
A 24-hour news channel based on outrage has to continuously throw more coal in the fire,
and Soros really fits that really well.
He also is visible.
There are photographs of him.
You can meme his head.
Like, he's not a Rothschild that way.
No, he's not old money.
He's very new.
And he's very vocal in his politics and his own personal beliefs in ways that the Rothschilds never were.
Now, Mike, as a follower of cults and conspiracies, I was shocked to realize that I did not know, or maybe I'd forgotten because I was focused on other aspects of their story, but that the Aum Shinrikyo terrorist cult in Japan, this is the one that was led by supposed godman Shoko Asahara, and they were most infamously responsible for the Tokyo subway siren gas attack in 1995, listeners will remember, were also vehemently anti-Semitic.
And this, to me, it just makes me wonder about this bizarre algorithm here in terms of the appeal and the utility of anti-Semitism to these differing groups and ideologies wherever they happen to be in the world, right?
And we've seen this a lot with young extremists, young jihadists.
They will bounce back and forth between a neo-Nazi movement, then the black Hebrew Israelites, then an eco-fascist movement.
It is not about the ideology.
It is about who is the enemy.
And the common enemy, whether you are an eco-terrorist, whether you are a jihadist, whether you are a Japanese cultist, the common enemy is the Jew.
And this is a very easy thing to rally around.
Well, we hate each other, but we all hate them.
And we can all agree that they are the ones who are really responsible for this.
I was really surprised by the amount of anti-Semitic content that's come out of Japan in the last couple decades, the amount of anti-Semitic content that's come out of China in the last couple of decades.
That is, I mean, these are not places that you think of with Judaism.
I mean, these are countries that probably have enough Jews to fill a basketball arena.
But there is a huge market for this stuff in these countries because the scapegoat's always going to be the same.
Yeah, even if they're people who barely have any presence in the culture or any history of having been seen as some kind of danger.
Well, maybe more so.
Maybe more so, right?
It's easier.
It becomes easier.
Yeah, they'd have no visibility at all.
You don't know anybody like that.
You know, zooming out as we round up here, you have a line, you referenced this earlier in our interview here, but you have a line that really stood out to me.
You write, somehow, you're writing about the States, somehow in a country where the only limits on success were your own dreams, the Rothschilds had accomplished too much and couldn't be trusted because of it.
And I wanted to ask whether, and I'm asking this as the Canadian on staff, do you think that this basic, conflicted delusion at the heart of American identity, which is like, you've gotta make it, but if you do, we might hate you, or you might be evil.
Like, do you feel that that in itself is an invitation to conspiracy theorizing in general?
Yeah, it definitely is.
And I think with a lot of the anti-Semitic stuff that's going around right now, a lot of these flyers that are being passed around, they're just lists of people in banking and entertainment and academia and politics who are Jewish.
And it is this idea that there are too many Jews relative to the amount of Jews in America.
There's too many that have done too well.
But of course, this is America.
And you know, we should theoretically be like, if you made it to the top, it's because you're better.
It's you're smarter.
And if Jews, if there's a lot of Jews in academia, a lot of Jews in C-suites, there aren't, but you know, they're visible.
It's the thought of, well, maybe we should just do better.
Maybe we need to outsmart them.
Maybe, you know, maybe we need to do something that they're doing and do it better.
But it's never like that.
It's just they're doing too well.
Therefore, we're not doing well enough.
It's as if there is just a certain amount of success and a certain amount of wealth.
And there are only a certain number of slices of the pie.
And a Jewish person getting a bigger slice of the pie means my slice of the pie is going to be smaller.
And that is wrong.
And if your co-religionist or your fellow ethnic identity person, if they're the ones who win, then somehow that can be aspirational.
And you can use that both as a sign of hope while also I don't know, offloading the guilt of what it actually means to be successful as a capitalist onto somebody else.
Sure.
You offload all of the bad parts and you think only about the trappings of it.
You know, I think for Trump, some of the appeal with him really was this aspirational idea of he was a blue collar billionaire, which I mean, oh my God, really?
Come on!
But there really was a thought of, if you vote for Trump, you're going to become like Trump.
And you will have all of this elegance.
You can step on anybody you want to, and it's fine.
You can stiff your contractors.
You can weasel out of paying your bills.
And it's great.
It is the most American thing you can do.
And, you know, meanwhile, you've got these these German Jewish families that just worked really hard and maybe got some lucky breaks, but also found niches in markets that didn't exist before and rose out of nothing and really are the ultimate bootstrap stories.
But they are the least trusted of all because they keep it to themselves.
It also seems like it's important to note that there are instances in which that success is built on some questionable moral decisions about business practices and who to get in bed with, but that that is ultimately a critique of capitalist ambition more so than it is of being Jewish, right?
Sure, and there are questions about that with the Rothschilds.
I write about Natty Rothschild's relationship with Cecil Rhodes and the De Beers Mining Company.
It's very dark.
And the Rothschilds wrote letters back and forth about the repression of people in the Cape Colony, and they were excited by it.
They were trying, you know, they were building out their diamond industry.
Now they were not the sort of genocidal colonialists that Rhodes was, and they backed away from him eventually.
But that's not one of the things that anti-Semites talk about.
Like there are legitimate questions as to Some of the business practices of the Rothschilds, but you never hear about any of that stuff.
It's just the, they own $500 trillion in all the central banks.
So when you talk about that kind of outlandish nonsense, you're not talking about the actual issues that really do need to be discussed.
Well, and to that point, do you think that a book like this leads to that book, which is, okay, we know that the stories that you've been telling about the Rothschilds are bunk, but let's actually get to what the issues really are.
Is that something you're going to pursue?
I don't know.
You know, part of that is that it's a little bit outside of my experience.
You know, the Neil Ferguson biographies of the Rothschilds that I used, which are, there's a two volume set and they're just enormous.
They're just full of the arcana of business decisions.
And a lot of it goes into that, like some of the colonialism and some of the monopolization and stuff like that.
But they're dense and the narrative is not all that compelling if you are not already sort of an expert in historical banking.
It's stuff that doesn't really get through to most people because it's just so complicated.
It's hard, yeah.
Yeah, it's very, very hard.
It's not light reading.
And that litany of business decisions would probably sit very comfortably alongside any of the other major wealthy families of all sorts of ethnic and religious origin all over the world.
It's not unique to the Rothschilds.
You put DuPont and Rockefeller right next to them, right?
Oh, totally.
Morgan, all those people.
And, you know, I get this a lot with Soros, like, oh, you can't criticize Soros because he's Jewish.
You can criticize Soros for anything you want.
The problem is that the criticism is always he wants to destroy Western civilization and not, you know, hey, we're going to take a look at his shorting of the pound in 1992.
People just are like, check, please.
You know, nobody wants to get into that.
But if you're talking about how the guy wants to, you know, Mike Rothschild, thank you so much for joining us.
It's a pleasure to have you back.
Best of luck with this book.
Thank you, guys.
This was terrific.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
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