Premium Episode 217: Esoteric Agenda and the Rise Of Online Video Conspiracism (Sample)
In the ‘00s there were three big Conspiracy theory movies on the internet: the 9/11 conspiracy theory film Loose Change, the multi-conspiracy film Zeitgeist, and the illuminati and conspirituality film Esoteric Agenda. Esoteric Agenda is perhaps less famous than the other two, but it was just as impactful for the first generation of internet users who watched videos online.
On this episode, we talk about the movie and its creator Ben Stewart. Stewart was the singer/songwriter for an up-and-coming but unsigned band called Hierosonic. While Stewart initially made conspiracy videos to discuss topics in his songs, he soon discovered his YouTube clips were making a bigger impact than his music did. That set him on a path towards becoming a professional conspiracist that stretches to today. He now makes series for the conspirituality streaming network Gaia TV and right wing YouTuber Tim Pool. To help us learn more about Ben Stewart’s career arc Travis spoke to one time Hierosonic roadie Steven Wynne.
Travis, Liv, and Jake ponder the chicken-and-the-egg problem of the conspiracy theory media industry. What really drives the popularity of online conspiracy theories? Is it suppliers like Ben Stewart? Or does the demand for exciting misinformation create influencers like Ben Stewart?
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Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 217 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Esoteric Agenda and the Rise of Online Video Conspiracism episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Liv Agar, and Travis View.
Today, I'm going to be talking about a significant movie in the history of online conspiracism called Esoteric Agenda, and it was published in its complete form back in 2008.
This movie is interesting because it was actually made out of the struggles of a rock band leader to find a popular audience.
One of the reasons that I find conspiracism so fascinating is that it's a mode of thinking that is very, very old, but it constantly reinvents itself in each generation.
And particularly, it reinvents itself with the development of new information technology.
So all these wonderful inventions that allow us to learn facts about the world and be enriched with literature also empowers the spread of baseless conspiracy theories.
You can't really have a culture of conspiracism without first having widespread literacy, first of all, and then the printing press and then pamphlets that are cheap enough to just give away for free.
And then, you know, the Industrial Revolution that allows us to make books and newspapers that spread these theories even more widely.
And then the Radio, you know, that spread conspiracy theories through the airwaves.
This enabled, for example, the Great Depression-era conspiracists like Father Coughlin, and then, of course, conspiracy theories to spread in film and television, and then the internet.
This, of course, allowed conspiracy theories to, at first, spread in text in, like, forums and Usenet groups, and then cheap broadband, you know, enabled these theories to spread even faster into more people.
Yeah, I would make the case that the invention of iMovie was a terrible thing for conspiracy theorists because this allowed everybody To be able to edit their own movie if they wanted to and, you know, put in text and graphics and do some, you know, some Ken Burns pans.
Yeah.
This is not good.
iMovie's two main uses.
The first is making, you know, Star Wars lightsaber videos with your friends.
The second is videos about Jewish conspiracies, I think.
But for this episode, I'm going to be focusing on a particular stage in the development of conspiracy media, and that is video-based online conspiracies during the aughts.
It had to happen during the aughts because, well, online dial-up connections, this was like a commercial product starting in the early 90s, but for about a decade and a half afterwards, online video technology was really shitty.
I'm thinking of that like stereotype of a guy, you know, with a modem waiting for like an image of a topless woman to load.
like video compression technology, like MPEG-4, which came out in '98.
Like, the best you could hope for online was these really short clips of poor quality.
I'm thinking of that, like, stereotype of a guy, you know, with a modem waiting for,
like, an image of a topless woman to load, but instead of that, it's like, you know,
an image of...
It's like the Israeli flag.
Yeah, the Israeli flag and, like, connections.
He's like, come on, there's the top of the Star of David.
OK, all right, we're getting a little bit more.
His hand starts reaching, you know, reaching beneath his, you know, his mesh shorts waistline.
He's like, come on, just a little bit longer.
That was real, you know, it's like you'd navigate to like, I don't know, a Simpsons fan page or something.
And if it had a lot of JPEGs on it, you were like, all right, these are taking a while to load.
I'm going to go make myself something to drink and like come back in like five minutes when this web page is, you know, fully loaded because it took forever.
So video was basically not an option.
Yeah, I mean, when I booted this guy up to watch the film last night, I went into the, you know, the little gear section on YouTube and I was like, 360p?
Like that, that's all you've got?
Horrific.
But those dark times came to an end in 2005, because all of a sudden, big tech companies, they started figuring out how to make online streaming video work.
Now, it was still short clips of poor quality, but it was like much, much better than the years previously, so.
It was in 2005 that Google Video launched, and it was in 2005 that Dailymotion, another video service, launched, and it was also 2005 that YouTube launched.
Back then, it was an independent company prior to being acquired by Google.
And that, of course, led to the first generation of YouTubers, but it also allowed for the creation of the first online conspiracist videos.
In the aughts, there were like three big conspiracy movies that you might have seen.
