Part One: The Conspiracy to Begin All Conspiracies

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
M alright, alright, alright, alright, alright, alright, alright. Uh, you
know fissures, Sophie. Was that is that how you start
a podcast? I mean yeah, I mean technically, I mean
this podcast did it. That was because normally, if I'm
shouting a disease, it's gonna be like diphtheria or syphilis.

(00:21):
That I decided to throw a wild card in this time. Um,
although I could have given the topic today, it might
have been appropriate to just shout Hitler, I mean where
you were going, But then you didn't do it, and
now I'm confused. Well, Hitler did have a lot of
weird butt problems. So it's this is Behind the Bastards,
a podcast where we talk about the worst people in

(00:41):
all of history and the things behind them. In today's
episode is one of the latter. My guest today is
Langston Kerment from the Boys and from Insecure. Langston, how
are you doing today? Oh? I'm fantastic And what an intro?
What make the start? I love the way you start
your show? This is fantastic. We're professionals here, Langston, And
the way professionals open shows is by immediately before the

(01:05):
show starts shouting out the name of a disease, illness,
or just a totally shrieking um. Lankesons Lakes and has
a podcast. I do have a podcast. That's true. It's
it's about black people in our conspiracy theories. I rarely
yell anal Fishers, but I'm learning a lot today and
maybe that's something I'll incorporate. Linkston. One of my really

(01:27):
good friends, Cody del Rosario, he texts me, He's like,
You've got to listen to this podcast, and I'm like,
it's your show, and I'm like, yeah, that's kind of
on our network, and I will hell yeah, yeah, Well
Langston you you you just as you just said, you
do a show about conspiracy theories. Um, and today we're
talking about the conspiracy theory that kind of started all

(01:51):
modern conspiracy theories. We're going back to the source, the
the the origin point for like Q and on for
like the n w oh, the Illuminati conspiracies, all of
that ship, all that Bill Cooper's stuff starts with the
subject of today's episode. We are talking about the protocols
of the Elders of Zion. Yeah you heard anything about that? No,

(02:16):
But I just love a lot of fancy words strong together.
This is one of the most influential pieces of dangerous
conspiratorial nonsense ever created. It has gotten millions of people killed,
like like like a death told that that your average
dictator would struggle to or your average American president for

(02:36):
that manner, we struggled struggle to match like this is.
This thing has gotten so many real Jimmy Carter worth
of numbers. I got you. I love the Jimmy Carter's
your yard stick for a president. He gets a lot
of people kill. The greatest murderer of all time, I
would say, Jimmy Carter, history's greatest monster. Um. Yeah, you

(02:57):
can see in his eyes as he feverishly builds houses,
he's just desperately trying to weigh down his debt to humanity,
so boiling out of him. Uh So, as you're well aware,
as all of our listeners are well aware, we live
today in an age of conspiracies, real and theorized. I

(03:17):
think about half of the country, uh probably about half
of the world lives in a semi permanent state of
conspiratorial obsession. And a lot of these folks are right,
you know. Um, for example, there's a ton of black
people today who remember personally what the FBI co intel
pro like program did to the civil rights movement, the
black There's people all over the Arab world and in
Latin America who lost family members and lived in chains

(03:40):
for decades because of conspiracies cooked up or funded by
the CIA. A lot of people have been victims of
real conspiracies. So when I say we live in a
world of conspiracies, it's not all nonsense. Um, So I
would say the great plague of our modern world isn't
that a lot of people believe in conspiracies, because a
lot of people have a good reason to. The thing
that's slowly tearing our society apart, which is kind of

(04:00):
perfectly embodied by Q and On in the terminal case
of fascist brain worms that it spread the millions of
Americans is something different. It's called conspiracism. This term was
popularized by a scholar named Frank Mints in the nineteen eighties.
He defined conspiracism as belief in the primacy of conspiracies
and the unfolding of history. In other words, the idea

(04:20):
that conspiracies or a conspiracy is a moving the primary
moving factor in the history of a nation of the world.
That's conspiracism. It's demonstrably false because the vast majority of
ship that happens happens pretty much out in the open. Right.
There's all these different like like like with the with
the case of like kind of white supremacy in the
United States, there's a bunch of FBI conspiracies and stuff

(04:41):
you can point to, But the history of white supremacy
is mostly pretty open, like most of it's not really
all that hidden. It's just like the way things fucking
work and stuff. Um, But so you've got these real conspiracies.
Conspiracism is believing that everything that happens is tied to
a conspiracy in some way, as opposed to this then
being kind fragments of the reality that we live in.

(05:02):
As Frank Mintz wrote, conspiracism serves the needs of diverse
political and social groups in America and elsewhere. It identifies elites,
blames them for economic and social catastrophes, and assumes that
things will be better once popular action can remove them
from positions of power. And I think that gets to
the key difference between believing in conspiracies and conspiracism. If
you understand like that the FBI and the CIA carry

(05:24):
it out and still engage in a variety of conspiracies
to funk up a bunch of things. You probably don't
believe that just getting rid of one of those organizations
will solve all of the world's problems. Like you'd be
rad to get rid of the CIA and the FBI,
But it wouldn't stop Turkey from ethnically cleansing the Kurds,
or a year by jan by ethnically from ethnically cleansing Armenians.
It wouldn't fix climate change overnight. It wouldn't stop our

(05:45):
world from accelerating into an uninhabitable mess. Conspiracists believe it, like, yeah,
if you get this conspiracy out of the way, Like
that's the Q and on thing, right, if we can
get rid of this cabal of evil child eating pedophiles
to solve all of the world's problems, everything will be fair.
We just have to solve this one. It's kind of
an optimistic worldview when you really think about it, conspiracism

(06:05):
because it believes that there's a magic bullet that can
fix everything. So yeah, scholar, and you like, it's it's
clear why conspiracism is particularly um attractive today. Because all
of our problem we have so many problems, and they're
all so complex, and they all like have tendrils not
just into these different government organizations and different like cabals

(06:26):
and whatnot, but they have all these tendrils into like
just the way we live our lives. Right, it'd be
nice if there was like one group of small one
small group of evil men making climate change happen, But
it's largely tied to the fact that we all kind
of live the life that we live and we have
all these systems that ensure that we're going to continue
pumping carbon into the atmosphere and that's hard to fix.
Like dope, if it was just like those some three

(06:48):
dudes and you were just like, oh, you're fucking something
all right, by yeah, yes, I And I maintained that
it is three dudes, mostly so that I don't have
to work on me, but that yeah, that's the personal work.
But I'm ay, there's there's two, like there's the there's
that like oh seven companies responsible for like the carbon emissions.
Like that's true, but they're doing it because of the

(07:10):
way we all because for example, we all need to
drive a car because we for years like allowed fossil
fuel companies to destroy any chance at functional public transport
in a large chunk of the world, or like, um,
you know, yeah, yeah, like you can tie a lot
of emissions to Amazon, but Amazon is emitting because we
all want our second day delivery and ship like there's

(07:32):
it's it's all more complicated than just like Jeff Bezos
bad he is, but a lot of a bunch of
fruit leather the other day from Amazon. And I didn't
have to do that. I didn't need that product. You
wanted the fruit leather, and so you really wanted that
fruit ye Did I need a hundred pieces of fruit leather?

(07:54):
Absolutely not. That's on me, Jeff. We all we all
have our fruit leather in this discussion, you know, um
yeah so. Scholars Seymour lip Set and Earl rob wrote
that the typical conspiracy theory is international in scope, extends
both in space and time, dates back in history, and
is destined to endure forever. And that's kind of what

(08:15):
separates an actual conspiracy. You know, you can look at
real conspiracy like, okay, well, at this date, the c
i A launched a plan to overthrow the democratically elected
president of Guatemala and backed death squads and stuff, and
like there's a beginning and an end and a scope,
a limited scope to the conspiracy. A conspiracy theory, there's
no limit. It goes on forever, It goes back in

(08:35):
time forever, and it will never it will endure forever.
Alex Jones, for example, believes in a globalist conspiracy that
stretches literally back into prehistory. A small group of a
few thousand insiders, depending on what day he's talking about it,
have been working for a linear to enslave in the
human race. Destroying these globalists will solve every problem that
humans have. But an Alex's estimation, their precise member roster

(08:58):
is always changing and their plans are always a out
ten years away from completion. So like, no matter what
you do, it's always there. It's always if you could
just solve the problem, everything would be better, but you
never do. That's a fucking conspiracy theory. And in the
modern sense of the word. Key believers on the other hand,
and to tie every problem of their lives and nationwide
to this cabal that's fighting Donald Trump and magical combat

(09:19):
and yeah, like it it links up with all these
different ship We've talked about this a lot on the show.
Historian Daniel Pipes laid out a short list of characteristics
that virtually all conspiracy theories have in common. Power is
the goal, benefit indicates control, Conspiracies drive history, nothing is
accidental or foolish, and appearances deceived. Right. One of the
big like key cat like tenants of Q and on

(09:42):
is that there are no coincidences um. And part of
this is just because like man, fucking wild ship happens
in the world. You know, sometimes the Archduke of Austria
Hungary is trying to get a sandwich or is what
is like driving down the street and a guy at
a sandwich shop shoots him and then twenty million people die,
and that's just the way the fucking world goes. But conspiracy, no,
it's got to be you know, this guy was a

(10:03):
part of like he was a part of an organization,
but it was like just a bunch of poor serbians.
But they've got to imagine, no, it was part of this.
There's people pulling the strings, the rothschilds needed it to happen,
and like those babies in that pizza shop, yeah there's yeah, yeah,
it wasn't just people talking about cheese, pizza. It's gotta
be yeah. Nazism, as at its heart, was a conspiracist theology.

