120: Caleb Maupin and the Conspiracy Left, with Sophie from Mars
A real treat this time, as Daniel and Jack are joined by special guest Sophie from Mars to talk about Caleb Maupin and the wider 'Conspiracy Left', i.e. those left-wingers (or pseudo left-wingers) who style themselves anti-imperialists (etc) and who embrace every bad cause from Putin/Assad-apologia to transphobia to conspiracist antisemitism. Sophie knows and understands this subject backwards and forwards. Her YouTube documentary video Conspiracy on the Left was an instant classic when it was released earlier this year, and she has lots of other videos in which (with others) she goes over Maupin's cultic conferences, his reactionary politics, his paranoid grudges, and his weird and patronising fascist screeds disguised as despatches from the new Lenin. A great chat about an important issue for the left to deal with. And there is also, you will be unsurprised to learn, some laughing at the cringe of it all. Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Annika on Twitter: @ardenthistorian Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Episode Notes: Sophie from Mars on YouTube Sophie from Mars - YouTube Sophie from Mars on Twitter Sophie 💅 From 💅 Mars (@sophie_frm_mars) / Twitter Conspiracy on the Left https://youtu.be/aZyIjBxxpTY Reading Caleb Maupin's "Satan At The Fountainhead" with Thoughtslime, We're In Hell & That Jess - YouTube Reading Caleb Maupin's Breadtube Serves Imperialism ft. That Jess & ThoughtSlime - YouTube Caleb Maupin exposed for abuses and cult manipulation tactcs - YouTube Pinko & Mildred watch Caleb Maupin addressing the allegations - YouTube
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
And welcome to episode 120 of I Don't Speak German.
We're back with a very special guest this time.
But firstly, I do need to apologize for Daniel because he's going to be incredibly annoying.
He is here, but he's going to be incredibly annoying all the way through the episode because he's had a horrible bug, a horrible, nasty bug.
And I have no sympathy for him whatsoever because he's now got this horrible low growling, scratchy voice, and it's making me uneasy, and I blame him.
So Daniel, apologize for yourself.
I deeply apologize for sounding like this.
This is not a bit.
I actually do just sound like this right now.
Maybe some people find it sexy.
We'll find out.
But DMs are open, I suppose.
But other than that, we should just move on from this topic entirely.
We should indeed.
To introduce our very special guest, we're thrilled and honoured to have with us on this episode, which has been one of the hardest episodes to set up in our entire history, so I'm kind of not really believing that we're finally here doing it.
But we are, and we are very happy to be welcoming Sophie from Mars.
Hello, Sophie.
Hey, glad to be here.
Nice to meet you both.
Happy to be on the show.
I personally think Daniel's low gravelly voice is very sexy, but I'm a Tom Waits fan, so it's a natural tendency, I think.
I'm a fan.
My vote is it's a good voice.
Alright, well I'll take that as a positive for sure.
I feel like I'm being haunted by Tom Waits at the moment, because I literally spent most of the night before last talking about him on another podcast.
Anyway, yeah, so this is episode 120, and I think it's going to be quite a loose chat, but we're going to be talking Sort of mostly about a gentleman, I don't know, our listeners may have heard of him, by the name of Caleb Maupin, an obscure... I was joking, but he is an obscure figure, really, except that he's nowhere near as obscure as he ought to be.
He should be more obscure, yeah.
The more obscure, the better.
Yeah, absolutely.
Let's just cancel the podcast.
Let's not do this.
Yeah, this is it.
We're helping him by talking about him.
It's the age-old paradox.
But yeah, I'm very lucky to have with me two people who have the requisite brain worms to spend all their time listening to awful people, you know, uncut and unedited, and then report upon it.
So I'm lucky.
I just get to piggyback on Daniel.
He does all the listening.
And Sophie, I think you were saying that you have the same sorts of brain worms when it comes to people like Maupin and Alex Jones.
Yeah, it's very unfortunate.
I can't expose myself to hours and hours and hours of just like terrible people's terrible opinions and lies and not really be bothered.
I was just saying before the show that I think the worst thing about InfoWars is there's too many ad breaks.
If it was just Alex Jones, just like hours and hours straight of just like I'll be fine with that if it was just like hours straight of nothing but that.
Maybe it's the deep gravelly voice, I'm not realizing actually.
Maybe that's what I'm actually, I'm just drawn in by.
No.
I had a funny thing on the video that kind of brought this together, that I made, the Conspiracy on the Left, which is a documentary about conspiracy theories, conspiracy belief, and people who call themselves left-wing who believe in them.
And as we're going to discuss today, Caleb Maupin is a very central figure in that.
But actually, probably the worst people in that are the folks at the Grey Zone.
And they suck.
They're just really terrible.
Largely because the layers of lies They are trained journalists.
So it's like, when they lie about things, it's a densely packed lie that you have to spend a long time carefully unpicking.
But they'll say them all like completely straight face, no shame.
And they also just have Negative charisma.
And so when I was having the video subtitled by my friend, she got really mad at me.
She was like, I never want to watch another second of Greyzone or Jimmy Dore again.
Because she had already had a lot of exposure to Caleb Maupin through like other people's content laughing at him.
She already knew about him.
But like, again, if only he were more obscure, but like, she was like, I had to watch so much Greyzone and so much like Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté and then Jimmy Dore because of you.
And I was like, babe, I had to watch hours of these guys.
I know the feeling.
I think you can kind of, I mean, if you want to, make a semi-excuse for people like Alex Jones and Jimmy Dore, which is that they are essentially entertainers rather than journalists or anything like that.
Although, of course, they claim to be doing journalism and reporting facts, which makes it egregious.
But they are, whereas people like Max Blumenthal used to be a useful journalist.
You know, he knows how to do the job properly, but he chooses not to now.
Yeah, as I'm saying, I do find the Grey Zone more reprehensible across many fronts.
I'm not like, we should turn this episode into actually a Grey Zone episode.
I've thought about for a long time doing a deeper dive into what's wrong with the Grey Zone.
As I noted in my documentary, they are the first people who ever received the warning on Twitter, like, this article contains hacked materials.
They have actually done things that have kind of broken ground, at least in social media journalism kind of spaces.
It's unfortunate that what they're doing, the ground they are breaking is lying to try to apologize for the Assad regime.
It's like winning the Nobel Prize for inventing a new kind of like rabbit poison or something.
Yeah, but you mentioned your documentary video, Left Conspiracy.
What's its actual title?
It's something like Left Conspiracy Theory.
It's Conspiracy on the Left.
Because the kind of beginning conceit is that people think that right-wingers are the ones who have conspiracy beliefs and spread conspiracy theories, and it's understandable why in the current moment in history we are in, people think that, but it's not true in an intrinsic way.
Like, the left and obviously liberals, like, We aren't actually like situated in a pure protective bubble of like facts and logic where we were immune to lies and conspiracy theories and misinformation.
Yeah, absolutely.
That is a brilliant video.
I've shouted it out on the show before, which is funny because you have a much bigger audience than we do.
But just on the off chance of somebody that was listening to us but not watching you, I've managed to maybe send a couple of people your way.
But yeah, that's a brilliant video.
And that's the video where you do go into Caleb Maupin.
And Caleb Maupin is...
Well, he's been in the news a bit, hasn't he, this year?
The news in our circles, I suppose you could say.
I mean, do I get to be the first to say spanky tanky?
Is that my role?
Well, it looks like it.
Congratulations.
Yeah.
So, it's a funny thing.
Because while I was making Conspiracy on the Left and chatting to a few other people who were kind of on the tail of looking at leftist conspiracy theorists, looking at this group who I call the Conspiracy Left, like Caleb Mopp in the Gray Zone, Jimmy Dore, who else?
George Galloway, right?
These are the current influences in our conspiracy leftist space.
I was chatting with a few other people who were at least aware of them, like Mildred from Thought Slime and some other friends who make leftist video essays who were aware of them or were actively researching them for stuff.
Like Mia Mulder talked a little bit about them in a video about why people don't trust the establishment.
And kind of behind the scenes, like, when we were talking about them, we were all like, so, the CPI is a cult, right?
So, for those who have no context at all, Caleb Maupin was slash is the head of a thing called the Center for Political Innovation, which is a LaRoucheite conspiracy cult masquerading as a policy think tank.
And also sort of masquerading as a communist party as well.
Yes.
Well, yeah, because so they're all of their branding is like CPI USA, which is clearly trying to like crib on the SEO of CP USA, like the Communist Party USA.
They really want people to like accidentally wind up at their website instead of the Communist Party and then see a bunch of like lies about the Communist Party and how they're all funded by the CIA, I guess.
Yeah, so the CPI, very strange organization.
