#788: Mike Rothschild Returns
Today, Dan is away, so Jordan takes the opportunity to sit down with Mike Rothschild to discuss a whole host of issues related to his forthcoming book, Jewish Space Lasers.
March 24, 2023 - Knowledge Fight
01:31:28
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unidentified
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I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Dan and George. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| I need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
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unidentified
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Stop it. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
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unidentified
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Andy in Kansas. | |
| It's time to pray. | ||
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unidentified
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Andy in Kansas. | |
| You're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding us. | ||
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your room. | ||
|
unidentified
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Knowledge fight. | |
| Knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Hello, everyone. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I am Jordan. | ||
| I'm not... | ||
| I'm not sharing the mic with Dan today. | ||
| It's just me, but I also have a subject here to interview. | ||
| Please welcome back Mike Rothschild to the Knowledge Fight community. | ||
| Hello, Mike. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| How are you doing? | ||
| I'm doing just great. | ||
| I think the first question, obviously, is what's your bright spot? | ||
| My bright spot is the new season of Star Trek Picard. | ||
| I have been loving it. | ||
| We're five episodes in, I think, out of ten. | ||
| And it's going to some really cool places. | ||
| It's a lot of nostalgia, but it's also a really interesting story. | ||
| There's some really cool new characters. | ||
| It's nice to see everybody back. | ||
| Mr. Worf is beheading people. | ||
| Wait, is that a normal thing? | ||
| I've never watched The Next Generation. | ||
| Well, you couldn't... | ||
| Yeah, this episode is no longer about anything you've ever done. | ||
| This is just the Star Trek podcast. | ||
| No, this is a Star Trek podcast, yet another one. | ||
| Well, you couldn't behead people on syndication in the early 1990s. | ||
| There was one where they blew up a guy's head. | ||
| Scanner style. | ||
| Scanner style with phasers. | ||
| They sort of blew up his head and then a worm comes out of his chest and they blew that up too. | ||
| And it kind of scandalized a lot of people and so I think they backed off from the gore. | ||
| But now it's, I mean, it's streaming. | ||
| You can do anything you want. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| John Wick happened. | ||
| Who fucking cares? | ||
| Geysers of blood. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Shoot it up. | ||
| We've all watched woo-woo-shoo movies forever. | ||
| Yeah, America is finally catching up to the gore of everybody else's entertainment. | ||
| It's about time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's about time. | ||
| Just in case you were wondering, my bright spot is, until further notice, we're recording this on Tuesday, so the World Baseball Classic will be ending tonight. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Oh my god, it was incredible! | ||
| Did you watch the game last night? | ||
| I did, I did. | ||
| Now, have you heard? | ||
| Now, did you watch the Japan-Mexico game? | ||
| That's what was last night, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that was last night. | ||
| Did you hear the Japanese call of the walk-off double? | ||
| No, but I mean, I can't even comprehend. | ||
| It is, I don't want to spoil anything because it's amazing, so when we're done, just go listen to that, and it just kind of renews your faith in humanity. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| I mean, one of my best friends growing up in high school eventually moved to Japan, so I know some swear words, and I'm assuming that that is... | ||
| Littered throughout the call, right? | ||
| It's a lot of screaming. | ||
| And I don't understand it, but I don't need to. | ||
| Because I can just tell how excited they are. | ||
| And it's nice to see some joy and some excitement in a world that keeps trying to take it away from us. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, one of the things that I love so much about it is Murakami is the greatest hitter in baseball, in NBB at the very least, right? | ||
| And for him to have such a terrible world baseball classic and then literally come up in the bottom of the ninth, down one run, two minutes, like it doesn't get more. | ||
| That's why we do it. | ||
| That's why we watch it. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| No, I want to scream at you about it for the next 25 minutes. | ||
| This is the Star Trek of Baseball podcast. | ||
| The moment Dan leaves, Alex Jones is gone! | ||
| What else do we need? | ||
| Well, one thing we need, thanks Jordan, great transition, is to talk about your book. | ||
| Your new book is coming out not until September, right? | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And it is called... | ||
| Jewish space lasers? | ||
| Yes, Jewish space lasers, the Rothschilds, and 200 years of conspiracy theories. | ||
| And on the cover, there's a little asterisk by my name with no relation at the bottom. | ||
| Well, you got it. | ||
| Not that it will dissuade anybody who wants to believe that I am part of the trillionaire world-controlling family. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| I just thought I'd start the conversation. | ||
| We don't need to talk about it in every interview. | ||
| I'm still going to anyway, but at least I'm trying. | ||
| My first question was, what part of the $500 trillion is yours? | ||
| But I guess now that I can just get rid of that one, right? | ||
| I don't know if they have that many zeros to put behind a decimal point. | ||
| I think that was one of the numbers that was floated around, right? | ||
| $500 trillion. | ||
| $500 trillion. | ||
| That is one of the numbers that you see floating around. | ||
| And actually, in the book, I talk about... | ||
| Where that number might come from, because there's a really good chance that it's just totally made up. | ||
| But there's a book that came out in 1940 by a guy named George Washington Armstrong, whose own bio notes, he was like a Texas oil man, and his own bio notes that he was a staunch segregationist and opponent of the 14th and 15th Amendment. | ||
| This guy wrote a book called Rothschild Money Trust. | ||
| And essentially, he blames the Rothschilds for his oil business going bankrupt after World War I. Sure. | ||
| And he comes up with this number that the family has $300 billion, which I think he got from a different crank, this fake Russian count who I write about in the book, who took his own life after his United Gentiles League failed. | ||
| Some real characters in this one. | ||
| Oh, yeah, there are plenty. | ||
| I enjoyed your book a great deal. | ||
| It's very, very good. | ||
| It's got a very propulsive... | ||
| It's never slow. | ||
| It's always taking you through each individual aspect of where it is this comes from. | ||
| Obviously, you start right where it begins with Jesus being like, hey, man! | ||
| No charging interest! | ||
| And then it all goes to shit from there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this guy, Armstrong, he took this figure $300 billion and he just decided that the family made another $100 billion off of the First World War. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Sure, of course. | ||
| And made another $100 billion off the Great Depression. | ||
| And he was writing in the 1940s. | ||
| He was writing in the 1940s. | ||
| So $100 billion in the 1940s is roughly a quincillion or whatever number. | ||
| It's an inconceivable amount of money. | ||
| And you see that with other attempts to quantify the Rothschild Network. | ||
| You see these amounts of money that are more money than exist. | ||
| The Chinese author of Currency Wars, a very, very popular conspiracy theory book in China, Posits the Rothschilds might have like $1.2 quadrillion. | ||
| It's numbers that are so far away from reality, they're hard to talk about. | ||
| Because it's like, where do you even start to come up with that? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, it is to a certain extent, like every joke I ever made about... | ||
| Austin Powers, whenever he's like $100 billion and everybody's like, oh, okay, I guess that's, it's just a fictional number. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| You know, it's just whatever. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You find the same thing with, you know, abortion statistics, like you guys were talking about the other day. | ||
| Like, these numbers are just, they just come out of nowhere. | ||
| And you can't refute them because they're totally made up. | ||
| So the best you can do is try to figure out what the real number is. | ||
| And in something like the Rothschilds, that number probably is not really knowable because the family is so broken up and they've sold off so many of their assets. | ||
| So you're really just guessing. | ||
| And when you're pushing conspiracy theories, the bigger the number, the more traction it's going to get. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And the other, obviously, one of the problems you talk about in the book is it doesn't matter what they could do. | ||
| We're going to give you an exact accounting. | ||
| They could have their accounting firm put everything out online, line by line by line, and that would never be enough. | ||
| No, it would just be fake. | ||
| Those aren't the real books. | ||
| They do the same thing with why there are no Rothschilds on the Forbes richest list. | ||
| Oh, that's not the real list. | ||
| Or they got their names taken off. | ||
| At some point, you just can't argue with it at a certain point. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So one thing that I really enjoyed about the way that you structure the book is you kind of start with that premise from the very beginning. | ||
| Does that make sense, you know, that idea? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I talk about how this stuff can't really be refuted in a lot of cases, and that's the stance that the family has. | ||
| You know, when I started putting the book proposal together, I thought, well, I've got to see if I can actually... | ||
| Sure, of course. | ||
| That was the first, yeah. | ||
| And that's the first step. | ||
| Like, if I'm pitching a book where I write about the Rothschilds and I'm, you know, supposed to talk to the Rothschilds, like, let's see if I can actually get access to them. | ||
| I thought, oh, you know, this is going to be great. | ||
| They're going to want to tell their story. | ||
| Well, that was, like, really naive of me because if they wanted to tell their story, they would just do that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, to a certain extent, there is like a... | ||
| They've been not telling their story for several hundred years at this point. | ||
| It would take a lot to change that, and I think my book pitch was not going to move that needle. | ||
