Badlands Media - Badlands Story Hour Ep. 167: Assassin's Creed

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

Chris Paul and Burning Bright dig into the 2016 Justin Kurzel film Assassin's Creed, based on the long-running Ubisoft video game series and starring Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson, and Charlotte Rampling. Both guys agree the movie underdelivers on its concept but is way better than the brutal reviews it received at the time, and the conceptual material gives them plenty to chew on. The conversation winds through how open world game engines build only what the player can see (a great metaphor for our own constructed reality), the eerie 2013 trailer for Ubisoft's The Division that predicted COVID with unsettling accuracy, and how Xbox lobbies and 4chan were quietly red-pilling young men years before MAGA existed. From there they dig into the philosophical heart of the film: the Templars chasing the Apple of Eden to eliminate free will, the assassins as imperfect guardians of human sovereignty, and whether a secret society fighting for the people can ever really be on the people's side. They close with the surveillance state as a counterfeit god, JFK's warning about secrecy, and why morality has to be inherent rather than coded by law.

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That lendsmead.tv slash river. You will not regret it. All righty then. And with that, I will say, good evening. Welcome to Badlands Story Hour. I am Chris Paul. That is Burning Bright. And tonight we are discussing Assassin's Creed, written by Michael Leslie, Adam Cooper, and Bill Collage, Collage. Director Justin Curzel, starring Michael Fastbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, and the always great Brendan Gleason, who is in an incredible number of the movies that we do, as well as the great Charlotte Rampling.

this was a Chris Paul selection. I am a huge fan of the Assassin's Creed video game franchise. I think they're just incredible games. I don't play video games as much now as I used to 15 years ago or maybe even 20 years ago when the first one came out. But every time one of these games comes out, I have to get it. I have to play it. The stories are incredible. The game world that is built out. is incredible. And I just kind of love the lore. The backdrop for all this, as it is in the movie, is kind of this battle between secret societies who are vying for the control of humanity. And it started out, and to a lesser degree now, but it was present through all the early ones, are the Knights Templar.

They are the secret society that represents the adversary in all of the games throughout the franchise. And then there's an order of assassins all over the world that contests the Knights Templar, fighting for good as opposed to this evil. And we can talk about what their creed is and whether or not that's a good thing. But the video game franchise has traveled throughout time from ancient Greece and ancient Egypt all the way up through the American Revolutionary War. and it's all over the map in terms of location. Throughout that time, some really cool environments. It goes through historical stories that people are very familiar with from culture and history and the rest of it.

And it's just always a really interesting experience. So when this movie first came out, I went and saw it in the theaters, was very excited and then was just kind of like eh. Because the movie honestly is just an eh. Some really cool action. the parkour is a major part of the video game franchise and I think it's pretty well represented some of the action sequences I think are pretty gripping and exciting and inventive in the film

but there's just not ultimately a lot there to really grasp onto in terms of character development and the rest I think in this clips package it's almost the entire movie sends the action sequences but for the movie itself I liked it better this time than the first time I watched it, but what did you think? Yeah, I had actually never seen this.

I avoided it because of the... It got very terrible reviews, which I thought was unwarranted once I watched it for the show. I expected to think the movie was, like, outright bad watching it, but that the concepts would be interesting to discuss because I am familiar with the games. I played the first, like, three or four. really liked them a lot.

I do think the video game series sort of lost its way, like 10 years in. This first one I just looked up came out in 2007. So that was 19 years ago. And when I say that, I mean, the games are still these big open world, incredible technological adventures. The last one I played, I think, was set in Greece. Yeah, that would be Odyssey. Yeah, Odyssey. Oh, yeah, that's amazing.

But the story, they started to, like, there's a lot of commentary within the Assassin's Creed community of the games that they sort of started to abandon the modern day storytelling. And apparently this was a directive handed down from the corporate suits at Ubisoft, which was originally a French company. And then I think it's this big conglomerate now. Ubisoft is widely like one of the most hated among many hated companies in video games. And the reason is stuff like this, where they've taken great IPs and just like mind them of all originality that they originally had. So I know a lot of Assassin's Creed fans are kind of pissed that they dropped a lot of the storylines. Like a lot of the last couple of games, they don't even like talk about Templars and things like that. They sort of ignore the obsturgo of it all.

And the original couple of games, I think the first one was, was. based in like Jerusalem or something. And then you had the one that really blew up, I think, was the sequel, which was in Renaissance, Italy. And that was fantastic. I thought I thought the movie was decent. I think the cast is like A plus plus. But this is almost one of those movies where like because the cast is so good and because the concept is so good, you can't help but wonder, man, what if we got, just a little bit of a better representation here of what was going on in the game.

Like, they clearly were hoping for this to be a big franchise. Ultimately, it didn't get a sequel that it was obviously setting itself up for at the end. You don't cast 2016 Michael Fastbender in the lead without, like, thinking that this is going to be a big thing. In terms of why, I think it didn't work, I mean, there's, there's like the, for Normie, I can see some reasons why, but even from the perspective of somebody who is familiar with the games, I thought they focused a little too much on the present day, the modern day. And I don't know if I would have a really clear idea of what was going on, if I wasn't really familiar with the framework of the game.

Like, I think you can pick up, okay, this guy is going back in time, basically, you know, plugging into his ancestors. Like, they acknowledge that. But what the assassins are trying to do is way more clearly communicated in the games. And the main thing, like, I have a lot of my notes here. And after I was organizing them, I kind of had this realization. If I didn't play the games, I'm not sure I would come out of this saying the Assassin's Guild are the good guys. Not that I'm saying Abstergo are represented as good because they're pretty obvious Hollywood corporate evil mastermind guys, scientists and the like.

But there's a lot of lines in this movie vaguely hinting at what the assassins are trying to do. And none of it is really explained. And maybe they wanted to do that in sequels, but that's the age-old mistake of not explaining these things in your first. movie assuming that you're going to get sequels. So I thought it was, again, I think the concept is great. I thought it was well acted. I think Fastbender's great. I'm a big fan of his, so I thought he kind of commanded the screen well. But the one piece of advice I would have given them retroactively from a writing perspective that the games do really well. People that didn't play the games could probably imagine how this would have turned out. In the games, there is like a constant dialogue

between the past and the future. And that does not happen in this movie. That's the number one thing I was looking for. Like the past version of Michael Fastbender, there is no communication or acknowledgement of the future version of him. And that was one of the strengths of the game to me, was like the present version of the assassin trying to figure out what his past version was doing and the past version having all these revelations about what was going

on in the future. And they don't close the other side of that loop in this movie. The whole thing is based around observing the past, but the past doesn't interact with the present in any way. So, you know, there's still a lot of great stuff to mind here, but I was confused watching that. The whole time, I was like, man, when is the past version of Fastbender going to, have dialogue or agency in any way. But the only version of him that has really any dialogue or moves the plot in any way is the present tense version of him that we see. Yeah, I guess I don't remember that part from the video games as well.

And I'm not saying that it didn't happen or anything because I... It might not have been all of them. Yeah, yeah. Because the past version, of course, the character Desmond was his name in the video games. he would go back into through the kind of DNA sequencing of generational memory, he would go back into the memories of his ancestors and relive those memories to understand, to build back the whole timeline to know what's happening now. I don't remember so much of a communication, but there may have been one.

In terms of the video games, I want to talk about just a few of the aspects of the video games and even some of the stuff from the games, from the construction of the games itself that I think is really interesting in a lot of what we talk about. And there was maybe just a kind of parallel to it in the dialogue here. You know, they did a lot of fan service in this movie

trying to bring those elements of the game in, even though they weren't totally required by the script, like the bleeding, for instance, I think is maybe the closest that we get to kind of what you're referring to there, where the memories begin showing up in real time. And there were these instances of that happening. And that still does happen in the games a little bit. But the way that the Marion Cotillard character described that was that these visions are

kind of layering themselves onto your perceptive reality. And that's something that we kind of talk about a lot. Yeah. I want to steer just away from the movie just for a second and take two minutes and watch a little chunk of video here about how these video game worlds are constructed and Assassin's Creed is actually used as an example in this video and I think that in terms of the reality construction

that we sometimes talk about on this show and some of the stuff I talk about in my other work I think that this is conceptually really interesting And then I also remind me, I want to talk about Ubisoft a little bit too. Yeah. Okay, so here we are. Despite having been a graphics programmer since the early 2000s, the first time I stepped into Horizon, Forbidden West, I was taken aback by the sheer scale of the world. How do games like this, or Assassin's Creed or Spider-Man, which also boast enormous, detailed worlds?

How do they draw all of this without compromising on performance? It's really interesting, because the techniques used have been built on and refined for decades. at this point. So the first method is relatively simple. Let's start with the world and populate it with some stuff. It doesn't really matter what that stuff is, but we'll keep it relatively simple. Now let's take a look from above. So let's pretend that we're taking an eagle-ey's view of what the player is seeing. So that's the player down there. And we can visualize what they see with this green box. This is called the view Frustum, and it's what they can see from their perspective. And a view Frustum is basically like a box. It's defined by six sides. You have the left and right, which of course correspond to the left and right parts of your screen. You have the top and bottom, which correspond to the top and bottom of your screen. And finally, you have the near and far.