(10:27):
All of Germany's problems could be laid at the feet
of international Jewry, who are responsible not just for German
defeat in World War One, but for the overthrow of
the Czars and the establishment of the USSR. When the
war turned against the Nazis, Hitler and his high command
diverted crucial war resources towards fueling the extermination camps in
the East, because eliminating the Jews was for them a
military priority. Not all conspiracist beliefs center around the idea

(10:51):
of an international Jewish conspiracy, but conspiracism itself has its
origins intricately tied to anti Semitism, and in the most
successful conspiracy theory ever made in human history, the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion. The concept of grand conspiracies
is not particularly old, as these things go conspiracy theories.
Grand conspiracy theories go back about nine hundred years and

(11:12):
have only really become operational in the last two hundred years.
The inciting incident for the birth of all modern grand
conspiracy theories is the French Revolution. This makes sense when
you really think about it. One of the world's great powers,
the most powerful military force in the world at the time,
the most established monarchy in the world, is overthrown seemingly

(11:32):
overnight and replaced with a radical left wing government. Blood
letting and chaos ensues. Many people felt the changes that
swept France couldn't possibly have been the result of long
simmering unrest in kingly incompetence. It couldn't be the king
was dumb, he fucked up. People took their chance and
they got lucky, and things just worked out and they
overthrew the government. It couldn't be that. It has to
be some some cabal was plotting this, And unfortunately for

(11:56):
just a whole lot of people, the birth of modern
conspiracy theories happened to very neatly coincide with something else,
the birth of modern anti semitism. So these two things
are really happening right at the same time. When I
talk about modern anti semitism, not just talking about like
it's it's what is the difference between racism and anti semitism.
Anti Semitism is a type of racism, but not all people,

(12:18):
not all different groups of people have the same thing
that that Jewish people go through with anti Semitism, which
is anti Semitism isn't just bigotry against Jewish people, it's
belief that they control the entire world. Right, That's not
a thing that is universal in racism. It's a thing
that it exists beyond that, but like that's a specific thing. Yeah,
with Black people, they're never worried we're in charge. They're

(12:40):
pretty confident we are not. I think they're a little
worried Lebron might be in charge, but everybody else they're
like pretty certain we ain't got ship. Whereas Jewish people,
they're real worried about being Lebron is in charge. And
I hope so, I mean, god, that would be comforting, um,
because he's good, big strong arms, that beautiful. It would

(13:04):
just be nice to know that the person in charge
of the world had at least a talent. Right, Well,
you've got one skill, maybe he has other skill. This
will be fun. Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's not going
to bomb anybody. I've so comforted by that that future

(13:24):
for us, Yeah, just just Lebron James. The only bombs
he drops are basketballs. That would be nice. Did you
just try to do a sports reference? I mean I did,
I did my best. Really painful for me. I know,
I'm sorry. I mean I'm brought of you for knowing

(13:45):
Lebron's last name. Yes, yeah, I mean I do live
in the world and he does run it. So it's
one of the things that's hard to miss. Yeah. Again,
anti Semitism like and kind of the modern sense of
the word. And we talk academically a lot of times
to day if you're just if you're racist again Jewish people,

(14:05):
that's anti semitism, and it is. But when we talk
about it academically, we're talking about not just racism, but
the theory that the Jews control everything, right, like that
that conspiratorial belief that doesn't go back forever. Um. There's Again,
racism against Jewish people has a long history. You can
find Romans like Cicero talking about Jewish gold and Roman
poets like Juvenal decrying Jews is drunken and misbehaved. But

(14:28):
the bigotry on display by these guys, these Romans is
the same kind of bigotry they had about everyone who
wasn't Roman, right, Like, you can find them saying the
same ship about Carthagenians and stuff. The ancient Romans burnt
down Jerusalem, but they didn't do it because they believe
there was a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. That
were angry that Jewish people didn't worship the emperor, and
we're you know it was it was. It was imperial ship.

(14:48):
It wasn't like a belief in some sort of conspiracy.
They burned it down and they said, this isn't personal, fellas,
this is this is what we do. We're the Roman Empire.
We burned down a lot of cities and that's what
we're gonna last a thousand years. Please don't think this
is about your religious beliefs. This has nothing to do

(15:08):
with that. I mean a little bit, but yeah, we
don't think you're pulling the strings. We're pulling the strings
were the Roman Empire. Yeah, early Christians spent a lot
of time vilifying Jewish thinkers, and this is kind of
where the roots of anti Semitism go back. This was
due partly to the fact that in the early days
of Christianity, most people who and most people weren't Christians

(15:30):
just saw it as like a kind of Judaism, right, Like, oh,
you've got Christian Jews are kind of the same thing,
Like they like Christian and Jewish people don't see it
that way, but like Roman Pagans are like, well they're
all they're all the same. They all believe there's just
one God, like a bunch of lunatics. Um yeah so um. Christians,
early Christians wanted to differentiate themselves from Jewish people, and

(15:51):
one way to do that was by attacking Judaism, an
early Christian apologist, which is like a guy, you know,
a hype man for Christianity, Like he's there trying to
drum up interest in the religion. Justin was maybe the
first Christian to claim that Jewish people had quote killed
the Christ and Justin is the origin of the like
the Jews killed Jesus thing, right, that Mel Gibson movie

(16:12):
and stuff. Yeah, I love that his name is Justin.
That's great. That just another Justin fucking ship up for everybody. First,
Justin really showed up. Justin the martyr just was a
piece of ship, right, thanks Justin. At least it wasn't
a chet and he's one of the kind Justin you know,

(16:37):
we we sure do. Justin was followed in sort of
weaving the bones of anti Semitism by a guy called
Tertullian who was one of the fathers of the Christian Church.
Tertullian called synagogues fountains of persecution. Now, these stereotypes is
Jewish people as rebels who rejected Jesus and persecuted Christians

(16:58):
evolved over the decades and centuries as Christianity went from
kind of a fringe cult to the dominant religion of
the Western world. And these the bigotry shaped the attitudes
of a lot of medieval Christian communities towards the Jewish diaspora.
There were programs and massacres inspired by these beliefs. In
eleven ninety at least a hundred and fifty Jewish people
were massacred in the town of York, and twelve ninety

(17:21):
Jews were exposed in mass from England and an act
of ethnic cleansing, one that was followed by France and
thirteen o six in Spain in fourteen ninety two. In
fifteen forty three, Martin Luther called the Church in Rome
the devils Synagogue and derided Catholic Orthodoxy as Jewish in
his Greed. We don't talking about how racist Martin Luther
was so Jewish, These Jewish Catholics, they only talk about

(17:45):
how nice that dude was. And he was a piece
of ship, massive piece of ship. Wrote a whole book
about how he didn't like Jewish people. Real bad guy.
I never I never trusted his air cut. So for
me it was a no from the start. But I've
only heard good news, and this is bad news on
the whole Martin different news. You're bad news about a

(18:05):
couple of people in this it was well again, the
Holocaust really changed a lot of this because after the
Holocaust people started feeling some shame for saying bigger than
things about Jewish people in public. Um. But man, everybody
was racist against Jewish people right up until that moment. Right.
There's these There are a couple of big myths in Christendom.

(18:26):
One of them was the idea of like the blood
Passover is how it's referred to, which is that rabbis
kidnapped Jewish babies and use their blood to make like
mats of bread basically like to celebrate the Passover. And
the other and you'll see there are churches in Europe
today with stained glass reliefs of rabbi's killing Christians like
to this day are still up like that they refused

(18:47):
to take down or like that or whatever. I mean,
nobody's going to these churches. Yeah, it's one of those
things like when it's often framed because of how kind
of rapidly society changed after the Holocaust, it's often from
it's like the Germans drummed all of this hatred up.
No they didn't. It went back. There were ethnic cleansings

(19:07):
in every country in Europe against the Jews and the
centuries prior to the Holocaust. You know, it's a yeah
and the the yes. And the other big myth is
the judent sow, which is like a pig, that is,
Jewish babies are suckling at its breasts. And you'll see this.
There are stained glass reliefs of Jewish babies like nursing
from pigs in the great old cathedrals of Europe. It's

(19:32):
deeply woven in the history of Christianity, is what I'm saying.
We don't talk about it, so what really said? But again,
this these aren't conspiracy. There's conspiracies about like yeah, Rabbi's
murdering kids and stuff like that, but there's not nobody's
talking about Jews running the world. Right, there's this idea
these are aliens that are missed. They're dangerous because they're different.