| But what I was able to do was talk to their family archivist in London, and she said, you know, we get all these questions about all the conspiracy theories, and we never talk about it because we can't prove it's not true. | ||
| You can't prove a negative. | ||
| You can't prove that the family doesn't own every central bank except three or five or seven or whatever the meme today is. | ||
| You just have to put out there what you have done and hope that the people who need to be convinced will listen. | ||
| And of course, they won't. | ||
| So it's like we get back to the beginning. | ||
| You can't really refute a lot of this stuff. | ||
| So you have to drill down to where does it come from, how does it spread, and why do people believe it? | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| So, I mean, I think a lot of people have a ton of different theories on where does it come from. | ||
| You know, like, and you can draw it back, say we go back to the protocols of the elders of Zion, you know, the Russian propaganda. | ||
| But that's not the beginning. | ||
| You know, you go back further and you get to blood libel and that's not the beginning. | ||
| You know, like, where do you think that this kind of, I suppose, I guess the beginning of anti-Semitism comes from? | ||
| You know, where does it really begin to you? | ||
| Yeah, it really begins with recorded history. | ||
| The Jews have always made a convenient scapegoat and object of blame for whatever group did not want them in the inner circle, whether it's the Romans, whether it's the early Christians, whether it's the Turks, whether it's the Nazis. | ||
| It's always kind of the same thing. | ||
| The stories are told in different ways. | ||
| It spreads faster. | ||
| The names change, the dates change, but ultimately what you're looking at is an outgroup with their own customs, their own language. | ||
| They dress funny. | ||
| They stay very insular. | ||
| We talk about with the Rothschilds how they kept their fortune in their own family line, sometimes through some pretty extreme ways, including cousin marriage and things that we find abhorrent now. | ||
| That was a really common practice then. | ||
| It wasn't just the Rothschilds who did it. | ||
| Yeah, it is funny at the time that people were like, oh, cousin marriage is so terrible, and yet the royal families from all of the countries were married. | ||
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Totally. | |
| I mean, Prince Philip was Queen Elizabeth's third cousin, I think. | ||
| And it's just the number of things that we will accept if it's not a wealthy Jewish family doing it is pretty high. | ||
| So as Jews began to face more restrictions, particularly in Europe, they found themselves in certain professions, and one of those professions. | ||
| And, you know, there were canon law prohibitions on making money off of lending. | ||
| You know, there's all kinds of things about how metal can't beget metal and all these very obscure canon laws. | ||
| So the Jews really prospered in these fields. | ||
| They prospered in money changing and making small loans and opening businesses. | ||
| The Christians decided, oh, we actually want to get in on that. | ||
| We want to make some money. | ||
| Then suddenly usury, which is the worst thing you can possibly do. | ||
| Oh, no, that's just interest. | ||
| But when the Jews do it, it's still usury. | ||
| And what's the difference? | ||
| We have no idea. | ||
| I mean, to a certain extent, like one of the things that struck me reading the book was like, why doesn't anybody just come out and say the moment Jesus was like, don't start charging interest. | ||
| Jesus himself created two tiers of human being that were inevitably going to become in conflict. | ||
| Yeah, people just don't think that way. | ||
| We see this all the time in modern conspiracy theories. | ||
| People don't ask themselves the easy questions, the really simple, almost pedantic things that would falsify the vast majority of conspiracy theories because people like conspiracy theories. | ||
| People like... | ||
| Blaming out groups. | ||
| People like to have secret knowledge. | ||
| So you don't ask yourself the very simple questions because where's the fun in that? | ||
| Right. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| Of course. | ||
| No. | ||
| And then, you know, you have to I mean, one thing that you talk about a lot in the book is just the convenience of choosing a Jewish billionaire. | ||
| Over and over and over again, despite all of the other billionaires, the royal families, all of those things. | ||
| We're not going to be mad at the British royal family. | ||
| We're going to be mad at the, quote, Jewish royal family of the Rothschilds, that kind of thing. | ||
| So, I mean, I suppose the best place to start with where that comes from is where do the Rothschilds... | ||
| I would hope you could talk a little bit about the beginning of the Rothschild family and that kind of mystique that they have. | ||
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Sure. | |
| And it's a really good place to start. | ||
| And I start the book with a kind of brief history of the Rothschild family. | ||
| And then I get a little bit later, I get into some of the, you know, some history sort of leading up to the Second World War. | ||
| Because after that, it's just not that interesting. | ||
| But the Rothschilds... | ||
| Well, it's not... | ||
| No, I recognize that. | ||
| But I will say that there's something... | ||
| Very, very interesting that happens right before World War II that I would like to talk about. | ||
| We'll get to that later. | ||
| Absolutely, yes. | ||
| So the Rothschilds came from the Frankfurt ghetto, the Judengas, and there were, I think, about 3,000 Jews living in there. | ||
| And it was basically squalor. | ||
| You know, they're living in essentially a walled ghetto, and they're only allowed out at certain times, and they have to bow and scrape before the Christians. | ||
| But in that ghetto, you have a number of prosperous merchants. | ||
| Mayor Amschel Rothschild was the son of a Jewish merchant who was sort of moving up in the world, and he actually went to rabbinical school, but he had to leave because both his parents died. | ||
| So he moves back to Frankfurt, and he starts getting into the family business, which starts off with coins and medals. | ||
| So he's dealing in rare metals, rare coins, starting to make small loans, starts to get into textiles. | ||
| And then at some point he becomes the court Jew for the crown prince of Hess. | ||
| So the son of the leader of Hess. | ||
| And this is the Holy Roman Empire. | ||
| So we're still 100 years before Germany comes together. | ||
| The Holy Roman Empire is all these states. | ||
| Frankfurt has a special status as a free city. | ||
| So it's kind of its own enclave. | ||
| It's very important in terms of trade and banking. | ||
| And Mayer just moves up the ladder very slowly. | ||
| He has 10 children. | ||
| He has five sons. | ||
| You know, of course, we only really talk about the sons. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| I mean, you make a good point later on in how that a lot of people tried to erase the female Rothschild story from history. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| You know, like as if they weren't involved. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| And it's really only been within the last few years that the daughters of the Rothschilds and the wives have really started to take their place in scholarship. | ||
| Welcome to the shithole, ladies. | ||
| Now you're going to be involved in all the shitty conspiracies. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Everybody gets their turn. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So the Rothschilds, you know, they're making their way up the ladder in Frankfurt Jewish businesses. | ||
| But then the Napoleonic Wars hit. | ||
| And Nathan Rothschild, who is mayor's son, he's in England by this time. | ||
| He's moved first to Manchester to get into the textile business. | ||
| And this is the point where some of the Rothschild sons start going off into Europe. | ||
| And of course, you hear all the conspiracies. | ||
| Mayor sent his five sons to the capitals. | ||
| A lot of them moved out after he died. | ||
| That whole timeline gets completely messed up by conspiracy theories. | ||
| Before we get there, can I ask you to explain just one thing? | ||
| And I think it's going to hit the listeners' ears pretty heavy. | ||
| When you said court Jew, there's a lot, a lot going on behind those two words that you get into in the book, but that idea of like... | ||
| Because it wasn't supposed to be lending with interest, these royal families would get around that concept by hiring somebody... | ||
| A court Jew to handle that. | ||
| Yeah, so you'll see a number of different terms for this. | ||
| Court factor is a big one. | ||
| But they basically were court Jews. | ||
| They were Jewish bankers who were kept on in kind of an informal role by European royalty because they had access to money and they had the ability to either borrow from other community members or loan it themselves. | ||
| And you have extremely rich Jews going back to the Middle Ages who were the court Jews for European royalty. | ||
| Well, you're not going to see him anymore. | ||
| And a lot of them died completely destitute. | ||
| A lot of them were arrested. | ||
| There's a very famous court Jew, Sus the Jew, I think in the 13th or 14th century, who was accused of sexually libertine activities with Christian women and was executed horribly and publicly after a show trial. | ||
| That legend is repurposed over and over and over. | ||
| The Nazis really glommed onto it. | ||
| So for these court Jews, life was very precarious. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| This was kind of the they were kind of the go betweens with the money. | ||
| That's the thing that I wanted to because that was something that I didn't know about as far as the tradition of where the Rothschilds came from. | ||
| Yes. | ||
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unidentified
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Like the idea of the mystique and all of those things being about money and stuff. | |
| People forget that at any point in time, despite all of the wealth that they had accrued at that point, in an instant it could have been ripped away. | ||
| So they're coming from this space of, like, I'm always on the knife's edge of survival, no matter how much money I have. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they're still living in the ghetto. | ||
| They are still, when Mayer's sons left, they were really the first of the family line to leave the ghetto. | ||
| But he and his wife, Goodall, stayed there. | ||
| She stayed, you know, he died fairly young. | ||
| I mean, I guess young in our terms, but she stayed there for another three decades. | ||
| She couldn't move anywhere. | ||
| She moved into myth herself. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's one of the interesting things about her is that... | ||
| Whereas, you know, Mayer and Nathan and all of them become myth due to their accruing of wealth. | ||
| She becomes myth due to her refusal to it. | ||
| She lived in the same spot, in the same house, like in A Knight's Tale. | ||
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unidentified
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You know, that kind of thing. | |
| So that's one of the things that I find very fascinating. | ||
| From the very beginning of their story, they have these two simultaneous paths of both becoming extremely wealthy and maintaining a humility that I think a lot of other people around them absolutely did not have. | ||