The near being how close you can be to things before they cut off, and the far being how far you can see. Those six planes define everything that's visible to them. This is called the viewing Fruston. On top of that, each object in the scene can be thought of as having a simple volume around them. Spheres are popular because doing math with spheres is really simple. Things like distance calculations, those sort of things. Those are a breeze. You can get a much tighter fit with a box, though. The downside, of course, being that the math tends to be a tiny bit more complex, but not overly so, making them a nice trade-off on efficiency. Now that we have this idea of a viewing volume and each object having a simple bounding volume,

then you're simply going to do an intersection test. For every single object in the scene, you test whether their bounding volume intersects with the view custom, and everything that's completely outside, that's discarded, because that's not visible. And everything that's inside or bordering, that's drawn. Remember that this test needs to be conservative, meaning that if you draw a little too much, that's okay, because that's better than drawing too little. If we do that, here's our scene. Everything that's being discarded is being colored red, while everything that's being kept is being colored green. And as an example, if our world happens to contain hundreds of objects,

well, with this simple pass, we've whittled down that number considerably with just this simple technique. But Frustum Culling, as awesome as it is, isn't usually enough, as the recently released Cities Skylines 2 found out. Ignoring all the other problems with the game, this report shows that they relied solely on Frustum Culling, which is a really really big mistake. It's the first step, not the only step. You need to go further, and this is where occlusion coloring comes in. Let's take this simple example of a camera and some objects sitting in the world. Now, we can easily discard what's blatantly visible or not with our view Frustum check. So everything outside of the viewing Frustum, we've already discarded those,

being left with just the things inside the view Frustum. Now imagine a big object here, near the camera. Let's say that it's a wall, or a building, or anything big and solid. You can't see past this thing. So we can draw lines from the camera to the edges of this object and extend them beyond, forming a volume, an area where realistically nothing inside of it is visible to you. So that's occlusion, but how do we calculate occlusion? And most importantly, how do games manage to do it so fast? Because this needs to be done near instantly. Let's start with a real... Okay, so I don't want to like watch the entire video, but I think that's probably enough to kind of understand the concept because there is a need to preserve energy and processing power

and memory and the rest of it. The game is only actually creating the world insofar as the perspective, you know, you in the world is able to see it. And I think that just conceptually thinking about that and applying it to some of the aspects of our own reality provide certain insights to different things. And so I just wanted to kind of just give a nod to to that concept because Assassin's Creed is one of those games. For anyone in the chat who's played it, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It is a massive world that you're in. And one of the funny things about it is if you ever approach the edge of that world, like it doesn't let you go any further. It's kind of like the Truman show at the end where he,

eventually just takes the boat and bumps into the wall and that's all there is there. Like Assassin's Creed, if you go too far through that border, it's going to desynchronize you, like kill your character and make you start over again. And so the world only exists insofar as you can know it, which is just an interesting statement or concept or insight into consciousness and the rest of it. And I'll pause there. Yeah. As a kid, my older cousins and my brother used to make fun of me with video games because I really liked AI characters. Like I liked trying to figure out what they would do and everything in games. Obviously, open world games became, didn't exist literally until we had three-dimensional games, which I think, you know, PlayStation 1, Sony PlayStation

N64. There might have been some before that, but in terms of like mass market, Super Mario on N64 was like the biggie that kind of first started doing that. But in those open world games, I would like to follow around NPC characters, which is what we often refer to Normies as. So these are for anybody who didn't play these kinds of games. This is where a lot of terminology comes from. And it's kind of interesting because a lot of internet terminology, Info war terminology certainly, but just deep lower internet terminology

crosses over significantly with gamer, terminology, NPCs, non-playable characters, AI, simulation theory. Simulation theory isn't anything new, but it's certainly what I think of with that explanation that you showed. And I think the modern discussions

around simulation theory are kind of weird because I don't think it's weird to think about simulation theory, but it essentially posits that that it's more likely than not that we reside inside of a simulation And I think a lot of people immediately dismiss that as some sort of like video gamey type thing. But I think it's pretty logical that whether you do or don't believe in God, that what you're showing there from a video game perspective is literally what human perception is.

So it's largely indistinguishable from a simulation. I think the reason people get so turned off by the idea of simulation theory is there's an implicit. implication in terms of how a lot of people talk about it, that it means everything is fake, as in nothing has meaning. Certainly not how I would see it. But, you know, it's kind of interesting when you look at open world games. I think open world games in particular, like Assassin's Creed, I think it's the best-selling open-world game series there is. And again, for people that haven't played these, the difference between an open world and a close world game or a linear game. is that in an open world,

you can go anywhere within the boundaries that Chris describes. You choose, do you want to go to this town or to that town? Do you want to jump in the river? Do you want to go kill this guy or make friends with him? Grand Theft Auto is actually probably the most famous and best-selling open world game there is. And that's a huge difference

from 80s and 90s games that were linear. You go through the Mario level, you go through the Mega Man level, you have a fighting game like Mortal Kombat, And I think it's kind of interesting to consider why open world games became the dominant game form as technology progressed. And I think a lot of that has to do with technology. I think a lot of that has to do with human psychology of even within what players know is a simulated false reality. They want to be able to do whatever they want to do in that simulated false reality. So it's kind of a funny, like, analog.

Very few people who play games like playing games that are on rails, where you've got to do one thing and then the next thing. They like being like, I'm in Greece. I got this character. I'm going to go do whatever I want to do. I want to just go back to Ubisoft for a second because, so they have like the Tom Clancy franchises division and I think it's called, Ghost Recon.

Ghost Recon, that's it. Those are amazing games and the Assassin's Creed stuff. And so as we'll get into with Assassin's Creed, there's kind of like this disclosure element to some of their games. And you can call it predictive programming and there's a fine line there. You know, it's two sides of the same coin. Sometimes are they telling us what's going to happen so that we can avoid it or are they telling us so that we accept it? but I want to just show people the trailer for their series, The Division.

I don't know if you're familiar with these. Yeah. Yeah, I played the first one. Okay. And I mean, I played them both. I think that they're absolutely incredible. But knowing what we've known, experiencing what we've experienced. Especially when this came out.

Yeah. So this was 2013. This is the trailer for Division. In 2001, a real world exercise set that the emergency response to a bioterror attack in the continental United States. The operation was called Dark Winter. Within just a few days, the simulation spiraled out of control. The operation predicted a rapid breakdown in essential institutions, civil disorder, and massive civilian casualties. Dark Winter has revealed how vulnerable we've become.

Our lifestyle, our security, our safety, depends on a delicate, unscable economy. We've created a system so complicated that we've made. We don't want to understand how to control. Oil, power, shipping, transport. We live in a complex world. And the more complex it gets, the more fragile it becomes. The system is built on a global supply chain that gets things where they're needed, just in time. We've created house of cars.

We've moved just one, and everything falls apart. And what's fueling the system? Money. Americans can spend $90 billion in a single day of shopping. Last year, 200 million people swamped their local stores on November 23rd. We call that day, Black Friday. Did you know that a flu virus can survive on the surface of a banknote for up to 17 days? Calm, come!

To begin during the crush of Black Friday sales. A pathogen will jump from tainted banknotes to human skin. On to food, toys, children, and loved ones. By the time patient zero feels the first sore throat, millions of people will already be infected. From this point, the breakdown will happen fast. Day one, hospitals will reach capacity. Panic will strike. Day two, quarantine zones will be established.

Resources will be rationally. Transport will go into lockdown. Day three, international trade will stock. The oil will dry up. The stock market will collapse. Day four, the power will fail. Shells will be empty, the taps will run dry. And once hunger and despair take hold, people will do anything for survival. By day five, everyone will be a potential threat. In 2007, a new presidential directive was signed quietly into law.

This maps out the government's response to a crisis. A plan to cope with a real law-winter. It is known as Directive 51. There are rumors of shadow agencies, sleeper-sized, covert agents. But nothing can be confirmed. Our complex world is primed for breakdown. And once the chaos strikes, there won't be resources to save us all. The only question left is,

What will it take to save what remains? So that was the trailer that they used at the conference. Let me see if I can just find a second of the. Do you want to show my screen for one second? Sure, yeah. I don't know if you were going to bring this up. I don't. Oh, the Joe Biden dark winter thing is that?

Yeah. I mean. Joe Biden warns of dark winter in America and this was all about COVID and everything. I mean, but yeah, that that is wild just how on the nose it is. And not untrue. You know, like we're getting a, we're getting a masterclass in this from Donald Trump himself right now, allegedly, you know, with the straight of whore moose, right? Where a macro narrative worldwide that's being talked about even in Normieville is, man, this one fucking canal, huh? Like is screwing up me taking my kid to gymnastics or something?