(19:53):
There's not this idea that like, there's the secret masters
of the universe. That really got started after the French
Revolution in the seventeen hundreds UM. When the French Revolution hit,
conspiracies were immediately woven to lay blame for it on
the Jews. A couple of years after the revolution, Edmund
Burke published a manifesto on the French Revolution where he

(20:14):
declared the revolutionaries jew brokers and old Julie. Now this
is one of history's great ironies because you have seen
a quote from Edmund Burke, if you've watched documentaries about
the Holocaust, if you've watched documentaries about the Nazis, there's
a specific Edmund Burke quote that shows up fucking concept
I probably saw a hundred times as a kid. The

(20:34):
quote is the only thing necessary for the triumph of
evil is for good men to do nothing. And that
is often used in and like Holocaust documentaries and the
never again since is that like, if only good people
had done something, we could have stopped this. And the
people who used that quote, I don't think generally know
that Edmund Burke helped found modern anti Semitism. They don't

(20:55):
know that he wasn't including Jews, and that he was
not is like, listen, good men should do something, not
you Jews, stay out of it. You're not good people.
That's the that's the field you get from Mr Burke. Um.
And yeah, his Burke's attitude towards the French Revolution is

(21:16):
very similar to Adolf Hitler's attitude towards the Russian Revolution
because Hitler blamed it on Judeo Bolshevik's that was always
the term he would use. They're the same, it's the
same basic idea. Right, this cataclysm has changed Europe forever.
This dynasty has been swept from power. It can't just
have been because they were shipped and they made people angry.
It has to be the Jews, you know. Um. Obviously,

(21:37):
the fact that the idea that Jewish people had been
pulling the strings was not the only or even the
most prominent conspiracy theory in the wake of the French Revolution.
In seven of French Jesuit named Abbe Borrowell wrote a
treatise blaming the revolution on a cabal of Freemason's Barrow
was a reactionary, one of the French aristocrats who opposed
the revolution because it took his friends stuff. His argument

(21:59):
was nonsense, since many of the nobles who had been
massacred in the French Revolution had been Freemasons themselves. It
was not like a poor dude thing. But there were
a lot of conspiracies about the Masons um and Borrowell
did not initially blame Jewish people for the revolution. He
just thought the Freemasons did it. But he's got this
conspiracy theory out that the Freemasons were behind it. Guys
like Burke are blaming it on Jewish people. And both

(22:21):
of these conspiracy theories starts circulating at the same time,
which meant the two were bound to cross pollinate. Now,
it's worth noting that throughout this period, Jewish communities lived
very much on the margins of most European communities. They
were legally second or even third class citizens in most countries.
As historian Richard Levy writes, quote, Jews living in European

(22:42):
lands and in those parts of the world where Europeans
settled had gradually become a pariah people. The embodiment of
evil instincts, a false religion, and inferior physical traits. Until
the late eighteenth century, with few exceptions, they lived apart,
wrapped in their own self sufficient religious culture, subject to
severe legal disabilities, special taxes, occasion expulsion, and outbursts of
popular fury. Although much on the minds of other people's,

(23:04):
Jews were left for them to themselves. For long periods.
Their only connection to the larger societies in which they
lived was in the economic sphere, where a few amassed
legendary fortunes while the great majority pursued marginal, obnoxious occupations
such as money lending, peddling, rent collecting, and tavern keeping.
There was segregation against Jewish people in a lot of hear.
You couldn't do certain jobs. You weren't allowed in public,

(23:25):
you couldn't join the army, you couldn't do all of
the things that Christians could do. One of the few
things Jewish people were allowed to do was lend money,
which is where like this, the idea of the Jewish
banker comes from us that and this is the same
thing when in Islamic society you're not allowed to charge
interest if you're like an Islamic banker. So in both
Christian Christendom and and the Muslim world. A lot of

(23:45):
banking is done by Jewish people because that's all they're
allowed to do. Like, you haven't given us any other option.
What the funk else are we supposed to do? You know,
you took away every other job here we are, and
then you made fun of us for it and built
a big old conspiracy experience. Yeah, you can't win with
you know, racism um tale as old as time. Um.

(24:09):
So as the modern world came into building being and
secularism went vogue among intellectuals, some of the prescriptions against
Jewish people started. The fake Christianity stop stops being like
dominant in government, And a lot of reasonable people are like, well,
why are we restricting Jewish people If we're not we
don't govern based on Christianity. We shouldn't oppress these people

(24:29):
just for being Jewish. And so campaigns for emancipation started
to pick up in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, and
these are these are campaigns by Jewish people and their
allies for equal rights under the law. A lot of
this was driven by the French Revolution because in the
French Revolution, after the king was overthrown. Jewish people gained
on paper at least equal rights. It didn't really work
out that way, as it never does with emancipation campaigns,

(24:51):
but things got a lot better for them. And this
is part of why guys like Edwin Edmund Burke were
so certain that Jews were behind the whole thing. Right,
there's a revolution, a lot of prescription and and and
laws against Jewish people doing stuff are repealed. Of course
it must have been them that orchestrated it, because they benefited. Right,
It's a key aspect of conspiracism. You see a group
that benefits, you assume they caused the thing. Um, it's

(25:14):
the way human brains work, I guess. In seventeen eighty nine,
when the National Assembly of France approved the Declaration of
Rights of Man and Citizen, one prominent French representative called
upon his fellow citizens to acknowledge Jews as free French citizens.
He argued that they were do everything any other citizen
was doe, which sounds great, but then he went on
to say this Jews should be given everything as individuals

(25:37):
and nothing as a nation. Basically, I like a few
of these guys, Yeah, I just don't like him as
a group. Yeah, exactly, I'm fine with Jewish people as
individuals were all humans. Their religion is bad and they
need to give it up to integrate into society. That's
what he's saying, right, Like, you, as long as you assimilate,

(26:00):
then you get equal rights. If you continue to be Jewish,
then I'm not cool with you. And this was very
common among like I guess what you'd call the woke
left at the time, that like, we shouldn't restrict Jewish
people from doing anything, but they should stop being Jewish.
You know, that's a common idea. Just come on, we
like us, we love you if you do everything we

(26:22):
do and never argue with us again. A story that
has never been repeated in history. So a major move
towards the mass emancipation of your European Jews came courtesy
of a guy you might not suspect, Napoleon Bonaparte. He's
actually a huge figure in Jewish emancipation in the early

(26:42):
days of his empire. He was. One of the things
that made him noteworthy is he welcomed Jewish men into
his army as soldiers, which was not done in a
lot of Europe. He was like because and this. He
wasn't doing this because he was particularly woke or a
good person. He was doing this because, like you're a
body's a body people to die for me. You guys
die just as do Jewish people respond the same to

(27:03):
getting shot as white. Bring it in, you Jewish dude,
stand in front of me, Stand in front of me.
I've got a good feeling about you. I don't care
what you believe as long as you hold a gun
for me. You know. That's that's Napoleon's attitude. Um And again,
he's not doing this because he's a nice man. But
it has really a positive impact on a lot of
Jewish communities in Europe because Napoleon conquers fucking everything. When

(27:25):
his armies conquered the city of Padua in Italy, they
knocked down the walls of that city's ghetto, basically to
say that like this, your restrictions, like you, your your
life a second class citizens is over. We're destroying the
wall that separates you from the wet rest of society,
which is a huge moment for Italian Jews, right like
Italian Jewish people who had been oppressed for centuries see

(27:47):
French Jews carrying guns, giving orders and liberating them from bondage.
It's a big fucking moment, and a Messianic fervor begins
to sweep through Europe, which is this idea. You know,
Jewish people are still waiting for the Messiah, right like
that's this He's He's going to come, He's going to come.
A lot of them become convinced in this period that
Napoleon's coming was a sign that the Messiah is about

(28:08):
to come. Napoleon was sent by God to liberate us
and our our time of our time of struggle and
trial is almost over. Boy, they you're a little off
on that one, little bit off on that one. This
only feels like when Suge Knight went to the source
rewards and told everybody to come to death row. You

(28:28):
know what I mean. It's yeah, he's offering an alternative option,
but it's not gonna be good for anybody. You know,
a lot of a lot of Italian Jewish historians compare
Suge Knight to the It's it's an extremely common uh.
Like Sugar Knight, Napoleon was shot twice at the VMA.