I'm sure we'll get into it in more detail.
But basically, behind the scenes, we were looking at all this stuff and looking at all the ways that his followers talk about him, all of the ways that he acts, the ways that he keeps all of them in this alternate reality bubble where only what he says is the truth.
And besides that, just everything about it gives deeply culty vibes, but there's nothing substantive to point to Right?
That I could go, this is definitely a cult.
I just know in my heart it is true.
And then, like, very shortly after I released my documentary, like, the CPI members came out with a kind of a document, a disclosure that, like, it was a cult and Caleb Maupin had been sexually abusing people within this cult that he was trying to set up and showed, like, texts to his wife where he was like, I want to take The members from CPI, who he referred to in this text as the kids, and live on a compound in the middle of nowhere and stuff like this.
And I was like, fuck man, it's a cult!
Like, I knew it was a cult!
I'm so annoyed I couldn't say it was a cult!
Yeah.
I think one of the things that really gave me cult vibes before this came out was watching some of the videos they release of public events.
And there was a real sense of, because he sort of gets them to come out with him and stand in public places and do these chants that they have.
We are city builders and things like that.
And there's a real sense, A, of them chanting on command and B, of a kind of a...
Like a testing of allegiance ritual where, you know, you have to come out and be publicly humiliated because the leader says so, and if he can get you to do this, then he's tested.
Well, he certainly enjoys people being humiliated.
Real Rustboro Baptist Church vibes to those videos.
Oh, true, yeah.
If you look at the documentaries made about that group, that was a very deliberate strategy of like, we're going to go out there and say horrifyingly offensive things, and it just drives in-group satisfaction.
And again, the fact that he's almost telling on himself in the BreadTube book, in his BreadTube serves capitalism, I think is what it's called.
Imperialism.
Imperialism.
Excuse me.
Pardon me.
Dave, you see?
I can see your agenda.
You're trying to take the word imperialism out of the discussion, so that people don't... There's no discussion of imperialism, no.
But he includes Steve Hassan as, like, a breadtuber, and it's like, how?
Like, Steve Hassan is, like, an expert on cult dynamics, because he was in a cult.
Steve Hassan... I mean, he's got his problems, but he is... Steve Hassan also, like, thinks that being trans is a cult, and I don't know if anyone's noticed this about Breadtube, Quite a few Breadtubers are transgender.
The idea that he is like puppeteering Breadtube from behind the scenes and it's like half of Breadtube is like trans women and he thinks that all trans people have been like brainwashed into being trans through sissy hypnoporn is a hell of a claim.
It's just a hell of a claim and it can only be explained by, well, Steve Hassan went on to CNN and said that said that MAGA is a cult and Caleb loves MAGA.
So he wants to do everything he can to smear.
Well, I mean, also he just wants to do everything he can to smear people who spread useful information about how to identify cults and conspiracy theories.
Because if you can identify those things, you will look at him and you will go, oh, that's a conspiracy cult.
Yes, indeed.
Indeed.
So going back a little bit, maybe, because I'm conscious of the fact that we're talking quite loosely and there might be a few people scratching their heads at this point thinking, what are they talking about?
How would...
How would you describe, if you could put it in a bottle, what is Morpins politics?
Okay.
First, if you have no context at all, I need you to imagine a very red man.
And I know I've just been asked about his politics, but I need a base to build on, so I need you to picture a guy who is just Just red in the face at all times.
And so he talks about communism.
He talks about communism, right?
That's crucial.
But he is not a communist.
The ways he talks about communism are all about the past.
He is entirely reactionary, entirely past facing.
He's all about the USSR, about historic regimes, about Stalin.
when he talks about like current modern geopolitics, you would think if he was a communist and even if he's like a statist communist, then the, the, the thing he would focus on would be like, yes, China, which he does talk about, but like maybe Cuba.
Right.
But instead his, his big focuses are like Syria, Nicaragua, Venezuela.
And it's like, well, this is because these are places that in his career.
So he has, he has had a career as a journalist primarily for Russia today.
He has been paid by the governments of these places to go there and basically make propaganda for their governments.
And it's just like where most actual communists are very future-facing and thinking about how we make communism in the future and make a more equitable world from now in the future.
He's all about the past and that's because he doesn't actually want to build communism.
Look, the best way I can explain his politics is, Mildred from Thought Slime told me this thing about Nick Fuentes, the Nazi child.
She said that she described what fascists believe in.
And Fuentes, who was indignantly insisting, I'm not a fascist, He looked at her description of what fascists believe in and he's like, yes, that's what I believe.
And he was just like, that's all true, because he believes it because he's a fascist.
And at some point in researching Caleb Maupin, it clicked for me that when he's describing communism, he's describing fascism.
So when he says he's a communist, it's because he's a fascist, actually, but he just doesn't really understand what either of those things are.
Yeah, so the pseudo-communist is probably the fastest way to label him.
And he's actually, some people would say a Nazbol, a nationalist Bolshevik.
He's certainly a reactionary, certainly a conservative.
He'll really give it the big legs about how he actually supports all sorts of progressive stuff, but he doesn't.
God, I've waffled so much on this answer, I'm realising it.
It's really hard, because without the context of understanding who Lyndon LaRouche is, it's really hard to explain what the fuck is going on with Caleb Maupin's politics.
Yeah, one of the key things about, we talked a little bit on this show about the Grey Zone article about Abigail Thorne.
We talked a little bit about that when we talked about Jimmy Dore earlier this year.
And one of the things about that was because it originates in this absolutely wackadoodle article in the Grey Zone by Blumenthal and Clarenberg, I believe.
Yes.
It works on their usual technique, which is to make it look and sound aesthetically very much like serious journalism, and then to just construct a chain of implications out of saying, well, here's a thing, and here's another thing, and here is a connection between them.
Abigail once worked with Stuart Goldgreen, who shook hands with Max McKee, and he is the nephew of John McKee, who runs the Illuminati.
And the Illuminati, you're thinking, well, that's the end of the conspiracy.
But actually, no, it's that John McKee is friends with Klaus Schwab.
It's this whole, like, it's this wild chain.
It's a completely aesthetic method of making an argument.
You're not really making an argument, you're just putting on the aesthetic of an argument.
And that's exactly what Jimmy Dore does.
Jimmy Dore argues in the same way.
He just says, well, this person here says I'm wrong about what I've just said.
You know, like the Douma gas attack was a false flag or whatever.
They say I'm wrong, but they write for a fact-checking site that gets money from somebody you don't like.
So, they're lying.
You can't trust... You can just discount anything that is said that disputes... It's associative, again.
And Jimmy Dore, of course, talked to Caleb on his show about the Abigail Thorne quote-unquote story.
And one of the things that struck me about that was the determination, apparently, of everybody involved to make it not George Sorrell, so whoever, who was actually sort of in there somewhere as one of the funding sources for this thing about trying to overcome vaccine hesitancy, but to make it the British royal family. who was actually sort of in there somewhere as one I know, yeah.
And that's because the British Royal Family are central to conspiracy theories proposed by Lyndon LaRouche.
It's so hard!
Good lord.
Okay, instead of being negative for a second, let's speak affirmatively about how the real world actually works.
In reality, the intelligence community does use methods of informational dominance to try to obscure the truth about what is going on in the world and what world governments are up to from people.
A crucial thing about receiving funding from people is that it's meant to obscure.
When the government declassifies documents, about 50 years ago we did this shady shit, The deliberate point is that you can't trust what they're saying.
Like, sometimes they'll declassify documents that are bullshit.
Sometimes they'll declassify documents that are true.
And because you can't tell the difference because they come from the same source, like declassified CIA documents or whatever, You actually have no, like, verifiable source there.
And it's the same thing when, like, when you can point to a chain of, like, there's funding coming from this group, it doesn't actually, like, immediately discount what is true inherently because they received funding.
The method of, like, um, Discounting a source as reliable is not therefore everything they say is fake.
That's not how information dominance works.
Part of the point is creating confusion and mixing in tons of truth with lies.
But on the other hand, on the other side of this conversation, it's very easy to point to the agenda of what's going on with them pointing at Abigail Thorne because they are anti-vaccine and she was making a video trying to combat vaccine hesitancy.
So they were angry about that.
The argument they're trying to make is like, this source is untrustworthy.
The reality is, that doesn't mean that what they're saying is necessarily untrue.
Because it's like, if it was necessarily untrue, we would be able to still look at a source and be like, cool, we know what the lies are because it came from there.
It's like the god who only ever lies and the god who only ever tells the truth.
You'd still get some things out of the guy who only ever lies.
But someone who lies sometimes and tells the truth sometimes, and that's the actual way that the intelligence community works, is much worse and much more confusing.