| Yeah, and they maintained their Judaism. | ||
| They were very committed. | ||
| They were very committed to their Jewish practice. | ||
| And many, many other Jewish bankers in Germany and elsewhere, they converted. | ||
| And especially when a lot of them moved to the United States, a lot of them converted, took Christian last names, left all of that behind. | ||
| But the Rothschilds really stayed as a beacon of visible Jewish wealth. | ||
| And I think that's another thing that's really compounded all the conspiracy theories about them, is that they didn't assimilate. | ||
| They stayed true to who they were. | ||
| And I mean, it's hard not to believe that there was a lot of resentment from the people who converted. | ||
| I have no doubt that when they were feeling that, they were going, well, the only way we can survive is to do this. | ||
| We're jealous of you for being able to retain your Judaism, right? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| It's like they were so rich that even the rules for other wealthy Jews did not apply as much to them. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So it is... | ||
| It is a little bit like the dick was stacked against them conspiracy-wise from the beginning. | ||
| Oh, totally. | ||
| You should never have been that successful. | ||
| Kind of like, how dare you, period. | ||
| One of the things that struck me as I was thinking about it is you're going through what amounts to hundreds of years of this cycle of ebb and flow of anti-Semitism. | ||
| You know, and one thing that I kept thinking of, oddly enough, is, I don't know if you've watched MTV's Real World Road Rules Challenge. | ||
| I have not, sadly. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
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unidentified
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Okay. | |
| The only thing about it is that in the early part of the game, what gets me, what I can compare this to, is the first person who goes into elimination, the first person they all vote in, if that person comes back, then the next week they're going to vote that same person in. | ||
| Because all of the alliances, all of the powers that they've created have been built around the idea that they're already gone. | ||
| So no matter how many times they keep coming back, in order to avoid conflict between the current alliances, that person keeps going back in and in and in. | ||
| And the cyclical nature of anti-Semitism reminds me of that because it appears that every time there's about to be a conflict... | ||
| Of such huge proportions, the first thing that happens is they send in the Jews to elimination, so to speak. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it just keeps happening over and over again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it's the path of least resistance for racism. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's always the easiest thing to scapegoat the most visible outgroup. | ||
| And certainly the Jews have dealt with that for two millennia. | ||
| And the Rothschilds have dealt with it, you know, since they really rose up to international power. | ||
| They've always been the beacon for cranks and anti-Semites and, you know, the 19th and 20 early 20th century version of conspiracy grifters to look at and say it's their fault because they're the Jews we know best and they've got the most money. | ||
| Right. | ||
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And it's just it's just so easy to do it. | |
| Yeah, what struck me, what struck me as you're going through this. | ||
| Later on, eventually you talk about Amshuryoko, the Japanese cult. | ||
| And when you go into that area and you see there isn't really any source for that, it's completely external. | ||
| And the thought occurred to me, like, the horrific thought occurred to me, like, it doesn't matter. | ||
| Even if Hitler had successfully eradicated the, quote, Jews, the next second there would have been, oh, we found out that everybody from Africa is a Jew. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| So, again, it is like, one of the things about anti-Semitism is it's the fundament of racism. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is the bedrock of everything we're dealing with now is based in the same stuff from decades ago, generations ago, centuries ago, and even in countries with no Jewish tradition. | ||
| I mean, there are probably enough Jews in Japan to fit inside a small college basketball arena. | ||
| And you still have this bizarre fascination. | ||
| And some of it is kind of complementary. | ||
| Some of it is Japanese people, especially the 70s and 80s, were looking at Jews as kind of a fellow oppressed minority. | ||
| You know, the West is trying to take them down. | ||
| They're trying to take us down. | ||
| They don't want us to be too successful. | ||
| They're spreading all kinds of theories and tropes about us. | ||
| They did the same thing to the Jews. | ||
| And there was a lot of fascination about Jewish business and Jewish wealth. | ||
| But of course, that very quickly curdles into into blame, into conspiracy theory. | ||
| And of course, a lot of it is wrapped up with, you know, local culture and local conspiracy theories. | ||
| You know, the nuclear stuff is very big. | ||
| Anti-nuclear stuff is very big in Japan, and the Jews were blamed for that. | ||
| So anything that you can blame on a Jew or a group of Jews that's even just germane to your own culture is very easy to do that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, and it is it is almost like it's oversimplification, obviously, but to a certain extent, it is bullying of like, well, I'm going to be. | ||
| be a racist either way. | ||
| I wake up every day as a racist and I'm going to racist today. | ||
| It is easier for me to be racist towards Jews. | ||
| There aren't that many of them. | ||
| I don't want to be racist towards people who can kick the shit out of me. | ||
| I don't want to be racist towards people who have a bigger team than I do. | ||
| And so again, we keep coming back to It's almost an unfortunate place that Jews have been trapped in from the moment they were like, hey, let's be Jews today. | ||
| It was the beginning. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the tropes get recycled. | ||
| The terms change. | ||
| It's the Illuminati in the 90s. | ||
| It's the super government. | ||
| It's the insiders. | ||
| It's the hidden hand. | ||
| But it's always the same thing. | ||
| It's this small group. | ||
| It controls everything else. | ||
| And meanwhile, the small group is going, hey, we're not all part of that. | ||
| Like, most Jews were born into, you know, especially before the 20th century, most Jews are still born into relative poverty. | ||
| In Eastern Europe. | ||
| And the vast majority of Jewish people have no access to that kind of money. | ||
| You know, to them, the Rothschilds are a beacon of aspiration. | ||
| You know, they talk about this and talk about the Rothschilds in pop culture. | ||
| You know, the Rothschilds are the family that you hope will one day come to your humble shtetl and enjoy a cup of your tea. | ||
| That, you know, this kind of scapegoating and outgrouping, it doesn't even apply to most of the people who are scapegoated. | ||
| Yeah, and the thing about that that fascinates me is it is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. | ||
| The people both admire—the outgroup—or no, not the outgroup, the in-group, so to speak—admires the Rothschilds, puts them on a pedestal of their own. | ||
| then calls them the Jewish royal family. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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And at the same time, they are on a pedestal because they are so successful. | |
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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That in a certain way, they are the Jewish royal family. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But at the same time, not in the way that, you know, like it is both a true and untrue. | ||
| untrue things simultaneously. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And you can see that in a lot of the writing about the family. | ||
| Especially sort of the early American writing about the family. | ||
| There is that pedestal. | ||
| There's that admiration for the wealth and style and the money and the palaces. | ||
| But it's almost like, well, we don't want them to be too successful. | ||
| We don't want them over here. | ||
| They can stay over there and have their palaces. | ||
| And that's beautiful. | ||
| Every American should want to be that rich, but not that rich. | ||
| And it comes back to that interest versus usury. | ||
| Who decides? | ||
| What is acceptable and what is not acceptable? | ||
| And how do you navigate if you are the group of people who are in that gray zone of, well, we're successful, but are we too successful? | ||
| How are we being judged today? | ||
| Well, I mean, Jesus tried and here we are. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The one time somebody was like, let's try and figure this out for good. | ||
| Well. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So, but that takes us into the grifters. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So all of this stuff, you know, we've got the reality of the Rothschilds being both admired and hated simultaneously by the poorest and by the richest. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You know, like the bankers who aren't Jewish. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They are furious. | ||
| How dare they? | ||
| The bangers who had to convert to whatever way that they felt they needed to to survive. | ||
| They're furious. | ||
| All of those things. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| So these are the people who have something to gain by the destruction of the Rothschilds. | ||
| And then we get to the propagandists. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So the propagandists take advantage of those things, right? | ||
| And they began, you know, right away, too. | ||
| Like, you talk of, of course, you know, our listeners are familiar with Alex and are familiar with Bill Cooper, you know, and then Father Coughlin, but you talk about people even further back from, I mean, the early 1800s, right? | ||
| Yeah, so the Rothschild myth really begins in the 1840s. | ||
| And it begins in earnest with a pamphlet written by a French hack journalist whose name I'm going to butcher, Georges Dernvale. | ||
| Probably wasn't his real name, but he went by Satan. | ||
| Which was his real name. | ||
| Which was his real name. | ||
| George Satan. | ||
| And he writes a pamphlet blaming... | ||
| The two of the Rothschild brothers, James de Rothschild, who's based in Paris, and then Nathan Rothschild, who had died by that point. | ||
| And this is the origin of the Waterloo myth. | ||
| This is the myth where Nathan Rothschild was supposedly at the Battle of Waterloo, watched the whole thing go down, knew that Wellington's forces were going to win, but that a lot of people didn't think Wellington was going to win. | ||
| So he, you know, as the story goes, he takes a midnight horse ride to the channel port of Ostend in Belgium. | ||
| Pays terrified sailor 2,000 francs to ferry him in a once-in-the-century storm, gets to the London Stock Exchange just in time, and stands against his favorite pillar, slumped over and looking defeated. | ||