The first was Loose Change, and this was basically the 9-11-was-a-false-flag kind of conspiracy video.
The second was Zeitgeist.
We've talked about that one before.
This promoted multiple conspiracy theories, including the hypothesis that Jesus never existed, even as a human rabbi, that the Federal Reserve System is controlled by a cabal of bankers who create global catastrophes, and that there was a secret plan to merge all governments and implant everyone with a tracking chip.
Classic stuff.
And thirdly, there was a film called Esoteric Agenda.
So this film is perhaps less famous than the other two, but it was just as influential.
On Twitter, Joe Rogan promoted Esoteric Agenda three times starting in 2009.
I checked his account.
Oh my god, three times?
This is a bad video.
It's awful.
I'm just imagining Joe Rogan, you know, sitting on like a hot couch, just a, you know, little piglet, you know, just sweating and, you know, watching this piece of shit documentary and thinking so highly of it that he's like, you gotta watch this three times.
I mean, they claim in it that the Jews worshipped Saturn.
It's also promoted by Alex Jones and Russell Brand, and many people have cited Esoteric Agenda as inspiring their journey into the conspiracy rabbit hole.
That includes Jacob Chansley, aka the QAnon Shaman, according to a recent interview he did with us.
Esoteric Agenda promotes several conspiracy theories, but one of the core ones it promotes is as old as the modern age of conspiracism.
It posited that the world is controlled by a secret society called the Illuminati.
For hundreds of years, this has been a favorite conspiracist tale, usually promoted by fundamentalist Christians and right-wing reactionaries, but Esoteric Agenda had a very different origin, and there's no evidence that its creator started as a fundamentalist Christian or right-wing reactionary, but he certainly fell in with that crowd.
This movie was born out of the struggles of a popular but unsigned band named Hyrosonic to promote their music.
They say that they chose the name Hyrosonic because it means holy sound and also because it's a unique word which means that only one sort of like result will pop up when you plug it into search engines.
SEO optimization.
It's smart.
Exactly.
Very savvy.
SEO back in like, you know, the early 2000s.
I do also want to say that it's also probably unique because the prefix hyro is Greek and sonic is Latin.
I'm not a stickler for that kind of thing, but it's probably why they would never appeared as a word before.
Hyrosonic was led by a man named Benjamin Joseph Stewart.
In addition to Esoteric Agenda, he made two more conspiracy films in The Odds.
Now the group eventually dissolved, but the conspiracy theories left their mark, and Ben Stewart himself went on to have a long career as a professional conspiracist, which stretches to today.
Hey, you know, do what you get paid for.
If it's a bad thing you're working out, you know, just lean into it.
Yeah, you know, it is too bad because it's like really there's nothing wrong, I don't think, with like with a band leader having crazy beliefs.
In fact, I think they should have some crazy beliefs, you know?
Yeah.
Like you should like, you know, they maybe think they worship the devil or think that they're a demigod.
Maybe they think that they're going to inspire world peace with, you know, a perfect song that only they can write.
But, you know, no one, you know, listens to music hoping to have some, you know, conventional thoughts in their head.
Ben Stuart may or may not realize it, but he is someone who has helped continue a tradition of conspiracism that goes back hundreds of years.
So, the modern age of conspiracism emerged in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
Displaced French clergy and European conservatives, horrified at the upheaval in France, sought to make sense of what happened.
And what they settled on was the origin of what some scholars call the New World Order conspiracy theory.
They posited that the social unrest was not created organically or wasn't the product of like, you know, the popularity of emerging ideals of the Enlightenment, but rather this disruption was orchestrated by the Illuminati, a secret society founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt.
Weishaupt was driven by anti-monarchism, anti-religion, and the idea that humankind could be perfected through the application of reason.
And therefore, these early conspiracists believed that the Illuminati, with help from their friends in the Freemasons, were the hidden masterminds of the French Revolution and any other movement that sought to challenge the authority of kings and priests.
So, was Weishaupt, was he an American guy?
No, no, no.
He's Bavarian.
He's Bavarian Illuminati.
And, um, no, he was, he was into like esoteric knowledge and he was like, he was really well read.
He wanted something like the Freemasons.
That was a secret society of occult knowledge, but like cooler, less theatrical and less lame.
Would he have been aware of the, you know, 1776?
I mean, big year for America, you know?
No, that's a, that is a coincidence, but it also, you know, it's also fodder for conspiracists.
Okay, all right.
It's always interesting how these, like, modern conspiracists, like, inherit a lot of cultural, political baggage that they're not quite aware of.
Because, like, this modern creation, like, opposes, you know, two kind of things that monarchists weren't really fond of, which is, like, developing liberal, anti-monarchist enlightenment.
And then, like, kind of the global commerce system that is, like, kind of overpowering them and becoming more politically relevant than the old feudal system.
And, like, that kind of fear makes a sort of logical sense for them.
But you see in the modern period how these ideas come to develop for just like some middle class American guy making videos in his basement.
It's like, why would you believe this weird neurotic thing?
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