And why am I talking about the intelligence community?
Because a ton of leftist conspiracy theories revolve around the intelligence community.
I mean, as do many conspiracy theories, obviously.
Because leftists are much, I think, more quick to position ourselves as the enemies of the state, the enemies of the capitalist regime, we are looking for places where we can be like, yeah, look, the CIA is up to some shit here.
And like, yeah, you have to actually understand how the intelligence community actually works in order to make meaningful claims about that.
You can't just be like, well, the CIA, this is the shit that Morpin and pals will say about leftist influences.
The CIA was involved in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom put money behind these intellectuals and academics.
And those intellectuals and academics, therefore, were all liars and wrong.
And it's like, well, You've just taken a really crucial misstep, right?
Because you just said they gave funding to people who they thought were basically harmless, or were not useful leftists, and were not a threat.
It doesn't mean that those people are going to say untrue things 100% of the time.
I am conscious of what you said about establishing a context for people to be able to follow along.
So maybe I should just talk a bit about who Caleb Maupin is so we can get into the finer points I'm trying to make here without leaving people behind.
Caleb Maupin is, as I said before, involved with a group called the CPI.
Until recently, he was trying to make a little pseudo-communist cult.
He's still trying to do it.
As I said before, he got ousted and ousted as being a sex creep by the members of the group.
He has recently done a video explaining why he thinks nothing they've said is true.
You know, a big shock from a guy who's accused of being a sex creep to come out and say, no, they're lying about me.
We've never seen it before.
And in the video, he also says that he is basically, like, recreating the CPI and making a new CPI and that he is not going to be the head of it or in charge of any of the money because he apparently sees that as what they were complaining about and not him Being a sex creep.
He is instead taking the official position of ideological leader of the new CPI, which is a very normal job.
Yeah.
So, as I said before, he's a pseudo-communist.
He likes to say that he's a communist.
He's actually a reactionary.
He's actually very certifiably a fascist.
And he's also Really cringe, which has led him to be the subject of a lot of people's reaction streams and that kind of content where they're just laughing at him.
But some of the stuff that he's been up to is actually really sinister.
like some of the stuff that they were exposing in this document about him, you know, You know, he pressured a heroin addict into going into sex work when they were a volunteer for his organization and then employed, and then used their services to get and then used their services to get his gratification.
And then I think that they'd also relapsed and shit like this.
In his video where he's saying he doesn't think anything that they said is true, he claims that they manipulated him It's really fucked up.
He also, like, ah god.
Okay, Daniel's joke about the spanky tanky is gonna be contextualized now, unfortunately.
Unfortunately, everyone brace for psychic damage.
Morpin, um, Morpin, and if you've ever seen Morpin, this is a bad sentence I'm about to say, Morpin has a spanking fetish, which, you know, it's very normal, whatever, but he, um, he, ah god, would Like, bait people into conversations about their experiences of being spanked as children so that he could later go and pleasure himself thinking about what they had said.
That's not all.
Like, the sexual part of what's, like, his abuse of people is not all by a long shot.
He also, like, had multiple people, like, sell everything they owned and move across the country to live in a tiny motel room that they were, like, paying him rent to live in.
Yeah, I mean, a cult.
It's a cult.
It was a cult.
It still is a cult.
He wants to remake the cult.
He got kicked out of the cult, but he wants to do it again.
He's a bad fucking dude.
He sucks.
He's also very bad at disguising the fact he's a raging anti-Semite.
He talks constantly about the international bankers.
Sometimes he'll say the globalists when he's feeling extra spicy.
He is constantly singling out particular Jewish people who he thinks are real baddies.
He loathes Hannah Arendt with a burning and terrible passion.
Steve Hassan, for that matter, is Jewish.
Not to give in to the like, this is another thing, like all conspiracy theorists, Caleb would love to have a good guys and bad guys thing where you're either on his side or you're on our side because we oppose him.
So therefore, you know, there's the other side.
You know, obviously, I don't claim Steve Hassan in any fashion.
As I said before, the guy's a transphobe.
In very much the same way, you know, there are lots of content creators like, you know, you got like Destiny or Vaush or whoever who fucking suck and have contributed a massive amount of like reactionary gibberish to the online left, who I in no way claim as well.
And he thinks that we're all one like monolith, which he calls the synthetic left, which is such a cool name.
It's so good.
Yeah, I think that's probably a fairly good summary of who Caleb Moffin is.
Fairly good.
There are some other, like, the more details you learn about him, it's always embarrassing shit.
Like, he, I found out that when he was a student activist, he once showed up to a protest that was supposed to be for, was it Syrian refugees?
It was refugees of some kind, and he showed up with, for some reason, the imperial flag of Russia.
For some fucking reason.
And he was just, like, roundly rejected and asked to leave by all of the activists there.
He's also done stuff like he was gonna do a public debate with a fascist because he's a fascist and wants to share platforms with fascists.
And his Marxist-Leninist comrades in the organizations that he was in at the time were trying to stop him and he lied to them about where it was happening so that they wouldn't be able to stop him.
There's all sorts of weird shit from his time before he was able to establish his cult, but all of it points to the fact that he has kind of always been like this and it's very unlikely to stop.
It's worth emphasizing, I think, his material links with... He works for RT, for instance.
Yeah, well, he did.
He did.
He did.
Does he not work for RT anymore?
Well, RT America was shut down at the start of the Ukraine war, when Russia invaded Ukraine.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, RT America was shut down by the American government.
And so he's been out of a job.
LMAO.
Eat shit, Caleb.
And this is also like right before the whole thing, because he is just a propagandist, like he was insisting Russia is not going to invade Ukraine.
There's a very funny mashup I've seen where it's like, it's like, Caleb saying over and over again.
Oh, this is also context for if you haven't, if you're listening and you've never seen or heard Caleb Maupin before, his voice is terrible.
It's clips of Caleb Maupin like having this rant where he's going like, Russia is not going to invade Ukraine.
And he says this like six times in a row because he always repeats himself tons because he's trying to mimic the styles of people like Donald Trump and Alex Jones.
So he's just going like, Russia is not going to invade Ukraine!
Russia is not going to invade Ukraine!
And I saw this great mashup where it's just like that and then like heavy metal of like Ukraine, like Ukrainian, you know, man pads and like anti-MSLs and shit, like fighting Russian forces from like two days, because it had been like the day before Russia invaded Ukraine.
He was insisting it wasn't going to happen.
And then people were like, LMAO, Caleb, come on, do better.
Yeah, and then he instantly switches to, okay, well, Russia is... well, I think initially it was a security exercise, wasn't it, or something like that, to denazify Ukraine and so on and so forth.
He very much follows the party line, well, Putin's line, the propaganda line, when it comes to Ukraine.
He'll mix in some extra spicy stuff, like he and his pals have spread the conspiracy theory around that That COVID was manufactured in a biolab in Ukraine by American imperialists, which is one of the most perfect examples I've seen of the dynamics of conspiracy theories on the left, where it's like you have the same exact narrative, but the bad guy has just been swapped out.
Because if you're a right-winger, you love America.
And so it's China who must have manufactured COVID.
But if you're a left-wing conspiracy theorist, then you hate America and you hate American imperialism.
But you're also, you know, an anti-vaxxer.
And you love Russia because it's challenging the American imperialist hegemony or some nonsense like this.
And so it's Ukraine who were manufacturing COVID.
Of course, of course.
And then you get to link Hunter Biden in as well, because of the... Oh, yes, of course.
Always Hunter.
You run into that in some of the sort of that Steve Bannon-ish, you know, like the MAGA types, right?
Although I will actually say that many of the far-right Nazis that I follow are very, very pro-Putin and pro-Russia's won Ukraine and are very actively anti-American.
It can be that way, yeah.
It can be that way.
There is a certain level of horseshoe theory at play when it comes to disinformation where people, well, so this is to talk about conspiracy theories for a second.
There are certain characteristics and mechanisms by which conspiracy theories and conspiracy belief exists, and it's really worth understanding them.
So, if you don't mind, I'll just pop up my lecture podium for a second and explain.
Conspiracy belief.
There are five kind of rules.
Conspiracy belief is universal, consequential, social, and emotional.
Those are the four characteristics.
And then there's another rule that I'll get to in a second.
So universal, what does that mean?
Universal just means that there is not actually a demographic who are like More prone inherently to conspiracy theories, or less prone, or for that matter, immune.
Because a lot of the people who were going into researching conspiracy theories were liberals.
And liberals love to believe that, you know, they read only the honest reporting, and it's Trump who spreads the misinformation.
So why are there all these conspiracy theories around?
Well, it must be the right wing.
