Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Conspiracy to Begin All Conspiracies

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

Robert is joined by Langston Kerman to discuss the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.Footnotes:  https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/conspiracy-theory-rule-them-all/615550/   https://www.dhi-moskau.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Ankuendigung_Hagemeister_2.pdf  https://sci-hub.do/https://www.jstor.org/stable/27669221?seq=1  https://watermark.silverchair.com/dcv024.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAApcwggKTBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggKEMIICgAIBADCCAnkGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMeGlbz4t7R6zib7QGAgEQgIICSlmk1ELwcC_GK6SCGjyjDA1lvDMPK1UHe8JFWVLRdcvvNwJhPVzpwMVSM4ikXjNOwTDwsiw_AX4joVsyKEfX240c6BRfrTuoMLUBI5lnjvFttMc6bn5XWfwM1bREsx8wzXlcjjKILJ421b4OlaWNpZy8t5j9zazKMJMIJ1P4jXv6Z2qa2WUY2sd9eZIhhSOYbV-6cHQUjZVX-2M10YDZ8qQzlAw2pWZkynuRiSyfDHaNl_cPtOoKCTwPwDzf83LMe22xJ6ExIo75peEUa10SdU1qLxzrRM-vdXVbxGIcpDQ4cJzoNyVt7P1lgUH8cOrBfrVVfhn6aCuaxCZTqMjrt4USNmn4EnWREdt3Qyoy_GiNMRH_p0nLsahXGr1PfmrDkHrRS28GMAgcDXmS-g7OnC43pU5yCofGaWDwbgXu_25b4dpvIkVIXF8J7SLyO0NNADEWdJqrwBsbnu2S8FcB2DaiUY-ZmruiHqTD5Ummf7Nl4r9hKGntpKXoDPdv1oaAnJCU9ZqkMi58XDx7PLQD_ZFGa2m3gLRV3zo_vpjaoR-kjI7-cU_fAz55uQqZ4VX65tvJNx0LSsLqEouLGlsaqjWQk2oHhBT2Ht3TFMTtQzuQ8NfrPDV59mYMGjbApWCaSnlV_Cfz0PYBp-mDNxWoglIBbQdLAu4DB4gtwp1mYjFWLIpxl3y4TwqREGiEznrynxhkwyLEeXF2k_q_fvex7QBfwSVU4nvGbAWMOxIy3ZcLMumzCdqH3NUHQH0eHeKwjnXQKtPXS5yu4dI  https://www.amazon.com/Lie-Libel-History-Protocols-Elders/dp/0803292457  https://theconversation.com/antisemitism-how-the-origins-of-historys-oldest-hatred-still-hold-sway-today-87878  https://www.philosophersmag.com/opinion/30-karl-marx-s-radical-antisemitism  Esther Webman. The Global Impact of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Century-Old Myth (Routledge Jewish Studies Series) (p. 59). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.  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. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. 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 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 and 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. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. anal fissures. Sophie, was that is that how you start a podcast? I mean, yeah. I mean, technically, I mean this podcast. Sure, we did it. That was because normally if I'm shouting a disease, it's going to be like diphtheria or syphilis that I decided to throw a wild card in this time. Although I could have given the topic today. It might have been appropriate to just shout Hitler. I mean, I thought that's where you were going, but then you didn't do it. And now I'm confused. Well, Hitler did have a lot of weird but problems. So it scans. This is behind the bastards. A podcast where we talk about the worst people in all of history and the things behind them in

today's episode is one of the latter. My guest today is Langston Kerman from The Boys and from Insecure. Langston, how are you doing today? Oh, I'm fantastic. And what an intro. What a thank you to start. I love the way you start your show. This is fantastic. We're professionals here, Langston. And the way professionals open shows is by immediately before the show starts shouting out the name of a disease illness or just atonally shrieking. Langston knows. Langston has a podcast. I do have a podcast. That's true. It's about black people in our conspiracy theories. I rarely yell anal fishers, but I'm learning a lot today. And maybe that's something I'll incorporate. Langston, one of my really good friends, Cody del Rosario, he texts me, he's like,

you got to listen to this podcast. And I'm like, it's your show. And I'm like, yeah, that's kind of on our network. And I will tell you. Yeah. Well, Langston, you just as you just said, you do a show about conspiracy theories. That's right. And today we're talking about about the conspiracy theory that kind of started all modern conspiracy theories. We're going back to the source, the the the origin point for like QAnon, for like the NWO, the Illuminati conspiracies, all of that shit, all that Bill Cooper stuff starts with the subject of today's episode. We are talking about the protocols of the Elders of Zion. Whoa. Yeah. You heard anything about that? No, but I just love a lot of fancy words strung together in the way that I'm enjoying.

