RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - The Spectre Spectre

Nov. 13, 2015 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

01:03:39

The Spectre Spectre

Paul Chandler and Richard Spencer discuss the 24th James Bond film, *Spectre*, as well as male and female fantasies, marriage, nostalgia for the Cold War, rooting for the villains, and really bad music. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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	I just thought it would be fun to do a kind of Spectre bond chat, and it can be real casual.
	I am interested in getting at what Spectre really is, because it seems to have a lot of interesting and contradictory meanings.
	It seems to be a neo-fascist organization and a Jewish organization at the same time.
	And yeah, I was just going to kind of, I just thought we could talk about, you know, just this kind of like idea of a wicked secret elite, you know, this and how that plays out and we can just kind of see where this goes.
	Sure.
	What are your initial thoughts on that?
	When it comes to the character of Ian Fleming, he is an equal opportunity offender and so I think...
	The character of Arik Goldfinger is specifically intended to be Jewish.
	Oh, yeah.
	If you look at the character of Dr. No, he's kind of a blended half Chinese, half Germanic villain.
	If I remember, I don't think Blofeld is actually supposed to be Jewish.
	No, he's actually specifically not Jewish.
	He mentions somewhere...
	That there's a note of Blofeld's birth in a cathedral in Thunderball.
	But I think it's also hard not to get away from a certain Jewish quality to Spectre.
	I was just looking at my copy of Thunderball here, but he talks about the Boulevard Ousmane.
	Again, that's a houseman.
	Did you know that's actually a prediction of Arlen Specter?
	Really?
	I'm joking.
	Oh, good lord.
	You went all Vigilant Citizen on me.
	I'm joking, right.
	Yeah, that's my main competition.
	I can't stand Vigilant Citizen.
	Oh, really?
	That's interesting.
	You think he steals your stuff?
	Or he's wrong?
	I've actually caught them ripping off stuff.
	Interesting.
	And it's very watered down, I guess, for a mass audience.
	But yeah, two or three times they've sort of directly ripped off pretty big sections.
	And I've emailed them and said, I don't mind you doing this.
	If you could just link me and they won't ever do it.
	So I've taken a very negative attitude to whoever that is.
	And it seems to be a...
	An Arab-sounding guy who is in the UK.
	Interesting.
	Because there's a YouTube channel that goes under that moniker, I guess, because people wondered for a long time who Vigilant Citizen X actually is.
	But I take it to be just some sort of goofy, not that bright Arab guy in the UK.
	Interesting.
	Because he kind of sounds like Ali G, if you listen to the videos.
	I've never listened to those.
	I didn't know that his voice was even...
	I happened upon it, yeah.
	There's a channel called Vigilant Citizen, and it lines up pretty well with all the material on the website, and you listen to it, and this guy sounds like L.A.G.
	He's like, the Illuminati, I've got many clones out there in the world.
	Here, for example, is...
	Really?
	Yeah, it's like, it's P. Diddy, part of the Illuminati.
	It's like, is this some Arab-British guy who's like a rapper or something?
	What is this?
	Anyway.
	That's funny.
	It is a weird situation, but...
	But anyway, I...
	So with Spectre, I mean, I don't...
	I mean, I see it kind of as because, you know, Ian Fleming was running in a lot of elite circles.
	I think he had a good sense for...
	The way that human beings can be easily given a boogeyman.
	And while I don't believe that there are no boogeymen, I think that the general approach of British intelligence, for my research, was to utilize projections.
	So a lot of what they would be doing, they would project onto other people.
	And the relationship of Jews in England is pretty complex because...
	You know, post-Cromwell, you have the Jews coming back, and there have always been quite a bit of, I guess, intermarriage, I guess you could say, amongst British Anglo elite and the Jewish banking elite and so forth.
	So I don't know that it could easily be parceled out, but my general assessment of Ian Fleming is not that he was particularly anti-Semitic, but rather that he took just a sort of pragmatic British imperial view, is the way I look at it.
	Interesting.
	And I do want to talk bigger picture, but I think this might be a good place to start.
	I remember watching Thunderball a few years ago, and this hit me, where Spectre is introduced, and there's this very famous scene where they're in this...
	Ken Adams set, a very famous long table of stainless steel.
	It's hyper-modernist in a kind of scary, scary way.
	Maybe in a fascist way, you could say, as well.
	Or a communist way, you could say, as well.
	And Blofeld is there, and there's a garage door, effectively, that's half-lowered, so you never see his face, and you just have this booming voice that comes over.
	And then he, of course, electrocutes someone to death for being a bit too corrupt or being corrupt within his organization.
	A very famous scene, parodied many times.
	One thing you forget is that this underground lair where they are, it's in a bank.
	And it's on this famous street in Paris, and the front for Spectre is the Society for Stateless Persons.
	And that struck me when I was watching it, that it struck me, again, just to have these resonances with a Jewish elite, and to maybe be a kind of crypto-reference to Jews.
	I mean, obviously Jews are not stateless now.
	They have their own state.
	But that was, you know, their consciousness, you know, amongst Ashkenazi Jews in Europe and Sephardic Jews as well, it came about as being stateless.