And it's like, yeah. So, you know, there's dark readings of it, but there's also, you know, what would white have, there's like that, I think we'll get into more of the movie, but what I think of when I watch a clip like that is we automatically defer to black hat framing of a video like that, planemics, plan scenarios, systemic control, Hegelian dialectic, which I think is all apt and reasonable. But then I wonder if there were secret white hats, if you did have military intelligence that also recognized this, what would they do about it? What would they try to disclose this in different ways? And you know, you could argue that this is a lot of what we have

learned in the Trump era from Donald Trump is like, hey, we're too reliant on foreign supply chains. We're too involved in foreign wars. Our money doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. The stock market goes up and down depending on what I tweet at any given moment. So, you know, maybe he's trying to do a slow release version of what would they call it, Agenda 2030, et cetera. Yeah, I mean, maybe they would just make video games like this and make sure that they get into the hands of lunatics like me. Because I played the shit out of these games and was like once the COVID thing started I was like I think I saw that yeah we've seen this one yeah yeah you can't you can't go around telling me that this is real if you know

because everybody always says now um what it what is it uh you oh you can't make that up I'm like yeah yeah except you can't except like yeah I hate that saying yeah I hate that saying yeah you know it's you know it's true because it seems so fake I think Elon tweeted that recently. Well, he tweeted, oh, he tweeted again recently? Maybe not recently. Maybe this was a couple of years ago, but we referenced it a lot. He said that about when he launched a Tesla in his face.

He said, you know, it's real because it looks so fake. No, I know it's fake because it looks so fake. And also because you can't do that. So the division thing, though, just to close this for people, Division one, I'm going to maybe get this backwards. I think Division one was in New York and Division II was in Washington, D.C. But it's the two of those. And it's like post-pandemic, maybe by a few months or a year or so, the one in Washington, D.C.

has the White House used as a base of operations. Yeah. It is very much like the scenarios that played out at the end of that move. Civil War that we watched. And in both games, you are essentially this like, this military unit that it's not like a formalized military unit. You're in the division. It's like a militia.

A militia. That's a much better way of putting it. And there are there are these various factions that take over certain parts of cities and they try to, you know, monopolize all of the resources and the trade routes and the rest. It's everything is a dystopia. It's a totally fallen world in the post-pandemic era. The pandemic still exists. There are biohazard areas and the rest of it.

And it is just the darkest possible view of what could have happened if there was a real pandemic scenario. And maybe it's worth taking a second on that because right now we're getting these COVID hearings while Trump is in China. China, of course, blamed for the emergence of the pandemic in the first place. I am of the belief that there was no pandemic at all and that we were just told a story about a pandemic that we believed and then a hospital protocol that was happy to kill through medical malpractice and data malpractice everybody who is willing to be killed by the so-called pandemic. Yeah, I firmly agree with that.

That's where that's my reading of the pandemic as well. I do not believe there was one when I supposedly got. COVID. I am one of those cooks who believes I was directly poisoned by a foreign government because my wife and I both got sick within 30 minutes of each other. And weirdest sickness I've ever had and it was almost exactly 24 hours after taking a Canada mandated COVID test up my nasal passage on an iPad while speaking to a government agent. So, and I had been reading about that. I had seen the memes and the conspiracies of they've got irradiated COVID tests, right? Like the swabs are irradiated. I'm like, I don't fucking know. Or there's a neurotoxin on

them. And I don't dismiss anything. I just was like, I think everything's fake. And then, yeah, I lost my taste for three weeks, couldn't smell anything for about a month, got really sick for maybe a full week. But strangest illness I ever had. And the crazy thing was, let's call it 4 p.m. Um, my wife had to go upstairs at her parents house and take this government test on a webcam. And at 4.30, I had to do it. And, um, I got sick exactly like on the dot 30 minutes after she got sick. Uh, so it literally fell. I was like, okay, yep, I just got, I put something in my nose. And it had a count, a cool down, like a video game cool down. And it hit me and we had the same exact symptoms and everything. But anyway, all that to be said, the modeling and the scenarios and everything, it's pretty ridiculous not to believe it at this point because they're open about it.

You know, this is the pop culture version of it that goes into much more extraneous detail. But we talk about all the time, these tabletop exercises. They did it with the pandemic ahead of time. They did it with the election, the 2020 election. They did it with the 2024 election. They have these tabletop scenarios. And another note, I know we're talking about video games a lot. And it's not just because this movie is directly inspired by one.

I've brought up probably not in a few years. I think a lot of the Info War, I think, or rather, I think if more gamers were in the info war, we'd be winning it harder. So a lot of people who are not gamers or men of a certain age or generations don't know how toxic gaming is, and I mean that in the best way possible. Like you put on the headset, you're playing with guys either that you know or all around the world. Like I used to have friends that I played with from other countries that we never met,

and we would play like five nights a week, just these different games, because we ended up hooking up in some game and riding with each other in a squad. And the conversations in those lobbies on the headsets were not just about games because you figure these late night gaming sessions, if you're on a Friday or Saturday night on there, you know, call it like 2010 to 2020, you're on there for six hours. You're there at 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. or whatever. You're talking about all kinds of shit. you're 99% guys.

There's the occasional fake female gamer that like slithers her way into one of those lobbies. But, you know, she usually gets harassed and leaves. But you're going to talk about the government. You're going to talk about pretty much how much everything sucks. You're going to talk about how they're making Star Wars gay. And I swear, I'm not even joking, the radicalization, meaning the red-pilling of American men, it happened on fucking Xbox. It happened on PlayStation and it happened on 4chan.

And all of those were the same thing. The guys that were on 4chan were on Xbox. The guys that were on Xbox were on 4chan. All those guys were Trump guys, whether they were Democrats or Republicans or anything in between. And to tie a bow on this point, the culture war that, you know, has made people millions on YouTube over the last decade. It started with Gamergate. It started that the first group of people that the media industrial complex went after was not MAGA. It was gamers.

It was male gamers. They did this in 2016. Post 2016, they obviously recognized MAGA was a massive force, maybe a way bigger force than they thought it was going to be. And they concentrated fire on Donald Trump and MAGA. Pre 2016, it was young men are becoming radicalized on Xbox and they are talking about things we cannot have them talking about. And they were literally trying to ban this. Like a lot of the Democrat especially, or actually it was Uniparty, representatives that are all, you know, infamous to us at this day and age, look up their prior histories and testimonies on Xbox and online gaming 10, 15 years ago.

and see the shit coming out of their mouths. They were threat assessing, and they weren't threat assessing because video games are violent. They were threat assessing because of what the guys were talking about, and to bring it all the way back to this movie, and to your point about the division, maybe they were threat assessing about some of the subject matter of some of these games that these guys were playing, that maybe they shouldn't have been playing according to the system.

Man, I can totally agree with you about the environment on those video games and then talking. I mean, I remember I used to play this game, Destiny, that people may or may not be aware of, but I would always play with the same guys. And we would kind of just get on and play at the same time. And like half of the team that I would play with, there's always like six guys. Maybe there were, I don't know, eight or nine, and it would be six of us at a time, depending on who was available. But they were like all military dudes. Yeah. And we would just be talking about that.

Cops and soldiers. Yeah. Yeah. And it was so much fun. I mean, I'm kind of a dork. Those were the days. I had my very public life. And besides that, I was like being the biggest dork and just isolating myself in the video.

That was socializing, though. That's modern. That, like, became modern male socializing. And what I mean about the Gamergate thing, you guys, like, if you're not, even if you're not in the video games, look up the history of Gamergate. Look up some kind of YouTube documentaries on Gamergate. Try to see if you can find a based channel. of them that have a lot of views probably are actually based channels talking about this. But they they went after it for that reason, in my opinion. They went after it because, you know,

it's no secret that especially among young white male American and European men, suicide rates have never been higher in the last 20 years in history. Depression rates, drug abuse, which Donald Trump talks about. It's like relevant to the China visit, supposedly. retreated to those spaces because society was weaponized to the point where we're just told like everybody hates you you're not going to get the job you want um if you try to do the right thing everyone hates you if you try to do the wrong thing everyone hates you if you're toxic like we are just as natural personality traits then you're just going to get more and more and more toxic towards society as they weaponize against you so you get into cod lobbies and just talk

shit you survive your job and like you know you interact with your family and then you go and you talk to people who understand what is going on and i think it was a precursor to sort of info war communities that started to really crop up post trump and again i do think we could use a little bit of that energy again like the funny thing is when people like me or you or ghost like upset people um It is such vanilla commentary compared to like if you grew up playing in these kinds of environments or communicating these kind of environments. And it just makes you think sometimes like, man, we're not ready. We're not ready for the awakening.

If people are upset about conversations about American elections, go play call of duty for a year with strangers and come back and we can talk. All right. So let's leave the video game conversation. and as we do that, it's probably the right time to take a break. Guys, if you are watching or listening on Rumble, please go ahead and hit that thumbs up. Theoretically, that helps us. And here is a word from ourselves.

