Behind the Bastards - Part One: Rudolf Steiner: The Racist Who Invented Organic Farming and Waldorf Schools

Episode Date: September 24, 2019

In Episode 86, Robert is joined by Chris Crofton to discuss Rudolf Steiner.Footnotes:1. A Reflection on the Anthroposophical Path of Schooling2. 'Isms & 'Ologies: All the movements, ideologies and doctrines that have shaped our world 3. Biodynamic farming is on the rise – but how effective is this alternative agricultural practice?4. Twitter Thread5. Head Archivist, Archives at the Goeheanum Dornach, Switzerland. Author of "Anthroposophy in the Time of Nazi Germany", Verlag R. Oldenberg, Munich, 1999. 6. Rudolf Steiner and the Jewish Question7. Winston Churchill: Accusations of anti-Semitism, economic inexperience and the blunt refusal that led to the deaths of millions8. STEINER REJECTED ANTISEMITISM AND RACISM ALL THROUGH HIS LIFE9. Waldorf Graduate awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine10. ‘Psychic’ Ex‐Student's Influence Shakes Waldorf School11. Why are Steiner schools so controversial?12. Anthroposophy and Ecofascism13. WHO WAS RUDOLF STEINER?14. Rudolf Steiner's Quackery15. Anthroposophic Medicine: An Integrative Medical System Originating in Europe16. Anthroposophy and Ecofascism17. ATLANTIS AND LEMURIA18. Truth and Knowledge Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's creating my occult belief systems that if you scratch deep beneath the surface are fundamentally anti-Semitic and racist? I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we have increasingly long and incoherent introductions. But this one does tie into the theme of the episode. What it doesn't tie into is my guest today, Chris Crofton.

Hey, how are you? I'm doing good. I always expect the air horns. Yeah, it's okay to be eating a croissant. You continue eating that croissant, and I will introduce you as a comedian, a musician, and an advice columnist. I hope you finish the croissant now. Yeah, I'm done. Fantastic. That's all true. I write an advice column called The Advice King for the Nashville scene, which is like there, oh, weekly there. And it's kind of a comedic advice column, but I get mad about stuff a lot. So I mean, this podcast seems like to me a good fit. Like, you guys get mad, don't you? Oh, yeah. Yeah, we do get mad. This is going to be, there's going to be some anger here. There's going to be also a lot of confusing

here. This is a weird episode to bring you in on for your first episode of Bastards. I'm ready. I'm ready for anything. This might be the weirdest one we've done yet. Have you ever heard of a guy named Rudolph Steiner? You know, honestly, he sounds familiar, but I don't, I can't figure out why. Well, let me ask a follow up question. Do you know anyone who ever went to a Waldorf school? I don't think so. That's okay. Now, he's not a huge name anymore. A lot of Waldorf schools are pretty common. They're an international chain of very progressive schools that have good reputation for like, particularly the arts. Jennifer Aniston graduated from a Waldorf school, Rutger Hauer graduated from a Waldorf school, Justin Thoreau and Big Sean.

You know, there's, there's a lot of different people who went to Waldorf schools and the Waldorf school was the brainchild of Rudolph Steiner, among other things. Now, most people, again, haven't heard of Mr. Steiner. He also invented organic farming and was an influential mind behind the development of Nazi ideology. Yeah, I was thinking he sounded like a Nazi. I mean, his name is Rudolph, after all. Yeah, he was not a Nazi, although weirdly enough, he ties in directly to another Nazi named Rudolph. It's quite the tale. Yeah. Well, the Waldorf school, okay, so that's a chain of like progressive yeah, high schools for rich people who, I don't think they're just high schools, but yeah,

chain of progressive schools for rich people. Yeah, okay. Yeah. So that makes sense that I would not have heard of those. Yeah, I'm from Connecticut. Oh, actually, no, you know what, Connecticut, there's definitely a Waldorf school. Okay, I'm not from, I didn't have enough money to be in that loop. But yeah, I'm sure I knew people who I'm sure I actually grew up with a lot of people who probably were going to those things or, you know, people in New Canaan, Connecticut. I'm from New Canaan, Connecticut, which is the dude of L. Paul Bremmer, the third who dismissed the Iraqi army, went to my school. Aw. Yeah. I know Paul Bremmer. I know those kind of people. Yeah, yeah. Paul Bremmer's the kind of guy who would send his kid to a Waldorf school,

which is nothing against actually, I have friends who went to Waldorf schools. I know so, but somebody who teaches at one, we're going to be talking about their origins today and some things that still go on at some of them that are pretty dark. But a lot of them are just kind of normal, progressive-y schools. So if you went to a Waldorf school, we're not calling you a Nazi, but there's about to be some Nazi shit up in this. Right? Well. Strap in. I mean, I'm not, I'd like to, I'm already mad at the Waldorf school for turning Justin Thoreau loose on us. I mean, I feel like one Rutger Hauer equals out like one and a half Justin Thoreaus. That's true. I mean, I'm very grateful for Rutger Hauer and I'm equally ungrateful for old Thoreau.

Yeah. Yeah. So like we can, we can both, we have, we have like the, the tears in the rain speech from the end of Blade Runner to thank Waldorf schools for, but also Justin Thoreau and a lot of friends. So yeah, it's tough, you know, I'm going to read a Wikipedia summary of what a Waldorf Steiner school is just so that we can kind of get on the same page about how they build themselves. So this is kind of the, the, the, the basic description you'll get of one from our most trustworthy randomly edited encyclopedia. Waldorf education, also known as Steiner education, is based on the educational philosophy of Rudolph Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy. It's pedagogy strives to develop pupils and intellectual artistic and practical skills in

an integrated and holistic manner. The cultivation of pupils imagination and creativity is a central focus. So that doesn't, that doesn't give you a lot of details, right? The, the, other than that, it's like, you know, it's focused on developing people, kids, intellectual and artistic skills, which like you'd hope any school would do. The mention of Anthroposophy is, is, is probably the one stand out there, which have you ever heard of Anthroposophy? No, could you say that part again of that description where he said, where it said Anthroposophy? Yeah, it just says that he's the founder of Anthroposophy, as well as the educational philosophy behind Waldorf schools. Well, okay,

that's unusual. Yeah, I've never heard of that. Yeah, yeah, you don't run into the phrase Anthroposophy a lot, but it's still a thing. Is that the thing where you judge someone's character by the shape of their head or like lumps, lumps in their head? That's phrenology. That's phrenology. Yeah, yeah, that's phrenology. Although I will say probably a lot of anthroposophists were phrenologists back in the day. They're like sitting around feeling each other's heads and drinking cognac. Yeah, yeah. So it's none of that sounds inherently bad, but obviously this is behind the bastards and it's going to get terrible. Right. So let's first delve into Rudolf Steiner's life. Rudolf Steiner was born at 1861 in a tiny Austrian village whose name I am about to butcher.

Kroszwek, his father is generally described as a, what, you don't even know if that's wrong, Sophie. You don't know Austrian villages. No, you probably got it right. That's the funny part. Well, our Austrian listenership will let me know if I'm wrong. His father is generally described as a mid-level railway official in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Once among the world's great powers, the old empire was in a state of advanced decay for much of Rudolf's life. It was also one of the world's major crossroads, an incredibly ethnically and culturally diverse melting pot encompassing the Balkans, much of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. His hometown is currently part of Croatia. So like, I guess if you're Croatian and listening, you'll know if

I've pronounced Kroszwek wrong. He was born in a Croatian melting pot. Well, but it was Austrian at the time. Okay. Yeah. You'd get shot for being Croatian back in those days. That's a white melting pot. Yeah. I mean, they didn't consider them all white at that point. If you were from that far east in Europe, they were like, that's not a white guy. He's from the Balkans. Okay. Italians were still earning the right to be called white when he was born. Okay. Yeah. So he spent most of his childhood in youth in Vienna as well as places with names like Steermark and Bergenland. As a young man, he showed a strong interest in mathematics, physics, and natural history. He eventually enrolled at age 18 in the Technical University in Vienna. He started attending

lectures by famous philosophers of that era, one of whom was Franz Bretano. Now, Bretano was the influential mind behind a number of concepts in philosophy that I don't find interesting and one in which I kind of do, the theory of perception. The key line here was perception is misception. In short, Bretano believed that our external senses could not tell us anything concrete about the existence of the world because we might just be hallucinating or whatever. As such, all we could know for certain was our internal perception. So if you smell a rose, you can't know that a rose is actually in front of you, but you can know that the scent of a rose is in your nose. That's may seem pedantic, but it had a big influence on Rudolph Steiner. And again, this was the 1880s,

so people had nothing else to do. Right. Yeah. But so speculate, a lot of speculation going on instead of the internet. There's a lot of just like thinking. Yeah. Yeah. That's literally what people had instead of the internet, which sounds like a nightmare. They were like, I think roses are actually a figment of our imagination while they were like sitting around doing nothing. That was their Twitter. That's cool. Yeah. Thank God we have the gram now. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I think I know which is worse by a long shot, actually. I think speculating about whether roses are invisible or not is a better pastime than playing Candy Crush. All right. Well, yeah, that's fair.