	And then there's the banking reference there to boot.
	And I just, that kind of, that little...
	I think there are a lot of fascist or Nazi references with Bond villains.
	In the book of Moonraker, the villain Hugo Drax is literally a neo-Nazi era.
	Or just a Nazi.
	Unreconstructed Nazi.
	Who's going to seek revenge against Britain and so on.
	There are other references as well in the films and in the books for this kind of Hitlerian type of mad genius.
	But there seems to be almost this other...
	Fear present with Spectre, and that is a Jewish elite.
	So why don't we...
	Let me just throw that out to you, and then...
	Let's see where that goes.
	Maybe talk a little bit about your research, because you've done a lot with Fleming's own background in secret services and wartime intelligence and so on.
	And then you've also done a lot in terms of thinking about elites, thinking about their messaging to society through popular culture and so on.
	Doors does that key unlock for you in terms of all these things?
	Well, if we think about the character of Fleming himself, and I did read some biographies of him when I was doing my grad work on his use of Bond.
	He, of course, lived prior to political correctness, and he was a lot freer and able to, in the sense of cultural commentary and...
	Commenting on people groups.
	It was a lot freer to be able to say what he really thought.
	And I remember researching his own personal library.
	And he had quite a few interesting titles.
	Obviously, I'm not trying to read too much into merely what books one possesses.
	If somebody saw my library, they might draw all kinds of crazy conclusions.
	But he did have quite a few race studies.
	He did have quite a few books on civilizations, eugenics, and so forth.
	So I think that he was on the up and up, I suppose you could say, when it came to the reality of different people groups.
	And so I think that you can clearly see with the character of Oreck Goldfinger that he is talking about a Jewish person there.
	He is talking about the Jewish influence in banking and monetary schemes and so forth.
	That's the whole point of that character.
	It's interesting that you bring up the question of specter in relationship to the stateless group.
	I always took that just simply to mean that That Spectre was purely international, that you had this elite sort of oligarchic level of society that was beyond concerns for nation-state or homeland or anything like that, because they were essentially moneyed oligarchs, a George Soros-type character.
	But I hadn't thought about it from the perspective of stateless in the sense of...
	You know, Ashkenazic or something like that, which I suppose is possible.
	I think something has to be going on there.
	I mean, you could even say it's unconscious, which I would be fine with, but there's something going on there.
	And it's actually, I just Googled it really quick.
	It's FIRCO in the novel.
	It's the International Brotherhood for the Assistance of Stateless Persons.
	Which, you know, again, I think what's interesting about it is that it flows both ways.
	It can...
	So it's like an ambivalent concept.
	It almost sounds like a humanitarian NGO.
	Oh, it definitely is, which has other resonances with Soros groups and things like that.
	Right, Soros is helping, quote, refugees, right?
	Exactly.
	Yeah, and so it's so pregnant with multiple meanings that I can't imagine that there isn't something going on there.
	Well, there have been accusations in Bond scholarship.
	Bondology is a whole field of study for those that might not be aware of Fleming being something like closet Nazi or closet anti-Semitic or this or that or whatever.
	I don't tend to think so just because of the number one, his operations in World War II in regard to the Germans and the many black ops and covert ops that he was involved in.
	I don't believe that that means he was necessarily committed to any ideology.
	I think he tended to follow that English penchant for pragmatism that Alexander Dugan is always rightly criticizing.
	So I tend to see him as pragmatic.
	He comes from a banking family.
	He went to Eton.
	He was recruited most likely, I think, in Germany when he was at a boarding school for British intelligence work and then later went into naval psyops.
	He worked for this man named Sir Godfrey, who is a very high-up person.
	I've always wondered about this, because a lot of the ways that Fleming's career has been depicted has been as, oh, he was a bit of a dilettante.
	He wished that he could have been James Bond, but he had to write novels to satisfy his fantasy life, which I'm sure there's a huge kernel of truth to that.
	But do you think there was, in a way, more going on in terms of his...
	Oh, absolutely.
	And I think Craig Cobble's book on that shows that definitively because of the many instances of...
	It's called Ian Fleming's Secret War.
	The many instances of the tie-ins between...
	The stories in his own life.
	Now, I don't think it was just Ian Fleming.
	I think there were a host of contenders that were sort of an amalgamation for the creation of the character of Bond.
	And this would be all the way back to maybe Sir Walter Raleigh or even Maxwell Knight and these different, even perhaps Crowley, even perhaps Dennis Wheatley.
	All of these people probably in some way Function to create the collage of the character of Bond.
	So I generally tend to argue, yes, that the Bond novels themselves had multiple functions.
	I think they functioned as Ian Fleming's own fantasy world.
	I think they functioned as a tool for him to utilize projection to always make.
	You know what I mean?
	Why aren't you a pragmatist?
	Why aren't you getting yours?
	You know what I mean?
	And Bond says something to the effect of, well...
	Yes, it is all kind of a Manichean dialectic of East versus West.
	Cowboys and Indians.
	He says, but you know what?
	I might as well just do what I want because I enjoy the pleasures of life.