And then they did some research and they were like, ah shit, it looks like actually everyone is prone to misinformation.
If it meets certain kind of criteria.
So, what is the why would misinformation appeal to you?
Well, that's the social and emotional part.
It's social.
So, like, if people around you who you respect and who you talk to and who you have exposure to believe things, you don't want to isolate yourself or alienate yourself from them.
So, you are more likely to just start believing them, honestly.
If everyone in the world said the sky was green, It's not impossible that you would as well.
Because, you know, even though it's observably untrue, you don't want to make yourself, like, cut off from people.
But you probably wouldn't say that because there isn't an emotional reason.
So emotional reasoning is really important to conspiracy theories.
Because basically, like, when you can feel that something is going on, you can feel that something is wrong, or you can feel Things aren't quite how you're being told, right?
Other theories as to explain what is actually going on really appeal to you.
It all has to do with, I think, a kind of human impulse to want to see the world as a more magical place than it really is.
A more meaningful place.
It can't just be all I can see.
There must be more.
Right?
And if you want to learn more about the world, you just can.
You find out it is a really interesting place, and there's all sorts of interesting mechanisms going on.
They're there to link around back to what we were just saying a second ago.
If you are curious about the shape of power in the world, and you can see that there are things that are wrong with the way the world is right now on the geopolitical stage, Pretty quickly, you'll find out that American imperialism exists, and America is this absolutely cancerous, destructive, apocalyptic force in the world, and always has been, and especially in the last 70 or so years.
Awful for the human race.
America and its consequences, etc.
Or maybe, America delenderest.
Or just good old-fashioned death to America.
But like, you know, you find out this kind of thing.
At least save a handful of Americans.
Throw in my little towel there.
Some of us are all right, right?
It's fine.
But, like, you know, you find out things like that.
You find out about the global structure of power in the world, and then it's like, cool, I've latched on to something that is real and true, and now I can actually, like, start to piece together the way the world actually works, right?
And that's why you get Within the cultic milieu, as Michael Bakun and other very good conspiracy researchers would call it, the disinformation sphere, people are aware of American imperialism, and then their conspiracy theories have to slot in to American imperialism.
And for some people, In the cultic milieu, America is a white supremacist project of settler colonialism that is trying to expand white supremacy and settler colonialism around the world and carry on with neoliberal capitalist hegemony.
And that means that it must be run by the worst fucking awful fascist people in the world and I'll try to prove that they are the bad guys behind the scenes.
Or for some people it's like well American imperialism is real so clearly America is run by the Jews behind the scenes or it's run by the metropolitan liberal elite or the globalists or the international bankers or whatever other coded language you want to use that basically just means the Jews.
And that's like, because American imperialism is so observably real, you find people are aware of this sort of middle step in their hierarchy of how the world works.
And on the lower levels, the issues that they care about will probably be entirely different.
And on the higher levels, who they think is behind the whole thing may be different, although you get a lot of leftist conspiracy theorists who are also anti-semites, as I've said.
But, you know, American imperialism, just because it is observable, winds up being acknowledged by all these people.
And that has to do with stigmatized knowledge and authorized knowledge.
Because it's so observable, and yet America hates to acknowledge that it is the center of an empire, It is this thing called stigmatized knowledge.
It's not necessarily unpublished or hidden away.
It's just that it's not promoted.
It would never be on the school curriculum.
They're not going in high school and just being like, kids, just so you know, you're growing up in a country that runs the world.
Everyone has to do as our country says or they will be invaded and occupied and brutally stigmatized until they do what we say and make all these weird like neoliberal market reforms that will tank their economy so that we can Save 99 cents on orange juice.
And we'll probably do a genocide along the way, just for fun.
That's never going to be like authorized knowledge, as it were, which means it is in the other category of stigmatized knowledge.
And so it's observably true to everyone, like America has this huge influence on geopolitics, but it's stigmatized knowledge.
It's like, as it were, the mainstream media doesn't want you to know kind of thing.
And so that's why it's really important.
And then in terms of what I was saying before about these rules of conspiracy belief, the fifth one is the one I like people to remember this sentence if you remember nothing else about conspiracy theories because it really works as a compass.
Conspiracy belief always reflects intergroup social conflict.
So, this is where we can really distinguish, like, real conspiracy theories from, like, joke conspiracy theories and fake conspiracy theories.
Because, like, if you want a quick litmus test for, like, a conspiracy theory that will catch on and spread and people will actually believe in, or one that is just kind of a meme, Does it reflect an intergroup social conflict?
So for anti-vaxxers, right, all the conspiracy theories about vaccines is like, they are vaccine hesitant.
They don't want themselves or their kids or whatever to have vaccines.
And they're told a story about why the government wants them to have a vaccine.
And then they believe that story because it reflects a conflict between them and people who want them to take the vaccine.
Or They hear in that story details about, like, it's the same people who manufacture BLM and woke culture who want you to have the vaccine.
And they feel an intergroup social conflict between themselves and people who get vaccines and support BLM and are woke and vote for the Democrats, etc.
And so there's your intergroup social conflict.
On the other hand, like, The conspiracy theory, I'm doing air quotes here, that Greenland doesn't exist, this is a meme that goes around, is never going to catch on because there's no intergroup social conflict that would drive people to emotionally resonate with the narrative that Greenland doesn't exist.
No one's actually going to be like, Yeah, it feels real to me that Greenland doesn't exist and the mainstream media wants you to believe in Greenland for whatever reason.
Well, my personal favorite fake conspiracy theory or anti-conspiracy theory is JFK's head just kind of did that.
Because it's like the opposite of motivated reasoning, right?
Like, conspiracy theorists want to prove a thing they already believe to be true, so they fill in all these details.
And so I'm going, it's like the opposite of motivated reasoning, because it's like, I'm refusing motivation.
It just did that.
There's no explanation.
Yeah, I was a JFK nut for a number of years, so I don't eat down that rabbit hole, let's just put it that way.
Most people who are in anti-fascist or cult and conspiracy research tend to have had a phase Being at least on the verge of believing a lot of conspiracy theories, actually.
No, I saw the Oliver Stone movie at just the right moment in my life.
Exactly.
100%.
I got better, don't worry.
We got better.
Well, there's your problem today.
Recent bonus episode about the JFK assassination.
My favorite conspiracy theory is that it was just a really good barbecue that he had that day.
Because apparently H.W.
Bush, they had like a connection to like some really good people.
Oh god.
And like, you know, JFK had eaten barbecue that morning.
There's something in that story.
That's really fun.
That's really fun.
Anyway, sorry to get us off track there.
No, it's good.
It's fun.
Actually, this is something I will touch on since we were just talking about kind of maybe believing in conspiracy theories.
Something I mentioned in my documentary is conspiracy belief doesn't tend to work.
Either you are a conspiracy theorist for sure, or you're a sane, normal person.
People really like to think that's how it works, but I liken it to believing in ghosts in the video.
It's like that.
Most people who watch a ghost show are going like, ah, that's fake.
I can't believe people actually believe that.
They're watching a chair move across the room or whatever, and they're like, that's not how ghosts really work.
They believe in something.
But the fun for them is watching something that they analyze critically, and the disbelief is actually as important as the belief.
And it's a relatively very small minority of the total audience who are sitting there like, you know, holy shit, you know, everything I'm seeing here is definitely really ghosts.
I think it was a relatively small amount of the audience actually sitting there thinking, wow, Donald Trump's such a great businessman.
Probably the rest of the audience were watching for other reasons.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's and then it's the very, very small number of people then who would buy Alex Jones's like brain force plus DNA force, turmeric 95, whatever, like all of his all of his stuff is bought by a very, very, very small fraction of his audience who are kind of the same people who would believe absolutely everything he tells them.
And that's why he's able to sell like things like he says, like, iodine shields and um um male vitality pills and whatever and this is all because they will buy it because he's telling them that the world is full of forces that are taking away their like their you know their vitality and then stealing away their natural power basically and only he can save them
and he only needs for a very small number of people who are entirely unhinged like entirely detached from reality and live entirely in his world to um in order to make millions and millions of dollars uh and in the same way caleb maupin only needs a very very very small fraction of people to entirely buy into his bullshit in order for him to walk around like larping as a revolutionary communist actually organizing and doing nothing to help the working class
Which is pretty much the end game of his grift, is he wants to just, like, think of himself as a modern day Lenin while doing absolutely fuck all to help anybody.
Yeah, not to divert us back onto pettier territory than some of the interesting stuff you were just talking about, but it is astounding the hubris he displays where he all but openly compares himself, you know, lists himself in the same breath as people like Huey Newton and Martin Luther King and so on and so forth.
Lenin and Mao, he says.