And I mean, the soft disclosure commercials have been fantastic. This one is like next level, next level. I can't even believe this is real. I mean, you know, real. Yeah, yeah. Today we remember those who gave everything And memory is never still No, Tiji, we can't stop for Sank and we have to deliver

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Load up on Soft D I don't know what will. We eventually got to get like the soft disclosure of Avengers together. I've been saying. Zach's powerful, though. He's definitely in the lead. The mullet is unbelievable. The dance moves.

I had no idea that he could move like that. Even the artificial intelligence version of Zach could move like that. Yeah, if you were anti-AI, that changed your mind. We also should take a second while we are on a little pause here from the show and let you know about Deadwood happening in June the 25th through the 28th. We are only, what, five, six weeks away from our third trip to Deadwood, South Dakota for the Great American Restoration Tour. That is like the biggest Badlands field trip you could have. ever attend. You can go to badlandsmedia.tv slash events and get your live in-person tickets to that. And obviously, virtual tickets will be on sale as well. So another fun summer event.

Man, we have some good guards coming up for the rest of the year. And this one's great timing. I mean, it's days before the 250th celebration. And I think they're doing some big stuff in South Dakota. I don't know if it's that week or the next week, but lots of cool stuff happening at that time. Yeah, this is just the perfect timing. I mean, we are now, I think, 11 days from Memorial Day, which is when the 250th birthday celebration is set to really begin in earnest. And then we'll have Flag Day, Trump's birthday, UFC at the White House Day on June 14th. And then we're sandwiched with our Deadwood right between that. and July 4th, so that'll be really cool.

Okay, so let's get back into the film and all of that. I mean, man, where to begin, I suppose, with the big thematic element, where we have the secret society now represented by modern technocrats and billionaires and globalists who are going to deploy the scientists at increasing. incredibly high cost to figure out how to seize the object that will allow them to eradicate free will, and in doing so, implement a society that is safe or secret societies. I think that that's really where they're going with it. They are trying to finally once and for all wipe out this group of assassins who just won't let Templars be Templars.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a great conceit. And the whole framework, I mean, there's so many directions to go. And one of them, though, before I forget it, I don't know if this is entirely intentional, but I remember reading about it years and years ago and thinking about it a lot, the Apple of Eden idea. As it's presented in the movie and as it's presented in the games is essentially this technology, or rather it's implied to be a DNA chain or code that has to do with human free will

for anybody who, again, I don't think all this was that well communicated in the movie version. But that's essentially what they're going after. The modern globalists, the Templars are after this sequence, because if they understand where free will comes from in the human genome, they could engineer it away. And so the Assassin's Creed, the Assassin's Guild, are the guardians of this hidden knowledge, which is this code. But of course, they literalize this stuff in the game and in the movies.

But it's very interesting terminology they use, the Apple of Eden. Even some people, conspiracy theorists, long-time conspiracy theorists, will think about the, what's his name, Steve Jobs of it all and Macintosh and Apple and why they chose that symbolism and sort of became the heirs of Silicon Valley, which, you know, largely ushered in a lot of what you're talking about with the technocrats. But I think about this from a faith-based perspective, too. I think it's really interesting that the quote-unquote bad guys in this, the Templars, who are also who when you say Templars to normal people, if they know about them, they don't immediately think secret society. That's like you've got to be into some deep, this community type of stuff to think secret society when you hear Templars. When you talk to a Normie about the Knights Templar, they think Crusades. They think Crusaders, right?

That's how we've been taught about them. Kingdom of Heaven is a great movie that kind of explores that the Knights Templar may or may not have been a subversion on the Christian Crusaders the entire time and the ones essentially subversions. converting them and working to destabilize them from within. So I think this kind of gets that across well. But the Apple of Eden, if you do have this secret society, let's ignore the DNA of it all and pretend there's no secret code in the human genome that creates free will. Where does free will come from? Well, that would be God, wouldn't it?

And what is the symbol of man's fall from grace? that would be the apple from the Garden of Eden, wouldn't it be? And so what are the assassins actually protecting and what are the Templars actually going after? Where my mind goes with this, I don't know if it was intentional. I know the framing is in terms of the symbolism. But where I go with it is the Templar are looking to stamp out belief. They are looking to stamp out human faith, basically. And if they can remove human faith in God, then they can remove free will.

They can basically create a system of automaton's. And the assassins who are pro-sovereignty, well, what is sovereignty? What is free will? There are certainly some Satanist leanings we could get into an exploration of. But a positive reading of it would be that's God's gift to man. The apple of Eden is God's gift. or free will is God's gift. And I think that's an interesting way to look at all this,

because the Knights Templar kind of gild themselves in religious garb. And, you know, you've even got at the end of this movie, they're like in an old church is where they do their rituals. And we know that they do this. The Vatican does this. Of course, there's a lot of Vatican symbolism and actual storylines all throughout the Assassin's Creed series. They're very focused on the Vatican and the Knights Templar. But, you know, they're the ones who are basically wearing Christianity as a skin suit, and the assassins are sort of the ones that might be guarding this.

So, again, it's all framed as a literal, like, here's the code to free will. But I think there's so much window dressing around the church and around men of faith that I kind of think of it like that, like men carrying the faith and the belief and then the institution that is trying to remove that. because it and I would say is that true? I would say it is true. The older I get, the more I look around and be like, who are the people that I think are just the fucking worst? They don't believe in anything. And, you know, there might be something to that with the Templars. Yeah, I think all of that's very well said.

And I like kind of the way you frame that. The quote from the Jeremy Irons character in the movie, the Charlotte Rampley, character, the woman who represents the Templar elder. She says, we've won. People no longer care about their civil liberties. They care about their standard of life. The modern world has outgrown notions like freedom. They're content to follow. And the Jeremy Irons character responds, the threat remains while free will exists for centuries we've tried with religion, with politics, and now consumerism to eliminate dissent. Isn't it time we gave science a try? And eliminate dissent is really where they're going with things. Yeah, and always happen to his point.

And giving science a try is exactly what we see happening right now. The tech dystopia is aimed directly at this. And I think that there's, you know, we don't have to just assume that all of the tech can only be deployed for this reason. But we are well on our way to a totalitarian surveillance state. Now, someone in the chat on DPH the other night, and we didn't get to answer this, but essentially asked while we were talking about data centers and surveillance and the rest of this, isn't that a way that we could eliminate crime, which is basically the same argument that they're making from the Templar side in this movie, this is how we can eliminate violence, as though violence is the worst possible thing, worse even than being constantly surveilled.

And this is something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about over the years. If there is an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God who is aware of every thought that we think, and it's totally fine to believe that, I believe that. And there is, I guess that that puts you in a sort of relationship. And this is kind of the fear of God thing. God knows everything that I'm going to do. So I need to curtail my actions with the fact that God is observing me in mind. I should not be doing things that God will find detestable.

And I'm going to limit my behavior according. So the kind of old way that this used to be. addressed and thought about brought up like oh is god watching you jerk off like that's something that i heard about throughout like my upbringing you know and people would use that either to say oh god doesn't watch that stuff or like hey man you better watch it kind of thing you're going to go blind that's where all that stuff that's where all that comes from so now we are talking in the in the kind of tech dystopia that humans by way of the machine, first off the machine, but humans by way the machine, are going to supplant God

in that role and be able to observe human behavior and track human behavior to make sure that nobody's doing anything bad. You know, with Trump and China right now, we're hearing stories about the level of surveillance state that they have and the rest of the rest of. And you can always use the kind of all watch the, you know, the watchful eye, the presence of big brother, the survey, the total surveillance state. And you can see. say, well, this is going to prevent all the bad behavior that we all agree we don't want in society. Well, that's not really the point. You can't actually do that correctly ever. The machine can't do it. Humans can't do it. Humans have to choose that for themselves to understand there is a god up there.

We are accountable to something. And so we need to curtail our behavior on our own as an act of our own free will. And because the presence of the all-knowing being is there, we will curtail our behavior, but it can't be thrust upon us by other humans, vis-a-vis the machine, being able to do that. Yeah. And I think we talked about the son of it was last week or the week before, but just the whole free will element, morality. We talk about morality a lot. And, you know, in addition to your framing of God watching you, essentially, that's like the mechanistic view of morality. Like I almost see that as like the, ironically, the materialist view of these things. It sounds so strange to say it about God in that scenario.

But doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, basically. if you're only doing the right thing because you fear punishment, that's like a lot of liberal framing or system thinkers think that I think we talked recently about morality and law. And for me, I think we as people, as humans, get that relationship inverted. You can have a separate discussion about whether or not there should be any laws. But I'm talking about laws on a conceptual basis. My understanding is that law from like a Christian biblical perspective was meant to codify what is right and wrong inherently. It wasn't, and then what became a bastardization of that is then literalists, materialist, satanist, evil, Templars, took that, took the law, took the commandments, took God's word, and said, hey, once these things are laws, they become good or bad. And that is baked into so much of what is

wrong with the world in my estimation. And one of the anecdotes I bring up often is I spend years in Canada. Obviously, my wife is from there. And, you know, we'd spot little differences, of course, over time, ideological differences. But it wasn't until the COVID pandemic era. that I was absolutely shocked at the core, like, baseline differences in many, not all Canadians and Americans. And, of course, there's many Americans who cucked themselves during that period, too. But I recall a conversation I had with the guy that I considered, like, the most based Canadian I knew, assuming he was going to agree with me about the whole Vax mandates situation. And I was just like hanging out with, you know, having a beer by the fire or something when I was up there.

maybe 2021, 22, something like that. And I just said like, yeah, man, these mandates, maybe he brought up the mandates, the vaccine mandates. And I was like, yeah, it's crazy. And he said, I know, right? Can you believe people aren't doing it? And like, but the real reason it was a shock to me wasn't because I'm like, oh, I guess he's a true believer in the virus.

That wasn't it. He didn't think it was possible to not do something that the government had. mandated. Wow. And that was where the disconnect was because he asked me, he was like, oh, are you, he wasn't ideologically opposed. He just didn't seem to care either way, but he couldn't believe people weren't getting vaccinated. And I told him like, well, I'm not vaccinated. And his question, he didn't yell at me or say that stupid or anything. His question was, how? How do you, how do you do that? I was like, you just don't do anything, you know, right? But there's, it's amazing. And I, and I, and I,

always think of that, that almost in a weird way started to really like layer its way into my awakening toward Christianity and belief and stuff like that in this morality framework. It's to say, man, I know that a lot of Americans suck, especially liberals, et cetera. We want to talk, you know, people in this community talk about that all the time. But there is something different about how Americans think of law and rights compared to most other people. And that was a real wake up to me. And I think even a lot of liberals who hate Trump and everything, they do have this baseline understanding that human beings have innate rights. And I would say that's pretty damn unique to us.

And it's pretty unique to Christianity. And to go back to the morality argument, I just think that's where it starts to me. That's where the perversion starts and where organizations, the Vatican, the Templars, these secret societies, they take advantage of that when you're talking about the surveillance state. It's relying on a foundational premise that I reject, which is that human beings are inherently bad, not just that they are sinners, but they are bad. And I was arguing with somebody about this last week of saying sin, sin, sin, sin. And, you know, I studied etymology.

I think I'm a smart guy. I do not conflate those two things with each other. sin and evil, but that's a whole philosophical discussion of whether sinning is evil and whether evil is sin, that sort of thing. But yeah, I think anytime you try to create, boil down morality into a system or get morality to be the end result of a system, you have completely missed the point somewhere along the line. Yeah, and I think that that's kind of the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament, the Old Testament societies, the law was handed down from God to Moses, and if you followed that law, then you, you know, in obeying God, yeah, then that would be good.

And people followed it to various degrees, and they would go from the order of the law, and they would go to the order of a king, and back and forth, and none of that ever worked until Jesus came and showed what morality could be and how God's morality could be, could be embodied in a human form and that people were actually capable of doing that.

And I think that one of the major issues in the rejection of Jesus Christ and the focus on law, when we're talking about law and the rule of law, as it's often used now, when they're talking about our society is based on the rule of law, they are talking about a society that explicitly rejects Jesus Christ. and that doesn't appear to most people in that expression. Donald Trump talks about the rule of law as well. I mean, and there's an element to the phrase, the rule of law, that just suggests to people that everyone should obey the law and that we've all agreed to obey the law and the rest of it. I think it's deeper than that in really important ways and that those ways kind of influence

how we go about society. I think some of this is present, by the way, in pitting groups against one another, as you mentioned before, with their crusades and the rest of it, trying to kind of lead this back to the film. The idea that Christians and Muslims are ultimately at war, I mean, you can talk about where the religion of Islam comes from in the first place. It's not Christianity. In my mind, there's only Jesus and not Jesus. Everything that is not Jesus is the same thing and that it all rejects Jesus. And just for the record here, I think that Christians in our everyday lives reject Jesus at various points throughout the day. And that it is like our practice and our duty and our mission to try to live in accordance with Jesus and bring that into our thoughts and our actions in every scenario.

And that we are all destined to fail at that almost constantly because we are by nature sinners. We are not perfect. We're not able to embody God's perfection in human form. If we're able to do it at all, it's sporadically and certainly not to the point where it becomes our identity as a character, which is why it has to be something that is put into practice. And so everything that is not that and that is explicitly not that is on the same side. And when you talk about Christians and Muslims fighting throughout the crusades, well, what? were those crusades ultimately for? They want to take the Holy City of Jerusalem, who occupies the Holy City now.

Then there's also the aspect of the Templars where they were guarding trade routes and essentially guarding financial resources that were used throughout, I guess it's kind of Europe down into the Middle East at the time. And so what element is all of that? and how do they work and operate under the guise of Christianity to continue the system that is inherently anti-Christian throughout that period? And I'm certainly not the expert on any of that stuff. Just for the audience's information, I tried to get Matt Erritt to come on and talk a bit about the Templars because he's done extensive work on all that. But he's traveling right now.

And since his regards, it would have been awesome to have him on. just for the Templar portion of the program. Go ahead. Well, that teased me up, actually, because you said, you know, I'm no expert in this, right? And I think there's value in learning about histories. I think there's value in observing the news. I think there's value in observing the stories about reality, as you might call them. As long as you understand what you're doing. And as long as you understand that in a deep, intimate study of history, you are

not going to come out of that knowing with certainty anything more than somebody who did not study that history knows, which is not to say that you will not understand more. And I know that might sound like semantics wishy-washiness, but I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Because, for example, what's in the news cycle right now today is a lot of truthers talking about, oh, of course Trump and G are working together, et cetera. And I've been saying, You know, well, a lot of these people have not done any research into the history of Xi Jinping, into the history of China, into the history of Russia or anything like that. That's not me claiming that the histories I've read are true. But it's worth evaluating those histories because they are the stories that led us to this time.

They're going to help you understand the present framing of these leaders and of these nations and the stories. and the stories that they represent, the stories told about them, the stories they tell about themselves, that can help to orient you in the present, and it can help to orient where you think things are going. So besides a cue drop saying, hey, maybe Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are working together, that's a great seed of a concept. When you start studying the histories of these guys and the stories of these nations, then that starts to collapse into reality for you. It starts to make sense.

You start to go, okay, well, actually, if I'm looking at the, if they were working together, what might I see? Well, I might look for alignment in, I might look for similarities or parallels in the story of Donald Trump and in the story of Xi Jinping and in the story of Vladimir Putin. And that's what I did. I wasn't claiming when I wrote the Russia or the China series to be saying, hey, I read up on all the facts of the histories here. I was reading the stories of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and saying, man, those stories are almost identical on a thematic level and like a major plot point level to the story of Donald Trump, which could be a massive hoodwinking. And either way, it's good to know that story.

I don't think it is because of the themes of what those stories are. They seem very anti-system. The people who are very pro-system are very against that. But I think to bring it back to the movie, one of the things that's kind of understated in this and in the game series that I think is just a great concept and it's something that's like right up your alley is that in this movie in particular, I think it's the Spanish Inquisition. It's kind of the main historical backdrop that draws an analog to the present day in this, 1492 or whatever it was. And I don't know much about that story. but this movie and this concept is basically telling you you don't know much about that story either not because you didn't look at the facts in your history book about the spanish inquisition

but it just very cleverly presents to you a fictional conceit a fictional framework of the knights templar secret society versus the assassins guild secret society fighting over the apple of Eden against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition. And it's not trying to tell you this is what was actually going on there. I think what it is trying to tell you is you have no idea what was going on there. So it's a long way to say, even if you know that an event happened in history, let's say we knew with certainty that the Spanish Inquisition happened, we have no idea why. And I think that is the major failing of people who base all of their knowledge on history. It's not that they believe events as explained to them occurred. It's that as we have

learned if you just change the intention of one of the sides of one of these stories, every single physical event could have happened exactly as you were told it occurred. And you could believe a complete falsity. And the last easy point on it would be 9-11 is the most recent. We all experienced it. We all understand the story that was told about that. Almost none of us believes that that did not happen. Very few people do not believe that it occurred, that the physical event occurred.

But almost nobody in our audience believe the story that was told about that. And now if you flash forward a thousand years and they're talking about 9-11 as a flashpoint in history, which it would be seen as, which story do you think is going to win? Because they're going to repeat all the same facts, all the same death statistics, and show you the footage that did occur and is real. And they will be telling a complete falsehood to everybody about what happened that day. Yeah, and that's why they do a lot of this stuff. they're creating future false histories. They don't actually give a shit whether or not we believe it because they know that whatever volume we achieve in convincing other people or in kind of collectively agreeing

with other people that the events did not occur as we were told they occurred. However loud that gets, it's not going to be loud enough to eclipse the mainstream media, the corporate stories, the well-funded PR campaigns that are released around these events. And yes, we know that the buildings collapsed and that people died in them. I knew people who died in them. So I don't doubt any of that. I can see that the buildings aren't there. But even the sentence, the World Trade Center towers collapsed because they were hit by airplanes.