(28:54):
Like Knight, Napoleon ran a dude over with this car
and then back over the guy again. Glad he did. Comparison,
you know who else is a lot like Suge Knight.
We're supported by suge Knight this podcast. Right, he backs us,
it doesn't he backs us, He goes forward, he backs

(29:16):
us again, and we're back. Uh, we're back, and we're
just appreciating Night and Napoleon too, two dudes just racking
up the WS at this point, both of them have

(29:40):
a fall from grace, right, Napoleon and Shug both end
up in prison. I stand behind my comparison. I think
it is a good one. They both did really well
and then not well at all immediately after. If you
could bridge the language gap between them, I actually do
think they would probably have gotten all. All empire builders

(30:03):
are the same kind of do you know? Uh so yeah.
Jewish people, as a result of Napoleon's kind of liberate,
liberatory rhetoric and the fact that like he really does
improve things for Jewish people in his empire, start to
feel like the Messianic period is here, We're about to
be freed. And for a few years you can see

(30:23):
why they felt that way. Between eighteen o eight and
eighteen fifteen, Napoleon's conquest of warsaw led to a mass
liberation of Polish shoes, who overnight received full civil rights
for the first time in their history. There were even
whispers during the Egyptian campaign that Napoleon meant to reconquer
the Holy Land for diaspora Jews and rebuild the Temple
in Jerusalem. The Napoleon went meant nothing of the sort.

(30:45):
He was never going to get. Napoleon give land to people.
You have misunderstood Napoleon, sir, But he recognized the propaganda
value in what he was doing, especially since the Jewish
community all throughout Europe, in the countries he's going to
war with, if I can get these people on my side,
if I can get them to think I'm going to
liberate them, maybe they will back me when I fight

(31:08):
their governments. You know, it's this, it's this, This is
it's a smart thing to do if you're a guy
like Napoleon. It's the thing the British Empire does all
throughout theory as they control. As you find these different groups,
these like marginalized groups in the countries that you're trying
to conquer, and you support them against the people they have,
you know, an issue with and that that's a good
that's if you're a conqueror coming in, it's a smart
thing to do. Well. It's the sad part is governments

(31:31):
are never nice to everyone, and so subsequently some dude
coming in looking to take over is gonna find some
folks that are pretty unhappy with the way things have
been going this entire time. Yes, exactly. So. Napoleon in
reality was number one, pretty racist against Jewish people. He
was just better than the king had been. Um, and

(31:51):
he didn't he didn't. He was like these guys we
were talking about, these early French revolutionaries. He he thought
Jewish people had equal rights. He didn't think they had
the right to be Jewish. Um. He wanted them to
join secular French culture. He actually called a meeting of
this like Jewish religious congress, the san Hedrin, that hadn't
met in centuries. And they think that he's calling the

(32:13):
meeting to be like, you know, it's time, you know,
the Messianic periods here, like I'm going to liberate like
your homeland for you and take you back. That's what
they think is happening. Napoleon is basically going to force
all these Jewish representatives to vote that their loyal frenchmen
who will fight for him. You know, that's what he
wants to do, is he wants to get he wants
to like he's running a show, vote to like get

(32:34):
all of these people on his side. Uh. And his
in reality, a lot of what he did for Jewish
people was really shitty. One of the things he did
was he canceled all debts owed by Christians to Jews.
And he didn't only do that, but he legally punished
all Jewish people in the French Empire by burdening them
with a communal debt to Christians that they had to repay. Basically,

(32:55):
it's wrong that you were doing the only job we
let you do and you owe all Christians money in
order to pay back, like the like the loans and
stuff that you like. It's really it's it's bad. He's
he's he's I mean, he's so he canceled Christian debt
and then put that debt on Jewish people. Yeah, basically, yes,
he's he's he I mean, he's Napoleon. He wasn't a

(33:16):
good guy, you know. Um. And what was more fucked up?
The really the most toxic aspect of this because even
with that and even with that taken into account, life
got a lot better for Jewish people under Napoleon. Um.
What was most fucked up about what Napoleon did was
the way that his enemies reacted to his supposed pro
Jewish leanings. See Napoleon went to war with basically everybody.

(33:39):
The rulers of Europe knew that all of these Jewish
communities in their countries were talking about how the Messiah
was nigh and Napoleon had been sent to free them,
and they responded with a propaganda blitz that tried tied
the dreaded Napoleon to the untrustworthy Jews trying to tear
down the old order of Europe for their own nefarious ends.
One of these propagandists was Abbe Borrowell, who did initially

(33:59):
blame the French Revolution on Freemasons, but in eighteen oh
six he started circulating a forged letter, probably sent to
him by members of the state police, who resented Napoleon's
liberal attitude towards the Jews. The Jewish Virtual Library writes
that this letter quote called attention to the alleged part
of the Jews and the conspiracy that he had earlier
attributed to the Mason's. This myth than international Jewish conspiracy

(34:22):
reappeared later on in nineteenth century Europe in places such
as Germany and Poland. So this is where this this
is where this myth starts. Right, is this guy who
had first blamed the revolution on the Freemasons. He sees
Napoleon doing some nice stuff for Jewish people. He loops
the minute that conspiracy the Jews and the Freemason's overthrew
the king of France, and now they're trying to destroy

(34:43):
the order in Europe. That's how this evolves. Now, the
group in Europe who most dove into this new conspiracy theory,
where the Czars of Russia their empire had a massive
downtrodden Jewish population. Um. There there had been massive genocides
and both Poland and Russia against the Jews for for
centuries at this point, including one the Calumnisty massacre in

(35:05):
eastern Poland that killed like three quarters of a million people. Um,
just like really really bad stuff. So obviously the Czars
have reason to be worried that these people aren't loyal
because they've been killing them. Yeah, you think I remember
what we did, right, And they're worried because Napoleon's coming

(35:26):
for them where they think it. I mean he did eventually,
but they think at the time he's coming for them. Right.
He's been beating his way through the Germans, which were
kind of our bulwark against France, and he's going to
be in our territory soon enough. In eighteen oh six,
they launched an unprecedented propaganda blitz that would somewhat inadvertently
create the basic ideas of modern anti Semitism. The whole

(35:47):
effort represented a massive propaganda reversal for Russia, who needed
both to justify an alliance with their ancestral enemies Prussia,
and also introduced a new enemy, the alien evil lurking
within preparing to tear the kind tread down. The culmination
of this work was a mass produced propaganda pamphlet called
The Appeal. And I'm going to quote now from an
essay written by Johanna Petrovsky stern quote. The document climaxes

(36:12):
with the entry of the Jews and the expansion of
the Jewish theme. Outwitted by a cutting Napoleon and disappointed
by only partial emancipation, the gullibal Jews of Napoleonic France
are portrayed as perfidious accomplices of France and true friends
of Bonaparte, a Satan who insolently revolted against the Holy
of Holies, the embodiment of absolute evil. Napoleon Bonaparte convened

(36:32):
the Jewish synagogues in France, demanding and insulting public homage
to the rabbis. He established a new Jewish Sanhedrin, which
the Russian document saw as the same godless institution which
in its time conspicuously contemned our condemned our Lord and
the Savior Jesus Christ to the cross. Napoleon maintained. The
appeal attended intended to unify the Jews, whom divine rage

(36:53):
dispersed throughout the land, and most importantly, to proclaim Napoleon
a false Messiah. And the Jews, those alleged haters of Christ,
were more than eager to assist Napoleon in his infamy.
So the real focus of this propaganda is still on Napoleon,
but it's trying. This is like the first real document
that throws all of this together, all this stuff that

(37:14):
becomes modern anti Semitism. It's it's so strange that they're
both Uh, he's both calling them idiots and like these
sort of like powerful figures in this whole thing. He's like, yeah,
they're big dumb idiots, but we watch out for him
because they're super dangerous. I mean, it's this thing. It's
particular in anti Semitism, but you see it always in conspiracies.