| And all the other bankers go, Rothschild knows, Rothschild knows, we've lost, the war is lost. | ||
| They start selling all their bonds. | ||
| You know, the British consoles drop by 95% or whatever the number is, and then Rothschild's agents, in a stroke of cunning, buy them all up. | ||
| Suddenly the news arrives. | ||
| Wellington is won. | ||
| The day is victorious. | ||
| Those consoles shoot up in value, and suddenly Nathan Rothschild is the richest man in the universe. | ||
| That story did not really exist until 30 years after the Battle of Waterloo, printed in this pamphlet by Satan. | ||
| So that's kind of the thing that everybody does know about. | ||
| And if you know anything about the Rothschilds, it's probably the Waterloo myth. | ||
| But there's another story in that pamphlet. | ||
| And it's blaming James de Rothschild for a train accident that took place just maybe a few weeks or a couple of months before this pamphlet came out. | ||
| And it's a train derailment, and I think 15 people die. | ||
| This is the era where train travel is just starting to become commonplace. | ||
| There are a lot of train accidents. | ||
| Somehow, James and his cheapness and his depravity and his indifference toward human life are all to blame for this horrible crash. | ||
| This pamphlet, called The Edifying and Curious History of James I, King of the Rothschilds. | ||
| Love these titles. | ||
| Man, those were the days of titles. | ||
| Those were the days. | ||
| You could title something, and you could say it was written by Satan. | ||
| Your first page of a book should be the title, and it should be single-spaced, size 8 font. | ||
| That's what it should be. | ||
| And just nothing but words. | ||
| Just an avalanche of words. | ||
| No margins. | ||
| No margins. | ||
| This pamphlet kicks off a pamphlet war. | ||
| And there are dozens of pro-Rothschild, anti-Rothschild pamphlets. | ||
| Response pamphlets, responses to the responses, pamphlets that are supposedly written by James. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| This spreads into the rest of Europe. | ||
| There are German versions, Austrian versions. | ||
| So this really starts to kick off this era of scapegoating the Rothschilds. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it is like a proto-Facebook fight. | ||
| It's a proto-Facebook fight. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| People posting, then shitposting, then people making bullshit jokes, but they take them seriously. | ||
| It was that exactly. | ||
| There is nothing new. | ||
| A pamphlet war in 1840s Paris is just... | ||
| You know, a fight on your community's next door page. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It is the same thing. | ||
| And this, of course, is tied into the revolutions of 1848, which are a series of socialist upheavals all across Europe. | ||
| And that eventually starts to die down. | ||
| And there's some other factors going in there that it just gets too complicated to talk about. | ||
| But then in the US, you start you're starting to see wealth building. | ||
| So there's another cycle of Rothschild conspiracy theories based around the Civil War that eventually Then there is another cycle in the 1890s in both France and in the U.S. that starts to get based around the gold versus silver debate. | ||
| That spills into the First World War. | ||
| That spills into the interwar period. | ||
| So every uptick of anti-Rothschild attacks spills over to the next one. | ||
| And what I do in the book is I trace... | ||
| Every cycle up going into the next cycle. | ||
| So the pre-World War II attacks, obviously we know where that leads to. | ||
| Then we get the Cold War. | ||
| Then we start getting 70s paranoia. | ||
| Then we get the internet. | ||
| And every cycle builds and builds and builds on the next one. | ||
| And everybody takes their version of it, puts it in their own book, usually sells a whole lot of copies of it. | ||
| And somebody sees that and goes, oh, I can do that. | ||
| I'm going to add in my own details. | ||
| Then they sell a whole bunch of copies. | ||
| Here we are, and we're talking about the same stuff. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| No, I mean, you're describing the beginning of those pamphlets turning into fucking Behold a Pale Horse. | ||
| Yep, exactly. | ||
| It is that perfect lineage of bullshit that continues unabated. | ||
| And in one part of your book, there's that detail you add of a lot of these books. | ||
| A lot of these anti-Semitic conspiracy theory books written by these dumb white dudes wind up in Osama bin Laden's collection. | ||
| And when you think about that, obviously he's not reading them because he's like, holy shit! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bill Cooper's got some great ideas. | |
| He's reading them because it is through these lenses that he can propagandize to get people to keep from fighting him and to get people to join his side. | ||
| That concept of all of this is part of an ecosystem that is exploited individually by so many different people. | ||
| It's like there's this big circle in the center. | ||
| And everybody just throws their little line on it and figures out which way to attack. | ||
| The Jews. | ||
| Yep, that's exactly what it is. | ||
| And you see the repurposing and over and over and over. | ||
| I mean, we see Cleon Skousen repurposes Carol Quigley while somebody repurposes Cleon Skousen. | ||
| You know, Pat Robertson extols him as he's laundering the protocols through Nesta Webster. | ||
| It becomes a kind of a, I mean, it's like the stereotypical red strings and corkboard, but the conspiracy is just how can we make money off of hating Jews? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, going through all of the propaganda that keeps getting put out, one thing that I keep going back to is this idea that it is almost universally supported monetarily by people who are guilty of the things that they're claiming the Rothschilds are doing. | ||
| I don't know how it is that Henry Ford gets away with being like, the Rothschilds are too rich! | ||
| You know, like that kind of thing. | ||
| Like, when we're building... | ||
| Elon Musk is currently building a factory town! | ||
| You know, like, what are we doing here? | ||
| Why are we blaming anybody but just, you know, that kind of thing? | ||
| And it does feel... | ||
| I mean, not to get conspiratorial. | ||
| What I'm not doing is getting conspiratorial. | ||
| I'm saying that this is part of the function of the system. | ||
| Is that because they are there to exploit, of course rich people are going to do it, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And rich people are going to take the people's attention off of their own misdeeds by focusing on the misdeeds of others. | ||
| And we see that over and over with a lot of these wealthy industrialists who would scapegoat Jewish money, a lot of the wealthy bankers. | ||
| The banking failures of the 1930s were easy to blame, particularly on the Rothschilds in Austria because they founded the first major Austrian bank that failed. | ||
| But, you know, at no point are we are we saying how are we going to abate this for everybody? | ||
| How are we going to make sure? | ||
| And then attempts to make sure that it doesn't happen again. | ||
| You blame those on the Jews, too. | ||
| If you look at something like the Federal Reserve, this was put together in an effort to get a handle on the constant cycles of boom and bust in the American economy. | ||
| And what do we do? | ||
| We just blame some Jews for it. | ||
| And we just make up that the Rothschilds not only were at this meeting, were at launch, there are huge parts of it. | ||
| They had nothing to do with it. | ||
| Literally nothing. | ||
| And then 50 years later, we destroy it by blaming the Jews and go back to the boom and bust cycle. | ||
| Right, that's exactly what it is. | ||
| It's that kind of cycle over and over and over again. | ||
| That's exactly what it is. | ||
| We make as much money as we can, and then when it starts to go south, well, let's blame the Jews for it. | ||
| And never look at our own behavior, at what we have enabled in the wealthiest in our society. | ||
| It's just, let's just blame. | ||
| These people who we have always blamed and for a lot of people are always going to be the most obvious targets. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, I mean, I suppose my next question is now, like, the way people respond to these conspiracy theories and the way that they are so effective is by giving people an avenue to do something about what is going wrong, right? | |
| So, to me, when I see the, like... | ||
| We just talked to Will Sommer about his book, which is another fantastic book. | ||
| I believe it's Trust the Plan. | ||
| And as I'm going through it, I keep coming back to this line that he has at the very end of his book, which is, I don't know if we can deal with conspiracy culture within the American political system. | ||
| And the thing that I keep coming back to is the word system on that. | ||
| I feel like what we're seeing is the problem as it happens. | ||
| A conspiracy theorist might say, oh, hey, you're using this debunking or whatever to distract from the real problem. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I just said earlier that Henry Ford is using anti-Semitism to distract from the real problem, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So it is like a preemptive, they say, oh, you're doing what we're doing, because when I say you're doing it, then it's all fucking confused. | ||
| Right, and it becomes impossible to actually talk about. | ||
| It becomes impossible to address the psychological and societal causes behind the success of anti-Semitism, or the success of conspiracy theories like QAnon, because we get so wrapped up in... | ||
| Our own versions of it, debunking our own versions of it, and kind of trying to find the people who started it. | ||
| You get a lot of this with QAnon, with trying to figure out who made the first post. | ||
| And my stance, and I know Will's stance, and the QAA guys, it's always been it doesn't matter. | ||
| Because people don't go to church and ask their pastor, who wrote the Bible? | ||
| Who wrote down the words? | ||
| It doesn't matter who wrote down the words. | ||
| What matters is that we have the words and we can reinterpret them endlessly. | ||
| But whoever hit that text on 4chan and hit post, that person doesn't matter. | ||
| The interpretations of it matter. | ||
| So the time that we waste arguing about all of this and trying to poke holes in our own versions of it distracts from the very real psychological aspects that these things tap into. | ||
| QAnon taps into the same stuff that the anti-Semitism of 1840s France taps into. | ||
| It moves at a different pace. | ||
| The stories are told a little bit differently. | ||
| But in the end, it's the same fears, the same hopes, the same need for villains and heroes and stories. | ||
| And that is always going to be part of human... | ||
| Human brains, and particularly Western political systems. | ||
| So I think Will is right on the money. | ||
| We can't address the societal systemic causes of this because nobody will ever be able to do that. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| I'm interested in what you just said right there. | ||
| Nobody will ever be able to handle the... | ||
| So my question then is like, okay, well now what the fuck do we do? | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| No, it's a great question. | ||
| You know, and this is the conversation that I keep having with myself about QAnon. | ||