	So Bond is presented more or less as just kind of this hedonistic figure.
	Who enjoys the pleasures of life, at least early on.
	You might could argue that he evolves as a character.
	But early on, he seems to be a kind of hedonistic, Nietzschean, beyond good and evil killing machine, more or less.
	So, you know, maybe Ian Fleming had a period in his life where he felt that way.
	Maybe over time, he felt different.
	Because, of course, in the stories, what is it by...
	You only live twice.
	Bond eventually gets married.
	So, you know, maybe there's a change of heart.
	They tried, I think, roughly to reflect that in the Daniel Craig reboots where you have him kind of settling down with the Lea Seydoux character.
	I forget her name in Spectre.
	Yeah, Madeline Swan.
	Yes, there you go, Swan.
	I'm rambling, but yeah, I think...
	No, ramble away.
	This is all interesting.
	I think it is a combination of factors, and it is partly Fleming's fantasy world, and it's also propaganda at the same time.
	Yeah, let's go into that.
	I'll just make some quick observations about Bond, the character.
	Bond, the character, is not Jack Ryan from The Hunt for Red October.
	What is this?
	I'm forgetting his name for the moment.
	Tom Clancy?
	Tom Clancy, of course, yeah.
	And obviously, all of these figures are in some way based on James Bond, but Clancy's figures are these patriotic, maybe even moralizing...
	Jack Ryan's Catholic, interestingly.
	They're these patriotic, moralizing good guys that are...
	Effectively, totally morally virtuous and do it to protect the Republic.
	God damn it.
	Bond isn't really.
	No, he's not.
	Bond is a very equivocal figure.
	At some level, he's kind of a flat figure in the sense that he doesn't always have the depth of his villains.
	He's kind of in a very Daniel Craig type way.
	He's kind of like a broken...
	who is thrown out there into the world.
	Um, and, and I think, but then there's another kind of level to him as well, which is, you know, you can see this at the end of casino Royale where he's like, I want to get to the hand that is, that holds the whip.
	You know, I, I want to, I want to delve deeper and get to those like hidden forces behind everything.
	Um, and so, you know, on, on, on one level, he is a, You know, a British patriot.
	And I don't think you should discount that.
	Totally, at least.
	But on another level, he's this modern post-English person.
	And he's not really even fighting the Cold War in the way that Jack Ryan would.
	He's fighting some secret war.
	Against all of these unknown forces that are kind of like avatars of different things.
	So I think that's, in a way, why James Bond is this iconic figure.
	It's that, you know, I mean, you could argue that John le Carre's world of espionage is kind of more human, you know, it's all about betrayals of the heart and ambivalence and, you know, winning and losing kind of at the same time.
	I'll hand him that.
	He definitely achieves that kind of human poignancy and tragedy.
	But the thing about Bond and why I've been fascinated with him my whole life, and I still am, There's this darkness and this grasping towards sex and death and mysteries and monsters.
	There's always this sense that there's something going on beyond the Cold War.
	It's not just the headlines.
	There's actually some monstrous half...
	Half-Chinese crypto-fascist who lives in a volcano.
	There's something about it that's grotesque that it always seems to indicate that there's something else going on there.
	Well, another angle to that could be that the character Bond is middle-lower middle class.
	You continually get the impression in the novels that he's more or less detached from the patriotism that he's supposed to feel.
	He may operate exteriorly in a patriotic fashion and get the job done, so to speak, but he seems to resent many times the character of M, his handler.
	When he's asked why he serves queen and country, the responses are generally just pragmatic.
	Why not?
	I mean, it's in my benefit, hedonistically speaking, to do so.
	So why not?
	So I think that because he, the queen and country, this is a sort of stand-in mother figure for him.
	And, I mean, that's kind of, I guess, basic pop psychology analysis, but I think there's something to that.
	Right, because he's orphaned and because...
	The state just sort of steps in to take that role.
	He resents that.
	He resents his own life.
	And that's why he represents—many Bondologist scholars you'll read, they'll talk about him as the Ubermensch character.
	He is the beyond good and evil character because he's not—he's really not committed to these ideologies.
	He doesn't really believe that Queen— I think that he,
	like most of us, had...
	I don't think he was directly, intentionally part of an international cabal to wreck the globe and create some sort of global government, but I do think that he is talking about the reality of that kind of a plan, that you do have internationalists conspiring to erect this monstrosity, and that's really what this...
	The octopus specter represents is a monstrosity.
	Do you think he had a taste of that during his war service?
	Yes, but that might depend on to what degree one, what perspective a person takes on World War II.
	I mean, if we just follow the mainline story, then he was a good guy because he was fighting Nazis.
	I mean, I believe that history is a lot more complex.
	I know you don't take that simplistic of a view of good guy, bad guy.
	I tend to agree with the presentation of Carol Quigley, not because I believe his philosophy, but because he is writing from the perspective of the Council on Foreign Relations that the Western banking elite saw a lot of interest in...
	Essentially stirring up two world wars, the first of which would weaken—well, World Wars I and II had the effect of weakening Russia and Germany, which are the historic enemies of the British Empire.