(37:36):
The enemy is simultaneously all powerful and incompetent. You know,
like it's dumb enough that like you're able to like
he doesn't like they can't stop us, they can't stop
us from what we're doing, but also like they control everything.
It's the thing you see. You know, I keep going
back to Alex Jones, but he's a good modern example. Um,
it's it's the thing with like Q and on where
the conspiracy is is worldwide. But also everyone has ten

(38:00):
steps behind Donald Trump, the perfect genius. You know, Joe
Biden can't read, but he also is somehow running this
cabal andy and taking down their great savior. Yeah, it's
it's it never makes much sense, is the point. The
Tsars wrote this appeal um, but it didn't stay like

(38:21):
the official propaganda line for long because right after it
gets published, Napoleon signs a peace treaty with Russia. The
Czar's backpedal and they issue like a new pro France
propaganda campaign to try to get everyone on board with
the fact that now we're friendly with France. And obviously
this this doesn't last. They eventually go to war. But
the government abandons this anti Semitic line of attack almost

(38:42):
as soon as they began it. But the appeal made
a terrible impact during its brief period of circulation. Russia
had always been a land of pagrams, and distrust of
Jewish communities ran deep. The appeal had provided a justification
for violence and confiscation of Jewish property. It was an
act of self defense against an embedded alien in and
so the appeal gives all these people who had always

(39:02):
been violent to Jews a justification for why they're defending
themselves by carrying out these proms. Independent newspapers started printing
their own follow ups to the appeal, imitating its key motif,
the idea of a vast Jewish conspiracy against the Russian people.
For the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Russian literature
increasingly depicted Jews differently from European literature. Russian literary scholar

(39:25):
Mikael Weisskopf writes, already in the eighteen twenties it becomes
visible in Russian prose and the idea of a secret
Jewish government which, together with other evil powers, is participating
in a plot against all humanity. It's almost like the
appeal is a virus, right, and once it gets out,
it starts to spread throughout Russia, throughout like the Russian
intellectual community, and it becomes by the eighteen twenties, it's

(39:48):
all throughout their fiction, it's all throughout their literature, this
idea of a vast Jewish conspiracy. It's broken containment, you know,
it's not in control of the czars anymore. Um, and
it it doesn't stay trapped in Russia. We see variants
arising throughout the rest of Europe in the mid eighteen twenties.
A good example of of of kind of one variant

(40:11):
of this that's it's different from what's happening in Russia,
but it has similar roots. Is the kind of anti
Semitism that you saw expressed by Karl Marx. Despite having
Jewish ancestry himself, Marx's early career involved some pretty rough claims.
This is his early career but there's some bad stuff
in here. In eighteen forty three, he blamed the existence
of modern capitalism on the Judaism, of Judaizing the Jews,

(40:34):
you know, on Christian society being made more Jewish. Carl,
I know, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, you always a reference.
That's a good guy. Why Carl. He was right about
a lot not um. He was wrong about stuff too,
He wrote a lot. You know, we were all rooting
for you, Carl. That's yeah, It's it's so common though.

(40:58):
It's the same thing if you look at like a
out of the founding intellectual minds of modern anarchism, guys
like Kropotkin and and prude Han super anti Semitic, really
really racist, like because just because everyone it was very
like all of Christendom was really bigoted against Jewish people.
Was extremely common. It seems like it's like the one
thing that can kind of bring everybody together at this
point is just like, well, we all hate Jews, right,

(41:20):
That's why the Nazis picket. You know, you find the
common enemy, and you rarely everyone around them, even though
the enemy is actually has no power and isn't responsible
for problems. It's just it's what works um. And again
with Marx, we see because kind of this Russian propaganda
hasn't reached to England yet. Where he's writing, Marx is
more in kind of line with these those old French revolutionaries.

(41:43):
He doesn't hate Jewish people, he doesn't like the Jewish religion, right.
He thinks that in his ideal society, Jewish people will
emancipate themselves by giving up Judaism, right. Um. And he's
not a fan of like Christianity in particular either, but
he believes that Jewish people are like they're they're they're
Religiou and his capitalists, so they have to give it
up in order to like become part of the rest

(42:04):
of the world. In eighty four, Marx wrote an essay
with the deeply Unfortunate title on the Jewish Question. He's
not the only one using this phrase, like, that's why
Hitler uses it, right, it is called that by a
lot of people. And the Jewish question is what do
we do with Jewish people? And of course the answer
is never listened to. Let him, just let him do
their thing, Just let's bite them over and have a

(42:29):
nice brunch. I don't know, maybe stop being shitty to him,
but no, that's never the answer. Uh. In this pamphlet
he described the Jewish religion as huckstering and the Jewish
God as money. He had concluded that, in the final analysis,
the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind
from Judaism. And again this sounds extermination. Is he's not

(42:49):
saying that, He's saying the emancive mankind will be emancipated
when they give up their religion. Right, we want the people,
we don't want their faith, which isn't good. But it's
different from like the Nazi arguments that you're going to
year later. This is kind of the standard liberal line
at this point in time in history. And yeah, it's
interesting you'll see people declare Marks anti semitic over this,
and Marx was again had Jewish ancestry. But one of

(43:11):
the people who will disagree with the claim that Mark
santy semitic is Jonathan Sachs, chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom.
And Sax's argument is simple. The word anti Semitism didn't
exist when Marx wrote his essay, and the bigotry he
expressed in that essay was against a religion. It did
not have a racial component, and he did not believe
in a conspiracy of Jewish people. Marx was bigoted against

(43:34):
the Jewish faith, but he didn't see there being He
didn't think Jewish people were inherently involved in a plot.
The building strains of Russian anti Semitism hadn't crossed over
into the West yet, and so the utterly commonplace bigotry
against Judaism that Marx expressed hadn't been cross pollinated with
conspiracism yet. That process wouldn't really get underway until the
late eighteen hundreds. The actual word anti Semitism was popularized

(43:58):
by a German journalist named Bill hell Mar in eighteen
seventy nine. Now mar was an anti semit He's the
guy who came up with the word. You know, like
you're high on the list. He wasn't pointing it out
in someone else. It was like, no, this is what
I am. We would have a word for the shitty
stuff I think there as awesome as me. You need

(44:19):
a title, You need a title. So Mark coined the
term in an unhinged screed he wrote titled the Victory
of Jewelry over Germandom. That was about what you'd expect.
It to be about and has some real Nazi strains
in it. You know, you can draw an electric line
from Mar to the death camps. Uh. And one of
the things that's interesting about mars bigotry and about the

(44:41):
idea of anti Semitism that he crafts, is that his
hatred of Jewish people was not based in Christianity because
he was secular, right, He didn't. He didn't hate Jewish
people because he thought they were responsible for killing Jesus.
He rejected myths about the ritual murder of Christian babies
by rabbis. Instead, according to an article in The Conversation,
quote he do on the fashionable theories of the French

(45:01):
academic Ernst Rennen, who viewed history as a world shaping
contest between Jewish Semites and Aryan Indo Europeans. Mar suggested
that the Jewish threat to Germany was racial. He said
that it was born of their immutable and destructive nature,
their tribal peculiarities and alien essence. Yeah, he was like, listen,

(45:23):
I'm not falling for any of that previous propaganda. I
know they're not suckling at pigs. I know they're not.
Their religion is fine. I don't like them at their core,
their essence is what's broken in them. You don't understand.
Let me tell you where the other racists fall short.
You guys are so focused on the book. Forget the book.

(45:43):
It's in their it's in their spirits, it's in their blood. Yeah,
you know that. Like he He really is a terrible
man um And one of the things that's so dangerous
about guys like Mark, guys like Ranan, is that their
bigotry isn't based in like provincial, like religious stuff. They're
not like bunch of old hillbillies who are superstitious against
the Jews. Their intellectuals, their secular and their hatred of

(46:06):
Jewish people. Their anti semitism is gets is intellectually respectable.
They get articles published in journals, scholars have to debate
their racism. And that's a big step forward. This isn't
you know, Because the world secularizing, we're leaving the old
bigotries in the past. And Mark finds a way to
be like, we don't have to leave this in the past.
I've modernized it. Yeah, this iPhone got an update, and

(46:30):
this iPhone got an update. Yeah, no planned obsolescence for racism.
Now One thing we've seen throughout the last couple of
decades of history that we've been covering today is that
all of the stages of this growth and anti Jewish
sentiment where a reaction to emancipation right, which again we
see this throughout history. This oppressed, marginalized group starts to

(46:51):
get equal rights. They don't even get them. They start
to get them, they start to agitate for them, and
people who are oppressing them freak the funk out that
this is a plot against the oppressors. In Russia's case,
it was a panic that Jewish communities might back Napoleon
in a coming war. Marx's essay on the Jewish Question
was a reaction to the growing emancipation movements across Europe.
Raanan and mar were both trying to stop Jewish integration

(47:14):
into Christian civilization. This happened throughout the Christian world. As
Richard Levy writes, quote, only after Jews had begun to
emerge from their isolation did anti Semitism begin to surface
in Europe. Instead of episodic repression and violence followed by
decades of calm, anti Semites endeavored to make persecution of
the Jews permanent, convinced that Jews had already gathered enormous power,

(47:35):
and that, as one pamphlet of the time put it,
the victory of Jewry was imminent. Anti Semites determined that
constant struggle against the enemy was an absolute necessity for
the survival of Christian civilization. They founded political parties, voluntary associations, newspapers,
and periodicals to this end. In the last quarter of
the nineteenth century, the word anti Semitism expressed a new
way of dealing with the problem of the Jews. So

(47:59):
when the old days, in the medieval period, right when
Christianity dominates everything, it's enough to just be racist against
the Jews. It's enough to just be bigger, it's enough
to just to share myths about them eating babies. When
the world modernizes and Jewish people start to integrate with society,
that's where bigotry isn't enough, because biggotry isn't modern. What
you need is a theory that there's a war. We're

(48:20):
engaged in a battle with the Jews. They're trying to
take over our society. These these campaigns for equal rights.
They're fighting to oppress us. And that's that's modern, you know,
like you can. You can have that in a scientific
industrial society. They're managing the hate just fine. We have
to create some sort of like hidden extra layer to

(48:42):
this bad boy, exactly exactly. And while Marx is proof
that there was a lot of anti Jewish bigotry on
the left, the vast majority of the growing anti Semitic
movement was conservative in nature. This was due in part
to the fact that as Jews gained political rights, most
of them wound up as liberals or social lists, because
those were the movements most effectively fighting for the emancipation

(49:03):
of all people. You know, like a lot of a
lot of Jewish political activists in this period, because they're oppressed,
understand the oppression of other groups and fight to liberate them,
and fight not just like racial groups, like liberate the
poor and stuff um. And the reactionary right sees this
and they fold anti Semitism into their propaganda against socialists.