| And the thoughts that I keep rolling with is... | ||
| Let me try and explain it this way, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, sure. | |
| So, a conspiracy theorist like Alex Jones, right? | ||
| They're coming to somebody selling them false hope. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you pull this bullshit or if you buy this bullshit, then you'll feel better. | ||
| If you do this, you'll feel better. | ||
| And for so much of our disinformation space, we say, well, they're lying to you. | ||
| They're lying to you. | ||
| This is bullshit. | ||
| This is nothing. | ||
| That product doesn't do that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But what I'm seeing now is that there's nothing to give in return. | ||
| So what winds up happening is they say, here's hope. | ||
| And you say, well, it's false hope. | ||
| And that's taking away hope and giving nothing in return, right? | ||
| So we've got false hope and no hope. | ||
| I understand why people buy false hope. | ||
| Oh, totally, totally. | ||
| I mean, look at just today, Tuesday. | ||
| This is supposedly indictment day for Donald Trump. | ||
| I mean, I don't think he—look, I think he's going to get indicted at some point. | ||
| But the idea that it is some magic bullet that's going to make everything better, I think, is that false hope. | ||
| But it's like you want him to have some consequences. | ||
| You don't want this to be able to go on indefinitely and the people who did it never to feel any pain because of it. | ||
| So I think you're totally right. | ||
| You're taking away false hope and you're replacing it with like cold pragmatism. | ||
| Yeah, stop hoping, dickwad! | ||
| Stop hoping! | ||
| Yeah, like that sucks. | ||
| Nobody wants that. | ||
| You know, you can only throw so much cold water on people's hopes. | ||
| But I think what we can do with a lot of this, and I think you can do it with, you know, sort of the micro with something like QAnon, and then the macro with something like antisemitism, is to at least understand what it is, where it comes from, what its allure is, and be able to spot it in your own life and push back against it. | ||
| So if you have... | ||
| That friend who's posting Facebook memes about international bankers, or they're parroting Kanye West talking about 300 Zionists who run the world. | ||
| You at least can know what that is, and you can say to that person, hey, here's what this is. | ||
| This is a really dangerous stereotype. | ||
| This is really hurtful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do better, for lack of a better term. | |
| And we can see it in ourselves. | ||
| We cannot share those things. | ||
| We cannot fall into those tropes and that easy blame. | ||
| But the idea of converting the whole world at scale into getting rid of all of these things that have been in our culture for thousands of years, that's probably a lot harder and a lot more frustrating. | ||
| Yeah, the thousands of years thing makes it a little bit tougher. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If there was a solution that was like, oh, we can knock this out in six months, I feel like we would have been there by now, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And there isn't that simple solution, and it's never going to be something that we can arrest our way out of. | ||
| We'll never be able to... | ||
| You know, put as many Trump cronies in jail to make all of these problems that made Trump and the MAGA movement so appealing to so many people. | ||
| That's not something we can arrest our way out of. | ||
| That's something we have to deal with in our own lives and in the lives of the people around us. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What are some ways to do that? | ||
| Oh, gosh. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Isn't that kind of a shitty question? | ||
| Because, you know, it feels like the end when you're like, we've got to find ways to deal with that. | ||
| And then somebody's like, how? | ||
| And you go, okay, so what if we buy bottled water? | ||
| What if we pump as much fluoride as we can into the water supply? | ||
| I feel like your advice is eco-terrorism. | ||
| I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I feel like you are going to say eco-terrorism right now. | ||
| That's your plan. | ||
| I know you, obviously. | ||
| Do not endorse any sort of terrorism. | ||
| You know, I think what we need to do is recognize the tendencies in ourselves and say, look, everybody has this stuff that they carry around with them. | ||
| Everybody has those jokes that they grew up hearing that they still think are kind of funny that are not acceptable anymore. | ||
| Everybody has the prejudices that they grew up with and that we can work to overcome them in ourselves, find them and see them in other people, people in our lives, work together as very, very small groups to understand where these things come from and understand that the people who believe this stuff are not all crazy. | ||
| Not every person who listens to Infowars is a raving lunatic. | ||
| Some are, certainly, but... | ||
| Most of them aren't. | ||
| They're just looking for some kind of community of people who think they're going through the same thing. | ||
| Maybe what we can do in the very basics is just build those communities again. | ||
| Be outside with other people and stop thinking about how terrible everything is and how everybody's out to get us. | ||
| Maybe that can make our lives just a tiny bit better. | ||
| Things like anti-Semitism and QAnon are not quite so appealing after a while. | ||
| I think things like anti-Semitism appeal to people who think everybody's out to get them and think that there is some other solution for their problems other than what they're doing. | ||
| Maybe by rebuilding our sense of community and our sense of interpersonal relationship, we can make hateful movements and conspiracy theories a little bit less shiny and a little bit less desirable. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| No, I mean, in reading Will's book, I kept coming back to these personal stories, and it's like, you know where QAnon begins? | ||
| It begins with a medical bill. | ||
| It doesn't begin on 4chan. | ||
| It doesn't begin there. | ||
| It doesn't begin in the 1840s. | ||
| It doesn't begin when Jesus was like, hey, maybe don't let these people get in here. | ||
| It was a medical bill that then started taking them down this terrible path. | ||
| So all too often, what I'm seeing is the intervention point for QAnon and the like is way before QAnon ever shows up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you find that I went through the depositions of a lot of the arrested January 6th rioters. | ||
| And what they talk about, a lot of them, is the pandemic closed their business. | ||
| The lockdown got them fired. | ||
| And they had nothing to do. | ||
| And they were pissed off. | ||
| And here's Donald Trump telling them, well, China did this to you. | ||
| And there's, you know, Alex Jones saying, Klaus Schwab did this to you. | ||
| And, you know, here's Breitbart saying George Soros did this to you. | ||
| And so it suddenly becomes like, oh, somebody did this to me. | ||
| This isn't my fault. | ||
| And it wasn't your fault. | ||
| It's not any individual person's fault. | ||
| There was a pandemic and there were lockdowns and the economy went into the shitter. | ||
| That's not any one person's fault, but it's a lot easier for it to be one person's fault or the World Economic Forum or Bill Gates than it is to look at how our economy works and why we weren't providing more money for people to stay home, why we weren't giving more money to businesses that didn't steal it in PPP loans. | ||
| There are real people to blame here, but that takes a lot of work and a lot of societal soul searching, whereas it's a lot easier to point the finger at the Hungarian billionaire or the German globalist or Bill Gates. | ||
| And that's really where it starts is this shit happened to me and somebody did it to me. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, the question, the interesting point there, which I find so fascinating because this is the push and pull that I feel in your book, right? | ||
| You're right. | ||
| It is a confluence of forces, a system that is designed explicitly to fuck you over, right? | ||
| And yet, at the same time, in the book, there are people with agency, you know? | ||
| And it's not us. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So in a certain sense, when you say to me, like, oh, you can't think that somebody did this to you, at the same time, I am at will of people with agency where I don't. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So part of that conversation is, like, somebody, people do need to be held accountable for doing this shit to me. | ||
| The problem, it may not be... | ||
| Conspiracies, so much as it is, no one's being held accountable for fucking with us. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah, and that goes back to all the anger with the banking crisis. | ||
| And you see so much anti-Semitism revolve around financial panics. | ||
| Certainly in the 30s. | ||
| You know, the boom and bust cycle. | ||
| Well, I mean, the bailout. | ||
| Sure, the bailout. | ||
| I think the bailout is a huge part of QAnon. | ||
| A huge part of the Tea Party. | ||
| A huge part of the Tea Party, which is a huge part of QAnon. | ||
| Yeah, the transition from, to me, like, the last person who really was giving that positive, you know, I'm not just debunking things, we can change things, was Obama, right? | ||
| You know, that hope and change message was the last time I had hope that things would change. | ||
| And then he appointed Geithner, and it was like, oh, well, we're fucked, right? | ||
| So, and then you go back, and you're like, well, the Iraq war. | ||
| That's the source of all of this conspiracy because it was a lie to get us into the war. | ||
| And then you go back further than that and you're like, oh, it was NAFTA. | ||
| All of these things are the decisions of our government that have effects on people that people are unable to affect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And that is a huge part of where so much of the anger comes from is totally legitimate. | ||
| People getting screwed over by lockdown, by the bailouts, by things like NAFTA, by economic proposals that don't do anything for them. | ||
| And I think the anger that drives people into conspiratorial movements and into hate movements, it is legitimate. | ||
| There is legitimate anger there. | ||
| People had a reason to be angry about the bailouts. | ||
| People have a reason to be angry about the still lingering after effects of the Iraq war. | ||
| But the people who get blamed for it usually are not people who had anything to do with it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's the people who get that target who have been targeted before. | ||
| Like, yeah, there are people... | ||
| Just like the challenge! | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Full circle, baby! | ||
| Full circle. | ||
| Full circle. | ||
| But it's easier to blame the people who are already getting blamed. | ||
| And that's why it just keeps coming back to Bill Gates, George Soros. | ||
| The Rothschilds, the World Economic Forum, because you've already got this whole corpus of material blaming them for all this other shit that happened. | ||
| Well, they're so evil, why won't they do more stuff? | ||
| And we don't look at the more obscure figures. | ||
| We don't look at the bank vice presidents. | ||