	So even though America later comes to take on the role of sort of the continuation of the Atlanticist democracy tradition of the West, You know, it's precisely the characters of the Irregulars.
	It's precisely William Stevenson.
	It's precisely Bill Donovan and Ian Fleming, who are the ones working in the background to really ensure that the U.S. will come into the war on the side of the Allies.
	And I don't think that was accidental because that was at the behest of British intelligence.
	And there have been a lot of books that actually treat of that subject.
	So I see it as kind of a long-term plan to weaken and destroy Russia and Germany for the interests of the West.
	And to what degree Fleming saw that, I suppose, could be debated.
	But the cutout villains, I think the biggest takeaway is that you have all these villains that are cutouts, these, you know...
	Almost cartoonish people.
	And you think, oh, well, it's fiction.
	But then when I look at the supposed villains that I'm supposed to take as villains in the real world, quote unquote, they seem to me to be just as cartoonish and Hollywood-ish.
	You know, when I look at a character like bin Laden and I look at his background and his associations with the CIA, to me, bin Laden is just as cartoonish as a Blofeld.
	So I wonder, you know, was Fleming telling us something like that?
	Interesting.
	Go through that.
	Do you think a lot of the villains were stand-ins or composites for contemporaneous worldviews?
	Yeah, so a lot of the Bond scholars, I think McIntyre has a couple books where he'll talk about Le Chiffre.
	And Casino Royale is, in some sense, a composite of Crowley.
	And we know that Dennis Wheatley, who was also MI5 handler, we know that he had direct meetings with Crowley.
	And, of course, Wheatley was doing that for research in regard to his esoteric sort of spy novels.
	You know, the Duke de Richelieu character played by Christopher Lee.
	So he was interested in the occult world of things, and many have made the argument that perhaps it looks like Crowley had some degree of association with MI5 as perhaps an asset or provocateur.
	There's evidence to suggest that Richard Spence has a book on that.
	And we know that...
	The other Richard Spence.
	Correct, right.
	Not me.
	Because Wheatley had met with Crowley and they talked about some of these operations they might use him for, because he was viewed as this powerful sort of sorcerer talisman by a lot of people, the idea was, well, could we capitalize on that and use that in some sort of operation?
	There's speculation.
	As to whether he might have been involved in the Rudolf Hess flight, but I don't know that anybody's actually proven that.
	It's a lot of speculation.
	So, a lot of Bondologists will talk about Le Chiffre being partly inspired by Crowley, as well as Blofeld, actually.
	Some of the Bondologists will talk about maybe Fleming saw that as a Blofeld character, too.
	You know, if somebody known as the most wickedest, you know, the wickedest man on earth or whatever, there's a lot of, there's a lot of drama to be had there by, you know, crafting your characters, you know, and if you look at, say, the Donald, the Donald Passion's version, I had to throw in my Donald Pleasance there.
	If you look at the Donald Pleasance version, he does kind of look like Crowley.
	He has this very bald, this bald-ish look.
	But I don't know if that's maybe just speculating there, but I've already forgotten what the question was, but...
	I did too.
	I think I asked whether Fleming had a taste of a kind of secret elite during the war.
	Oh, yes, I think so.
	But no, no, no, it's fine.
	I like flowing into other things like that.
	Yeah, it's also interesting, in Casino Royale, though it's a tad oblique, Fleming makes it clear that Le Chiffre is Jewish as well.
	There's this dossier that's read.
	And he's also this, like, you don't know where he comes from.
	This is another trope for Bond villains, which I think also kind of resonates with a kind of Jewishness to the villains, is that, oh, where are they coming from?
	Who are they really?
	There's one line in Goldfinger where I think it's when James Bond and...
	And Felix Leiter are in Miami.
	It's that famous scene where he goes, Dink, say hello to Felix.
	Dink, say goodbye to Felix.
	He's like, be on your way, man talk.
	He slaps her in the butt.
	Yeah, it's very funny.
	Kind of madman era, you know, misogyny or chauvinism.
	But anyway.
	Yeah, there's a line in Goldfinger right after that where James Wan asks Felix Leiter, who is this Auric Goldfinger?
	And Leiter says, oh, he's British, but he doesn't sound like it.
	And a lot of these villains will have these strange accents, maybe like a mixed accent, a mixed heritage, or you don't know where they are.
	They've suffered amnesia.
	That's actually Hugo Drax, who's the Nazi.
	And the chief are both like that.
	And I think that also seems to kind of resonate with a certain Jewish quality to these villains where, you know, you don't, it's a kind of like from the perspective of an Englishman, it's a, who is this person exactly?
	He has an English last name, but what does that mean?
	There's something about him that's not right.
	Well, certainly, yeah, and amongst...
	The British upper class, you kind of have this, I mean, you have, you know, the strains of very intense racial purity.
	That's obviously been there for a long time in the British upper class.
	And you also have the interbreeding or intermixing with quote-unquote Jews, whatever exactly that means, whether it be Ashkenazic or what.
	So, you know, and we see that with, you know, the king, Edward, what's his wife?
	I always forget her name.
	He married the American woman.
	Oh, I know who that is, yes.
	Wallace Simpson?