Right. Isn't true. So, I mean, I guess there's some outside chance that the planes really did cause them to collapse. But I don't believe that. You don't believe that. Most of the people in our audience don't believe that. Most of the people in America probably at this point don't believe that. Although a number of people would say that they did believe that.

Yes. Because they don't want to deal with the social blowback that they believe they might receive if they say what they actually think. And so that part, of course, is a real problem. and how that stuff is going to look 100 years from now or a thousand years from now, who knows? But the point is that when we are told about these events, we have the events as to what actually occurred, which are often unknowable, but even to the extent that we do know them, the story as it's told to us, can be switched up in terms of its meaning or whatever else.

and then we're really just in a morass. And the problem is that the morass is frustrating to people. They think that having a well-defined story about what occurred that we all agree upon alleviates the problem of the morass. It doesn't alleviate the problem in any way whatsoever. It just ignores that it is a morass. And that's what frustrates people so much about my approach because I'm just always reminding them like, oh, hey guys, you remember that all of that is actually a morass and you're not

paying attention to it at all. And instead, you're pretending that all of this is a very well-defined, well-understood version of events. It's not that. And so that, for a lot of people, gets very annoying, very hard to deal with. And I totally understand and get that. As far as the 1492 of it all, 1492, aside from Columbus sailing the Ovales, Ocean Blue was also the year that the Jews were expelled from Spain and parts of Italy as well over kind of from 1492 to the next couple decades was the Jews being expelled from Mediterranean Europe. And there are also now stories. Everybody can look them up on their own. You don't have to take my word for it. But you can find numerous articles talking about how there's

at least some level of proof that Christopher Columbus himself was a Jew. And so then what would that mean if Columbus was a Jew who sailed the ocean blue and then inadvertently discovered America? And here we are so many years later, totally not a Jewish country, but also completely run by Jewish bankers who also funded the American Revolution and the rest of it. I mean, who knows about these things? Probably none of them are true. But if they are true, then.

Judeo Christian, Chris. Deo Christian. And they do talk about the Judeo-Christian roots of our country. Well, what are those Judeo-Christian roots? The Judeo-Christian thing we should begin to see instead of, because it is actually an oxymoron, we should begin to see it as, and listen, man, I'm not a hater of Jews. I just want some perspective on what this thing actually is. Jews and Christians are not the same thing.

They're not part of the same thing. they are actually opposites that coexist on a spectrum. And that's fine. We can coexist with people who are anti-Christian. I don't think that that is the, I don't think that that's the goal ultimately. I don't hate Jews. I want Jews to find Jesus,

just like I want everybody who doesn't know Jesus to do. Okay. So that doesn't mean I want to kill Jews or I want to expel them from the country or from society or see bad things happen to them or anything. I want to see wonderful things happen to them, and that includes my friends who are Jews, who I'm still friends with.

Okay? I would like to see them find Jesus, and then they would be like, well, that would mean I'm not Jewish anymore. And I'm like, yes, okay? So it's not like, but I don't want to see anything bad happen to them. I want to see something wonderful happen to them.

By the way, none of them can prove that they are bloodline Judeans in the first place, and that's really what we're talking about. The idea of the Jew just, was invented like 200 years ago. And this is a much different conversation. Which is why we need a Matt Walsh documentary where he sits down with Jews.

I wonder if Matt will do this documentary where you sit down with Jews because I've been told that there are ethnic Jews and non-ethnic Jews, all kinds of different, like a bagel shop. A lot of Jews run bagel shops, from what I understand. I did not grow up in New York, but that's what I've been told.

And, you know, none of them seem to know what one is. And, you know, I keep joking about that in our chat, but I'm like, what is a Jew? Nobody, ghosts will, like, power up. Like, you can charge him up for a while. And then he'll be like, here's the history of Israel, this testament and that testament. I'm like, okay, what's a Jew, though? exactly but yeah

and I would just amend I think it was just a phonetic or I'm being pedantic but I would say we can't coexist with people who are anti-Christian we can coexist with people

who are not Christian because anti to me is the problem we are dealing with we are co-existing with people who are anti-Christian anti-white anti-American

and anti means that they don't just not like us, they want to destroy us. I'm not talking about Jews. You're saying people in general, like, communists, I don't think we can coexist with. And I don't mean kill them. I mean, we cannot coexist in a cohesive society. It's not a good thing to coexist with people who hate you and who hate everything you stand for. So I think, like, there's a difference between you don't have to share my ideology, but if you are, like, radically, opposed to the sort of principles of the nation, then yeah, I don't think you should be here.

Yeah, I mean, I would say I think that we are forced to coexist with people who are anti-Christian and that the way to coexist with them is by living in a manner that makes a Christ-like life attractive to them and can be. convincing enough to them so that they pursue it themselves, which is, you know, we could quibble about the terminology and the strategy and the rest of it. I was going to say something else, and I totally forgot what it was. The idea to go back kind of in the direction of the film and of secret societies, you know, I've said a number of times over the years, like that this whole thing could just be. two different factions of Freemasons constantly hoodwinking us forever, one trying to defeat the other. And that's kind of what we get here in the Assassin's Creed, uvra.

You know, it's two secret societies. One of them is the evil secret society. The other one is a group of people who has to do evil things to conquer the greater evil. And they kind of give themselves license to do that. And that is a debate as old as time. And I'm not sure ultimately where I would come down on that. I mean, if we are necessarily in a situation where we have to live in a fallen world and survive in that world, I have many friends who, by the way, would just say, well, that is the world that we deal with. And so we have to figure out how to live in a killer be killed world.

I don't know that that's necessarily the case, and I'm not sure that Jesus would make that case. And I think that if everyone was truly committed to living in a Christ-like manner, in great enough numbers, the incentive and the opportunity to live in a way that is in polar opposition to that would be limited to the extent that it could actually be defeated. and nobody ever actually tries that because it is so hard to do it for each one of us in ourselves that we just agree that's not going to work. Therefore, we're allowed to live in ways that are not Christ-like. As long as they're more Christ-like than the people that we are opposed to. And I think that the Assassin's Creed moral framing would suggest that it's along those lines.

is it just two groups of secret societies offering two different ways to approach the world? And you really do just have to choose one or the other while we are here in this domain and try to live in a Christ-like way ourselves, maybe. Yeah. And as much as a lot of our commentary and definitely mine is very glowing about Donald Trump and the age of Trump. And I've been having a good time. And I think we're in a better place than we were in.

from a mental perspective, from an awakening perspective. But one of the notes I wrote down to your point was, can you have secret white hats? I don't mean literally. I mean, if the white hats are secret, can they be called white hats? And this is something that I would need to revisit the games. But when I said at the start of the show, there are thematic elements of Assassin's Creed that I felt were being

a little mistranslated in this movie. That was the number one that jumped out to me. And I could be wrong. I would need to revisit the games and see if maybe the framing is very similar. I thought this film was very

unkind to the assassins. I don't know if it knew it was being unkind to them. Now, I'm not saying that they were the greatest in the game or whatever that that's even right. But in the game, my memory was that they were the assassins were bound together in their shared ideology of human morality and sovereignty like free will and morality was a big big thing whereas the movie they have the line that's we work in the dark to serve the light okay cute line but then they say everything is permitted do like that's do what that wilt right i mean it it's kind of interesting

And, you know, again, that's why I said at the start of the show, like, you could lean in one direction and say, man, these are the guardians of sovereignty and free will. You could lean a little bit on the other side of the line and go, if you have a certain guy that takes that oath, he's going to interpret that in an entirely different way than you are interpreting that, because the pitch of the Assassin's Guild in this movie is free will. there's no other component that is discussed in this movie at any point in time. There is no moral component. There is no like philosophy or a cultural component that's ever discussed. It is just these people want to remove free will. These people want to guard free will. I suppose I would be on the side of the people trying to guard free will, but they don't seem great. They don't seem like great people. I kept waiting for like the Fastbender that, you know, the character in this film is not like a character from the games that they invented him for this movie. You know, same type of story, but he's not a character with a biography from the game.

And I thought that was a mistake because there's nothing redeeming about Michael Fastbender in this movie when you really start thinking about it. We are told at the beginning he is a violent criminal. he witnesses his mother's murder by his father it's never explained really in detail why that happened we know that they were protecting the apple but it's like what what was the father doing what was his whole role everything just boils down to this apple thing

whereas in the games there was a lot more going on with the assassins where they were like trying to stop certain people from rising to power they were trying to get other people to rise the power. And I thought if they had really leaned on that, it would have been more clearly communicated like, no, these people are not just defending the Apple of Eden. They are attempting, supposedly, to keep the Templars from installing their control systems in these different countries while they're doing it all. It's not just all about the Apple or the

ring of power. And before I pass it to you, it made me think of a quote that should not be controversial in the truth community. And in fact, is a quote that many truthers. repeat ad nauseum while getting upset if you have a conversation like the one you just started about whether or not we're watching two secret societies war with each other. In fact, truthers seem kind of excited about the idea that maybe the Trumps belong to some old secret society that's combating the good guys. Well, there's a quote from one of the presidents, John F. Kennedy. The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society. And we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment far outweighs the dangers, which are cited to justify it. And what's so crazy about that quote to me now is it if I said that in 2017, every single truther on the internet would agree with it. And now, In 2026, the response to most things is shut up and dribble or shut up and trust the plan. Stop questioning people in positions of authority because to question people in positions of authority might disrupt the plan. And yeah, I thought there could have been a little bit more of that, but that's kind of what I was thinking of. I don't know that you can have moral secret societies if they remain secret. Yeah, I've thought about that a lot myself.