When Rudolph was 21 in 1882, a Germanist scholar named Karl Schroer tasked him with helping to publish Gertha's works on natural history. Now, Gertha was a free thinker who considered himself a Christian, but thought all Christian churches were more or less nonsense. He was notably an anti-nationalist, but is also widely considered to be one of the founding minds behind the idea of Germanness. As Steiner was working through Gertha's catalogue, he also grew involved in the burgeoning Pan-German movement. The German state had only been founded about a decade earlier at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, and a lot of people in central Europe with backgrounds similar to Steiner were super excited about this hip new concept called

being German. He started churning out articles for the Austrian Pan-German press and essentially tried to push the idea that Austria ought to be a part of this new Germany thing. So he gets very into the idea of Germany, which I don't know if you're aware, has been kind of a mixed bag, historically. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, it was like the narrative of the modern world was like emerging at that time, like along with industrialization. So it was, I guess, I mean, I'm actually, I don't know what I'm talking about. Cold Brew just made me say industrialization. Yeah, no, it had a lot to do with industrialization. But yeah, they had like, they were just establishing the narrative of like modern,

yeah, anyway. Go ahead. Yeah, I get, I mean, I'm just thinking about what they're doing. Okay. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's happening right now is they're moving past the idea of these countries that were countries because some dude had conquered an empire 300 years before and were moving towards this idea of countries based on ethnic groups. So like the Roman empire, that like ethnicity didn't fucking matter to the Roman Empire. It was like they're Woodstock. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was like they're Woodstock but racist. I think maybe I'm pan German. Yeah, maybe all the people who don't look exactly like me are worse and I should just live in a country with people like me. Right, right, right. Yeah. So that's sort of the developing

idea at the time. But a cultural shift. A cultural shift. A big one. Yeah. From 1884 to 1890, Steiner made a living as the private tutor of a rich businessman and an encyclopedia writer. He also worked on his PhD at the University of Rostock. His thesis had an appropriately boring title. The basic question of epistemology, especially in relation to Ficht's philosophy of science. I have no idea what it's about and I'm not going to learn. Up through the 1890s, there was little reason to believe Steiner would ever be a particularly influential or interesting human being. During the late 1890s, he started editing literature magazines and the trade papers for the German stage association. He became prominent among the German typesetters

and printers associations. And during the early 1900s, he lectured increasingly on history, literature, and the art of speaking to various audiences. But sometime around the turn of the 20th century, Rudolf Steiner had a profound spiritual experience. And it's kind of unclear what exactly happened. But he just sort of became convinced that he could see into the spirit world and communicate with celestial beings. Yeah, there was opium. They were all smoking opium back then. Yeah. Fuck an opium or something. Some steppin' wolf bullshit. Yeah. Now, I wish I had a more exciting answer for the actual event that like flipped his brain on here, but yeah, it might have been fucking opium. So he went truly, he really did truly,

he thought in some way that he had had a supernatural or was a supernatural awakening. That would be a fair way to say it. He had a supernatural awakening and became convinced that he could communicate with this spiritual world outside of the regular world. Wow. Yeah. So that's where Steiner's head goes in this period of time. That's odd. That doesn't happen to everybody. No, it does not happen to everybody, thankfully. Because we really could not handle that many more Rudolf Steiner's in our history. No, that happens to a lot of like the worst people have those kind of epiphanies. People like Jim Jones and stuff like that. Don't have epiphanies. That's one of the leading messages of this show. If you start to think that

you are in touch with the spirit world or whatever, you might want to settle down because you're probably about to do something bad eventually. Stick to drugs that just dole your sense of the supernatural. That's the first. Tobacco, alcohol, opium. Exactly. Oh yeah. No, not opium. Chewing tobacco. Stick to chewing tobacco. Keep those ghosts out of your head. Yeah. Just be normal. Settle down. Settle down. Early 1900s guy. Yeah. Yeah. If only. So in 1901, Count and Countess Brockdorf, a pair of Austrian nobles with a deep interest in the occult, listened to some of Steiner's increasingly weird lectures on history and spirituality and got interested in the guy. They invited him to speak at the Theosophical Society. I know about

that. Yeah. Yeah. What do you know about the Theosophical Society? That doesn't have anything to do with Madame Blavatsky. It sure as shit does. That's where we're headed. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I am very excited to talk about Helena Blavatsky. We have not talked about her on the show yet. And I think you've obviously heard of her, which is great. I'm going to guess a lot of listeners haven't. She's one of the most important people who ever lived for some terrible reasons and is a neat tale. We'll do an episode on her someday. Was she tied? Did she have anything to do with Rasputin? Yeah. I think there's some rumors to that effect. I don't know exactly that, but I can tell you she had a shitload to do with some Nazis.

Okay. I didn't really know that. Okay. Yeah. Not directly, but in terms of her ideas. Sure. Helena Blavatsky was about 30 some odd years older than Rudolf Steiner. And while she never lived to see the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany, her ideas were utterly critical to the formation of what those of us in the Nazi study in business call esoteric Hitlerism. She was a foundational mind behind the New Age movement, too. And her influence extends to shit like goop and your local vaguely witchcraft themed store. One of Helena's big ideas was the concept of root races. And this is where we get the term Aryans, first being used in a context similar to how the Nazis used it. Helena Blavatsky is the person who invented the modern context

with which the word Aryans is used. And by modern, I mean racist. I did not know that. Yeah. There's an actual Aryan ethnic group that went up through India and into China that's a thing that if you're an anthropologist, you're going to study the Aryans. And then there's like Nazi Aryans, like this idea. Right. Cause she was from Russia, right? She was not. Yeah, I think so. So she wasn't trying to, if she was talking about Aryans, she was probably talking about just some like a supernatural race or something like that, but not necessarily German. And then the Germans probably were like, Oh, that's us. Yeah. Yeah. She was not talking about Germans, but she was talking about Aryans in a way that like some Germans really latched on. And

then developed her ideas more. Yeah. That sounds like us. Yeah. So she believed in this concept of root races. And she believed that modern peoples were descendants from these different root races. And in her philosophy, the extinction of Native Americans was a matter of what she called karmic necessity as a result of the will of spiritual masters who secretly organized and ordained all human progress. So Helena Blavatsky is like Aryans are a thing. Whenever races get wiped out, it's good. It's ghosts making it happen because of karma. So that's why genocide happens. Ghost karma. Now spiritual. That's fucking ghost karma is that Scientology. Yeah. Yeah. There's a little bit of that in here. And Blavatsky, like, you know,

Blavatsky had an impact on, what's his fucking name? The Satanist guy. Alistair Crowley. Yeah, Crowley. Crowley had an impact, a significant impact on the development of Alron Hubbard. Yeah. So like all of these, all of these people are tied together. I do a lot. Have you talked about Jack Parsons on this show yet? A little bit. We talked a little bit about him in the Alron Hubbard episode. We didn't get much into like the ghost baby or the devil baby or whatever that Alron Hubbard tried to fucking to that lady. Yeah. It's a wild tale. Scarlet woman. Yeah. All of this stuff is tied. So Helena Blavatsky, like I said, she's in the intellectual chain of custody for Nazism, as well as like

kind of modern Satanism and as well as like just like random books on tarot that you pick up at like your local corner store. Like all of this shit is she was very influential. And how did Rudolph find out about her? Well, she was just a big, like he gets invited to speak at the Theosophical Society. Okay. And Helena Blavatsky was the founder of the Theosophical Society. So she's like the intellectual guru behind this cult that he first gets invited to speak at and then finds himself being drawn into. So that's where he gets like taken in by all these ideas of root races and like spiritual masters and karmic necessity. And I should, I should note the spiritual masters that Blavatsky and then Steiner talked about were like vague non-human entities, possibly

from space. You wouldn't be far off to lump them in with HP Lovecraft's concept of the old ones. They're not wildly dissimilar. So on the outside, at least the Theosophical Society presented itself as a group of free thinking intellectuals asking questions about the nature of the universe and spirituality. But its actual organization was fundamentally authoritarian. Only Blavatsky and her chosen successor, Annie Besant, could receive the secret truths from their other worldly patrons. Ergo all-power in the organization descended by necessity from those people in a pretty straight line. Now, of course, Madame Blavatsky didn't just receive her wisdom from direct conversations with the old ones. That would be silly. She also benefited from the astral

equivalent of a public library, the Akashic Record. These indestructible tablets of astral light held the entirety of the human past, present, and future in them. By studying the tablets, one could discover perfect knowledge of the world and history. Now, anyone theoretically could access these records. It's sort of like Wikipedia. But since they were astral projections, the desires and biases and fears of an individual viewer could lead them to make the mistake of thinking that like they were reading the wrong thing on the records, which is why only trained occultists could be trusted to derive useful information from the Akashic Record. Where was the Akashic Record? In a building? It's in space. It's in space. Oh, so this was like, it was not public domain. It was

like, I mean, okay. It's Space Ghost Wikipedia. Right. So it's something they said existed, and everybody took their word for it kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Kind of like the gold tablets that told old, what's the name of the guy who founded Mormonism? Joseph Smith. Yeah, Joseph Smith. I found a tablet that said I can have sex with your wife and they're like, where is it? It exploded. Yeah. It's like that, but less physical because no one even pretends that the Akashic Record was ever a physical thing. I just love it. Joseph Smith got away with that. I just, I give it to him just for hootspa, just to say, you know, where is the tablet? I want to see this tablet. Listen, you can have sex with my wife. I just want to see the gold