	Yes, Wallace Simpson, yes.
	Yeah.
	So, you know, that's kind of a mysterious...
	I'm still kind of on my own researching what exactly is going on in the background with Jewish relationships with the nobility and upper class in England.
	But if we look at the figure of Bond, I think...
	Excuse me.
	character Fleming what I think like I said Fleming is pre-PC so he's a lot he's able to say a lot more and make a lot more jokes and actually there's a lot of humor in this you know more or less with sort of the stereotypical uh presentations I mean it's it's it would it would drive a social justice warrior crazy today but it's not anything it's it's It's something you might read in Mark Twain.
	It's not that ridiculous.
	Rudyard Kipling or something where you have these...
	These quote racial statements or something.
	Fleming has no problem making these racial statements and making jokes.
	Yeah, he's also fascinated by the mixing of races.
	And that's the bad guy.
	The bad guy is almost always some sort of mulatto.
	He also has some bizarre perversion that he's into.
	There's something tragic or demented about mixing races.
	In Dr. Noh, where he describes the Shigros, who are half Chinese and half Chinese Negro, it's kind of like they have the intelligence of the Chinese, but then the brutality of the Negro all mixed together.
	Again, it would send a blue-haired social justice warrior running up a tree.
	And you know what's funny?
	You can even watch...
	Yeah.
	If you watch Live or Let Die, which is 70s, it still has the racial stuff in it.
	Yeah.
	And my guess is that they tried to kind of mitigate it because it might have been a little, even for the 70s, a little too unpolitically correct.
	And so there's the black cab driver will say, where are you going, cue ball?
	Yeah.
	He'll kind of throw in these white jokes and then...
	But what's funny is that Bond will kind of make those racial jokes back.
	And you have a lot of racial parodies, even in the film versions of Liber Let Die.
	Yes.
	Which is, it's one of those films that's trying to not be racist, but it's generally viewed as the most racist Bond film.
	Which is also kind of funny.
	Not one of my favorite films, by the way.
	Maybe one of my least favorites.
	Did you know when he runs on the heads of the alligators, that's actually based on a real operation of Ian Fleming's?
	I'm joking.
	I'm joking.
	Well, I don't know what to believe.
	I could believe it.
	That is what I was so stupid, that scene.
	It's so ridiculous.
	Oh, yeah.
	We forget also in the age of CGI that was done for real.
	I mean, a guy did that.
	I mean, granted, the crocodiles, or alligators, which I always mix this up, but I mean, they're tied down or something, but there's actually, on YouTube, they have, like, outtakes of him running across the alligators, and so he's, like, slipping and falling, like, about to be eaten.
	It's just unbelievable.
	It wasn't Roger Moore, by the way.
	It was obviously a stuntman, but nevertheless...
	Was Mr. Biggs...
	Head actually inflated.
	I'm not sure they subjected.
	Did they pop a stuntman's head?
	Yeah, they had to go through half a dozen stuntmen to get that scene right.
	They're like, take three!
	But, yeah, yeah, no, no, there's clearly, like, Fleming clearly has a racial consciousness, and he's fascinated by it.
	He does, and his library reflects that, too.
	That's what I was trying to get at in the beginning.
	So tell me a little about a scholarship, and you say you don't quite buy it, but this scholarship that he's a crypto-Nazi, I don't think I've ever heard that before.
	Well, I mean, there's...
	Maybe I should qualify that because...
	Where you're probably going to find that kind of a treatment.
	So I have a shelf on secondary bond studies and a lot of these, I mean, if you've been in academia, you know that when you're doing thesis type research, you will be forced to get all these books and these secondary studies that will be written by these feminists and so forth, right?
	So there's all these, there's like a whole book even on feminist readings of Bond or something like this.
	Well, I don't doubt that.
	Yeah, and so, you know, their assessment of a lot of this is that, oh, this is just the worst.
	I mean, this is the total, you know, patriarchal, testosterone, capitalist, you know, everything that they see as just the worst thing in history.
	is embodied in Bond.
	And so that was going to be reflected in their analyses, which I think is pretty ridiculous because, I mean, these people have like no sense of time, you know, like what was appropriate for a certain time.
	Exactly.
	No, that is lunacy.
	I would say that clearly Fleming's no Democrat, just in the...
	Just in the sense that what's good and right in his world are basically old white guys sending high-energy young white guys out to engage in secret missions.
	In which law is no obstacle.
	They have a license to kill in foreign lands.
	Let's also keep that in mind.
	So I think there is a...
	And many other people have mentioned this.
	I mean, there's clearly a neo-imperialist quality to James Bond.
	Many of the scholarly assessments we'll talk about.
	I mean, that will be pretty common in the secondary scholarship.
	The imperial, and in fact, what I kind of argued when I was doing my paper on it was that he is really the embodiment of the Anglo-American establishment, for good or for ill.
	So, absolutely, you're spot on.
	Let's go back to Spectre, and why don't I let you talk a little bit here, because you've done much, much more reading than I have.
	And much more research into elite societies and how the existence of these hidden elites, which I would say is not a conspiracy theory.
	Every society has people who are far more powerful than the politicians.