Well, yeah, like you said, Martin Luther King, he's had video intros on a lot of his videos that show Martin Luther King speaking and then show him speaking right next to each other.
But yeah, there is a clip I showed in the video where he says, if Lenin were alive today, he would write a book about BreadTube.
If Mao were alive today, he would write a book about BreadTube.
And it's like, no, they fucking wouldn't, dude.
At absolute most, if Lenin were alive today, I could believe him writing a blog post about how dogshit the online left is.
I can't imagine him writing a book about how BreadTube is funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Steve Hassan is using deprogramming to brainwash people into blah blah blah blah blah.
That's not real.
That's awfully, awfully not real.
It's really just the same thing that people do on YouTube when they do response videos to people they're having drama with, isn't it?
Except that because his aesthetic is of a guy in a suit who writes books, he has to do it in book form.
His book is just a very long post.
Yeah.
And it follows all the logic of it in how it's written and the quality and the citations, of which there are basically none.
Yeah, it's wild.
So to apply that central rule I was talking about, that fifth rule, conspiracy theories reflect intergroup social conflict.
What's going on with RedTube?
Basically, RedTube, again, if people don't know at all, Kind of referred to like the overlapping fandoms of Lindsay Ellis, ContraPoints, Hbomberguy, Philosophy Tube, I guess like Jenny Nicholson, Sean Danielson kind of folks.
And then like more and more people started joining in and it became this like idea in a lot of the minds of a lot of the fandom of like There are all these leftist content creators now.
They are going to start this big wave of left populism and it's going to really change things.
But unfortunately, that was interfacing with the fact that most people are awfully class unconscious and waste their time on things like Electoral politics.
And so it's entirely subsumed with like, who should we vote for?
And why, you know, like endless debates over like, should you vote for Biden or Trump?
And it's like, this is a very easy question.
Biden and then move on with your life.
Like, not the fascist.
And then go and like, spend the rest of the day at your local mutual aid org.
Like, You cast your vote, and then that should be, like, that much of your life.
Just the tiniest, tiniest fraction.
This takes no figuring out, right?
And then go and actually help people with, like, the organized, you know, organized mutual aid and direct action and organizing the working class and, you know, unionizing and shit like this.
If we were engaging with, like, Um, the actual left politics of practice and how to actually make a change in the world.
You know, we would be focusing on, on yeah, like mutual aid, direct action, real based shit that's going on.
And so there emerges this intergroup social conflict where like BreadTube is nominally going to do all this amazing shit.
And the things that their fans say about them is that they're going to do all this amazing shit.
They're revolutionaries and they're going to make communism happen.
But actually, it's just, you know, some people like explaining really basic concepts about like, why are the cops bad, you know, in their bedroom in silly costumes?
And then at the same time, also like, you know, other content creators like the streamers having debates about like, should you vote for Biden or should you vote for Trump?
Or was this mass shooter justified or fucking awful shit like this?
Do trans people deserve rights?
And it's like just a colossal waste of time.
And so you get a lot of people who are a little bit more educated on what communists actually believe in and how to make the world actually a better place.
Like a little bit more.
Very, very frustrated by all of this going on.
But they're not educated enough to actually recognize an authentic communist.
And then you have all of your conspiracy leftists, all of your pseudo-communists just waiting to swallow them up, you know, into their alternate reality.
And this also intersects with a particular Set of biases that BreadTube had or has, depending on, you know, the leftist content creation sphere has, which is that it tends to be very white.
Besides the number of trans people, it tends to otherwise just be, like, very cis, hetero, white, abled, patriarchal, like, you know, all of the kind of normative biases, as it were, except that there are a lot of trans people because we spend a lot of time online.
And And so all of these kind of marginalized politics, again like except for maybe trans politics, really don't get talked about in the same way that a project of organized, willful, revolutionary communists would actually put their focus on.
If it was actually this project of all of that, of everything that RedTube fans were wishing for and would wish for it to be, then people would be spending a lot more time talking about, as Fanon put it, the wretched of the earth.
And there would be a lot more understanding of geopolitics and all this stuff.
But unfortunately, you've got a bunch of people who are all within the imperial core who are subject to a lot of biases and just aren't aware of the things that they aren't aware of.
And I don't just mean that tautologically.
I mean, they don't even know that they don't know anything in a lot of cases.
And so either they're not talking about them or they talk about them in short and incredibly destructive and misinformed ways.
Like, there's a whole debacle of, like, debate streamers trying to talk about Black nationalism because they know Shit about dick about black nationalism.
They end up calling them all like ethnostatist fascists.
And it's like, you are calling the Black Panthers ethnostatist fascists right now.
You are so wide of the mark, my guy.
So, again, I'm just trying to explain the frustrations that come out about the leftist content creation sphere.
And then Caleb Maupin writes this bread tube serves imperialism.
So there's your intergroup social conflict, and then there's your conspiracy theory set to explain why it's true.
Yeah, although from his point of view, that's not the conflict though, is it?
From his point of view, what he is is a fascist attacking liberalism, because that's the aim of the book, really.
It's from a conservative reactionary, if not outright fascist position, and I do think he is a fascist, that's attacking a I suppose from his point of view, a building liberal or left liberal movement.
I think that's the antagonism from where he's coming from.
Well, yeah, his explanation in the book is basically that, like, is basically... Oh, God.
Okay, so we're gonna get into LaRouche.
So, Lyndon LaRouche was also a pseudo-communist, anti-Semite cult leader who spread a lot of conspiracy theories.
My guy said that Angela Davis was an undercover CIA agent, and it's like, she went to jail.
Like, if she was an undercover CIA agent, why would she go to jail, dude?
Shit like this, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And through a series of fallings out with the Communist Party USA, he ended up projecting all of his personal grievances into conspiracy theories, as happens so often with conspiracy theorists.
It's like, they have personal grievances.
Those personal grievances happen to align with intergroup social conflict, and therefore there is an audience Who will listen to you talk about your insane personal grievances as if they are the real explanation of what's really going on here.
And so LaRouche was this counter to the Communist Party USA figure who had this conspiracy cult around him where he claimed that they were all funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, that the Congress for Cultural Freedom had funded the The Frankfurt School and promoted cultural Marxism, which is actually where we literally get the term in English, cultural Marxism.
Kultobolshevismus was what the Nazis said, that propaganda term, but the English version of the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory literally comes from Lyndon LaRouche.
And then Morpin is just a follower of LaRouche.
He has close ties to a bunch of people who consider themselves in the LaRouche movement.
He's like a guy called Daniel Burke, who's running for Senate, who's like, I think his Twitter name still today might say at the end of it, exonerate LaRouche.
You know, shit like this.
And Morpin says a lot of the same shit that LaRouche said.
So to tie it back to earlier, that thing about the royal family.
LaRouche said that the CPUSA and other connected communists were funded by the British Royal Family.
That's why the Grey Zone want to say the Royal Family specifically, rather than the actual literal truth that it was George Soros' money that helped to fund the research that went into Abigail Thorne's video.
Although they also do spend a lot of time attacking George Soros because, as I have said, they are also anti-Semites.
That's it, isn't it?
Because, you know, it has all this surface aesthetics that looks like good leftist history, you know, or alternative history.
You know, if you've grown up from a wee slightly leftist Ben reading Chomsky, you know, and, you know, you broke your teeth on manufacturing consent and John Pilger and all this stuff, very much as I did, you know, as a young man.
Then it can make a lot of sense to you.
You're reading this stuff about the CIA funding things like the animated animal farm, etc.
as an anti-communist propaganda.
Yeah, that's all true.
And if you get it served to you in a way that is plausible, it looks like good leftist sort of counter-history or alternate history, which of course sometimes from some people it is.
I mean, a lot of this is true.
But when you get beneath that with Morpin, Into the actual structure of the argument, what you've got is a tiny number of shadowy elites, whom I identify as globalists and international bankers, via their nefarious arms of the state that they control, almost like a deep state, you could even say, funding liberalism.
So you end up with a politics that's the exact same shape as what you've got on the right now, which is this wave of stuff about how And if you're Nick Fuentes, then you're willing to say outright that you think it's the Jews, and otherwise you use coded language.
who wants to reset the world.
It's just the same shape.
And if you're Nick Fuentes, then you're willing to say outright that you think it's the Jews, and otherwise you use coded language.
Yeah, well, reset is actually important, because again, speaking of that kind of horseshoe theory of the cultic milieu.
The conspiracy left talk about the Great Reset as well.
The Great Reset is a popular right-wing conspiracy theory.
It's also popular among the conspiracy left because they just fall into making the same claims from a marginally different... They'll say the same things and then say, but I want communism.