This is one of the most influential pieces of dangerous conspiratorial nonsense ever created. It has gotten millions of people killed. Like like like a death toll that that your average dictator would struggle to or your average American president for that matter would struggle to match. Like this is this thing has gotten so many fucking real Jimmy Carter worth of numbers. I got you. Yeah. I love the Jimmy Carter is your yardstick for a person who gets a lot of people killed. The greatest martyr of all time, I would say. Yeah. Jimmy Carter, history's greatest monster. Yeah. You can see in his eyes as he feverishly builds houses that he's just desperately trying to weigh down his debt to humanity. Those bruises are coming from the inside is what I always say.

He's so boiling out of him. So as you're well aware, as all of our listeners are well aware, we live today in an age of conspiracies, real and theorized. I think about half of the country, probably about half of the world lives in a semi permanent state of conspiratorial obsession. And a lot of these folks are right. You know, for example, there's a ton of black people today who remember personally what the FBI co Intel pro like programmed into the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers. Absolutely. There's people all over the Arab world and in Latin America who lost family members and lived in chains for decades because of conspiracies cooked up or funded by the CIA. A lot of people have been victims of real conspiracies. So when I say we

live in a world of conspiracies, it's not all nonsense. So I would say the great plague of our modern world isn't that a lot of people believe in conspiracies because a lot of people have a good reason to the thing that's slowly tearing our society apart, which is kind of perfectly embodied by QAnon and the terminal case of fascist brainworms that it's spread to millions of Americans is something different. It's called conspiracism. This term was popularized by a scholar named Frank Mintz in the 1980s. He defined conspiracism as belief in the primacy of conspiracies and the unfolding of history. In other words, the idea that conspiracies are a conspiracy is a moving the primary moving factor in the history of a nation of the world. That's

conspiracism. It's demonstrably false because the vast majority of shit that happens happens pretty much out in the open, right? There's all these different like, like with the case of like kind of white supremacy in the United States, there's a bunch of FBI conspiracies and stuff you can point to. But the history of white supremacy is mostly pretty open. Like most of it's not really all that hidden. It's just like the way things fucking work and stuff. But so you've got these real conspiracies, conspiracism is believing that everything that happens is tied to a conspiracy in some way as opposed to this them being kind of fragments of the reality that we live in. As Frank Mintz wrote, conspiracism serves the needs of diverse political and social groups in

America and elsewhere. It identifies elites, blames them for economic and social catastrophes, and assumes that things will be better once popular action can remove them from positions of power. And I think that gets to the key difference between believing in conspiracies and conspiracism. If you understand like that the FBI and the CIA carried out and still engage in a variety of conspiracies to fuck up a bunch of things, you probably don't believe that just getting rid of one of those organizations will solve all of the world's problems. Like you'd be rad to get rid of the CIA and the FBI, but it wouldn't stop Turkey from ethnically cleansing the Kurds or Azerbaijan by ethnic from ethnically cleansing Armenians. It wouldn't fix climate change overnight. It wouldn't

stop our world from accelerating into an uninhabitable mess. Conspiracists believe it like, yeah, if you get this conspiracy out of the way, like that's the QAnon thing, right? If we can get rid of this cabal of evil child-eating pedophiles and solve all of the world's problems, everything will be fixed. And we just have to solve this. It's kind of an optimistic worldview when you really think about it, conspiracism, because it believes that there's a magic bullet that can fix everything. So yeah, scholar, and it's clear why conspiracism is particularly attractive today, because we have so many problems and they're all so complex and they all have tendrils not just into these different government organizations and different cabals

and whatnot, but they have all these tendrils into just the way we live our lives, right? It'd be nice if there was one small group of evil men making climate change happen, but it's largely tied to the fact that we all kind of live the lives that we live, and we have all these systems that ensure that we're going to continue pumping carbon into the atmosphere. And that's hard to fix. I mean, that would be dope if it was just like those some three dudes, and you were just like, oh, you're fucking something up. All right, bye. Yeah. Yes. And I maintain that it is three dudes, mostly so that I don't have to work on me, but that's the personal work that I'm avoiding. There's that like, oh, seven companies responsible for

like 80% of the carbon emissions. That's true, but they're doing it because of the way we all, because for example, we all need to drive a car because we for years, like allowed fossil fuel companies to destroy any chance at functional public transport in a large chunk of the world, or like, you know, yeah, yeah, like you can tie a lot of emissions to Amazon, but Amazon is emitting because we all want our second day delivery and shit, like there's it's all more complicated than just like Jeff Bezos bad. He is terrible. He's terrible. But I also bought a bunch of fruit leather the other day from Amazon, and I didn't have to do that. I didn't need that product. You wanted the fruit leather. And so you really wanted that fruit. Yeah.