| We don't look at the people we're sending to Congress who say they're going to do this for us, and they just don't do it. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| We scapegoat the wrong people, and they're a very good... | ||
| There are people who are very good at taking advantage of our need to scapegoat by pointing us at those people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, again, I'm sorry I read your book. | ||
| I'm going to keep pointing to it. | ||
| I enjoyed it. | ||
| But, you know, the story of, I believe it's Gandron? | ||
| Gandron's Manifesto. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| What fascinated me, the detail that fascinated me about that, is that most of that was fucking stolen shit, copypasta bullshit. | ||
| What he added, though, was an anti-Semitic element. | ||
| Like, that detail seems so weirdly important to me, and I can't really completely unpack why. | ||
| Why is it that, of all the things that this dude, I mean, why? | ||
| And it was about shorting currencies, right? | ||
| Like, what are we doing? | ||
| What does this guy have anything to do with shorting currency? | ||
| What does he have to blame on George Soros? | ||
| George Soros has nothing to do with this guy. | ||
| None of this has any application to this person's life. | ||
| It's just a crutch. | ||
| It's just something to be angry about. | ||
| Because... | ||
| choices he's made at where his life has gone. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| You don't want to do that. | ||
| You want to blame these other people. | ||
| So you take this nonsensical garbage in this one manifesto, which, of course, the media, you know, prints all of it and tries to analyze it as if it's supposed to be analyzed. | ||
| I mean, the vast majority of it is not supposed to be analyzed. | ||
| But the anti-Semitism comes from somewhere. | ||
| And it comes from this really rich tradition of the financial machinations of this elite Have ruined my life. | ||
| Well, the financial machinations of the elite probably have been detrimental to your life. | ||
| Except it's just not this guy. | ||
| It's these other people whose names you'll never know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it is fascinating to me just that we're playing so much catch-up, you know? | ||
| What I see in my head all too often is these propagandists, these people exploiting things, are children throwing plates off of a table. | ||
| And we're all there picking up all the pieces of those plates, and we're like, finally, we put the plate back together, and there are already three more plates on the floor. | ||
| You know, the disinformation situation is so much of a, all too often it feels like a losing battle. | ||
| You know, like, I'm sure you feel it. | ||
| You've become part of disinformation, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I get, you know, conspiracy theories about my last name or my, you know, who really pays me, all this other stuff. | ||
| Who really pays you? | ||
| The eco-terrorists. | ||
| God, I knew it! | ||
| I knew it! | ||
| Finally. | ||
| But it's actually one of the reasons why I really wanted to look to the past and the origins, because the sort of boil-in-a-bag, ready-in-five-minutes conspiracy theories that we spend so much of our time knocking down now, they won't even be remembered in a month. | ||
| We won't even remember what we were talking about, why we were talking about it. | ||
| No, the migrant caravan is coming. | ||
| The migrant caravan is coming. | ||
| We're on two or three years late, but it's on the way. | ||
| Well, and the right culture war obsession is so good at that, at taking a minuscule issue and blowing it up into the most important thing that could possibly affect your life, and then two weeks later, you'll never speak of it again. | ||
| We saw this with, they're banning Dr. Seuss books. | ||
| They want to take your Keurig away. | ||
| Now it's gas stove. | ||
| Death panels! | ||
| Death panels! | ||
| You know, trans rights in high school sports. | ||
| This is not stuff most people care about. | ||
| Of course, we've seen the results in elections where the more you run on this stuff, the less well you do because most people don't care about it. | ||
| But you're getting on Fox News. | ||
| You're getting on Steve Bannon's podcast. | ||
| You grift off that, and then here's the next thing. | ||
| And it's usually some line in a governmental report that somebody takes out of context, and then you can spin up a whole new cycle again. | ||
| Well, you know, While we're trying to debunk the gas stove hijack of 2023, they're coming up with something else. | ||
| So for me, the more interesting things are the pamphlets from the 1840s, the Nazi propaganda videos from a century ago, because that's the building blocks of why this stuff works so well. | ||
| And if we don't get a handle on the whole bottom of the Jenga tower, we're never going to be able to pull the pieces out that finally topple the whole thing. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, from reading your book, what conclusion I've drawn is that we are not going to get a top-down solution. | ||
| No. | ||
| So, I mean, what's fascinating about the book is that difference in agency. | ||
| When you think about World War I, a certain narrative point of view could be this dumb fuck family couldn't stop fighting with each other. | ||
| There's all of these little bits of who has agency, and we all too often, I feel like, don't focus on how it is to give ourselves agency. | ||
| Like that idea of, hey, if somebody wants to lie us into a war... | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| I'm not gonna go! | ||
| And if enough people said I'm not gonna go, then we don't go. | ||
| How do we skip over that? | ||
| It feels like we can't do anything because we have to wait for the top, and because we think that, we can't do anything, and we wait for the top. | ||
| And they're not gonna do anything. | ||
| And we get stuck in this cycle of waiting for salvation. | ||
| From entities that don't have the power to give it to us. | ||
| And actively don't want to. | ||
| And actively don't want to. | ||
| Yeah, they're doing their best to keep from giving us agency. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And I think the best thing that we can do is really just, you know, in ourselves, you know, just don't be an anti-Semite. | ||
| Don't be an asshole. | ||
|
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Don't fall for QAnon. | |
| I do appreciate that our entire motto is essentially boiled down to don't be a dick. | ||
| So you're right on the right show. | ||
| And if enough people decide I'm not going to be a dick today, maybe things can get a little bit better. | ||
| But it's so hard because we are kept so distracted and we are kept so in pursuit of the next paycheck, the next promotion. | ||
| the next time that we can win an argument on the internet and we're not doing the things to really truly take care of ourselves. | ||
| I was in some of those protest marches at the very beginning. | ||
| It kind of petered out, and then everybody just kind of moved on. | ||
| Yeah, that's America for you, right? | ||
| Yep, that's the West. | ||
| It is very much like, why are you mad today? | ||
| Two weeks from now, no one will care. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
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And that includes the Iraq fucking war. | |
| Yep, totally. | ||
| If the Iraq war didn't move the needle for more than a month, we're in real trouble. | ||
| Well, if Sandy Hook didn't really move the needle on gun control, What's going to? | ||
| You know? | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it is to a certain extent, just like what you're saying, you know, the people in QAnon and the people who are trapped in these conspiracy theories and the people who are trapped in this mind view, in this worldview, they're not irrational in the sense that if they want to achieve their goals, they do have to act like insane people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you want to achieve the hang Mike Pence goal, you're not going to vote on it. | ||
| The problem is the goal. | ||
| That kind of thing. | ||
| So it's that rationality that I feel is so destructive. | ||
| Again, nobody's giving them a positive place for this to go, but the liars. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Nobody's saying to them, I hear you. | ||
| I'm angry too. | ||
| Let's figure it out together. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because that doesn't sell books. | ||
| That doesn't get the podcast subscriptions. | ||
| That's hard to build a brand off of. | ||
| I mean, that's literally our brand, so I hope it's not. | ||
| All I can do, and all you guys do, and very well, is just put the information out there and try to figure out how to talk about it in the right way. | ||
| You know, I really appreciate when you guys get really, really, like, volcanically mad about Alex Jones being talked about the wrong way. | ||
| Yeah, we do occasionally have, you know, after 795 episodes of being mad at Alex, you know, you take a few to be mad at the rest of the press. | ||
| Sooner or later you get there. | ||
| Yeah, and I see the same thing with Q. I see the same thing with Soros. | ||
| There is a right way to talk about this and a responsible way to talk about this. | ||
| And I think for people like us who do this is to keep having those conversations and keep talking about how is it right and responsible to talk about this? | ||
| What is the line of platforming this versus not platforming it? | ||
| These are very important conversations. | ||
| And I think to do it without the sort of salaciousness and finding the wrong things to focus on, that's really tricky to do. | ||
| And I think we can do more of that. | ||
| And maybe we can start moving the conversation into a more productive place to make conspiracy theories and hatred less appealing for people on our side of things. | ||
| And maybe just come together a little bit more. | ||
| But it's really hard. | ||
| And you guys know full well. | ||
| It's just really hard. | ||
| To me, the thought I've always had about us and Alex is I don't want us to be big. | ||
| I want us to put a snow globe over Alex. | ||
| So the only way you can experience him is if you shake us. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| There's no mainstream press coverage. | ||
| There's no nothing about this. | ||
| Like with QAnon, there's no mainstream press coverage. | ||
| It's under these bubbles. | ||
| So we can all contain them. | ||
| Because you can't... | ||
| I mean, if you've been paying attention to the past several thousand years, which, based on your book, you have, you can't eradicate them. | ||
| They're not going to go away. | ||
| We have to find a way to contain them in these kinds of things. | ||
| So that's what I've always dreamt of. | ||
| Dan wants to be good at stuff, and I just want to be a snow globe, which I think explains the difference in our philosophies. | ||
| Well, I talk about this in the introduction of the book, about the sources. | ||
| I say very explicitly, do not go read this stuff. | ||
| You do not have to read it to understand the thoughts behind it. | ||
| You don't need to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. | ||
| You don't need to read David Icke. | ||
| You don't need to watch The Eternal Jew to understand why it's bad. | ||
| That's where the snow globe comes out. | ||
| I think it's a great analogy because it's talking about this stuff in a responsible way. | ||