tablet. It exploded. It's like I always say, Chris. Great minds who want to have sex with 15-year-olds, think alike. Oh, God. So that's interesting. So Madame Lovatsky, okay, so this smells to me of just rich kids. I mean, this just sounds like rich kids. They're just a bunch of rich kids and they got, they like to do weird shit, which is... Not a lot of day laborers among the Theosophical Society. No, yeah, exactly. Not a lot of construction workers. Your average peasant was like making bricks out of shit while these people are talking about... We're like getting ready to die in World War One. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So like eating like root vegetables and getting ready to die in World War One while these assholes are in some mahogany room. I've talked to Goose. Yeah, being

like I am the only one who could access the invisible library and shit like that. The ghost library in space. It's fun. I've been to rich people's parties. They're fun. I mean, you know, I think they replaced, all the spiritualism has been replaced with cocaine now. That might be a step forward, actually. It's less dangerous. It's just 100% bullshit that goes away in the morning. I will say Sigmund Freud was also in this city at around this time. So these people were probably doing a lot of cocaine as well. Oh, God. Like this is the period in which people realize how awesome cocaine is. So I'm going to guess actually a lot of this is explained that that might be why Steiner had his spiritual awakening. So these guys, go ahead.

No, no, continue. Oh, I was just going to say like, anyway, this sounds like a lot of fun. I mean, in a way, you know, if it didn't go bad, I mean, like the idea of like getting together and I feel like I was born at the wrong time. I think I would have had a great time in these things being like, I think that, you know, I think if I have a little another bump of cocaine, I bet I can see my grandma projected on a, yeah, or like, I'll start spitting out. What's that stuff that they used to, uh, uh, what's the stuff that looked like pasta that they were always, but it turned out it was like cheesecloth. They were, uh, during Seance's ectoplasm. Oh, oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's how they would fake

ectoplasm. I would love that. I would just be like, oh, I'm about to produce ectoplasm. That'd be a way to get laid back in. I would just, I would, this guy, he, he, he produces ectoplasm. It's awesome. I would just try to be their coke dealer and see if I could get, get them to let me tell lies about the Akashic record. If I gave them enough blow, like, can I see it yet? Can I see it yet? You let me know when I'm there. My boyfriend says he produces ectoplasm, but I think it's cheesecloth. I don't even know what cheese, that's what they always say in the, in the, in the descriptions. They're like, like, you know, the debunkers are like, it was always cheesecloth. I'm never clear on what cheesecloth is anyway. I think those debunkers may not know because

they weren't there at those coke. I mean, like, given the amount of blow these guys were probably doing, they might just have been hocking up big wads of like congealed mucus and cocaine. That would look like ectoplasm. Oh my God. It's just all the excess coke that couldn't get absorbed. In that case, I bet Justin Thoreau's produced quite a bit of ectoplasm. Yes. Yes. And speaking of ectoplasm, you know what's a lot like ectoplasm, Chris? What? The products and services that support this show. Oh, cool. Yeah, this is an ad break. All right. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast

series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23

I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're back. Sophie's proud of me. I'm proud of you. We're

rolling right along into the tale of Rudolf Steiner. So like I said, only trained occultists could be trusted to derive useful information from the Akashic record. And as soon as he starts speaking at the Theosophical Society, Steiner almost immediately afterwards joins the society and he very quickly rises to become one of those experts. In 1902, barely a year after his start lecturing there, he was asked to become the General Secretary of the German Theosophical Society. The one term he attached to taking the gig was that he would be allowed to lecture and teach about the results of his own spiritual investigations. So they're like, well, you run the German branch of this weird ghost society of ours. And he's like, I'll do it, but you got

to let me say that I'm able to read the ghost encyclopedia too. Wow. So that's his, it's a solid grift. Oh, it's also a solid job. What a great job. I wonder what a salary was. I want to know what the salary was for the, you know, the head of the Russian division of the Theosophical Society. That's what I'd like to know. I'm going to guess it was like an uncomfortable amount of money, but also barely enough money to buy lunch today. Like back then, it would have been a fortune. And today it's like a wrap in downtown LA. That's my guest for his salary. Yeah. Now, early in his studies, Steiner's studies, most of those investigations focused on Atlantis and Lemuria. He was way into Atlantis and Lemuria. And I should say, in some occult circles,

Lemuria is just another name for Atlantis. But in Steiner's conception, they were two different sunken continents, both home to different root races of humanity. Now, he wrote a number of books on these topics and they are all complete and utter nonsense. Wow. I'm just going to quote one paragraph from one of these books where Steiner explains that human beings started out as a gender creatures capable of fucking themselves. So we're definitely capable of fucking ourselves. Yes. Yes, we are proving that now, but not the way he pay attention. He didn't foresee climate change. But yeah. When we study the Akashic records, we see that at a period in the far past, human forms appear soft, plastic and quite unlike those of later times. They still retain an equal

measure the nature of man and woman. As time passes and matter densifies, the human body appears in two forms, one of which resembles the man's later form, the other, the woman's. Before the appearance of these differentiated forms, every human being could of itself bring forth another. The fructification was no outer process, but one which took place within the human body itself. When the body took on a male or female form, it lost the possibility of self fructification. Cooperation with another body was necessary in order to produce a new human being. Fructify. Wow. That is some horse shit. That's the kind of shit I, that's how I would describe the beginning of the human race. You guys have no idea how much easier this podcast would be if I could just say

that I was basing all of my write ups on a ghost encyclopedia. Like, so if you wouldn't have to put sources up, I wouldn't have to cite anything. I could just lie. Oh, it would be so much easier. That's exactly also how an eight year old would say that the human race started. Yeah. How did you figure this out? I saw it in the ghost book that nobody else can read. Yeah, there's always, it's always something that nobody else can have access to. Yeah. That's where the best evidence comes from. By 1912, Steiner's own theories about the universe and the space ghost library had deviated enough from the theosophical movement that he was forced to create his own weird cult. I'm going to quote now from Anthroposophy and Eco-Fascism

by Peter Staudenmeier, the title of which sort of spoils where this story is heading. Quote, he broke from mainstream theosophy in 1912, taking most of the German speaking sections with him. When Basant and her colleagues declared the young Krishna Murti, a boy they discovered in India to be the reincarnation of Christ, Steiner was unwilling to accept a brown skin Hindu lad as the next spiritual master. What had separated Steiner all along from Blavatsky, Basant, and the other India-oriented theosophists was his insistence on the superiority of European esoteric traditions. In the wake of the split, Steiner founded the Anthroposophical Society in Germany. Shortly before the outbreak of World War One, he moved the fledgling organization's

international headquarters to Switzerland. Under the protection of Swiss neutrality, he was able to build up a permanent center in the village of Dornoch. So that's the move that he makes. Dornoch, yeah. I'm probably pronouncing it wrong. Switzerland, man, their neutrality has caused a lot of fucking trouble. It has. They need to choose a side. So that is very interesting. But by the way, just quickly, Hindu lad is a great name for an indie rock band. Yeah, it would be. And that's this like, so part of like one of the, there's a couple of weird things to do with Hinduism in here. One of them is that like one of the most influential

fascist philosophers in this period was an Indian woman. Another of these weird facts is that like yeah, the Theosophical Society was very much oriented towards India because India was in fact where like the or the actual Aryans like moved through and stuff and like settled and what not the Indo-Aryan peoples. Yeah. And there was a belief even among the Nazis that like you could find some of like the like Aryan bloodlines in India and the Nazis sent a number of expeditions up into like Tibet and shit. I know about that. That's so fucking weird, man. It's weird. And what's worth noting here is that while the Nazis were willing to accept that like India might have like there might be Aryan bloodlines in India, Steiner was too racist for that.