And I agree that's a real problem. If what you are doing is good, you should be able to tell people about it. And if you think that you can't sell a good thing to people broadly and get them on your side, you've basically adopted the same idea that people get so upset at the Talmuduk Jews for adopting, and in the worst framing, I understand that not all Jews, blah, blah, blah, hashtag, not all Jews, that the Gentiles, that the people in general are goyam, their cattle, who can be let around. They're too stupid to think for themselves. They cannot live productive lives without guidance, and therefore decisions need to be made for them.

Well, the idea that everything has to be done in secret and that our good society is going to take on the bad society but must do it in secret because the people aren't going to approve of it, or they're too dumb to approve of it, they're too willing to take the incentives from the bad people to go along with the good program. All of that, the Goyam view is inherent in that thought process in the first place. And I think that that is ultimately a real problem for that viewpoint that is, to my knowledge, never addressed. Yep. It's defended. It's not just not addressed. It's defended. Yeah.

The do as thou wilt thing is definitely a problem for the Assassin's Creed. And I've thought that throughout playing the games for many years. I think that, and I guess the character, Etzio, in one of the early games, kind of addresses. it a little bit and says that it that the nothing is true part of it just means that society's foundations are fragile, that institutions lie, and the rest of it. There's some dialogue bit in one of the early games. I was looking in some of this today. Which is why I didn't assume that it meant what I mean the film framing of it, I don't think it was a little clumsy to me. I thought there was some stuff lost in translation between the two. Yeah, kind of glosses over.

it. He just gets fed to him from the mother's reappearance and the bleeding effect. She explains the creed to him. And he actually adopts the creed and accepts it himself. The idea being that through your own free will, you accept who you are determined to be because of your biology and genetics. And once you fully embrace that, then you become that thing. The institutions lie. Society's foundations are much. more fragile than we imagine them to be or that we are told they are. But ultimately, it is man's action that dictates how the world is going to operate. It is inescapable that our actions dictate the outcomes and therefore we have to bear the consequences of those actions. And so it's kind of a very complex moral framework that I don't think devolves as simplistically into the kind of Alistair Crowley. version of do as thou wilt that we are communicated but it's also not just a pure like we live according to god's order now yeah there's no moral there's no moral code necessarily

yes except to the extent that we would tether that framing to a more foundational moral code like if we believe that jesus represents logos and that's what it is in the bible it's not just that there is a morality. It's that Jesus literally represents the embodiment of God's perfect order. And if we understand that there is an underlying order that we have to align ourselves with, well, then you can take this moral framing and apply it to that order and tether it to that order or to even natural law, which is a more secular version of that order. And then maybe you have something there that that allows for that complexity whereas the Crowley version of it doesn't um i guess that is maybe the way to resolve those to the extent that those can be resolved yeah and again

going back to that the reason i think of that kennedy quote often um the key word there and that i use often in my own framing in recent years of uh biblical morality baseline morality is inherent the word inherent, which is, you know, what you just made me think of, that there, that Jesus is representative of an inherent order to things, which means there is good and there is evil, which also means, and this is, I'm not a biblical scholar, but I also don't care to be in terms of like giving me the authority to speak about these things. Because with morality, if we are created, in God's image and in accordance with God's design, then inherent within us is that knowledge. That's my opinion.

That's my feeling. That's my intuition. Inherent within you is good and perhaps bad. But to know that there is a difference between those things. And I have always considered it to be a huge contradiction in the minds of some Christians, obviously not all, that ignore that and put everything in human nature down to either inherent evil, which is how some take the sinner's commentary, or nurture alone. Like if you're taught the right things at the right times, you'll be good.

If you're not taught the right things at the right times, you'll be bad. That also doesn't make sense from a moral framework, you know, from a biblical framework. because why would God create a world wherein somebody never gets exposed to his teachings and then doom that person to hell? It doesn't make any fucking sense. It doesn't make any fucking sense. And I've argued with Christians about this

until I'm blue in the face back when I was an atheist. But now that I am not an atheist, I still don't think it makes any sense, but I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's because it's not true. I think it's because there is an inherent foundational morality that is encoded into us

that we can choose. to break and sin and that that is inherent to the fall of man. And I think the sort of dance between the Assassins Guild and the Templars is kind of about that, is this idea of this inherent thing. They focus it on free will as opposed to morality. But I think that if free will is encoded, then morality would be as well. And again, that word from John F. Kennedy, we are a we are as a people inherently opposed to secrecy. I just, I like the way he framed it, because he doesn't try to explain it away. Like, he doesn't need to explain this law or that law, or these are the consequences of secrecy. He just says, we the American people, we the Christian people,

which is really what he meant, because he was obviously born and raised Catholic, and was very devout. We are inherently opposed to secrecy. We are inherently opposed to lies. And as your president, I don't need to make any other argument against that. And as a truther, we shouldn't need to make any argument against that. We could understand why you need to keep secrets from your enemies. But if the plan doesn't end with full disclosure to the American people of everything,

that needs to be disclosed, it is repugnant and it is inherently opposed to what we stand for. So I'm willing to die on that hill. Yes. And it's also inherently opposed to the very program they've laid out in all of the secret code they gave everybody. Freedom. Yeah. And for the people. Well, it can't be for the people if you're not even willing to tell the people what you're doing.

That's like that's totally incompatible. And I don't know how anyone is still defending claims otherwise. And it's not a knock on the Q thing or even Q people or any of it. It's just to say at some point, you have to come out and say, hey, we have to do this thing. This thing included a whole lot of Psiops because the truth is all of you have been brainwashed for really, really long time. And we hope that you'll forgive the extent to which. we were also tricking you, but at this point now, I hope you all can see what is in front of you and everybody needs to kind of take some responsibility and work forward unless you want

to be hoodwinked again because they're not going to stop trying. And I would be like totally okay with that. I really would be okay with that, I think. Well, one point on that that you make off and that I agree with largely is that one of the reasons I really, I focused a lot of my commentary in the last couple of years on Donald Trump over over just the plan in general. And that's not because I'm hero-worshipping him, but I do write about him a lot more than the plan and stuff like and the secret white hats and patriots. And one of the reasons is a lot of the stuff you've said about Trump for years that I like, which is that he is kind of the only guy who does do that. I'm not saying he doesn't engage with sciops. You know, he's he's he's in the battle space.

The Rich Higgins memo, we've heard of the million times. John brings it up a lot. But to your, the way you frame Trump a lot, he really does always give you that framework. He does give you like he says what's going on. I mean, he really does, I think, embody the choice to know refrain that a lot of cute people talk about. And that I used to focus on with a lot of that commentary, which is why I still do have a good feeling about him and the way he navigates these things. Because I do think there's a certain element of Trump being like, I did tell you that the pandemic was bullshit. I told you that the elections were fake.

I did tell you that stuff. Now, I'm going to continue to operate as the president, you know, of the 80% of people who don't believe any of the shit I'm saying. I'm still going to operate as their president under the framework they understand. But I am saying the true thing. I am saying that to you people. And that's how I interpret the choice to no refrain when it comes to Donald Trump. not in terms of secret military operations. Yeah, I'm totally with you on that.

Okay, so we're kind of running long, which is fine, but I have a few things left, and if you have some, feel free to bring them up. I wanted to just note how great the line was that Brennan Gleason delivered in his one scene there. He said a man grows with the greatness of his task. and that yeah yeah i thought that that was incredible not only on its own but in the context of him explaining to his son that he had to kill his mother and uh because the they had both agreed

that the mission was bigger than either of them their lives were already committed to that cause and he tells him i should have killed you too but i really did didn't have the heart to do it. And so he was basically also saying, maybe my greatness didn't grow well enough. Yeah. But then, of course, it turns out that the son kind of redeems that whole situation. In the end, on behalf of the order that his mom was a part of,

which means he now accepts his father's explanation. His father then appears in the bleed through. And kind of like they have the moment of knowing as how does. in his understanding of what it is he has come from, him accepting what it means to be that, and then his ability to reconcile and move forward. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to write this yet because I'm not sure it's fully baked in my mind.

But I think that maybe I talked about this the other night with John or maybe I talked about it with you last week. But I think that one of the major aspects of this kind of awakening period is you realize that all of these things that we participated in, that we believe we're an important part of our world, things that we even liked, things that we loved in some instances are actually not what we believe them to be. There's something else, and that's something else that they are is evil in large part. Maybe it's two sides again of the same coin.