| It's talking about it in a responsible way, but also understanding that this shit works for a reason. | ||
| And if you start reading it just to even understand it, there's a decent chance if it hits you at the right time in the right way, it could start pulling you in. | ||
| And that's always my worst fear with a lot of this stuff. | ||
| That is such a great point. | ||
| With my family, if you are hit at the right time, in the right spot in your life, then things can go weird. | ||
| I don't look at people who walk by the Scientology Center and go in as people who are like, hmm, I bet Scientology's got great ideas. | ||
| I look at them as people who are like, I don't know what to fucking do. | ||
| And then they see a bright light. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| And a guy in a crisp sailor suit saying free stress test. | ||
| Love bombs you, you know, that whole, yeah. | ||
| Hey, you feeling any pressure in your life? | ||
| Well, who is going to say no to that? | ||
| Feeling any stress? | ||
| Of course we are. | ||
| We are all feeling stress. | ||
| And if you just had a bad day and you're walking by the right guy at the right time, 99% of people are going to just keep walking. | ||
| But that one guy is going to get pulled in. | ||
| That one person is going to be presented with something ridiculous like, behold a pale horse, and 99 people are going to go, this is garbage. | ||
| And one person is going to go, oh, interesting. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| I had a bad day, and this sounds interesting to me. | ||
| That's all it takes. | ||
| Yeah, I had my car towed today. | ||
| I'm a Scientologist now. | ||
| It's not that straight a line, but it's not as far away as you might want. | ||
| No, and no one is immune. | ||
| No one is too smart, too accomplished to get hit by the right asshole speaking the right poison into their ear at the right time. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, it is one of the things that I have always felt... | ||
| Not, you know, not offended by so much as, like, disappointed by. | ||
| Is so many people refusing to look at Q followers and say, there but for the grace of God go I. Yeah. | ||
| As opposed to, like, look at these dum-dums. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Look at these idiots who believe that someone will be held accountable in government. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, yeah. | |
| You morons! | ||
| You know, like, that kind of thing. | ||
| As opposed to thinking, you know, if I had... | ||
| Sometimes I think if I was, like... | ||
| 22 in the situation that I was in, and somebody offered me hope like that. | ||
| It's entirely possible that I could have joined it. | ||
| Sometimes I'm grateful that I spent several years of my life hopeless. | ||
| Well, and that's the thing. | ||
| It's where we come back to it with Will. | ||
| It takes one medical bill, one job loss, just the right timing, and you can think you're better than this. | ||
| There's not many people who are better than somebody telling them it's all going to be okay. | ||
| And here, this book helped me. | ||
| Or, hey, check this video out. | ||
| And we saw that just over and over during the pandemic. | ||
| Just people who needed something in their life because they were just alone and they didn't have anything to do. | ||
| People who had families at home, people who were able to keep their jobs. | ||
| You know, maybe those people were able to resist some of the conspiracy theories a little bit more than the person who suddenly is alone and their friend's group is cut off and they don't have their job anymore and people they know are getting sick. | ||
| And what are you going to do? | ||
| You sit around and watch TV or are you going to go find some answers? | ||
| And you'll find it in a Facebook group. | ||
| And it's a Facebook group that's telling you, well... | ||
| I heard Bill Gates had something to do with this. | ||
| Check out Event 201 and you go look at that. | ||
| And suddenly the wheels start turning and it doesn't take a lot. | ||
| And then you find yourself storming the Capitol because a process started and at some point you just didn't want it to stop and you couldn't stop it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, I mean, when we did our live show. | ||
| A lot of people came up to us after the show with a story similar to that of, like, I was feeling lonely, I was feeling lost, and then I found you guys, and this helped me. | ||
| And to us, to Dan and I, we see that as, like, maybe the most important responsibility in our lives. | ||
| Like, truthfully, that we can have an effect on somebody like that is... | ||
| I mean, a responsibility maybe no one should have. | ||
| Maybe we don't deserve that responsibility. | ||
| And maybe we're not going to live up to it as well as we'd like to. | ||
| But it is so important to us that it's like, the number one thought we have is, will this exploit our audience in any way? | ||
| Because if somebody gives you that level of trust, it has to be returned tenfold. | ||
| It is a deep responsibility to have a platform of any kind where anybody is listening to you and thinking that you know what you're talking about. | ||
| That is a responsibility that it's almost sacred in a way. | ||
| I get emails or I get DMs on Twitter of people who are like, I read your book and now I understand what my mom is going through. | ||
| Or I read a piece you wrote and suddenly Q didn't make as much sense to me anymore. | ||
| And I'm going... | ||
| I'm never going to save the world. | ||
| You guys are never going to save the world. | ||
| But maybe we can make it a little bit less shitty for a few people. | ||
| And that is a responsibility that I know we both take incredibly seriously. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| No, I was... | ||
| Dan and I were talking a little bit. | ||
| And at a certain point, you know, you say something very, very simple. | ||
| Like, if CEOs and politicians would just fucking act right, then we wouldn't be in this situation. | ||
| And then the part of my brain that kicks in is the ego of saying that, like, what I'm really saying is they should act more like me. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Why aren't they more like me? | ||
| But then I think of Dostoevsky, and I think of every happy family is happy in the same way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And every unhappy family is happy separate. | ||
| You know, like that concept of maybe if they would just act right, that has nothing to do with me. | ||
| It's just unfortunate that there's really only one way to be. | ||
| Well, and that's why the idea of de-radicalizing at scale doesn't work because everybody has their own path into this. | ||
| It's so individual, isn't it? | ||
| It's so individual. | ||
| It is that one thing that happened to them when they were nine years old. | ||
| Or it's they lost their job on this particular day and there was that one bill they couldn't pay and it just started that cycle of debt. | ||
| Everybody's path into it is different and therefore everybody's path out has to be different and there is no textbook. | ||
| That is a great point. | ||
| That is a great, great point. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, and there is no textbook for how to de-radicalize from conspiracy theories because everybody's going to have a different textbook. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, obviously, like, the irony of our situation is, with disinformation, with this kind of thing, we also want a big solution. | ||
| We also want a simple, hey, if we could all just say this, then it would go away. | ||
| And yet, at the same time, it's such an individual problem that it can't be solved like that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| It would be great to think that if everybody listened to Knowledge Fight, Alex Jones would have to get a job. | ||
|
unidentified
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Or if everybody read Jewish Space Lasers, anti-Semitism would go away. | |
| I'm like, yeah, that's great. | ||
| Do you have any real solutions? | ||
| Because that's never going to happen. | ||
| Well, I mean, it is so fascinating reading this book. | ||
| It is over and over and over again like, okay, if the intervention was here. | ||
| Society-wide of like, oh, we needed to intervene before this happened, then this pogrom wouldn't have started. | ||
| It is that intense a truth of like, this was where the real pogrom started. | ||
| It didn't start in 1939. | ||
| It started in 1929, at the end of the war, whenever Germany was, you know, all of those things. | ||
| So it's so fucking brutal. | ||
| I mean, obviously not 1929. | ||
| You understand my point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you can look at it as Europe is in ruins in 1945, because in 1921, the communists and the social democrats in... | ||
| Weimar Germany couldn't get it together. | ||
| Couldn't get their shit together. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And it's because there was doctrinal infighting among this group of communists versus socialists. | ||
| I mean, whatever. | ||
| Then 20 years later, there's millions of dead people. | ||
| These problems are so... | ||
| When we have identified them, the pea is in the pool already. | ||
| So, the only way to get pee out of a pool is just not pour the pee in. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That is, I think, essentially where we're stuck with. | ||
| Where we're stuck at is, in order to get rid of the pee in the pool, we have to drain the pool. | ||
| Which, again, brings us back to drain the swamp. | ||
| When you have the preemptive, I know you are, but what am I? | ||
| It gets in the way of actually solving the problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, so Mike, fix that. | ||
| Get your shit together, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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That'll be the next book, How I Fixed Everything. | |
| Mike Solves Everything. | ||
| Mike Solves Everything. | ||
| Coming in 2025. | ||
| Well, Mike, could you tell us... | ||
| I don't want to dominate your time any longer. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| We're well past an hour. | ||
| Oh, no, no, no. | ||
| We could go endlessly. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, excellent. | ||
| Then I have some more questions for you. | ||
| Let me see where we're at. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If you were going to give a... | ||
| How would I put this? | ||
| In your personal experience, as the person who is... | ||
| The object of a conspiracy theory. | ||
| Have you seen any situations that have been able to prevent it from occurring? | ||
| When you researched your book, there are so many situations where it's like tidal forces coming together, where at the end of the day, a pogrom is going to happen. | ||
| Have you seen any examples where those tidal forces get stemmed, got stopped? | ||
| You know, it's really hard. | ||
| If you say no, I'm going to be really bummed out. | ||
| No, and I'm trying to think of, because these things are so cyclical, you can attempt to intervene. | ||
| You can attempt to foresee the problems. | ||
| You know, actually a really good example is right at the end of the war, when the concentration camps were starting to get opened up, and Eisenhower had the foresight to have everything documented, knowing that there would be people who would say that this didn't happen. | ||
| And, you know, you had stories, obviously, of survivors. | ||
| I mean, is your advice be like Ike? | ||