(49:23):
And this brings us once again to Czarist Russia. The
late eighteen hundreds were also a period of increasing left
wing resistance to the Czarist dictatorship. The People's Will a
left wing political organization we might call accelerationist terrorists, although
I think they were rad embarked on a campaign of
direct violence aimed at destroying the Czarist regime. This culminated

(49:44):
with their successful assassination by bomb of Czar Alexander the
Second in eighteen eighty one. They just blew him up.
They threw a bomb at his carriage and exploded him. No,
he had guys with them. They sunk up a lot
of people like it's it's a big old thing, you know.
And there were there had been a do you know

(50:06):
who else would be very into that? You know who
else would assassinate the Czar of Russia? Our sponsor Raytheon? Yeah,
I mean yes they would, so, yes they would. Yeah.
If there's one sponsor of ours that's good at assassinating zars,
it's Ray You could really draw directly. The people's will

(50:27):
is just a precursor of Raytheon. They couldn't shoot knife
out of the sky from drones, so a guy had
to throw a big, comical spherical bomb carriage. But it's
in Raytheon's d n a. That's why their motto is Raytheon,
fuck the Czar. Here's products all right. So a bunch

(50:52):
of Russian revolutionaries in this period, a lot of the
people who were trying to overthrow the czar were Jewish
men and women. And this was both because a lot
of Jewish people were heavily represented in socialist movements at
this period and also because the Tsars had massacred Jewish
people for centuries. You know, it makes sense again, I'm
I'm thoroughly on the pro murdering the czar side of things.

(51:12):
In case people are curious, they are terrorists. This is terrorism.
They're just justified. You know, if you live under Azar,
it's fine. I'm down with it. There their their chair
backwards to to you know what I mean? Yeah, exactly exactly.

(51:34):
So the waves of anarchists and socialist terrorist text and
a lot of these terrorists in this period and Russia
are anarchists, right. This is idea from a coun and
of propaganda of the deed. The best propaganda is like
killing the fucking cs are like, we don't want a czar.
What is the best way we can tell people we
don't want the czar? What if we kill him? Um?
And I think the people's will was kind of more

(51:55):
just like, I don't know, I'm not an expert on this.
I don't think I don't know if it would be
right to call him anarchists, definitely left wing and socialist
e um. But they killed Thizar, and this freaks the
funk out of the government. Right, So there's, as you
would expect, in the wake of the head of state
being killed, this massive wave of repression, of repression not
just against the actual group that had killed Thizar, but
against anyone doing socialist organizing in Russia. And there is

(52:17):
this kind of unhinged panic among Russian conservatives that there's
a that there's a conspiracy not just to kill Bisarre,
but to overthrow the government, which there is. But they
convinced themselves not that this is happening, because we're terrible
at ruling Russia and we've oppressed people horrifically, and they
have good reason to want to overthrow the government. They're
convinced it's the Jews, right, because this propaganda started circulating

(52:40):
in eighteen o six, Right, this has been going on
for a while, this idea that there's a conspiracy to
destroy our government and it's the Jews behind it. Now,
for some context, this is a bloody period in Russian history,
not compared to modern Russian history, but compared to I
don't know. Most places, about seventeen thousand people are killed
or wounded in terrorist attacks and less twenty years of

(53:00):
the Russian Empire, there is a lot of violence. Yeah, um,
like some bad ship going on. Uh. And it was
a time of tremendous upheaval and rapid change. Zar Alexander
the Second, before his death, had freed the serfs, right,
So like Russia is industrializing rapidly, they d served them.
There's a lot of political changes. There's also all this
terrorism and violence. There's these military defeats and crimea and

(53:23):
again against Japan. And as we discussed at the top
of the episode, when things are changing rapidly, when people,
particularly conservatives, feel like they don't have any solid ground
beneath their feet, that's the kind of situation in which
conspiracism really breeds most effectively, because you need something to
explain it. You don't want to think that like, well,
all of these economic and social forces have come together

(53:43):
to cause rapid change and unrest, and we need to
adapt to it. No, no, no, there's an evil cobal
responsible for everything I don't understand, and if we can
kill them, we'll solve all of our problems. It's it's
hard to believe that the world just played out the
way that it played out and you got fucked, So
it's easier to like blame a specific party for you
getting fucked. Yeah, yeah, And it's it's a story as

(54:07):
at least a couple of hundred years old. And this
brings me finally to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
We had a long prologue this episode. So most people
who write about the protocols, and we'll talk about exactly
what they say in a little bit. Most people who
write about them will authoritatively state that they were created
initially by the Acrona, which was the Czarist secret police.

(54:29):
This the Acrona are like the precursor to the Gestapo
and the KGB, even like the FBI and the CIA.
You could argue they're one of the very first like
secret services, and their whole job is to keep the
Czarre in power. Right, They infiltrate We're supposed to infiltrate
left wing movements. We're supposed to stop assassination attempts, were
supposed to stop people from changing the order. So I
will say everyone says any article you read is gonna

(54:52):
say like the Acrona created the Protocols of the Elders
of Zion. They probably did, but there's zero conclusive evidence
that they did. History Rians who know this ship heavily
debate the origin of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
We do not have a comprehensive, utterly proven example for
like why they were made in the first place. Right,
there's a chain of custody you can tell kind of

(55:14):
like how they evolved over time. We don't know at
whose order they were crafted or if they were anyone,
So that's just not that's not clear. I'll attached an
article by a great historian who kind of breaks down why.
Because there's a famous comic book about the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion by a great Jewish m Stanley Siegel.
I think it was um, a great Jewish comic book artist,
and it's a good comic. It gets a lot of

(55:36):
historical details about the people who we know were involved
in the creation of the protocols. Wrong, because there's a
lot of myths about them. Again, the protocols are a
conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories arise to explain how they came
into being. There's a lot of disinformation out there that said,
broadly speaking, the Acrona are the most likely culprit for
the creation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

(55:57):
If they didn't make it or order its creation, they
certainly had a major hand in its early distribution. But
before we talk about how the protocol spread, I should
explain precisely what they are. In short, the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion are a fake document that purports
to be the minutes of a meeting of the global
Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity. It's yeah, right, Like it's like,

(56:19):
we had this meeting to talk about our evil world
dominations games, and we wrote it down case like you
might not have been able to make the meeting. We
gotta get you know, right back the minutes for me
real quick. Yeah, yeah, yeah, with the minutes of our
plan to destroy civilization. Yes, very funny that you would
think it works that way, Um, but yeah, that's that's

(56:40):
kind of how this is framed, I am. And it's
kind of the document has written not just as minutes,
but it's like kind of, oh, you missed the meeting,
but you're a part of this organization. This will get
you up to speed on our plan destroy Christianity. You know,
like it's so like you were on vacation the week
we had the Global Conspiracy Conference. Take a look at this, Yeah, exactly.
Anybody who missed the reading, it's all available here. Yeah,

(57:03):
you fell asleep during the meeting, We get it. It
goes on a while. Here's the minute. It will be
good enough for a book report, but you'll at least
be caught up. You you can find the quote separately,
but everything else is in there. It's very funny. Um,
it's not funny. Millions die, um, but it's it's it's
it's it's patently ridiculous, right any reasonable person. Of course,

(57:26):
if there's a grand world conspiracy, they don't just have
a document that says, here's what we're doing. But this
is a lot we talk about in our Bill Cooper episode,
A bunch of Bill Cooper's conspiracy theories were based on
leaked military documents talking about their plans to destroy the world,
Like as if that would get written down. Um, anyway,
I'm not going to read huge excerpts from the Protocols

(57:47):
of the Elders of Zion for obvious reasons, but it's
necessary to read some pieces of it so you can
understand how the arguments in it were framed. Here's how
it opens, according to a nineteen seventy edition of the
Protocols based on an Eard twentieth century British translation. Quote
protocol is from Protocol number one. If there's like a
bunch of them right lines and might, freedom and idea

(58:10):
only liberalism, gold, faith, self government, despotism of capital, the
internal foe, the mob, anarchy, politics versus morals, the right
of the strong, the invincibility of jew Masonic authority in
justifies means, the mob a blind man, political abc, party discord,
most satisfactory form of rule, despotism, alcohol, classicism, corruption, principles

(58:33):
and rules of the Jewish Masonic government, Terror, liberty, equality
and fraternity, principle of dynastic rule, annihilation of the privileges
of the goy aristocracy i e. Non jew As if
they need to write that in them right like you
got like, I should remind you that the words that
we use um Putting aside fine phrases, we shall speak
of the significance of each thought by comparisons and deductions.