How far are we away from the fascists who already are starting to incorporate anti-capitalist talking points to reach a broader base of people who are dissatisfied with capitalism?
They'll pick up on what you're doing.
They'll pick up on this thing that there is some popularity to anti-capitalist ideas, and they'll just use this same shit to promote even more fascist shit.
I was going to say, to sum up the kind of thing you were saying before, what Maupin's perspective is or what he's trying to push, it's basically like the Congress for Cultural Freedom funded academics who were not real revolutionary communists.
And they're doing the same thing now by propping up, you know, secretly propping up bread tubers and artificially inflating their popularity or whatever.
And, you know, it's untrue and obviously untrue for a ton of reasons.
One thing, just like people like ContraPoints did not overnight make like get a million subscribers.
She was actually making content for years and like deleted a ton of her old videos because she transitioned and like so you might if you've only just heard of her and you are a lazy fucking hack like Caleb Maupin look at her channel and be like no videos before this time and she has this many followers now clearly she exploded overnight and this is artificial growth inflated by the congress of cultural freedom and no No, that's not what's going on at all.
You've got a bunch of people who, like, worked very hard to explain the things that they wanted to explain and build an audience slowly over a long time.
You know, I've been doing YouTube for, like, five years.
I have, like, 100,000 subscribers now.
It is a well-known feature of fascist state to have the complete inability to Google shit.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Well, I was going to say, the way you've just described it, it sounds like it works very much the way... What's the term that they use?
Oh, rapid onset gender dysphoria.
Because that is a load of people talking to each other on Mumsnet who are suddenly like, what?
Where's all this coming from?
Whereas, of course, what they're seeing is the end result of a long process.
Something that's actually just appeared out of nowhere.
You actually talk to these people's daughters and they're like, yeah, I was wearing thigh highs in secret and trying on dresses and doing makeup.
And I don't know what other crucial egg moments, like, you know, just a million little things for years and years and years and years and years.
And even my mom saw all of that stuff and was like, you know, but as you say, you see the end result.
You see the end result happening now.
You're like, Oh shit, this is a sudden, miraculous change.
So somebody must have done it to us.
Somebody must have caused it somehow.
Well, the thing about, like, the artificially inflating the, you know, channel growths and whatever is very funny to me.
Because, like, as I've already said, as I've already said, everyone's on the left, people's channels don't really grow that fast.
Social media platforms that we have right now have a terrific far right bias.
But, like, I could probably get into a little bit more later about like the response that there's been since I put the video out from the conspiracy left.
But one thing that was very funny was that I started calling them conspiracy theorists.
They started denying that they were conspiracy theorists.
And then one of the first things I saw as a response to the video One of the people I talk about in the video being asked, why does Sophie from Mars have nearly 100,000 subscribers on YouTube?
And then responding, because someone with a lot of money wants her to, would be my guess.
And it's like, no, I've worked for like five years.
I was on benefits when I started this channel.
I was working unpaid and then underpaid and below minimum wage for at least the first two years of this.
It's just not, like, it's not a mystery, you know?
It's not at all.
And also, like, if their narrative were true at all, then after releasing the video, I would have easily gained another, you know, 200,000 more subscribers or whatever, and I haven't, you know?
I'm still at, like, you know, 110k now, like, because I took a long break from releasing stuff because I was, um, I've had some shit going on in my life.
It's all very mundane and very normal.
And to them, like I said before, they want to believe there's more going on in the world.
The world is a much more interesting place than all that.
And also, as if 100,000 subscribers is an achievement beyond the ken of mortal people, right?
There are people who literally race to get to a million subscribers with complete bullshit YouTube channels.
Not to be uncouth on a smaller podcast right now, but to all the conspiracy leftists, sorry you've got no clout, bro.
100,000 is not that impressive.
It's the smallest level of recognition that you get from YouTube.
Just because there is a plaque they'll give you doesn't mean that it's god-tier social media clout.
They are all just basically seething that they themselves do not have a bajillion subscribers.
Yeah, so you threatened just now to tell us more about the reaction to the video.
Please do, I'd love to hear that.
Oh yeah, sure.
It's been fascinating.
As I said before, these guys are fascists.
It's been one of the frustrating things in I don't know.
Even if your entire audience agree with what you've said, because you've laid it out very carefully and shown them why it's true, there's something about seeing these other guys and all of their pals, like they're, you know, two dozen Twitter accounts or whatever, repeating over and over again, like, they're not fascists.
When you've got dudes who are saying, like, sex should be, like, tightly controlled and they think MAGA is based and shit like this.
And you're just like, well, these guys are obviously fascists.
And in very much the same way, like, they kept on insisting they were not conspiracy theorists.
But the funniest thing happened, like, one of them tried to make a joke about my eyebrows, which I generally tend to trim kind of short and have like the baby brows fashion that people are aware of.
Someone tried to make this joke about my eyebrows.
Because they were all desperately trying to make there be anything that could stick that they could make fun of me with, one of them posted a picture of me and posted a picture of a guy called Michael Aquino or something who is some
Intelligence community satanic temple guy or something and they made a joke that he was my dad because he has weird eyebrows like that was the joke it was a visual gag And tons of their audience believed it, like, because firstly, they didn't understand the joke they were trying to make, because it was a shitty joke.
And secondly, they're conspiracy theorists!
So while trying to claim that they were not conspiracy theorists, they started a conspiracy theory about me, that my dad is this Michael Aquino guy.
And it was like, what the fuck is happening?
And then at the same time, they also, like, the same account tried to make a joke about Abby Thorne's grandfather being Alistair Crowley, the magician and also, like, satanic temple.
I don't entirely remember Alistair Crowley's whole history.
You know, and Abby had also, like, never heard of Alistair Crowley the same way I've never heard of this, like, Michael Aquino guy.
And because they were trying to make jokes But, like, the jokes were not landing so hard.
And their entire audience are conspiracy theorists.
It just became a conspiracy theory about us.
I remember someone posting that... Someone posting, completely straight-faced, that they were like, all these people, all these bread tubers reject that they serve imperialism.
But then you look into their families, and you find out that they're all related to imperial wizards.
That was the word they used.
And it blew my mind.
Did they put three parentheses, Ren Imperial Wizards, is the question?
Then there was the CPI conference after my video came out.
And there was the bit where there was Caleb Moppen's bizarre keynote speech at his own conference.
And as you commented earlier, Jack, it was all very, yeah, just a culty vibe.
I remember, I said this before, we had to not say certain things publicly because we didn't want to say publicly that we thought it was a cult.
But I remember us Cutting a joke from the CPI Cringe Corner, where we were like, it really feels like Caleb Maupin has told them when to laugh.
He's rehearsed when exactly they should laugh and when they should clap at his jokes.
And when that document came out, it turned out that was literally exactly what was going on.
Because there's this moment where he goes like, There was this moment where he goes like, and I know that Abigail Thorne of Philosophy Tube and Bread Tube is funded by the Royal Family, and it's the biggest round of applause of the entire event.
And it was just like, he has engineered this moment.
It's so clear to see, but we couldn't say it publicly.
Yeah, so now, delightfully, I have a section of my haters, which is a great thing that I get to have.
Not just a fanbase, and not just an anti-fanbase, but I have different flavors of hater.
I have someone in my comments who's like, calling me a mentally ill man or whatever, and I'm like, okay, I need to figure out whether this person is a conspiracy theorist, or a debate bro fan, or a TERF, or a fascist, or, I repeat myself.
But like, they, yeah, so I've got all these conspiracy theorists who every now and then just pop up and say like, you know, your dad is an imperial wizard.
And I'm like, my dad was an IT consultant.
I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
It's very revealing that their go-to attack mode is to, A, talk about your family, and to try to associate you with, like, satanic figures.
Because it's just back into, you know, satanic bloodlines.
It's an immediate flex.
Where do we go?
Where do we go?
Satanic bloodlines.
Right into Alex Jones' antisemitic territory.
And also, I'm trans, so it's the ongoing satanic panic that we're in that we've never really exited from.
They're trying to just say that I'm... they should just call me a degenerate and be over it honestly.
I have more than once, I think, replied to someone spreading this kind of conspiracy bullshit and be like just say tranny it's simpler just like just fucking just call me a man and get out of my mentions already it's it's so there was a there was a guy um there was a guy who you might be aware of called has who um yeah oh yes we're we're your kind of people let's just put it that way
You may also be aware of him by the names The Kremlin, Gremlin, or AK4ft7.
One time he was in my replies, and he kept on going, trying to ratio me one single time.
He kept on coming back with all these posts that he thought were absolute bangers.
And every single time, he would get like three likes, and I would get like 200 likes.