Okay. So that's that's the guy. Yeah, that's the guy who would look at the Nazis and their ideas towards India and be like, y'all are too open-minded about this shit. Right. I just want, I'm just thinking about a guy in Hollywood is playing bass in a band called Hindulad. What are you even up to? One of those bands were like every song on their set list is 11 minutes or longer. Yeah. They're all white. Yeah. They're all white. They open for Vandegraaf generator once in the 70s. Vandegraaf. That's deep. Steiner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We can talk about Prague. I mean, I'm going to guess to be honest, a lot of this story has influenced

different Prague rock albums. Prague overlap with racist early 20th century racist philosophy esoteric. Yeah. That's cool. If I were to read this out to the founder of King Crimson, he would just nod his head and be like, of course. He'd be like, I know that already. You think I don't know that? Why do you think I picked up the guitar? If it wasn't for Rudolph and his theories, I would never have started playing the guitar. So Steiner declared his new occult philosophy to be anthroposophical spiritual science, which he called human science in the broadest sense or, oh boy, Geist Zwischenschacht in 1912. Yeah. Thank you. His 1912, his followers created the anthroposophical society in imitation of

the theosophical society. This was the beginning of anthroposophy, a thing which is very much still around today. Now, here's where I point out that this episode is going to wind up being a little bit disordered because both the beliefs of anthroposophy and its impacts on society are incredibly wide ranging. So at this point, I'm going to talk a little bit about anthroposophical medicine. All right. So we're pulling out of the time stream a little bit to talk about one of the impacts of Rudolph Steiner's beliefs. So Steiner was not a doctor, never had any medical training, but his spiritual revelations informed him of several critical things. And I'm going to quote now from a good write up in Quack Watch that summarizes some key facts of anthroposophic

medical beliefs. Good health is achieved when the physical organism is properly aligned with three non-physical bodies that manifest during a human's lifetime. The etheric body, a set of life forces, the astral body, higher soul forces, and the eye, a spark of divine selfhood or ego that separates true humans from animals and subhumans. Real warning on that subhuman thing, yeah, yeah. Bad health, on the other hand, often reflects the working out of one's karmic destiny. If one enters this world carrying spiritual impurities resulting from sins and errors committed in previous lives, disease can serve as a rite of passage, purging evils from one's bodily spiritual system. Thus medical intervention is often a bad idea. A doctor who cures a patient

with drugs, etc. may be blocking the patient's karmic self-healing process. No way that could be problematic. Yeah, that's, yeah, we shouldn't help that person because they're going, they're gonna need to die. Yeah. They're gonna, they need to die as part of their journey. This dysentery sucks for them now, but when they die and come back in another life, they're gonna be so much happier. Yeah, it's just simple, also the simple, you know, like whatever your, whatever bad shit is happening to somebody is their own fault. It's like whenever I go drinking with my friends, I try to trick them into drinking ever clear at the end of the night so that they vomit and then they feel better the next morning.

Yeah. Which is why I am a doctor too, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. No. Now, what? Not a doctor. I am a doctor. Sophie says you're not a doctor. I am absolutely, I'm a doctor, Reverend. And well, if this guy's a doctor, you're a doctor. We're all doctors. Thank you. See, exactly. And actually, shockingly, there are a terrifying number of doctors who believe this, like actual doctors. Every trustful kid in Europe in the beginning of the 20th century thought they were a doctor, apparently. Yeah. And unfortunately, that hasn't stopped. A Lemurian doctor. Yeah. A Lemurian doctor with access to a ghost library where he learned medicine. God damn. And then there were people just working. Yeah. Yeah, then there's people like dying in a

field or like in an iron mine. Yeah, there's just some regular people who are working and eating fucking gruel. Yeah. Yeah. Excuse me, laborer, have I told you about the ghost library? They're like, my boy's got the jib. Can I borrow $5? He's gonna die tomorrow. Don't cure your son's illnesses. Do those ghosts have $5? It would be better for him in the future. Now, Peter Staudenmeier is an associate professor of German history at Marquette University, and he's written out a lot of stuff about this. He's maybe the world's foremost expert on Rudolph Steiner. And I'm going to quote him now talking about anthroposophic medicine. Quote, Steiner's doctrine of reincarnation, embraced by Latter-day anthroposophists the world over,

holds that individuals choose their parents before birth and indeed that we plan out our lives before beginning them to ensure that we receive the necessary spiritual lessons. If a disembodied soul bulks at its own chosen life prospects just before incarnation, it fails to incarnate fully, the source, according to anthroposophists, of prenatal defects and congenital disabilities. So if you're born with like an arm that doesn't work, like you got one of those like shrunken arms, or if you're born with like, you know, paralyzed from the waist down, that's because ghost you is a coward. Yeah. So it's, see, that's fine. That's a healthy thing to believe. It's, it's all, um, well, I don't know if all these philosophies end up being this basically

like, I don't want to pay taxes thing, but that's what it really adds up to. It's just like that guy with no arm, it's his own fault. I don't, it's just always justifying why if you feel good, you don't have to bother with anybody who feels bad. About 70% of occult beliefs historically are rooted in rich people wanting to explain why it's fine that things were great for them while everyone else was dying in a field. Yeah, it's just like libertarianism, except it's just got ghost libraries. And like in fairness to the occult, that's also like most of early Christianity. Uh, so yeah, it's just always the same. It's such a hack message too. It's just like, it's just like, what's the most esoteric reason we can come up with for not giving a fuck about anybody?

Yeah, I guess, but not early, like middle Christianity, like once the church becomes an institution, it starts being like, this is why the people who are rich and powerful should be rich and powerful. It's always the same, it's always the same fucking message. Yeah, it's always the same message. Like at the start, you get a guy who's like Jesus and is like, I'm going to beat the shit out of people at banks because they're assholes. And then 150 years later, it's turned into like, no, no, no, the people with banks are the people God likes the best. And we just never pull away from that belief system. So this is the, this is the occult version of that. Yeah, yeah. Now, as fucked up and blatantly anti-medical as

all of this sounds, there are a shocking number of actual MDs today who practice anthroposophical medicine. And in a little bit of fairness, they do use and prescribe real drugs. They are actual doctors. They also use natural and holistic remedies and therapies, though, some of which work and some of which are nonsense who bullshit. I'm going to quote now from the National Institute of Health, quote, Currently, there are approximately 24 anthroposophic medical institutions, which include hospitals, departments and hospitals, rehabilitation centers and other inpatient healthcare centers in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands and the United States. In Germany, three large anthroposophic hospitals provide accident and emergency services within

the requirement plans of the German federal states. Two of them are academic teaching hospitals linked to neighboring universities. So this is a thing today. There are doctors who believe this shit today. And again, these guys are actual MDs. Yeah, they're there. I didn't look exactly where but they exist. Yeah, I'm going to guess there's a shitload of them in Malibu. You throw a fucking rock in Malibu, you'll hit an anthroposophic doctor telling you that your kid's birth defects are because his ghost was scared. Have you tried an anthroposophic doctor? They're amazing. They tell your kid it's his fault. They're incredible. Yeah. They validate your belief system. Yeah. So there's a lot of people who will say that anthroposophic doctors

are just doing a slightly different kind of medicine and they're perfectly good doctors. And maybe that's true. I haven't met any, but I am skeptical of the idea that any of them could be truly good doctors. For one thing, most of them are anti-vaccine. See, Rudolph Steiner believed in reincarnation and he thought disease was part of a patient's karma. So if you treat illnesses or if you prevent an illness, you just forced that person to get sick again in a future life. During one of his lectures to doctors, Steiner said this of the smallpox vaccine. If we destroy the susceptibility to smallpox, we are concentrating only on the external side of karmic activity. See, it's not a full treatment to stop someone from getting smallpox

because you're not dealing with the actual root of the problem, which is space ghosts. Which is like a character flaw. See? Yeah, it's a character flaw from the past. Yeah. So the doctor then- That's why you shouldn't get vaccinated. The doctor's job is converted from helping someone live to letting them die. I mean, letting them die because whatever, it's their own fault. I mean, it's some process. It's like some learning curve or learning. Like you need to get sick. Yeah. Or else you're not going to- Yeah. You're not going to die like you're supposed to because you're a bad person.

It's literally you need to get sick because when you were a ghost, you decided you were going to get like smallpox at age seven. And you have to learn the lessons that you will be taught by getting smallpox at age seven. You picked this, so don't complain. So Steiner, this guy Steiner must not have had any ailments, I guess. He never got a cold or anything. He must have thought he was- Because this seems like the kind of philosophy that would end up killing you. You know what I mean? It's one of those things. I feel like I don't have, I wish I had more information about his early life. I just don't. He either was lucky and had none of those problems or he had all of the fucking diseases as a kid and he just grew up

thinking like, well, everybody should have to go through this bullshit. Right. And he came out of them. And he's like that. Yes. I'm like, it's been a character builder for me and it should be a character builder for everybody else. My guess is one of the two. Either he didn't get sick at all or he was like the sickest son of a bitch when he was a little kid and he just grew up thinking that that was normal and what everybody should go through. Some people, he's like instead of pulling himself up by his bootstraps, he pulled himself up by his diseases. Yeah, exactly. His disease straps, which were etheric and existed on the astral plane. So, yeah, we just talked about, yeah, so Steiner said that, yeah, if we

destroyed the susceptibility to smallpox, we're concentrating only in the external side of karmic activity. So he believed that. He also believed that dark wizards might try to create evil fake medications that would cut humanity off from its spiritual roots. Yeah, we got some wizards. Wow. Quote, endeavors to achieve this will be made by bringing out remedies to be administered by inoculation. Only these inoculations will influence the human body in a way that will make it refuse to give a home to the spiritual inclinations of the soul. So evil wizard doctors are going to give you vaccines that make your body refuse your soul. Rudolf Steiner. Yeah. So again, it seems like a bold stance to take based on nothing. Yeah, it's a bold stance to take based

on nothing in a weird stance to be the basis of a type of medicine that, again, a significant number of actual MDs believe today. So there are a lot of websites out there dedicated to defending Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy. We're going to hear from a couple of them a few times. One such site assures us, quote, anthroposophical doctors reject nothing in the toolbox of conventional medicine a priori. Every option is considered for its appropriateness in a specific instance. Antibiotics are used when necessary, but so are homeopathic remedies. Physical therapy is prescribed, but so is curative urythmi, which is movement exercise to balance the forces within the body. It's like dancing medicine. So, you know, we'll give it people antibiotics when they