Did I need 100 pieces of fruit leather? Absolutely not. That's on me. Jeff Bezos. We all have our fruit leather in this discussion, you know. Yeah. So scholars Seymour Lipset and Earl Robb wrote that the typical conspiracy theory is international in scope extends both in space and time dates back in history and is destined to endure forever. And that's kind of what separates an actual conspiracy. You know, you can look at real conspiracy like, OK, well, at this date, the CIA launched a plan to overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala and backed death squad and stuff. And like, there's a beginning and an end and a scope, a limited scope to the conspiracy conspiracy theory.

There's no limit. It goes on forever. It goes back in time forever. And it will never it will endure forever. Alex Jones, for example, believes in a globalist conspiracy that stretches literally back into prehistory, a small group of a few thousand insiders, depending on what day he's talking about. It had been working for millennia to enslave and eliminate the human race, destroying these globalists will solve every problem that humans have. But in Alex's estimation, their precise member roster is always changing. And their plans are always about 10 years away from completion. So no matter what you do, it's always there. It's always if you could just solve the problem, everything would be better. But you never do. That's a fucking conspiracy theory in

the modern sense of the word. Q believers, on the other hand, tend to tie every problem of their lives and nationwide to this cabal that's fighting Donald Trump and magical combat. And yeah, like it links up with all these differences. We've talked about this a lot on the show. Historian Daniel Pipes laid out a short list of characteristics that virtually all conspiracy theories have in common. Power is the goal. Benefit indicates control. Conspiracies drive history. Nothing is accidental or foolish and appearances deceive, right? One of the big like key cat like tenants of QAnon is that there are no coincidences. And part of this is just because like, man, fucking wild shit happens in the world. You know, sometimes the Archduke of Austria,

Hungary is trying to get a sandwich or is what is like driving down the street and the guy at a sandwich shop shoots him and then 20 million people die. And that's just the way the fucking world goes. But conspiracy, no, it's got to be, you know, this guy was a part of like he was a part of an organization, but it was like just a bunch of poor Serbians. But they've got to imagine, you know, as part of this, there's people pulling the strings, the Rothschilds needed it to happen. And like, sure. Yeah, there's babies in that pizza shop. Yeah, there's babies in that pizza shop. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't just people talking about cheese pizza. It's got to be, yeah. Yeah. Nazism as at its heart was a conspiracist theology. All of Germany's problems could be

laid at the feet of international Jewry, who are responsible not just for German defeat in World War One, but for the overthrow of the czars and the establishment of the USSR. When the war turned against the Nazis, Hitler and his high command diverted crucial war resources towards fueling the extermination camps in the East, because eliminating the Jews was for them a military priority. Not all conspiracist beliefs center around the idea of an international Jewish conspiracy, but conspiracism itself has its origins intricately tied to anti-Semitism. And in the most successful conspiracy theory ever made in human history, the protocols of the elders of Zion. The concept of grand conspiracies is not particularly old as these things go.

Conspiracy theories, grand conspiracy theories go back about 900 years and have only really become operational in the last 200 years. The inciting incident for the birth of all modern grand conspiracy theories is the French Revolution. This makes sense when you really think about it. One of the world's great powers, the most powerful military force in the world at the time, the most established monarchy in the world, is overthrown seemingly overnight and replaced with a radical left-wing government, bloodletting and chaos ensues. Many people felt the changes that swept France couldn't possibly have been the result of long simmering unrest and kingly incompetence. It couldn't be, the king was dumb, he fucked up, people took their chance and they got lucky and

things just worked out in the over through the government. It couldn't be that. It has to be some, some cabal was plotting this. And unfortunately for just a whole lot of people, the birth of modern conspiracy theories happened to very neatly coincide with something else, the birth of modern anti-Semitism. So these two things are really happening right at the same time. When I talk about modern anti-Semitism, not just talking about like, it's, it's, what is the difference between racism and anti-Semitism? Anti-Semitism is a type of racism, but not all people, not all different groups of people have the same thing that, that Jewish people go through with anti-Semitism, which is anti-Semitism isn't just bigotry against Jewish people,