| Maybe in that sense. | ||
| But, you know, and have that very slim jacket and trim haircut. | ||
| I'm more of a Truman guy. | ||
| I like the hat, you know? | ||
|
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Yeah, a good hat. | |
| We need that to come back. | ||
| He was a haberdasher. | ||
| What you can do is try to anticipate where some of these problems are going to be and try to take some action against it. | ||
| A lot of people in this field are talking about pre-bunking, kind of inoculating people against conspiracy theories that haven't happened yet, which I think is an incredible idea. | ||
| It's just so hard because these things are so reactive. | ||
| They react to things that are going on that really can't be predicted. | ||
| But I think if you can document as much as possible, and I think stick to what you know is true, and make that your base, it's harder to let yourself get pulled into it. | ||
| But so often these things happen so quickly, and especially now, they move much quicker. | ||
| The percentages of conspiracy belief are probably... | ||
| About the same now as they were in ye olde days. | ||
| But we now have methods to disseminate this stuff very, very quickly and in a way that has no barrier to entry. | ||
| You know, it used to be that if you wanted to spread your own conspiracy theory, you had to put a little bit of money into it. | ||
| You had to print the pamphlets. | ||
| You had to print the books. | ||
| You had to know where to get them. | ||
| And now it's just like, sure, I'm going to be a White House insider anon and I'm going to go on 4chan and I'm going to share some shit and maybe it'll take off. | ||
| And if you do it enough, and if you are prolific, and if you're telling a story that people want to hear, you can make yourself a personality in this world very quickly. | ||
| And that's the kind of thing that, you know, maybe we need social media companies to step in, and that's a whole other conversation that we've been having for a long time. | ||
| If you think holding politicians accountable is crazy, good luck with social media companies. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I was there at Citizens United. | ||
| Good fucking luck. | ||
| I mean, I find this... | ||
| What would I say? | ||
| Boy, it's hard to figure out because when you want to try and pre-bunk something, to me, I think of immediately... | ||
| What we should be doing right now is preparing for the next pandemic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, because there's going to be another. | ||
| Oh, of course there will be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it's not a conversation, and we know there's going to be another one because the elements that have created this pandemic are not gone. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, for instance, there's going to be another January 6th because the elements that created January 6th are not gone. | ||
| Right? | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So it seems like now is the time to prepare for those, you know, eventualities. | ||
| And yet at the same time, people are reasonably concerned about the fucking press. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's hard to prepare for the future when the present is still so uncertain. | ||
| And I think what happens in a lot of cases, and we're seeing this with some of this potential Trump indictment, is now we're seeing like every gathering of a couple of mega dopes is like a potential January 6th. | ||
| And I think what we're missing already is... | ||
| No, again, it was a confluence of events. | ||
| It was title forces all coming together. | ||
| And it wasn't like everybody going, here's what we're going to do on this day at exactly this point in time. | ||
| Some people said we're going to do this. | ||
| Other people just showed up. | ||
| This guy was doing some bullshit. | ||
| Mike Pence went rogue. | ||
| All of this stuff happened. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we're looking for things that in some cases can't really be seen until it's already happening. | ||
| And that makes that kind of inoculation very, very difficult. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| That's tough. | ||
| I mean, the thing I keep struggling with so often is just the lack of what to do. | ||
| You know, like, here is, to me, the way that we need to, like, take the first step towards combating conspiracy theories is doing both. | ||
| Debunking the fake conspiracy and offering a positive, hopeful view of how to move forward, you know? | ||
| So to me, it's almost like every conspiracy theory debunking should be like, hey, you know, this is not what's happening. | ||
| The government is not doing this. | ||
| There's no death panels. | ||
| Also, here are medical avenues that you can go to that help people out. | ||
| Everything should include that. | ||
| And if you're reading this, go here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| If you're angry about what Obamacare is going to do to you, here's the address of a free claim. | ||
| It's solutions and it's actionable things that you can do. | ||
| That's why Q was so popular because it was actionable. | ||
| It wasn't, I'm going to read secrets of the Federal Reserve and I'm going to know what the insiders are doing, but I can't do anything about it. | ||
| QAnon was, here's all the things that are going on. | ||
| Here's what you can do. | ||
| You can decode the drops. | ||
| You can make a video. | ||
| You can red pill your friends. | ||
| You can show up at this rally. | ||
| There were things that you could do. | ||
| And yeah, a lot of it was busy work, but that's at least feeling like you're part of the solution. | ||
| And I think we write off a lot of these movements as... | ||
| You know, as crazy, when in reality it's giving people something to do. | ||
| And like you've been saying, it's giving people hope. | ||
| And unless you can give people something else to look forward to and something else to focus on that is healthier and more productive and better for them, the conspiracy theory is always going to be more appealing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, at the end of the day, it all too often boils down to there are three choices. | ||
| There's no hope, false hope, and real hope. | ||
| And in the absence of real hope, Well, I can get no hope for free, so I might as well buy false hope. | ||
| That kind of experience. | ||
| False hope is something could happen. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| I mean, and the irony of that is, of course, that the false hope is more likely to lead to something actually happening than no hope, at the very least, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Like, the false hope led to January 6th. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No hope led to us being like, ah, fuck it. | ||
| Trump's president now. | ||
| Nothing I can do. | ||
| Nothing I can do. | ||
| The electoral college is real. | ||
| Like, we all pretend that matters. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yesterday, nine idiots decided abortion is illegal. | ||
| So that's just how we live now. | ||
| Oh, well, I guess can't do anything about it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that hopelessness and that... | ||
| That lack of agency is really, I mean, you guys know, it drives people toward not just conspiracies, but toward the gurus, toward the ones telling you, hey, we got this. | ||
| We're going to do this together. | ||
| And that is really appealing. | ||
| And that is where the popularity of Alex comes from. | ||
| That's where the popularity of none dare call it conspiracy comes from. | ||
| That's where the popularity of... | ||
| Eustace Mullins or any number of cranks comes from because at least it's somebody saying, hey, we're going to figure this out. | ||
| And maybe there's an oppressive super government lording over us, but at least now we know what it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| I suppose, okay, there's one last thing I want to get into and then we'll be done. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| I won't keep you any longer. | ||
| I've been having a fantastic time. | ||
|
unidentified
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Me too. | |
| So the funniest thing about Kanye going on Infowars now to me after reading your book is that no American music as it stands now would exist if it weren't for a Rothschild. | ||
| That's the funniest thing to me is that without Nico Rothschild financing Bird fucking Thelonious, like without her... | ||
| None of... | ||
| Kanye doesn't exist. | ||
| We're still playing bluegrass fucking music. | ||
| We got banjos on our knees. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| No, the irony of Nika being this patron of all of these jazz greats and all those samples making up some of the earliest hip-hop and then you got Professor Griff screaming about how the Jews are the cause of all the wickedness and all of Ice Cube and then fast forward and it's Kanye and... | ||
| There is no awareness of where you've been and how you got to where you are. | ||
| And that's the cycle that you try to break by going back to the sources with this stuff and going, look, this is where this came from. | ||
| And now we can spot it. | ||
| And now we know what it means. | ||
| And that to me is, there's a lot of utility in that. | ||
| There's a lot of value in that. | ||
| I agree 100%. | ||
| Mike, thank you so much for joining us for this, well, me, for this episode. | ||
| Could you go ahead and tell everybody where to find your, you have published books currently out that people can buy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And your new book, Jewish Space Layersers, will be out September 15th? | ||
| September 19th. | ||
| 19th, yeah. | ||
| Close enough. | ||
| Pre-order it on September 15th. | ||
| That's my advice to everyone. | ||
| Yeah, you can pre-order the book through bookshop.org or your local bookstore or that other place that sells books. | ||
| Pre-orders, hugely, hugely important. | ||
| That is what spurs more orders going into the future. | ||
| So, yes, definitely pre-order. | ||
| A lot of our audience is going to ask how best to support you specifically. | ||
| Any number of people in the intervening time period. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So if pre-orders are the way to go, then that's... | ||
| Pre-orders are the way to go. | ||
| And my book on QAnon, The Storm Is Upon Us, that is available everywhere. | ||
| Hardcover, paperback, e-book, audio book. | ||
| And you can find me on Twitter. | ||
| I'm still fighting the good fight on Twitter. | ||
| God knows why. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| I left after a very public explosion, so I'm happy to be gone. | ||
| Yes, you did. | ||
| No, you did the right thing. | ||
| It's going nowhere good. | ||
| But, you know, it's still there and it is still, you know, there is still value there. | ||
| And, you know, I'm trying to do my part to make it a little less horrible. | ||
| So you can find me at RothschildMD. | ||
| And, yeah, that's about that. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| Well, thank you so much for coming on to the show. | ||
| I suppose I am neither Neo nor Leo nor DZX Clark. | ||
| I am not the juiciest ice cube. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good night. | |
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks for holding. | |
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. |
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