have infections, but we'll also give them water with nothing in it that's been like waved around a root that we say cures things. That's a good doctor. Now, that seems, I guess, not the least. That's not the craziest thing in the world, given like the wide galaxy of stupid things people will do because they think that it's better for their health than traditional medicine. But Steiner's own words are even less reasonable than that. He told his followers that the heart was not a pump and that blood just circulates on its own, presumably by magic. He was also insistent that the brain was not involved in thought or cognition. He prescribed mistletoe for cancerous tumors and he was in general a complete fucking quack. So, I'm going to quote from quack watch

again talking about the doctors that Steiner inspired. Anthroposophical physicians do not appear to conduct double blind controlled experiments, so it is almost impossible to evaluate their success rates. All doctors witness mysterious declines as well as mysterious recoveries. Believers in anthroposophical medicine relate tales of highly successful treatments, but whether the alleged cures resulted from the treatments, the body's natural healing processes or overly optimistic reporting cannot be determined. Using ineffective alternatives instead of necessary science-based care can have serious consequences. On waldorfcritics.org, Robert Smith Hall describes how he suffered while being raised by anthroposophists. They believe that sickness is the sole

incarnating and also that it has to do with karma. They don't believe in inoculation, so I had all the child diseases going around. Some twice, Smith Hall reports that he was constantly ill throughout his childhood and that the primary treatment that his anthroposophical doctors prescribed was little white sugar pills called influto and buckets and buckets of horsetail tea and also chamomile tea. What the hell is horsetail tea? It's like a plant. Oh, okay. I thought it was a real horsetail. No, no, no. No thanks. Count me out of that one. I'll quit that religion based on I'm not having some tea made out of a horsetail. I mean, I suspect that would work better than chamomile tea.

These horses are full of healthy diseases. I guess so. Yeah, that's true. Okay. Yeah. Now, certain foods made him sick, so he was required to eat great quantities of these very foods. The feeling that my parents had was that I should eat more of it, as I obviously needed to incarnate through the food. So I grew up being force-fed food that was making me sick. As an adult, having broken away from anthroposophy, Smith Hall was examined by a conventional doctor who correctly diagnosed his wheat intolerance. He's been improving ever since. Is this Angelina Jolie's kid? You kind of get the feeling, right? Yeah, this kid grew up in Malibu. Yeah, yeah. Or like Brentwood. Somewhere with rich people. And like his parents were like, oh, he gets sick

whenever he eats wheat. And the doctor was like, that means you got to feed this kid as much wheat as he can fucking stand. Yeah. Never stop pouring wheat into the boy. What a bummer. Yeah, it sucks. I mean, that's terrible. I mean, I'm lucky he didn't have a peanut allergy or he would have died right away. You get the feeling that some kids with peanut allergies and anthroposophic doctors didn't make it. Yeah, the right away, they would die. Have more peanuts. Oh, they're dead. Well, you know, when they were ghosts, they were jerks when they were ghosts. Look, I know it's sad, but your kid picked this when he was a ghost. Do you know what kind of a jerk and a weakling your kid was when he was a ghost? Yeah. Now, excuse me, I'm a doctor. Don't, don't excuse me, me.

I'm a doctor. You know, my school of medicine is great because it's founded by a guy who never went to medical school. Yeah. Why don't you take a look at the ghost library if you're so smart. Oh, I'm sorry. Have you ever read the space encyclopedia? Wow. Yeah. So, we're going to talk some more about anthroposophic medicine and its impact on European vaccination rates. I'm gonna have some more cold brew. This is great. I love this show. I mean, this is very exciting stuff for me. This is my, I love this stuff. Yeah. It's fucking wild. This is what I do in my spare time, but I just don't have a show that I don't get to talk about it. I'm all by myself. This is great. This is what I did in my spare time

until I had a show. And now it's what I do in my spare time, but now Sophie yells at me and I get money. It's great. So, it works out. Yeah. So, we are going to get back to anthroposophic medicine, but before we get there, we're going to have to peel back a little bit and talk about the founding of the first Waldorf school. So, for the sake of fairness, I'm going to quote from a pro Steiner website now, Waldorf Answers. Quote, in 1918, when a revolution took place, not only in Russia, note by me, the Russian revolution started in 1917, but also in Germany and threatened to disintegrate the social fabric, Steiner presented suggestions for a conscious threefold differentiation of society as a path through the future. It focused on the development of freedom in the cultural

sphere, equality in the sphere of politics and legislation, and a globally oriented brotherhood in the sphere of economy. Steiner lectured widely on this topic, leading to a movement for social threefolding. That sounds nice, right? Yeah. In 1919, this led to the founding of the first free Waldorf school in Stuttgart at the initiative of Immolt Molt, the CEO of Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Factory. The school became the model for the Waldorf movement, leading to the building and development by 2009 of some 1600 Waldorf Kindergartens and 994 independent Waldorf or Rudolf Steiner schools worldwide, offering educational activities from early childhood through high school and, in some cases, programs for adults. So, Chris. Yes. Can you think of a better way for a school to

start than a cigarette factory paying for it? It started in, oh, it was paid for by, I thought it was in a cigarette, an old. No, the CEO of the cigarette factory decided he liked the cut of Rudolph Steiner's jib and was like, yeah, let's make a fucking school. Right. Well, it makes sense. Some rich guy. Yeah. If you own a cigarette factory, you got to be doing pretty good. So, you probably got nothing to do. So, then you want to think about things that are, you know, you got nothing to think about. So, you're going to start thinking about, hell, I want to think about something exciting. How about this bullshit? And then you make a school. Yeah. Let's make a school. I got nothing to do. Let's make a school. Yeah. Let's make a school. I got a bunch of money.

Each kids that cigarettes are critical for human health. I'm going to guess that Rudolph Steiner was very supportive of cigarettes as a health remedy. Oh, yeah. Which to be fair, most people were at this point in time. Totally. Yeah. Now, you know what actually is good for your health, Chris? What's that? The products and services that support this show. Oh, I see what you did. Guaranteed to cure your diseases. Every product, whatever happens to be advertised, will cure whatever you happen to have. That's the guarantee I make. We are all doctors. I come from the Evans School of Medicine. Going by Rudolph's rules, we're all doctors. You just got to incarnate that shit. Call me Dr. Crofton. I'm the anthropomorphic whatever.

I'm like, I've got a school of dilatantism. Yeah. All right. Product. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man

who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

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We're back. We're back. And we're talking about the cigarette factory that started a school. Now, as you might guess, a school founded by the CEO of a cigarette factory did not portend great things for the future of human health. Dr. Edzard Ernst has determined that, between 1999 and 2010, 10 outbreaks of measles in the UK, the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany have centered around Waldorf schools, all of which had immunization rates lower than 10%. There are more than 800 Waldorf schools in the world today. Many of these are well-regarded institutions, and a huge number of famous people have graduated from them. A lot of folks who work at these schools are, I'm sure, fine people and educators. But there are also some really

fucking dark stories from these places. Sharon Lombard, a parent whose daughter was enrolled at a Waldorf school, had this experience when her kid got sick. Quote, The anthroposophic doctor made a diagnosis. My child had lost the will to live. He announced one of the potential cures. We were to give our daughter red, yellow, and orange crayons to color with. I looked at my husband in disbelief. When the doctor instructed us to make the sign of a flame out of Aurum cream over my child's heart at bedtime, I was dumbfounded. He told us to apply the gold cream from below the heart upwards, towards the sky. So that's, well, that's medicine. How did this, all right, but why did this, did this woman not have any idea that this school was

weird? Well, that's things like, how does it end up in a Waldorf school if you're not already a crackpot? But it's got a great, it's got a great reputation for like the arts and stuff. And like they do, like a lot of really famous actors and musicians and stuff went to Waldorf schools. They seem to be good at encouraging creativity in kids. So they're willing to, they want the networking for their kids and they're willing to kill them. And if they, I don't think they really look into it that hard. They don't know what anthroposophic medicine is really, but they know that the doctor there is an actual MD medical degree. Yeah, that makes sense. How people get people into cults. They tell them what one thing about it. They just don't tell the other thing about it.

Exactly. And like in this parent, you're gonna love the Waldorf school. It's so great. It's all about creativity. And also, they won't give you any medicine, but we're not going to talk about that. Yeah, if your daughter's sick, they'll give her crayons. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's the way that stuff works. It's true. Now, this woman's daughter was eventually hospitalized and she did recover under the care of normal doctors. And if the only impact of Waldorf schools was a few sick and presumably a couple of dead kids, I might not be writing this episode. But the rabbit hole of weird here goes a lot deeper. And this is where things get racist as fuck. Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot. It was really hard to like

figure out the, like how to pattern this out time wise, because there's just so much to get to. So that we're going to be jumping around a little bit more than usual in this episode. Well, I got caught up in that. I was already mad at Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer for, for, for causing people to get sick. And now I forgot all about the racism. Yeah. So I found a fascinating write-up by a former Waldorf student also on QuackWatch. This student points out that the vast majority of Steiner spiritual beliefs and the ideas behind Anthroposophia itself were actually hidden from the students at the school. They don't talk about these beliefs like to the kids. Quote, the Waldorf I attended was lovely with caring teachers

and pleasant, carefully selected classmates. For the most part, I enjoyed my years there. Waldorf was small, 20 or so students at each grade level. The ambiance was close and comfortable, as Steiner would have wanted. Waldorf was a religious school, but with a twist, it hit its faith. The school presented itself as a progressive, ultra-modern learning institution, and in some ways it was. But the secular kind of framing of this was a disguise. Quote, we students memorized no passages from holy books. We sang from no hymnals. Yet a strange aura hung about the school. There was a pervasive but unspoken spiritualistic vibe in almost every lesson, in almost every activity. It was hard for most patients to detect, but we students felt it to one degree or another.