It's the kind of yin and yang of everything, where there's an evil aspect if you use it for evil. And if you're not using it for evil, then it's not evil and may even be good. All of that stuff is very confusing. It's very hard to parse. but that part of being able to stick the landing of the awakening and get through this process completely rather than being stuck in the second matrix. And maybe we did talk about it last week is being able to reconcile the world as it is and being able to live and operate in that world despite knowing what we know. And I think that Cal was an example in that scene of being able to do that. You made me think of Star Wars and I'm not even the biggest Star Wars guy.

but uh quigon jinn played by leum nisen he's a he's a great character and he is later star wars yeah he is he is besmirched heavily uh in the in the star wars fandom because he is the one who found anakin skywalker and trained him against the wishes of obi one canobi and mace windu and uh and yoda uh quigon jinn insisted that Anakin be trained, even though the other three Jedi of the order had great misgivings about him. They thought that there was something in his future that was going to turn out to be very Hitlerish, for lack of a better term. But Quigone's posthumously, he made Obi-1 promise him to train the boy. And then Obi-1 does this in line with Quigon's wishes.

and the sort of theme that Lucas was going for there was eventually, although he commits many atrocities, Anakin Skywalker is the only one capable of defeating the emperor and does defeat the emperor and freeze the galaxy from the emperor, right? So it's kind of interesting because I think as a moral framework, I think a lot of Star Wars people actually kind of get that a little mixed up and they think, oh, you know, it's okay that Anakin committed all these atrocities as Darth Vader because he eventually did the right thing.

I don't think that that was what Lucas was trying to say. I think he was trying to say, Quigon Jin in the moment made the right moral decision because at the time, Anakin Skywalker was a young boy who needed help. And at that time, he did the right thing. And the other Jedi did not want to do the right thing because they feared a future that Quigon said may or may not happen. So I've always liked him as a character

because he did the right thing. Many bad things happened, but eventually it aged pretty well. And I don't know. Maybe that's the answer to some of these things. Like the morality stuff here is the more macro-oriented I get, the more big-picture stuff I think about,

the more micro-oriented I actually feel, which is, man, all I can control is what's in front of me on one framing, but I think even on a moral framework, it's that radiation concept of doing the right thing that's in front of you. And like you said earlier, you know, people give up on the idea of having a moral society. And it's like, well, are you an immoral person? Why don't you just focus on that?

And then the rest of it might work itself out. Yeah. And that's all we really can focus on in the first place. Like everybody wants to change the world. That is a ridiculous, ridiculous goal. And the people who have that goal and pursue that goal, and prioritize the pursuit of that goal are almost always sociopaths.

It just somehow works that way. Two last things. So one of them is the balance back and forth between Jeremy Irons' character, Reichen, the father and the daughter. I think her name's Sophia in the movie too, which is interesting, because of course that means,

I think that's the Greek word for wisdom, if I'm not mistaken. He says to her at one point, you've brought order to society for the first time and suggesting that she has done that by turning over the apple of Eden, which eliminates free will. Her goal, as she stated multiple times, was to put an end to violence and to put an end to pain for everyone. She is a secular utopian. That was the goal of all of the Templars. and they wanted to eliminate free will in order to do that. They thought they were going to fix the world by removing the one thing, as you mentioned before,

that is the substance of the world. The only thing that can make you good is, and by the way, this is what all I think free will is. I don't think that we can actually determine a whole range of things. I think that we can determine in the moment whether or not we are going to take the godly choice, or the not godly choice it is either christ or antichrist in every single one of these decisions and we are making that choice consistently always and in the mind of god he can know all of the outcomes and all of these situations but it is still up to us to choose god or not god christ or not christ in every one of these um in every one of these moments yeah well again i'm not trying to reduce that by referencing star

Wars, but that's literally why I referenced Quigong Jim, because I think that's what he lived as. And like, there's books of Star Wars that are actually like way better than the movies that kind of talk about this, is that was Quigon Jin actually the ultimate Jedi? And the reason for that was that in the moment he was focused on what is the right choice in this moment. I'm not going to meditate on it. I'm not going to try to project what this kid's going to do in 30 years. I'm going to focus on what is the right thing to do right now and have faith that I'm going to do that thing every time usually works out. The only other line I had, a tattooed teacher, she might have gone to bed, but she was in the chat earlier tonight, also called this out. So one of the quotes from

the Cotillard character, violence is a disease like cancer. And like cancer, we hope to control it one day. And I wrote down Freudian slip, because fastbender, Cal, leads into that by saying, you can cure me. Can you cure violence? It's a conversation about curing violence. And she says, violence is like cancer. We hope to control it. She removes the word cure from his sentence and replaces it with control. And I thought that was a nice little calm there of that is what that is what the centers for disease control. not cure and you know you don't have to be too much of a truth of these days to believe that that's what the whole industry is all about yeah it's also what they said about michael jordan in the

90s you cannot stop him you can only hope to contain him um there was a great line delivered um kind of the bookend on that scene uh later in the film when cal says um you know you're supposed to cure me of violence who's going to cure you of basically your deranged scientist. Being a psycho. Yeah. Yeah. And then there was one last thing. I think that I wanted to mention, oh, the idea that the leap of faith was required for free will.

And I think that that's true, you have to ultimately decide that you are going to do the godly thing, even though you do not know the outcome. and even though the outcome you want that you believe you want is pursued in the other direction, you still have to do it anyway. That is where the leap of faith comes in and you have to do that over and over and over again in your life. And you especially have to do it when it is something of critical importance

and it takes a lot of strength to be able to do that as something you kind of develop over time. The great thing about this, as people who have played the games understand, is that any time you jump off of anything in the world there will be an extremely soft haystack for you to just disappear into. And no enemy soldiers will notice that you have jumped off of this 10-story structure into this very small haystack. No townspeople will notice.

Nobody will notice. You can stay in there as long as you want. It'll be fine. And as soon as the guards are gone, you can come out of there. Yeah, or you can whistle from the haystack. and get the guards to come over and then pull them in there. Yes. Yes.

Man, you mentioned this on a show years ago that you just thought there was going to be more quicksand in your life. Yeah. Yeah. I thought there was going to be more haystacks to hide in. Yeah. It's like, man, this is. But even the haystacks I've seen are quite tightly bound and don't seem like great hiding places. Yeah.

History has really run out of plentiful haystacks. Yeah, right. Okay, so we will leave it there. I know we have a couple of rants. I'm not sure if we have any boosts, but in the rant business, we have submission yogi with a cue in there somewhere,

I think is how it goes. Pretty effing cool movie, absolutely insane that it's rated PG for moderate violence. I did not realize that this movie is rated PG. That is insane. I agree. And then the final demand says, Bibi, did you and Mrs. B live in Canada during COVID or was it a visit?

Why did you have to test for the government online in Canada? Was it to come back to the U.S.? A random household test? Never heard of that. Wow. At the time we lived in Boston, we were going up to visit. And as a condition of our visit, once we got to our place of quarantine, where we were staying with other human beings.

So this made perfect sense. We had to take tests on camera. And if we did not, we were going to be arrested and removed from the nation. And after that humiliation ritual, I said, I am not fucking going back there until all this shit is done. And I did not. Nice work. Also, what do we have? 15 Tony B.A.

Left a subscription. I think Snowcat. Yes. Snowcat operator in chat earlier, bought some people, some subscriptions. So thank you, all of you, and thank you all for watching. So let's talk about next week. You are going to be gone next week, correct? I am.

Okay, so Burning Bright is going to miss Story Hour for next week. And in place of Burning Bright, I am putting on my friend, Josh, who I think all of you will get a big kick out of. He is a bit of a wild man, very entertaining. He is a writer, a screenwriter, and a professor of literature. He's also a very, very funny, funny guy knows everything about movies, has watched more movies, more times than I can ever imagine. And so the movie for next week is one that has been requested from Badlands, Story Hour fans, I think numerous times over the years. I think maybe Bay Theater Dave was the first one to request it.

But next week we are going to do Bullworth starring Warren Beatty and or Beatty, Warren Beatty and Hallie Berry among others. Beatty also wrote and directed the movie. Here is the description. A suicidally disillusioned liberal politician. puts a contract out on himself and takes the opportunity to be bluntly honest with his voters by affecting the rhythms and speech of hip-hop music and culture. Wow.

So there we have it. I've never seen this. More have I. Yeah. Yeah. We did miss a boost. I wanted to grab. That was AJC sent over 20 bucks.

Thank you, men. Blessings all. Thank you very much, J.C. always sneaking in at the end usually so we call you this time yeah Warren Beattie so he was the parallax view man yes really had never seen any of his stuff before you picked that one bunch of a bunch of great films he's been in maybe we'll do some more of them one day but yeah so thank you everybody for watching and we will see you next week for bulworth good thank you so much for joining us and don't forget to hit the thumbs up on this video and a

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