(58:56):
We shall throw light upon surrounding facts. What I am
about to set forth, then, is our system from the
two points of view, that of ourselves and that of
the goyum i e. Non Jews. They keep putting that
in there, hoping that they were going to end that
list by we didn't start the fire. That might be

(59:17):
a cover of Billy Joe. We don't need um. It
must be noted that men with bad instincts are in
more number than the good, and therefore the best results
in governing them from them are attained by violence and terrorization,
not by academic discussions. Every man aims at power. Everyone
would like to become a dictator if only he could.
And where indeed are the men who would not be

(59:38):
willing to sacrifice the welfare of all for the sake
of securing their own welfare. What has restrained the beats
of prey, the beasts of prey who are called men?
What has served their guidance hitherto? In the beginning of
the structure of society they were subjected to brutal and
blind force, afterwards to law, which is the same force
only disguised. I draw the conclusion that by the law
of nature right lies in force. So the author of

(01:00:00):
the document, who was a rabbi standing in for the
whole Jewish conspiracy, argues that because people are dumb and evil,
they should be ruled, and of course they should be
ruled by the Jews. The rest of the document goes
on to propose ways to do this. It claims that
for centuries, the white world was governed by a mix
of the Church and monarchs, and as long as the
Church and monarchs were in power, the Jewish conspiracy couldn't succeed.

(01:00:23):
I mean, the first half of that was like a
Trump tweet, just like keywords, it's nuns and they're all different.
There's a bunch of different editions of the protocols. They're
all a little bit different. This is the only one
I found that has that weird little yeah, like Trump
tweets at the start of it. So the fake author
of this fake document continues to argue that the Jewish conspiracy,
in order to get off the ground, had to destroy

(01:00:43):
faith in religion. So secularism and socialism were invented by
Jews to destroy the church because the Church was standing
in their way of power. After they got rid of
the church, they had to overthrow the crowned heads of
Europe because the kings are the least protection people had
from the conspiracy the fine and this is again, this
is why he gets drawn into the French Revolution, Right,

(01:01:03):
the French Revolution is bad because they got rid of
the king. The Jews got rid of the king because
the king was standing in the way of them succeeding.
One of the protocols are really pro monarchist document right,
like if we just had kings, everything would be better. Yeah.
I think those uh, those bloodlines are the thing that
we need to hold closest and cherish the most. Yeah,

(01:01:26):
let's let's let's let's line up our our our city
based off of incests babies, let's do that. Just some
cousins with weird arms that that's who we need in charge.
There's a conspiracy to destroy our freedom, so we have
to have kings. It's not it doesn't make a lot
of sense when you think about it. Um. So. Yeah.

(01:01:46):
The first version of the Protocols came out around eight
nineties six, so they were largely talking about the end
of the French monarchy in this like that. That was
the the initial thing that the protocols are focused around
the monarchs have been overthrown. That's the big problem. And
the protocols are basically a roadmap purportedly written during this
convention laying out the plan to conquer and govern the world.

(01:02:07):
I'll give a brief summary. Protocol one is to break
down the national power of non Jewish states by fomenting
internal revolutions. Appeals to class hatred or key to this,
i e. Socialists are doing the work of Jewish people
by convincing the poor that the richer fucking them over right,
poor people would be happy with their lot in life
if it weren't for this conspiracy. If only these socialists

(01:02:30):
were convincing that their lives suck, they'd be happy, and
then our nation would be strong. Uh. These internal revolutions
would be fomented by having Jewish agents convinced groups of
people to agitate for liberty, equality and fraternity. If you remember, liberty, egality,
and fraternity are like that was the motto of the

(01:02:51):
French Revolution, Like, that's what we're fighting for, is we
want to all be equal citizens under the law, as
opposed to having like a king and a class of
nobles who rule over us. And the argument of the protocol,
so that this is a Jewish conspiracy because people aren't
equal and liberty is a bad idea. It's just a
it's just a plot in order to make our government's
weaker so the Jews can take over UM. Again, it's

(01:03:13):
a shitty argument by bad people who think that having
a ZAR is the best thing you could possibly you
could possibly have. UM And the basic idea is that
the Jews are behind a global campaign for equal rights,
which are evil. Autocratic governments are weakened by this, first
by liberalism, then by socialism, and finally by anarchy. The
second protocol was that all law all wars would be

(01:03:34):
shifted to an economic basis, ensuring that territorial advantages for
one side or the other didn't really happen. Basically, the
author of this book took thee by then obvious fact
that economics one wars and use that to claim that
the way conflict work and worked in industrialized society was
the fault of the Jews, because like they they control
the economy, so wars aren't like noble and good anymore.

(01:03:56):
They're just like these these industrial butcheries because of the Jews. UM.
Next is the strengthening of Jewish international rights i e. Emancipation,
which the author claims comes at the expense of gentiles,
because that's their argument. Racists always make right. The the
idea is that like part of their conspiracy is agitating
for equal rights, because if they have equal rights, then

(01:04:17):
Christians have less rights. That's that's a huge part of
this document. And there's other ship. Right, there's a slid
math that's math is checking out for me. I'm over
here calculating that makes perfect. It's the same argument that
powerful groups always make, you know, um in the face
of an oppressed group agitating for more equal rights. And

(01:04:40):
there's other ships in there. They argue that like alcohol
was introduced by Jewish people to like numb the minds
of Christians, like race poisons all this Nazi Sian it's
a lot of Nazi ship you know um, And it's
it's very basic. Today, there's a million conspiracies, not all
of which are on their surface anti Semitic. That's have
this the same bay thing, right, there's this conspiracy they're

(01:05:02):
they're weakening your minds with television and with popular music
and with drugs and alcohols that you don't notice that
you're being controlled by this evil cabal. And most of
the people who believe that do believe that call is
the Jews, but they don't say it anymore usually, right,
um now, in the late eighteen hundreds, this idea was revolutionary.
This is the first conspiracy theory like this, right, it's

(01:05:23):
the father of them all. And the fact that the
early nineteen hundreds were a period of calamitous wars that
led to economic collapse in the fall of several governments,
including the Czarist monarchy, convinced a lot of people that
the Protocols had been perfectly accurate. In the years after
World War One, a growing core of conspiracists would would claim,
we know the Protocols are real because everything they predicted

(01:05:43):
is coming true. I actually found a nineteen twenty edition
of the Protocols that argues a remarkable similarity between the
protocols and acts of the Bolshevik government, which it claims
is under the control of Jewish leaders. And it's true
that there were a lot of Jewish Bolsheviks, but you'll
notice the guy who wound up in charge of the
U s SSR was Joseph Stalin, who was not at
all Jewish, and in fact j Staal's chief rival for

(01:06:06):
power was a Jewish Man, Leon Trotsky, who he forced
into exile and then assassinated when like he had a
guy stabbed him to death with an ice pick in Mexico. Like,
oh yeah, it's a pretty boss story. Ramon Mercat is
the name of the guy who killed Trotsky. Jesus, that's
not a nice assassination at all that I mean, it's Stalin. Yeah,

(01:06:29):
it's Stalin. Stalin better than I guess Hitler when it
comes to treating Jewish communities. Not great on treating Jewish community,
like in uss are a rough deal for Jewish people.
During Stalin's air including like near the end of his life,
became convinced that a cabal of Jewish doctors were planning
his assassination, which is why he didn't have any when
he had his stroke. There was no medical aid because

(01:06:50):
he purged all of these doctors because he was afraid
of a Jewish conspiracy. The idea that the USSR was
like Jewish, it's just nonsense. It's completely a historical um.
And there's a lot of suffering of Jewish people under
Stalin's government, you know anyway, So I just I just
like your low bar, you're like better than Hitler, Like really,

(01:07:10):
I The sad thing is when you're talking about like
that particular war, Stalin does look a lot better because
he's standing next to Hitler. You know, it's he's a
real Beyonce next to Michelle, you know what I mean.
I do also looks better because he was handsome, and

(01:07:32):
I mean there's a lot of similarities between Beyonce and Stalin.
We've all talked about this a lot off this. I'm like,
you know who, you know who. I've noticed a lot
of similarities between Stalin and is Conan O'Brien because Stalin

(01:07:53):
big lover of pranks, huge lover of pranks. Conan O'Brien,
legendary prankster. Just reading this is completely off topic. But
there's this amazing thing that there's actually nobody named Conan O'Brien.
What do you mean what she's saying, he pronounced whatever whatever.