	I mean, give me a break.
	It's not like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are actually...
	I think the Bond film was...
	couple of things because they had to you know there's this long history of of you know McClory and you know Fleming and Thunderball this it's a actually really cool history about did these legal battles and you know but effectively eons And in 2014, I believe they bought them back.
	Or maybe it was 2013.
	It doesn't matter.
	And it was all set up for this big reveal that we're both going back to the past nostalgically.
	We're going back to the Connery era of Blofeld and the Spectre.
	I think also clearly that film was trying to set up a Marvel Cinematic Universe type thing.
	Where, you know, all the films are now related and, you know, interconnected and there's going to be this big villain out there that's going to last for the next half a dozen films.
	I think they were definitely going for that because they're seeing, you know, the Marvel movies is, you know, they're making so much money.
	But I think on another level, that whole...
	What Spectre was was fairly confused in that film, and I think that led the film to be very disappointing in my mind.
	I liked the look of it, this idea of this ultra-elite, both fashionable and aristocratic.
	They're meeting in Rome, a very elite or conspiratorial city, you could say.
	In the seat of power, whether it's the Catholic Church, the Roman Empire, all these great resonances, the look of it was very good.
	But I felt like what Spectre was was a bit confused in that film, where you overheard their meetings and they were engaging in sex trafficking or drugs, which obviously that is both terrible and profitable.
	I don't know.
	It wasn't exactly let's change the course of history type stuff.
	It kind of sounded like petty crime writ large.
	Maybe you disagree with me here.
	Maybe it's a pizza-gatey.
	I don't know.
	But then the plot takes you to a point where what Spectre's really about is capturing all this information.
	And so it becomes a kind of...
	Post-Edward Snowden morality play about privacy and so on.
	And I found that a little disappointing, to be honest.
	Because it wasn't...
	The whole point of it all was never put forward.
	It was almost like a laziness in the script or something.
	At one point, Blofeld says, information is all.
	It's like a...
	You know, middle school social science teacher or something.
	Like a tech geek.
	Like the worst guy out there is a tech geek.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It just wasn't, you don't actually know what he was ultimately doing with it.
	And so it wasn't, you know, even with more comic book, comic book-y, and you could even say silly villains, like from the Moore era.
	And I'm thinking of Hugo Drax.
	Who was, you know, based on Fleming's Hugo Drax in the books, but in Moonwrecker, the film, you know, they basically dialed the knob to 11, and this guy wants to depopulate the entire planet outside of the animals and create a eugenic master races in space and then repopulate.
	I mean, it's totally ridiculous, but I almost admire it.
	Then I'm forgetting, what was the name?
	It was a German name for the Spy Who Loved Me villain.
	I'm forgetting what his name is, but he was also a kind of Blofeld character, but he wanted to create a new civilization underwater.
	You get that also in the film incarnation of Zoran Industries with Christopher Walken playing the eugenic, once again Germanic-ish guy who wants to basically take over Silicon Valley and then use earthquake weapons to destroy the West Coast.
	But yeah, you're right.
	That is a recurring theme there where they dial it up to Eleven and you get the statement from the villain's mouth what he's doing.
	But I love it.
	I love it.
	I think that you can make fun of it if you want, but I don't care.
	I think that's what makes these films great.
	And I think in a way we've lost that in the 21st century where we haven't had any great villain.
	I mean, the Craig-era villains...
	I mean, Casino Royale, what was that?
	Bribery?
	There was some guy funding some petty terrorist in Africa.
	I mean, no world-shaking stuff.
	One guy who wanted to raise the utility cost for third world people.
	I mean, yeah, it sucks to be them, but it's not really that earth-shattering, to be honest.
	Skyfall was like Raul Silva's revenge against M. It was just totally personal.
	It had no consequences.
	And then Spectre, they don't even know what the villain's doing.
	I think there's this kind of point where we almost, I don't know, can't imagine a villain anymore or something.
	I don't know.
	Well, maybe that's because good guy, bad guy evokes the notion of...
	Like, objective, you know, morals or something.
	And, you know, the modern, postmodern establishment cannot allow there to be anything objectively true or false.
	I mean, everybody's sort of brainwashed in the West into different forms of relativism.
	I'm just spitballing here.
	That could be it.
	But no, I totally agree that Spectre was a flawed film.
	You know, the reboots all have their flaws.
	I do think, and I argue in my book, that aspects of the reboots actually have windows into real conspiracies.
	And I don't think that should be too hard to believe, given the fact that most espionage writers, all the way back to Conrad or Graham Greene, they're writing about oftentimes real events that they saw, that they would put into fiction.
	And Kim, Kim Philby, something like this.
	And so I don't think it's far-fetched that modern screenwriters, and I didn't go to the trouble to research every single screenwriter of all the new ones and see what their Instagram connections were or anything like this.
	But, I mean, you can take for Quantum of Solace, for example, which I think is one of the weaker reboots.
	What is interesting about Quantum of Solace is that it shows, in my view, Basic pattern of a kind of Al Gore type scam, where they will utilize a sort of petty puppet dictator that they put in to sign, say, all the resources of a people group over to this shadowy private entity that's a kind of shell or a front for what we ultimately find out is Spectre.