It was in the air we breathed. It defined the tenor and subtext of our days. Ultimately, it shaped and colored our education as effectively as if priests were delivering sermons to us. So you don't state this stuff outright, but you kind of try to teach these kids some of the spiritual lessons of your beliefs, like covertly, without sort of directly proselytizing or talking about the actual shit Steiner believed. Later on in the write-up, this student gives a deeply unsettling example of what precisely lurked beneath the surface. In 12th grade, this happened to him in a biology class taught by the school headmaster, a guy named Gardner. Quote, he explained that the various races stood at different levels of moral development. Each was forging its own destiny.

He said these things sympathetically with no hint of condescension, yet the vibe was in the room that morning. The terms he used were more metaphysical than biological. The oriental races, he said, are ancient, wise, but vitiated. The African races are youthful, unformed, childlike, he said. Standing near the center of humanity's family are currently the most advanced races, the whites, he said. Where is this? Is there any references to where the school is or? I think this one, yeah, this one's in the United States. I believe it's on the east coast. This is during like the 1970s, I think, when this happened. Wow. Yeah, the author of this article also recalled an unsettling botany class with a teacher named Hertha Carl, who also taught

German and earth science, whatever that is. Can we find her on Facebook? I think she's dead now. She would have been a mature adult in the 70s. Yeah. Of all the Waldorf faculty, she made the least effort to disguise her devotion to Steiner. She drew figures of eight on the blackboard and lectured us about limb niscates, the mystic interaction of the telluric and etheric forces, which is the basic structure of nature, she said. During one day's main lesson, she veered off topic to warn us to never receive blood transfusions from members of other races. Blacks and Orientals have blood types that are physically different from ours, she taught us, and receiving such inferior blood would diminish our Aryan qualities. Yeah. Nothing coded about that.

Yeah. Nothing coded there. So Rudolph Steiner did not live a particularly fascinating life. He mostly wrote and lectured and taught people crazy shit throughout the early 1920s. He did thousands of lectures, 330 alone from January to September of 1924. He died in March of 1925, and his followers suggest that he basically exhausted himself with his workload. How old was he? He was 1860. He would have been in his 50s or 60s, I think. Now, he did not have what I would call a particularly compelling life by the standards of other cult leaders like Elron Hubbard. When it just comes to the details we know about his existence, it's not super wacky or fun to listen to. There's no creating, forcing a bunch of kids onto boats and searching for

treasure in the ocean for 13 years. But Rudolph Steiner is something of an iceberg. What you can see above the water line looks more or less respectable, or at least nothing no darker or sillier than like, you know, your friend with a tarot deck. But below that is where things get fucked up very quickly and where we run into the weird race science stuff. Like Madame Blavatsky, Steiner believed that Native Americans were, in his words, dying out of their own nature. He believed they were one of several lower races of humans. Most aboriginal and non-white races fell into this category. In Steiner's mind, they were closer to animals than higher races of humanity. Anthroposophy teaches that many of these races are descended from degenerate

remnants of the Lemurian root race and are thus devolving into literal apes. Steiner called, for example, Australian aboriginal people, quote, stunted men whose descendants still inhabit certain parts of the earth today as so-called savage tribes. Now, Steiner believed that- I just don't understand, I mean, I can't believe people, I mean, it's just like, there's just, you can just make, I mean, this is all made up, just made up. I mean, just make it up. I mean, I just unbelievable, you just fucking just start just spouting off about, and you wear spectacles or whatever and have a fucking ass got on, and that's about it. It's all theater. It's like theater and racism combined. I mean, it's only theater and racism if you don't believe he really read from the ghost encyclopedia in space. Right. Who believes that? Who are these, oh god, I would like to- I mean, ghost librarians for one.

I guess so, yeah. They gotta work. Yeah. Now, Steiner believed that Japanese, Mongolian, and Inuit people were descendants of Atlantis, and he had a broadly positive attitude, well, a more positive attitude towards them than, you know, Native American. Or obviously, black people. The best race, of course, was the Aryan race. I'm going to quote from Rudolph Steiner now. We are within the great root race of humanity that has peopled the earth since the land on which we now live rose up out of the inundation of the ocean. Ever since the Atlantean race began slowly to disappear, the great Aryan race has been the dominant one on earth. If we contemplate ourselves, we here in Europe are thus the fifth subrace of the great Aryan root race. I wonder how he felt about frogs, because frogs are from the water. Yep. I wonder if he thought they were like wise men or something. He might have agreed with Alex Jones on the subject of frogs and their sexuality. It's hard to say.

Frogs are some, like, remnant race that's on the way out, like, that did bad stuff when they were ghosts. Yeah. Frogs were terrible as ghosts. That's why they gotta live in swamps. Rudolph believed that every race or volk had its own special aura that best fit in its own specific homeland. He believed in something called volksgeist, a natural spirit embodied by an etheric being that spiritually led that group of people. Now, if you've studied your Nazism, that's essentially Nazism missing one or two little steps. Can you say that one more time? Volksgeist is a national spirit, the spirit of a nation, of a specific homeland of a racial people. That's a volksgeist. Like, the volksgeist is a national spirit that embodies, like, the spirituality of a group of people. Like, an etheric being who is, like, the soul of the German people, for example.

Right. Okay. Yeah, yeah. The Nazis didn't believe, obviously, Hitler was not an etheric being, he was a real person, but the Nazis did very much believe that he was the embodied national spirit of Aryanness, of Germany. So, again, Steiner isn't, was not literally a Nazi. He died in 1925 and was probably only broadly aware of Hitler and his party. But Hitler's own, like, the actual beliefs that the Nazis inculcated once they came to power were basically the same thing Rudolf Steiner's teaching, instead of it being an etheric being, it's literally Hitler. But it's the same idea. Yeah, I've read a lot about this birth, what led into Nazism. And it's like, if you want to be, like, a dictator, you search around for justifications and there was this soup of convenient bullshit for them to pick from that was happening around that time. So, yeah, it was, like, convenient, like, without, this guy was a dumbass, but this other person just, if Hitler may have even thought this guy was a dumbass,

but he used him as a, you know what I mean? I mean, it's just, this all becomes useful, like, these philosophies become useful to someone who puts them all together and says, here's why I need to do this bad shit. Yeah, and it's, you know, Steiner's not the only guy saying stuff like this and lead up to the Nazis. The Theosophical Society saying something like, he's part of, like, a constellation of thinkers who prepares the intellectual soil in Germany for the kind of beliefs that the Nazis introduce. Yeah. Like, he helps ready the soil. Although, again, I want to make it very clear he was not a Nazi himself was not a follower of Hitler's. Yeah. Now, back to racism. I'm going to quote again from that Staudenmeier write up, that's the professor from Marquette University who's done a lot of the research on Rudolf Steiner, quote,

Steiner propagated a host of racist myths about Negroes. He taught that black people are sensual, instinct driven, primitive creatures ruled by their brainstem. He denounced the immigration of blacks to Europe as terrible and brutal and decried its effects on blood and race. He warned that white women shouldn't read Negro novels during pregnancy. Otherwise, they'd have mulatto children. In 1922, he declared, the Negro race does not belong in Europe. And the fact that this race is now playing such a large role in Europe is, of course, nothing but a nuisance. But the worst insult from an anthroposophical point of view is Steiner's dictum that people of color can't develop spiritually on their own. They must either be educated by whites or reincarnated in white skin. Europeans, in contrast, are the most highly developed humans. Indeed, as Steiner said, Europe has always been the origin of all human development, which I think some people I know in the Middle East would be a little bit pissed to hear that,

but that's an argument for another day. For Steiner and for anthroposophy, there is no doubt that whites are the ones who develop humanity in themselves. The white race is the race of the future, the spiritually creative race. Now, this is all very fucked up. The good news is that most anthroposophist beliefs are hidden away from the students at Waldorf schools. This stuff is not like the general curriculum at a Waldorf school, and a lot of Steiner's work has been edited to make it fit into the modern era, and it's been pruned of its racism and just kind of turned into a more generically harmless, weird, kind of a cult New Agey mishmash of nonsense. The influence these deeper racist occult beliefs has on modern Waldorf schools is not consistent from country to country or from institution to institution, but it is still definitely present in some areas. In 2014, the BBC reported that diversity training was instituted on one Waldorf campus after, quote, four white teachers asked to tick a box giving their ethnicity ticked every box. They believed that they had ascended through all the races.

