Mike Rothschild returns to Knowledge Fight to dissect the Rothschild family’s role in conspiracy theories, from 1840s pamphlets like George Satan’s fabricated Waterloo myth to WWI-era claims of $300B manipulation by George Washington Armstrong. Modern tropes—QAnon, Bill Gates—mirror historical scapegoating, thriving on systemic distrust and emotional vulnerability. Rothschild warns against engaging with anti-Semitic texts like The Protocols, advocating instead for recognizing patterns and fostering accountability. Their discussion reveals how conspiracies exploit instability, offering false agency while distracting from real issues, like financial inequality or government failures. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.