	But in that installment, I don't think it's accidental that his name is Mr. Green.
	So, you know, under these sort of environmental, you know, overly obsessive environmental compulsions, that's the front, right?
	The green movement.
	You have this, you know, basically transferal of people's, you know, resources and whatnot over to a private entity.
	And you do see a lot of multinationals attempting to do that, attempting to...
	You know, these crazy, almost Blofeldian plots of, like, I'm going to control all water, you know what I mean?
	Yeah, yeah, or all carbon production on the earth kind of will be traded in one market that will be produced by Goldman Sachs.
	Yeah, I mean, there is a gargantuan, conspiratorial aspect to it all.
	Yeah, no, I definitely noticed Mr. Green as well, which is also a Jewish name and a Jewish, fairly Jewish-looking actor, which is interesting.
	You can take that for what it's worth.
	Yeah, what are some other aspects?
	How does the secret elite type, that quality of specter, how does that rhyme with...
	I think there's plenty of examples, even in the mainstream, I think that could fit that bill.
	More obvious ones, things like Bilderberg Group or something like this.
	To whatever degree the Iron Mountain meeting was real, I think that could be debated whether it was real or fake.
	But actually real.
	What was that?
	Well, I think it's out of the 60s, if I recall, and it's one of these kind of classic documents of conspiriana, as I call it, the conspiracy realm, where you have these sort of Pentagon strategists and Rand Corporation-type individuals meeting behind closed doors.
	The Iron Mountain complex, the sort of underground base type thing.
	I mean, that's like straight out of Blofeld or something.
	And what's interesting about the report from Iron Mountain is that for a long time it was believed to be essentially a conspiracy myth.
	It's something along the lines of the Protocols of Zion or something.
	But what's interesting about the report from Iron Mountain is that a lot of what's talked about...
	In it, it's been some years since I read it, probably eight or nine years, but it does talk about large-scale social engineering.
	It does talk about a lot of the changes that we've seen in the West.
	So I understand that that doesn't necessarily prove the document was real, but it could at least suggest that it might have been.
	Other potential contenders for this, you have any number of secret societies that might have wealthy, influential members.
	I think that's essentially what Kubrick was trying to convey with Eyes Wide Shut, is that you really do have these kinds of cabals that they have peculiar Well, stop saying all this fake news.
	Right.
	I love how this stuff...
	I don't know what was going on with Pizzagate and the pizza stuff and all of that Podesta things, but to describe this as fake news, which is being done by the mainstream left-right, is just ridiculous.
	Something is going on.
	Well, they haven't come out and said that the Podesta emails are fake.
	And all of these emails, which back up all manner of corruption, including...
	Large-scale media collusion, 60-plus talking heads and pundits colluding with the DNC and pay-for-play and Hillary organizing funds being transferred with Saudi Arabia and hinting at basically running ISIS and all these sort of things that the independent media has been talking about for a long time.
	You have here a lot of documentation.
	Then, of course, the spirit cooking and the...
	The bizarre terminology of Pizzagate, the hot dogs and all this stuff, whether it's code for drugs or gay sex or what, it's not exactly certain.
	But to just paste it all as fake is quite obviously absurd.
	And I think they're just really relying on nobody having...
	Whoever would believe that has basically no familiarity with it or the topic because that is just on its face absurd.
	But that does tend to be kind of the general approach of the establishment is to just deny all costs, of course, even if it's not even necessary, even if it makes you look absurd.
	It's like they still double down and continue.
	You know, with their narrative.
	But, I mean, there's a lot of other contenders that could apply as well.
	I mean, you've got the Dutroux affair with Marco Dutroux in Belgium and the Belgian elite and political class essentially trafficking in women and this reportedly involving ritual aspects.
	You've got Saville and the UK pedophiles and the whispers and reports of Saville being interested in dark aspects of the occult and so forth.
	I think there's a lot of potential contenders that could apply in an Eyes Wide Shut style scenario or a Spectre style scenario because they could potentially all be kind of blended together.
	Because really it's just black markets and like you were saying with the film Spectre.
	What you see in their secret meeting in Rome is basically a business meeting about running all the black markets, more or less.
	And then you find there's actually a deeper agenda about the real black market basically being this kind of private NSA setup that Blofeld has in Tunisia or wherever it is.
	Do you think we're...
	I would say, maybe I'm naive, that this information gathering is hyper-nationalized, but do you think there's an indication, in the sense that the United States does not want to give up its goods, but do you think there is an internationalization to the Snowden-like data gathering?
	Where do you think that is?
	Well, in my opinion, and I'm not saying this based on no research, but obviously I can't prove this, but I would posit that the real NSA is not necessarily a government building in Virginia or Massachusetts or wherever the NSA is located.
	The real NSA would be much more appropriately I mean, these mega conglomerates.
	And I say that because AT&T is, I think, I mean, I worked in sales for AT&T for a year, a while back.
	So I have a little bit of knowledge of the company.
	And if I recall, they're the largest global provider of Internet, if I recall.