(01:08:15):
Robert likes to mispronounce very famous people's names and doesn't
realize he's doing it and then gets roasted. No one
for everybody. Now, I think we have to accept that
no one knows how he existed so long ago. No
one can tell it's like Latin. We don't know how
it was pronounced. It was so far in the past,

(01:08:39):
famed late night shows. Scholars have their theories about how
his name was pronounced, but no one knows for certain.
Um anyway, look up Conan's history of this conversation. Yeah
we did, Sophie, and I just said. Scholars Scholars debate

(01:08:59):
like the origin, like like the origin of the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion. Scholars still debate his the
pronunciation of his name. Yeah, you know, it's true. Hanging
out with your favorite singer Arianna grand Sophie, it's pronounced grande. Oh,
good to know. I know you missed these things a

(01:09:22):
lot because you're not keyed in the pop culture like
I am. All right, So the Protocols were written well
ahead of the fall of the Czarist government. Um, but
they were written about the fall of another monarchy. And
so a lot of the stuff written about the French
Revolution sounded like it was talking about the Russian Revolution. Right.

(01:09:42):
This book is about how the Jews are going to
overthrow kings. They're writing about something that had already happened
in blaming it on the Jews. Then there's another revolution
that overthrows the Tsar of Russia, and a lot of
people see like, oh, this is proof the protocols are true, right,
everything that they've predicted is coming true. Look like this
is the only reason people would want to overthrow the Czar,
not that he got them into a war that killed
eight million people. Um, it must just be the Jews

(01:10:06):
are tried to invade Germany and got his ass kicked
in one of the most epic beat downs in military history.
After getting his ass kicked by the Japanese and another
one of the most epic beat downs in military history.
It's not that the Czar had his soldiers fire on
crowds of people protesting for bread. It was it was
it was the Jews. No other reason to want the

(01:10:27):
Czar out anyway, not a pro Csar podcast, I do apologize,
so yeah, Now, the actual facts of world history did
not matter in the least. The people of the early
nineteen hundreds were living and dying through the greatest war
in history, a terrible plague that killed millions right after
the war, and the collapse of the largest land empire

(01:10:47):
on Earth, Russia. The Russian Empire is like a seventh
of the world's land mass, like it's fucking huge. Yeah,
we we don't talk like Russia fucking big big, big, big, big,
big big country. And suddenly, you know, in the twenties
or in late teens, early twenties, it's just this massive
pile of people murdering each other. The Russian Revolution is

(01:11:08):
horrifically bloody. Um. And it just the the entire period
of time up to, during and after World War One
is just this, this period of violent chaos that hopefully
we will never see the like of again, right unless
it happens next month. So the fact that all everything
was falling apart seemed to be explained by the protocols,

(01:11:28):
and millions of people bought into them. Now the reality
is that the Protocols of the Elders of Giant Zion
wasn't just a forgery. It was an act of plagiarism.
And it wasn't just an act of plagiarism. It was
an act of plagiarism of an act of plagiarism. Um, yeah,
it's it's it's meta. I'm gonna I'm gonna read again
from the Jewish Virtual Library here quote the direct predecessor

(01:11:50):
of the protocols can be found in the pamphlet Dialogues
in a Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, published by the
non Jewish French satirist Maurice Jolie in eighteen sixty four.
In his dialogues, which make no mention of the Jews,
Jolie attacked the political ambitions of the Emperor Napoleon the
Third using the imagery of a diabolical plot in Hell.
The dialogues were caught by French authorities soon after their publication,

(01:12:13):
and Jolie was tried and sentenced to prison for his pamphlet.
Jolie's Dialogues, while intended as a political satire, soon fell
into the hands of a German anti Semite named Herman Getch,
writing under the name of Sir John Retcliffe. Getch was
a postal clerk and a spy for the Prussian secret Police.
He had been forced to leave the postal work due
to his part in forging evidence in the prosecution against

(01:12:34):
the Democratic leader Benedict Waldeck. In eighteen forty nine, Getch
adapted Jolie's dialogues into a mythical tale of a Jewish
conspiracy as part of a series of novels entitled Barets,
which appeared in eighteen sixty eight. In a chapter called
the Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of Representatives
of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, he spends the fantasy

(01:12:54):
of a secret centennial rabbinical conference which meets at midnight
and whose purpose is to review the past hun of
years and make plans for the next century. So this
satirist writes a book like throwing shade on fucking Napoleon
the Third and like he frames it as a dialogue
between these two dead guys, but he's yeah, yeah, he

(01:13:17):
gets sentenced to prison for this, and it probably was
a pretty good joke, right, And a German secret policeman
finds his dialogue and writes it into an anti Semitic
novel about a Jewish conspiracy because he thinks that like
the wording of the dialogue, which this guy had meant
to be about like how the King of France is

(01:13:37):
power hungry, he makes it about how the Jews are
trying to seize power. Um, so that happens. Now, The
most plausible theory for the origin of the Protocols as
we know them is that get getches novels, which are
again a plagiarism, wound up in Russia. They were translated
in eighteen seventy two, and in eighteen ninety one a
new edition was published and the Council of Representatives meeting

(01:13:58):
in Prague were con solidated under the name Rabbi's Speech.
So the whole dialogue between Monscuieu and um Machiavelli is
like put in the mouth of a rabbi. This translation
probably wound up in the hands of the Okrana and
and specifically the Okranna in France, because they have fourign offices,
just like the CIA and the Acrona. See a used
for this when the dry Fuss affair convulses France from

(01:14:20):
eight eight now we talked about Dreyfus in detail during
Behind the Insurrections. The short of it is that he
was a Jewish French military officer falsely accused of selling
secrets to the Germans. After France's defeat in eighteen seventy,
the case became a massive culture war issue in France.
Dreyfus was acquitted, but the whole period spawned a bunch

(01:14:40):
of fringe newsletters that blamed French defeat on this Jewish man.
At the time, Russia was allied with Germany and France
was her enemy. The same story we saw in eighteen
o six repeated itself. The Czarre secret police created the
protocols in order to pop up his conservative stances against
a wave of liberal sympathy that kept pushing for warm
Since many prominent liberals were Jewish and nice, anti Semitic

(01:15:03):
conspiracy would help to divide the left, to make regular
Russians less likely to trust any reform. And that is
more or less where the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion came from. The acronic plagiarizes, a work of plagiarism
by oppression in order to like prop up the Czar
against liberals. And it's it's again like that that first

(01:15:23):
appeal in eighteen o six, that first piece of big
anti Semitic propaganda. It's not meant to go worldwide. It
is meant to have a very specific impact within France
and Russia on a specific series of political issues. But
it fucking gets out of here. It breaks containment right
like a virus, and it goes viral immediately and within
a few years, the Elders of Zion, the Protocols of

(01:15:45):
the Elders of Zion have spread all over the world.
We're gonna talk about fucking Colombia in our next episode.
Um and provided went on to provide like inspire slaughter
and all over the planet and provide a lot of
the fuel for what became the Holocaust. Well, I have
is like, how does it spread like that? Like this
isn't the Internet doesn't exist, and I'm an idiot, so

(01:16:07):
I don't know how things. Uh, We're gonna break that
down in part two. I'm gonna we're gonna talk about
specifically the nation of Columbia, and I'll walk you through
exactly how it's spread throughout Columbia and the impact that
it has because it's very interesting and the story in Columbia,
similar things happen all over the world of different countries spread.
Don't worry, we bring it. We bring it back to
the Midwest too. Don't worry a little don't worry a

(01:16:32):
little bit. It's a little bit of Henry Ford. But first,
just just a teeny bit that there's a lot to
say about him doing this. I didn't include a whole
lot in here, just because there's so much else to
get over but we'll do a Henry Ford episode at
some point. Be a long one guy, no good, no good,
not a not a nice dude. Well you've got any plug,

(01:16:54):
double plug Langston. Yeah, yeah, you can listen to my podcast.
It's called My Mama told me. It's available everywhere. We
talk about conspiracy theories, and I'm gonna use a lot
of this information to apply to my own nonsense. So
this is exciting. Yeah, Well I love I don't know,

(01:17:15):
I don't know, I don't love anything. Just greatly on
just raid theon and kill him Bazaar. I do love
killing Tazar. So why don't you all go out and
while you wait for at part two, find us are
you know, deal with him? Kill him, kill him kill
kill a fuckings art, Go find us art, take him out.
Get an old timmy bomb and take out that tsar. Yeah,

(01:17:36):
one of those, you know, the kind like it's a
big sphere. It's got like a little knob on the top,
like a very long, just long wik that burns pretty slow,
but not slow enough to get away. You kill him
not yeah, you fucking take that czar anyway. This is
behind the bastards once again inciting violence against the Russian

(01:17:57):
Royal family. Um as is our want

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Behind the Bastards News

Follow Us On

Host

Robert Evans

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: The Conspiracy to Begin All Conspiracies