Now, that's not a harmless belief because that means that if you have a student who is, say, black or Hispanic or, you know, any other kind of non-white race, you don't just believe that, like, you know what it's like to be them because you lived that in the past life. You believe that you're better than them because you ascended past their level of existence and that they're going to have to live and die before they can come back as a better skin color. Yeah, it's fucking horrible. This is all horrible. This is all absolutely horrible. It's awful. Now, their reporting was based on the Department of Education memo on this school in the UK, which revealed that at least some Waldorf campuses were teaching children that Atlantis was a real thing. And if those kids were being taught Steiner's ideas about Atlantis, they were probably being taught at least a few of his ideas about a racial hierarchy. And again, this is in 2014 in the United Kingdom. Wow.

Yeah, in response to this, the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship, an umbrella group representing the community of Waldorf schools, said this, while the superficial reading of a handful of Steiner's voluminous, extensive lectures present statements that appear racist in modern terms, none of these occur in the educational writings. See, the idea... Who said that? That was the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship, which is a group that represents these schools collectively. And they're spokesman Chris Angel. Yeah. Look, now, it's like, okay, superficially, me saying that black people are a less evolved race and are degenerating into an ape-like species, that sounds racist superficially, but just superficially. Well, what is this?

Depressing. Yeah, it's bad. Now, SWSF, which is that umbrella group's guidelines published in 2011, noted that in order to be considered a Waldorf school, an institution needed to be able to show that, quote, an anthroposophical impulse lies at the heart of planning for the school. And there sure as shit is racism in Rudolf Steiner's writings on anthroposophy. So it does seem like there's got to inherently be some racism in any of these schools that actually, like, stick to the heart of anthroposophic teachings. That said, Waldorf schools are very decentralized. They aren't part of a strict hierarchy, and there's a lot of variance between different schools. If you went to a Waldorf school that seemed totally fine, I'm not trying to say that you imbibed a bunch of stealth racism.

That said, maybe comb through your memories and see if there was some weirdness that you learned that never quite made sense to you, because there might be. If you meet a rich kid who's a racist and has smallpox, you have the Waldorf school system to thank. I'm just saying maybe we should check in with Jennifer Aniston. I mean, so annoying, so stupid. It's all fucking rich people have nothing fucking to do. So they fill their time with a bunch of nonsense because they got nothing to fucking do. Yeah. It's really true.

It's just a simple matter of spare time. You got nothing to fucking do and everything's going right. So you just make up a bunch of shit to cause some trouble because you're bored out of your goddamn mind. I mean, that's where this all comes from. There's a lot of students today in Waldorf schools. There's a lot of rich kids, but I'm sure there's also a lot of middle class and working class kids whose parents just sacrifice because they're like, well, look at all of the great, my kid wants to be a dancer and a bunch of great dancers. Don't try to sell me on Waldorf schools being good. I'm not trying to say I know. I'm trying to point out like, I'm sure there's a bunch of parents who are like, and I'm sure it works out for some of them.

A lot of great dancers go to Waldorf schools. Robert, it takes me, it takes, first of all, we don't need any more dancers. Second of all, Robert. Robert, you have no idea how easy it is to make me decide that I fucking hate something. I am so mad already. I want to go, you know, I want to write as soon as I'm done with this podcast, I'm going to drink even more cold brew and just go to the nearest Waldorf school and find out what the punch is going on. Yeah, just find out what the fuck is going on like racist dancing smallpox people. I was going to defend the people going there a little bit, but it sounds like more fun to declare like essentially an intellectual g-hot on the concept of dancing.

So let's do that. I'm just fucking rich people fucking, you know, not just adjusting to the fact that life is essentially a one note situation. You fucking live and then you die and there's no ghost libraries. And as much as it's fun to poke around with the idea that maybe there I believe in ghosts actually sort of. But why not a ghost library? Well, that's the thing is like, it's like, but just keep it within realize that this is something that you're doing as a hobby because you're bored. Don't take it seriously for God's sake. For it's one thing to think maybe ghosts are real because you got a day off and you got nothing better to do.

But to fucking take that and run with it till you establish a school, then you're an absolute moron. I mean, that's the thing is you're actually a dumb ass. The whole idea that you would take your musings, the musings of a bored human go every which way possible. And the fact that you would codify them and make a school out of your dumb ass musings while you're bored is just so maddening to me. And also a perfect example of the egos of these wealthy people that they decide that their own dumb ass musings are actually true. I mean, the things that cross people's minds, you know, are the fact that, oh God, just makes me mad anyway. No, I mean, I agree with you about Steiner and the original people who cooked this up and the people who believe seriously in this stuff. It does seem like most of the parents at these schools know none of this stuff.

Like I'm going to be willing to bet if you like ask a bunch of parents at Waldorf schools, what's anthroposophy? They wouldn't be able to give you like an answer. I don't have any kids, so I'm mad at parents too, just generally. Oh, yeah. I'm mad at everybody involved in this whole story. If you send your kids to an alternative school, you should make sure that a guy who was like ten steps away from Hitler didn't come up with the philosophy behind how it's taught. But, yeah. Anyway, like I said, if you went to a Waldorf school, I'm very curious for your experiences, but you may not have imbibed any racism. Yeah, I'd be interesting from this podcast if you get a response from people who went to Waldorf schools and see if they got through it and just your great answers and no racism. Yeah, I'm sure they will, but there is documented evidence of eruptions of dangerous racist bullshit within them.

Or yeah, or there's just a fucking every dancer you see is a racist with smallpox. All dancers are racist and diseased. That's the official stance. I notice you're a good dancer, you piece of shit. You fucking Nazi. Oh, yeah. I'm going to quote from Peter Stadenmeier again, or Professor Stadenmeier again, quote. In 1995, there was a scandal in the Netherlands when it became publicly known that the Dutch Waldorf schools were teaching racial ethnography where children learned that the black race has thick lips and a sense of rhythm and that the yellow race hides its emotions behind a permanent smile. In 1994, the Steiner-Wright lecturer Reiner Schnurr at one of his frequent seminars for the anthroposophist adult school in Berlin gave a talk with the rather baffling title, overcoming racism and nationalism through Rudolph Steiner. According to a contemporary account, Schnurr emphasized the essential differences between races, noted the infantile nature of blacks, and alleged that due to immutable racial disparities, no equal in global system can be created for all people on Earth,

and that because of the differences between races, sending aid to the developing world is useless. What year was that? 1994! Wow, and that was in Amsterdam? That's in Berlin. Oh, Berlin. Fucking slick willies the president in the United States, and you're in Berlin, and like, yeah, that's the kind of shit people are saying. Steiner supporters, when they acknowledge his racism, tend to try to write it off as him being a product of his time, and that's not an inherently unfair argument. There's a lot of great thinkers who believed race as shit because it was the accepted wisdom in their day,

and we shouldn't discount all of a person's ideas just because they grew up in a time where people, like, didn't know things were bullshit that are bullshit. After all, people today believe in the moon, and we wouldn't want future generations to ignore all of our philosophers just for that. However, the product of his time argument doesn't hold water in the case of Rudolf Steiner. Remember, according to anthroposophic belief, he was reading all of this shit off of the Akashic records, which transcend time and space. So if anthroposophists truly believe what their guru wrote down about the source of his revelations, then when those revelations took place, can't matter. If you actually are an anthroposophist who believes in all of this stuff literally, that means that you have to take his race science stuff literally because he's not influenced by the bias of his times. He's reading what the record says about the nature of the black race and the yellow race and, like, whatever racist terms that he came up for for them. Right. You can't, like, say both things. You can't say you believe them, and then you also think he's a product of his times.

Yeah, exactly. Because he's not a product of his times. You think he's invested with some sort of supernatural. Yeah, yeah. He can't be a product of his times because he's reading the ghost books from the space library. Yeah, you're giving, you're allowing this guy extra normal power. I mean, part of this belief system is to believe that this man had some sort of supernatural power. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And if that's- Yeah, and that these race things he's talking about are somehow, you know, not only true, but sort of, you know, like, written in the ether. I mean, it's even worse. It's like, this is definitely, he's basically a vessel for this stuff. This is like divine truth.

Yeah, it's divine, like, inherent truth. It's not even based on his theories. Yeah. That's cult shit. Yeah, that's- Yeah. Oh, it's definitely cult shit. Yeah. Wow. So this is why people like Professor Stadenmeier will argue that anthroposophy is the covert curriculum. Those are his words of most Waldorf schools. There is evidence that in internal forum discussions online, anthroposophist educators have been caught talking about their belief that karma and reincarnation is, quote, the basis of all true education. And just as children choose their parents before birth, many anthroposophist teachers believe that teachers and students choose one another ethereally as well.

I'm going to quote from Peter Stadenmeier one more time. The curriculum at Waldorf schools is structured around the stages of spiritual maturation, posited by anthroposophy. In addition, each pupil is classified according to the medieval theory of humors. We all know the medieval humor philosophy of health was absolutely correct, which is why people lived so long in the medieval era. The nurse's office at their school is like just a bunch of leeches in a jar. It's an ax on a table. I don't want to go to the nurse. She puts that snake on me.