And all I was doing was just being like, Bro, this is weak.
This is just weak.
And he was doing this weird dance where he thought that he I guess he knew that if he did call me a man or say something explicitly transphobic, then he would get I would I would immediately just go like, hey, everyone, please report this tweet and his account will get banned.
So he was doing this weird thing where he was just being like, oh, should I say it?
You can't handle the truth.
I could say it, but you wouldn't be able to handle it.
And I was just like, What?
You're gonna call me a man?
You think this is the first time I've had a dude who doesn't shower call me a man in my mentions?
This would be entirely mediocre, unsurprising, and disappointing.
Just like everything else about you, my guy.
He really thought he was being very clever.
But I should probably state that has is no longer associated with Caleb Maupin, because as I predicted right after the video came out, there has been a schism.
I knew that these people would not be able to hold their project together for very long, and I knew that the general flavor of the schism would be that Maupin, like On one side, you have Morpin, Peter Coffin, the Space Commune boys, some other folks like this who are sticking with the LaRouche bullshit.
And then on the other side, you would have the more openly fascist side of the conspiracy left, who would basically, at some point, they would find Morpin and Peter Coffin, et cetera, intolerably soy.
They would just be like, these guys are just...
So, that was fun to watch.
Even if, like, it's just like, you know, several of the worst person you know all in a slap fight.
And it's like, no one wins here except me.
I get to enjoy watching you all hurt each other.
**JASON LENGSTORF** It's the let them fight GIF, basically.
**SAM LENGSTORF** It's been fun to watch them dissolve.
I have something that's supposed to delete my tweets after a certain period.
And so I'm really annoyed that it did that on the thread where I made my predictions about the conspiracy left, because my point has always been that conspiracy leftism is very dangerous.
But I don't believe these specific guys, as we said before, like Caleb Moffat, very obscure, like not obscure enough, but very obscure.
Like these specific guys are not too dangerous because they fundamentally like they're bad at their jobs.
They can't really hold an audience.
They're not very charismatic.
But if the right person comes along who is doing conspiracy leftism, it could be really bad.
It could be really, really bad in terms of linking up the QAnon world with anti-capitalist critiques.
That could honestly get going a massive Modern day nationalist socialist movement.
That is scary to me.
But I made this thread predicting, I was like, no, it's not gonna be these specific guys because they are just, like, frankly, a bunch of losers.
And very soon, they will all stab each other in the back and part ways.
And I was so annoyed that that thread got deleted because I had it dead to rights of exactly what would happen.
Like, All of the schisms, exactly how it would break down.
But that's part of the reaction to the video.
I don't want to claim that the video had that effect on them in any way, because I did just say this is the inevitable consequence of a bunch of untrustworthy liars trying to be in a marriage of convenience.
It's not going to last.
Yeah, no.
But what you were saying there, it's very convergent with what we've been saying on this show about some of the people we cover.
I mean, we've always said the chances of Mike Enoch and co.
leading the National Justice Party to a triumphant takeover of the American government.
Or even like something on January the 6th, you know, the chance of that specific coup attempt actually being successful for, you know, even the best case scenario, Trump was gonna hold the Capitol for a couple of days, you know, even if the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers had been incredibly well organized and they'd all gone off like a dream, you know.
Yeah, Mike Enoch is not gonna be the president, but the fact that these movements are out there and specifically, one of the things we talked about specifically with the NJP was the way that they are using left rhetoric to try to hoover up that diaspora of people who've gone to the left.
But disaffected after, for instance, Bernie lost the nomination in 2016.
Well yeah, this is why I find it so dangerous and irresponsible that we have people who call themselves leftists.
Not only these conspiracy theorists, but also people in the In the left content creation sphere who will platform fascists and will have these public debates with fascists and then have those fascists' audiences overlapping with their audiences.
Because then you have a bunch of fascists who my friend DJ Mule, who I host a show called Red Planet with every week on Sunday, 8 p.m.
to 11 p.m.
GMT, redplanet.team, check it out.
He made a very good point.
He described this, I think, perfectly well.
In Gamergate, you had all these disaffected young men who were online, and they were really angry.
And people came along and told them, everything you're angry about, it's women's fault.
It's because of women.
And then, then there was this, like, LeftTube emergence.
And a lot of that focus was, like, looking at the anti-feminists and critiquing them and Hbomberguy's, like, measured responses and whatever, this kind of content.
And people loved that.
And then a lot of people who saw the popularity of that, who wanted to get in on that kind of space, But we're still ultimately the same kind of disaffected angry men with no real understanding of how politics works.
Got into that space instead of watching each other.
And that's where you get this debate bro scene.
And what they're now telling each other is, everything you're angry about, that's capitalism's fault.
But the reason we can't overthrow capitalism?
It's because of women.
And I'll point you to the specific women and you should go harass them.
It's just like Gamergate again, but with a mildly left flavor.
It's Sockdem flavored Gamergate is what the debate scene is.
It's just so appallingly dangerous to have.
There are people, you know, from like, from the Daily Shower, not just like from the audience, but like from the pod itself who've been in like the servers of people like Vorsch and not been banned, not been taken out, you know, because they were invited for debates and then they just hung around there just because they were invited for debates and then they just hung around there just like still having free access And it's like, when are you going to take seriously?
Eric Stryker has debated Destiny like several times.
Exactly.
I mean, you know.
Is Eric Stryker?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Nobody listening to this podcast needs me to explain again who Eric Stryker is.
You're like, for the hundredth time, Eric Stryker is...
But like, yeah, it's really grim, and I just think it's so irresponsible, because like, the way I would describe it, and this is something I've written in something that I will eventually publish, it's something I've been working on for a while, but like, is, I don't believe that leftism should be platformed for debate alongside liberalism, conservatism, fascism, any more than like, climate science should be platformed in a debate alongside flat-eartherism.
Like, actual communist beliefs?
Like, there is a diaspora of communist belief, right?
I'm so open to having friendly, well-meaning, well-intentioned ideological debates between anarchists, you know, different flavors of anarchists, you know, anarcho-syndicalists, and maybe, like, you know, anarcho-primitivist anti-civ people, or between anarchists and Marxist-Leninists, or between Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyites, or Maoists, or whatever, you know, like, all the huge diaspora of socialist belief.
But having debates between someone who calls himself an anarchist, but is actually just a very milquetoast, thin gray gruel sock dem of absolutely no flavor or intrigue whatsoever.
And an open white nationalist is just so horrifically irresponsible because like these people don't have the materialism.
They don't have the class analysis or the consciousness to actually meaningfully draw anyone towards like actual communist beliefs.
And it's all just like it's just all, you know, I mean, the whole the whole online debate format is just a dick measuring contest anyway.
But like, even if it were the kind of collegiate debate on that to explore issues, it's like what issues can you explore with a fascist?
Should trans people be put to death or should they not?
Wow, what an interesting conversation.
And it's like, if you were debating within a socialist diaspora, you could have so much interesting conversation about so many different things.
You know, one thing, this is off the top of my head, the nature of revolution.
vanguardists believe that we need some kind of centralized organized hub of a party who are probably probably have some kind of electoral presence but mostly they work as a centralized um hub of organizing and other activist groups branch out from there and kind of report back to them right
whereas anarchists tend to believe in a spontaneous uprising which there is increasing evidence for in the in the information age and in the nature like the network like the the age of networked complexity that we live in now and the ways that you could engage in what mark fisher called like group consciousness raising like if if people through democratized mass media are given the the things they need to understand about what's wrong with the material conditions and then they want to engage in some kind of spontaneous uprising that's more power like more possible
now that it's ever been at any point in history thanks to the internet right and And just there, that was the top of my head, that's like, that is a super interesting conversation that two socialists of entirely different viewpoints could debate over.
And no part of that conversation is just saying, like, I think minorities should be put to death, or they shouldn't get to be considered people, or we should vote for Trump, or any of this shit, you know?
I have rambled again.
I have wildly gotten off the topic.
We agree.
I think I can safely say for Jack as well.
Agreed, 100%.
Yeah, no question.
The danger in discussing Caleb Maupin is that I end up discussing the intergroup social conflict that gives us Caleb Maupin.
Like, the reason that you have bread tubes as imperialism is how frustrating the online left is.
And so you wind up, I wind up anyway, ranting about how frustrating the online left is because if it weren't for that, we wouldn't have this.
In the same way that like, if it weren't for the CIA, backing a coup in Guatemala that resulted in the genocide of the indigenous Mayan people, you wouldn't have conspiracy theories that the CIA is going to do all sorts of other nasty shit if they weren't really there doing really awful shit all the time.
Yeah.