	So that would be a much better contender for...
	The actual arms of this octopus, so to speak.
	And I tend to think that at the highest levels, a lot of these sort of big tech giant things...
	I mean, I don't want to be overly simplistic and paint it all as a giant conspiracy because I don't think that reality is that easy to classify.
	I understand there's competing power structures and so forth.
	But I do think that you have...
	It's not accidental that...
	It's one company that is a kind of CIA front in QTEL that puts forth the startup money for so many of these now huge tech companies like Facebook, like Google.
	And so I wonder at times if Silicon Valley isn't just kind of a frontispiece in a way for the military-industrial complex.
	And we know that there is backdoor technology that the NSA and it's...
	You know, whatever it really is, AT&T or whatever, Bell Labs or whatever, you know, they do have backdoor technology into, I mean, this has come out even in trials with the ProMix technology and so forth.
	So I would say, yeah, it's international and it's not just a government building because, you know, if they shut down that government building, I mean, let's say for the sake of argument that the Snowden leaks were such...
	Did they cause such a furor that, for whatever reason, the government chose to shut down some building somewhere?
	I mean, AT&T still exists.
	So, you know, when I was working there, I went and stood over these giant servers because they were underground.
	This sounds like a Blofeld-type thing, but I'm not joking.
	There was a giant data storage facility.
	It's right out of Blofeld-type thing, not far from Nashville.
	It's actually outside of Nashville.
	And it houses all the internet traffic for the entire tri-state region.
	So, you know, if that had all been shut down in terms of the NSA, they're not shutting AT&T down, I can tell you that.
	So I would say, yes, there is a real match to what Blofeld's operation seems to be in that movie.
	Fascinating.
	Well, do you want to put a bookmark in it, or do you think there's some thread you'd like to pick up?
	I would add that if you're curious and you're listening to this, if you want to get the book, the best place is to get it directly from me.
	I would recommend the book, by the way.
	I read about half to three-fourths of it.
	As I was flying to and fro Texas, and I quite enjoyed the chapters.
	Thank you.
	I appreciate that.
	Yeah, some of it's goofy and lighthearted and satirical.
	I deal with Kubrick for about the first 80 pages.
	The next chunk is Spielberg and the alien mythos.
	I don't believe in aliens, but I'm interested in how Spielberg wants us to believe in aliens and why that might be.
	And then the third chunk of the book is 70s and 80s dystopia fantasy stuff that we all kind of grew up with.
	And then that last section is Hitchcock 007 and a couple chapters on David Lynch and then the influence of CIA and the Pentagon and Hollywood.
	So that's what the book is about.
	And I would say just get it from me.
	You can message me on the website.
	There's a tab.
	Through the socials of Facebook and Twitter, I can be accessed.
	Yes, definitely.
	It's remarkable how our tastes align.
	We like so many of the same things.
	The Kubrick and Bond and even Spielberg and stuff like that.
	It's remarkable.
	I never would have thought that just throwing up on a blog, just kind of these...
	And I'm not kidding.
	It was just kind of on the side and for fun.
	I was like, hey, why don't I just try writing a movie analysis that talks about actual conspiracies?
	I don't want to bore you, but I had a film class when I was in college that was basically Oliver Stone movies, and we were looking at comparing.
	History.
	We're supposedly what we think of the history and, you know, the way that Oliver Stone presents the story, be it Nixon, be it JFK or whatever.
	El Salvador.
	And I thought, you know, that's actually, you could do a whole book just on that.
	Just on, you know, kind of reality and the threshold between reality and fiction.
	And what better avenue than Fleming and Bond.
	So, just started throwing up these analyses and after, you know, about a hundred of them.
	Publisher comes along and says, hey, you want to put that together in a book?
	I said, yeah.
	So here we are.
	There's a fun book, I think, that's educational at the same time.
	It's kind of a lighthearted textbook, I guess you could say.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I really enjoyed the tour, and it actually got my wheels turning, because I think there are actually some other levels that you didn't go into.
	But kind of reading your book kind of got my wheels turning and got me thinking about these things.
	So yeah, it's definitely a fun read.
	Thank you.
	That would be the main thing.
	And I do offer lectures and interviews at Jay's Analysis.
	So if you want to support what I do, you can do the PayPal subscription as well.
	It's $4.95 a month or $60 a year.
	And I just finished, I think, eight.
	Eight lectures all the way through the entirety of Tragedy and Hope.
	And then prior to that, I did the entirety of Plato's Republic.
	So I kind of try to balance the classics of Western civilization and going through them with modern books and treatments.
	And that's more or less how I make a living now.
	That's awesome.
	I love it.
	Yeah.
	Don't send your kids to universities.
	Amen to that.
	Just pay people in the alternative media.
	If you send your kid to a university, you're going to get a gray-haired, ponytail, Frankfurt School leftover fossil telling them that they need to cut off their genitalia.
	This is supposed to be what an education in Western civilization is about or something.
	That is more or less my experience.
	And I went to a lot of schooling.
	Not all of it's bad, of course, but you have to kind of like pick and choose.
	Yeah, and not a pizza-related map.
	Not a pizza-related map.

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