Send me to the crayon doctor instead. Now, I can't and won't speculate on how all this might have influenced famous Waldorf grads like Jennifer Aniston. I can say, yeah, I'm deeply curious. First of all, I've always wanted to be a fly. I mean, I would give my right arm to hear just 45 minutes of conversation between Justin Thoreau and Jennifer Aniston at dinner. I mean, I would normally, just because I can only imagine how fucking stupid it would be. And not because they're necessarily stupid, but because they're in this bubble that would just make what they would talk about be so uniquely weird. There's a certain level of fame and exclusion from normality where you can't talk about things that don't sound like insane bullshit to anybody who worries about rent. I already figured listening to Justin Thoreau and Jennifer Aniston would be fascinating in a way that would be fascinating in the sense of like, holy fuck, these people are out of touch.

But then to imagine them having, I just want 40, can anyone who's listening to this podcast, does anyone have 45 minutes of overheard? I ask our listeners to wiretap a lot of different people. So maybe add Jennifer Aniston and Justin Thoreau to the wiretap. Justin Thoreau and Jennifer Aniston dated. Can you imagine their breakup? They probably said that it was to do with some kind of past life. The Akashic Records wrote about that decades before it happened. They were like, he was like, Jennifer, I have to break up with you because I think my ghost child was, I don't know, just wasn't up to snuff. I mean, she's like, what? It's entirely possible if Jennifer Aniston listened to this podcast, she would just be going like, what the fuck for real?

Oh, that's why that one teacher said that weird thing about root races. You do get that feeling. So yeah, one Waldorf school in Kings Langley, England was shut down in 2017 following a series of failed safety inspections. A Department of Education report noted, they pupil say that they are safe, but they are not because of flaws in the school systems and procedures for safeguarding and child protection. So it does seem like, again, and this is something like the former students who are critical of the schools do say, we all really enjoyed our time there. It seemed like a really good place. Later that you started to realize there was some weird shit going on. In this case, the closing seems to have been due to the school's failure to abide by basic safety rules and not directly due to their wacky occult beliefs.

The Waldorf school in Garden City, Long Island, however, was nearly shut down as a result of their wacky occult beliefs. Garden City Long Island is my hometown. That's where I went to Thanksgiving every year growing up. Yeah, the student that we read about who was talking about how some of his teachers would drop weird shit about race science and stuff, that's where he went. Okay, that's a rich town. The Garden City Long Island Waldorf school. Oh yeah, yeah. In 1979, The New York Times published this very fun article titled, Psychic X Students Influence Shakes Waldorf School.

Yeah, that's a great fucking headline. The issue started by talking about the Garden City Waldorf schools teacher training program, which trained roughly 20 student teachers per year to take positions in one of the dozens upon dozens of Waldorf schools operating at the time. Quote, what was described by one parent as internal chaos began when Mr. Walton, who has said that he is able to communicate with certain beings in the spiritual world, allegedly use these powers to advise school officials on matters ranging from language curriculum to what music to play at a school dance. As his influence reportedly grew among leading faculty members and with John F. Gardner, a former headmaster and at the time director of the Waldorf Institute, other staff and faculty members became resentful, called a meeting and voted to seek the resignations of those who accepted his suggestions. So we see a couple of things here. One is that the student basically claims to have the same thing happen to him that happened to Steiner where suddenly he can talk to spirits and like a bunch of high level teachers go along with him and change the school's policies based on this guy's what this guy says ghosts told him. Right. Like he was like the Rasputin of the Waldorf school.

Yeah. But in what you got to point out a couple of times just for the sake of fairness, other members of the faculty were like, this is bullshit. Yeah, made him resign and stuff. So like it is a scandal and it is emblematic of some problems within the Waldorf schools. It also suggests that a number of the staff and faculty are not howling lunatics who believe in ghost libraries. So I do want to be fair. This is a long time past Steiner's death and there's evidence that like some a lot of them don't believe the craziest parts of this belief system. Now, in spite of the scandal, the Garden City Waldorf school continued to operate and is still teaching students to this day.

It is one of a thousand operating Waldorf schools on the planet. There are 150 in North America. Wow, that's a lot. In some parts of the world. Yeah. That's three of three. Yeah, that is three a state. Now in some parts of the world, like the United Kingdom, several of these institutes even receive public funding.

At any given point in time, several hundred thousand children are enrolled in taking classes using lesson plans based in Anthroposophy, a fundamentally racist philosophy. And it gets worse because racism is not the only horrifying thing at the core of Anthroposophy. See, Rudolf Steiner was a very influential academic in Germany during World War One. He'd been a friend of Helmut von Moltka, the chief of the German general staff until his death in 1916. There's no, sorry, there's just nobody, there's no, there are no people in the world who fucking were more dangerous than German academics during the World War One period. Oh yeah. I mean, if we go back in time and take all the fucking academies of Germany during World War One and just dump them into a volcano, we'd be better off. Yeah, maybe like all of the people with any position of power whatsoever in Germany in World War One and dump them into a volcano.

Yeah, that was a dangerous, god, the people who were like philosophizing in Germany during World War One were fucking dangerous motherfuckers. Yeah. Now, after von Moltka's death in 1916, Steiner continued to channel his ghost and ask it for advice. As bad as this sounds, he was held in not insignificant influence among the German leadership. Of course not. Yeah, of course not. Why would he? Yeah, I know. He's talking to our old general for a ghost phone.

They were ready, they were ready for it. Fine. These stuffy old aristocrats and their ridiculous hats watched the Bolshevik Revolution sweep through Russia and listen to Woodrow Wilson sketch out his ideas on self-determination. Rudolph Steiner was hard at work providing them with an alternate theory for how the world could be reorganized after the war. He called this the tripartite structuring of the social organism. Modern anthroposophists call it social three-folding or the three-fold commonwealth. Here's how Staudenmeiter describes what that is. The three branches of this scheme, which resembles both fascist and semi-feudal corporatist models, are the state, political, military, and police functions, the economy, and the cultural sphere.

This last sphere encompasses all judicial, educational, intellectual, and spiritual matters, which are to be administered by corporations with individuals free to choose their school, church, court, etc. Anthroposophists consider this three-fold structure to be naturally ordained. Its central axiom is that the modern integration of politics, economy, and culture into an ostensibly democratic framework must falter because, according to Steiner, neither the economy nor cultural life can or should be structured democratically. The cultural sphere, which Steiner defined very broadly, is a realm of individual achievement where the most talented and capable should predominate, and the economy must never be subject to democratic public control because then it would collapse. Steiner's economic and political naivete are encapsulated in his claim that capitalism will become a legitimate capitalism if it is spiritualized. This is Steiner still? This is the same guy? It's the same fucking guy. He had so many ideas and they're all terrible. I mean, they're very much like, I mean, I guess maybe we'll get to this later, but the fact is that what's going on in the American government right now is...

That shit is going on. This whole Steiner school belief of getting rid of public education and I'm not saying charter schools are necessarily associated with racism, but the idea of, what's her face? Who's the head of the education department? Betsy DeVos. Yes. I would not be surprised if Eugenics played some... Whether she realizes it or not, her and her brother Eric Prince, they have these ideas of Judeo-Christian values that are under attack. There's a lot of that kind of mysticism under... It's underlying modern conservatism as well in America. They don't call it mysticism. They call it great again, but this make America great again. But this great again has a sort of mystical quality to it because they can't really define what that means and it has a lot to do, of course, or is entirely to do with race. But make America great again is a mystical slogan because it's not grounded in reality. It's something that's open to interpretation.

The whole shining city on a hill idea of America is a mystical bullshit. People love that shit. It's interesting. I would not be surprised if Betsy DeVos has read this man as a Rudolph Steiner. To be honest, I'm going to guess the person in American politics right now who he had a lot more influence on than Betsy DeVos is Marianne Williamson. We are going to talk about that and Rudolph Steiner's history with the Nazis and how we invented organic farming in part two of this series. Jesus Christ, this guy was relentless. This dude had, there's still so much gas left in the tank, man. It's fucking wild. But you know what it's time for now?

What? It's time for you to plug your plugables. Oh, is it right? Yeah, this is the end of the first episode on Steiner. Okay. God, I've had this fucking sinus infection for... Well, it's not even a sinus infection. It's just like endless sinus shit for a month anyway. You hear me complain about my sinuses on Twitter, at the Crofton Show, or on my Instagram, Chris underscore Crofton. And I do my famous Cold Brew Got Me Like series on there, which is just very important.

And I write an advice column called The Advice King for the Nashville scene and you should Google The Advice King and read all of them. There's like 200 and they're all fucking good. And you should go listen to my record, Hello It's Me, which came out last year and got a 7.4 on Pitchfork. And you can find me not on Pitchfork, but often brandishing a Pitchfork at Passersby on the highway. I just, I love Pitchfork and it's an art as much as it is a science. You can find this podcast on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter at At Bastards Pod. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK.

You can find Waldorf schools in the real world by finding a rich kid who wants to dance well. And yeah, shouting that out of them. So that's the end of the episode until Thursday and part two. I just want everyone to remember that at one point in his life, Joe Biden almost got into a knife fight with a guy nicknamed Corn Pop. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler.

Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.