And I would argue another, I mean, the only reason really to talk about Caleb Maupin at all, apart from just the sheer joy of laughing at him, is to talk about the problems that he expresses because he's been sort of, you know, he's a morbid symptom.
He's a classic morbid symptom.
And I think, yeah, the other social conflict that he embodies is just the class struggle at this point in Capital's history.
We're at a point where Capital is in this severe, ongoing, possibly even terminal decline phase, or crisis phase, and it's generating a resurgence of...
Put it possibly a little simplistically, generating a resurgence of fascism.
And I think he's one aspect of that.
So that's really to get at those things, the resurgence of fascism and the resurgence of socialism, but with the problems that that carries with it in our moment.
Those are really the structural things that it's worthwhile using him as a way to get at.
Yeah.
And the way that he's going to save us from apoptocratic, cannibalistic, final phase capitalism is by writing about YouTubers he finds annoying.
That's right.
Via that, he's going to convince us all to get behind his very peculiar sort of semi-Stalin, semi-Roosevelt New Deal, very reactionary form of socialism.
I can't believe we got this far without mentioning FDR.
That is a good point.
It is the funniest thing.
It is the funniest fucking thing.
Yeah, so along with Putin and Assad and other people that Caleb sees as crucial to the development of communism in the world, Caleb also believes that FDR is a city builder.
He thinks that there are two kinds of people, city builders and vandals, which if that doesn't A fascist worldview to you, I don't know what does.
Right?
I mean, what could possibly be clearer?
I think the entire human race is divided into the sheep and the wolves, basically.
That's what it is.
And yeah, he loves FDR because of that.
And he thinks that the solution is that they need a government of action to fight for working families.
And it's like, that is not an imperialist view, my guy.
Like, saying the solution here is for there to be a better American government is like, what?
I just think that the Tsar should be nicer to the people of the Russian Empire.
That will do just fine.
That'll be the same thing as communism.
Yeah.
I really do hope that he comes out with BreadTube Serves Into Imperialism 2, because I've believed he is going to write that book for a long time, because the response to him writing the first one was probably the most attention he's ever had, because he was writing about social media influencers.
So everyone who is mentioned in the book, and a bunch of other people besides, have talked about the book.
You know, I've talked about the book.
It talks about my friends, and when you publicly slander my friends, it becomes me or you, and it's going to be you, motherfucker.
But I really think that he's going to write BreadTube Serves Imperialism 2.
And I really hope that when he does, he includes a tweet of mine that he took real umbrage to.
I remember him quote tweeting this and putting it on his timeline for all his followers to see.
And he just repeated what I had said.
He said some shit to me.
I don't care to remember what.
And I replied, eat shit and choke, burger boy.
And he quote tweeted it and said, eat shit and choke borger boy.
Delightful.
And I was just like, God, I hope that the words eat shit and choke borger boy go onto the printed page for the first time in human history because of the sequel book.
It's going to be so good.
To be mentioned in the historical treatises of a hundred years hence.
It was then that the great revolutionary leader Caleb Moffat was slandered by the synthetic left with the following words, eat shit and choke, booger boy.
Yeah, it's his defining moment, you know, like when the czar executed Lenin's brother.
It's what turned him into a... No, there is another way.
It's probably more comparable to when Ted Kaczynski went to his favorite nature spot and saw that they turned it into a highway.
God.
Oh, Caleb.
Oh, Caleb.
than anything else um god oh caleb oh caleb yeah so where where he finds himself now is um to get current uh deeply embarrassing uh after he's been out you know outed and ousted uh from the cpi by its members he as i said he's trying to start a new cpi he has positioned himself as the ideological leader and that's his official title and he um
and now he's like now he's just kind of trolling.
He's been in my mentions recently.
He's got a new Twitter account and he's been in my mentions recently sharing clips where he says stuff ironically about eating babies or some shit.
In his mind, he has been so disingenuously and out of context bullied by Breadtube that it's comparable for him to, like, ironically say like nasty bullshit and that people would like he thinks that this is the kind of bait that people would take and and you know i mean to be fair i'm talking about it now
but like only in the context that this is like really fucking sad like he's cottoned on to the fact that the most attention he's ever had is from being bullied by actual leftists and so he he just wants he's just trying to get himself bullied more so congratulations caleb i'm bullying you right now um you you look like if uh beaker from the muppets ate a chili that was much too spicy for him uh you
You look like a magician whose only trick is bringing out Death's Capital and then crying in front of a party full of 11 year olds.
Congratulations, Caleb, you got what you wanted.
Now you can whine on your stream about how mean I am.
Oh, I'm sure he will.
I mean, I don't remember, like, he found us at some point.
I think, I don't even, I never, like, talked to people in there, like, but he found, uh, I think I was just talking about possibly doing a Caleb Maupin episode, you know?
And, like, maybe he was, I guess he was name-searching, because, like, he's the kind of guy who would just constantly name-search, right?
He is maybe second only to Elon Musk as the worst chronic name-searcher in history.
Sure.
But he did, like, show up and he was like, oh, the anti-fascist podcast wants to say, has things to say about me.
And I'm like, well, I was putting you on the long list, but now you're on the short one, asshole.
So, you know, you may not know this, but, you know, the next step in my, like, process is, all right, you have a YouTube channel.
I have many terabytes of hard drive space.
I have now added you to the official list, asshole.
So now you can no longer delete your videos without me having a copy of it.
For some reason he does have a particular hatred of anti-fascist groups and anti-fascist researchers.
For some reason.
I remember they actually bragged at the CPI conference, the one that went mildly viral because there was them holding up the Russian flag and the American flag next to each other.
Someone was holding up a sign that had the Russian Z on it and shit like this.
It was just deeply cringe.
It's the one we talked about in the CPI cringe corner, actually.
I remember them bragging at that conference that their security had been really good and had kept out Austin Antifa and Austin Redguard.
And it was like, what a brag that Antifa was trying to cancel your event, you know?
Yeah.
Scouts, we're just marching for the system, man.
We're just the agents of the system, you know?
We just don't know it.
That's the whole thing, you know?
Combating the real people who are going to challenge the way the world works.
I had one brief interaction with him on Twitter.
I said something about, I think it was in response to something he said on Twitter about, you know, I will work with people who have different opinions than me about trans people, et cetera.
And I, you know, I did a tweet where I was like, no, well, okay, you go ahead, but I won't, you know, and proper socialists shouldn't, you know.
And he came back at me with like, oh, I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was something about, he just assumed that I was a devotee of Vaush.
Oh, of course!
He must have been getting a lot of fallout from that debate, but it was weird.
Because he's the good guys and you're the bad guys, so we're all the same people.
Yeah.
But what was interesting was that over the same week or so, I caught the attention of James Lindsay and Jesse Single, for some reason.
Not in a big way, but all three of them responded to me in exactly the same way, quote tweeting me with an attempt to mock me and so on, and sic their followers on me.
And I remember thinking, for the third time it happened, I thought, yeah, strong deja vu, but why not?
It's three very similar types, I think.
Three very normal men with coherent political ideologies, taking real issue with your politics in a reasonable way, engaging with you in the town square, in the marketplace of ideas.
Well, I feel like we're winding down, but that's been a great chat.
Thank you very much.
Daniel, is there anything else you want to ask?
Oh, no, I've thoroughly enjoyed this, and I definitely do want to recommend that people go check out Sophie's YouTube channel, various other projects.
I'm sure there'll be plenty of links in the show notes, including the Patreon, which I am actually a... I believe I'm a low-tier subscriber, but I am a subscriber.
Oh, thank you so much!
Yeah, absolutely.
Sophie's content, highly recommended, especially that Left Conspiracy Theorist video.
I'm still forgetting what it's actually called.
But if you Google that, you will find the video and it's one of the best, it's genuinely one of the best things I've ever seen on YouTube.
And if you just want to go to, if you just want to laugh at Caleb Maupin, there's plenty of Sophie material doing that as well, going through his books.
The cringe corner at this point in here, yeah, for sure.
Yeah, the cringe corner with Mildred Thought Slime is very fun.
Thank you so much.
It's been great to be on.
I'd be happy to come on to chat about anything else you think I could speak relatively coherently on in future.
Yeah, thank you.
Also, I am working on something soon that will be similar in scope and kind of size to the Conspiracy on the Left project about climate doomerism.
So if people kind of enjoyed Conspiracy on the Left and my style there, that should be hopefully another kind of good project.
Yeah, no, definitely looking forward to that.
Okay, that was episode 120, everybody.
you know where we are and what to do so go forth and do it that was i don't speak german Thanks for listening.
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If you want to contact me, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, Daniel is at Daniel E Harper, and the show's Twitter is at IDSGPod.
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