it's belief that they control the entire world, right? That's not a thing that is universal in racism. It's a thing that exists beyond that, but like, that's a specific thing. Yeah, with black people, they're never worried we're in charge. They're pretty confident we are not in charge. Except for LeBron. I think they're a little worried LeBron might be in charge, but everybody else, they're like pretty certain we ain't got shit, whereas Jewish people, they're real worried about being in charge. LeBron is in charge. And I hope so. I mean, God, that would be comforting. Because he's good at something. He's doing his big, strong arms. That'd be beautiful. It would just be nice to know that the person in charge of the world had at

least a talent, right? Well, you've got one skill, maybe he has others. Yeah, we can teach him to talk. This'll be fine. Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's not going to bomb anybody. So comforted by that, that future for us. Yeah, just LeBron James running on government. It was beautiful. Yeah, the only bombs he drops are basketballs. That would be nice. Wow. Did you just try to do a sports reference? I mean, I did. I did my best. It was really painful for me. I know. I'm sorry. Well, I'm proud of you. I think you showed up. I mean, I'm proud of you for knowing LeBron's lesson. Yes. Yeah, I mean, I do live in the world. And he does run it. It's one of the things that's hard to miss. Yeah, again, anti-Semitism, like in kind of the modern

sense of the word. And we talk academically, a lot of times a day, if you're just, if you're racist against Jewish people, that's anti-Semitism. And it is. But when we talk about it academically, we're talking about not just racism, but the theory that the Jews control everything, right? Like that, that conspiratorial belief, that doesn't go back forever. There's, again, racism against Jewish people has a long history. You can find Romans like Cicero talking about Jewish gold and Roman poets like juvenile decrying Jews as drunken and misbehaved. But the bigotry on display by these guys, these Romans, is the same kind of bigotry they had about everyone who wasn't Roman, right? Like you can find them saying the same shit about Carthaginians and stuff.

The ancient Romans burnt down Jerusalem, but they didn't do it because they believed there was a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. They were angry that Jewish people didn't worship the emperor and were, you know, it was, it was, it was imperial shit. It wasn't like a belief in some sort of conspiracy. They burned it down and they said, this isn't personal, fellas. We just This isn't personal. This is what we do. We're the Roman empire. We burned down a lot of cities, and that's what we're going to last a thousand years. Yeah. Please don't think this is about your religious beliefs. This has nothing to do with that. I mean, a little bit, but yeah. We don't think you're pulling the strings. We're pulling the strings. We're the Roman empire.

Yeah. Early Christians spent a lot of time vilifying Jewish thinkers, and this is kind of where the roots of anti-Semitism go back. This was due partly to the fact that in the early days of Christianity, most people who, and most people weren't Christians, just saw it as like a kind of Judaism, right? Like, oh, you've got Christian and Jews are kind of the same thing. Like, Christian and Jewish people don't see it that way, but Roman pagans are like, well, they're all the same. They all believe there's just one God, like a bunch of lunatics. Yeah. So early Christians wanted to differentiate themselves from Jewish people, and one way to do that was by attacking Judaism. An early Christian apologist, which is like a

guy, you know, a hype man for Christianity. They're trying to drum up interest in the religion. Justin was maybe the first Christian to claim that Jewish people had, quote, killed the Christ. And Justin is the origin of the, like, the Jews killed Jesus thing, right? That Mel Gibson put in this movie and stuff. Yeah. I love that his name is Justin. That's great. Justin, another Justin. Fucking shit up for everybody. The first Justin really showed up. Justin the martyr. Yeah. Just was a piece of shit right off the jump.

Thanks, Justin. At least it wasn't a shit. We've got our own shit and he's one of a kind. Justin. Yeah, we sure do. Justin was followed and sort of weaving the bones of anti-Semitism by a guy called Tertullian, who was one of the fathers of the Christian church. Tertullian called synagogues fountains of persecution. Now, these stereotypes as Jewish people as rebels who rejected Jesus and persecuted Christians evolved over the decades and centuries as Christianity went from kind of a fringe cult to the dominant religion of the Western world. And these, this bigotry shaped the attitudes of a lot of medieval Christian communities towards the Jewish diaspora. There were pogroms and massacres inspired by these beliefs.

In 1190, at least 150 Jewish people were massacred in the town of York. In 1290, Jews were exposed en masse from England in an act of ethnic cleansing, one that was followed by France in 1306 and Spain in 1492. In 1543, Martin Luther called the church in Rome the devil's synagogue and derided Catholic orthodoxy as Jewish in his greed. We don't talk enough about how racist Martin Luther was. He was like, Catholics are so Jewish, these Jewish Catholics. They only talk about how nice that dude was. And he was a piece of shit, massive piece of shit, wrote a whole book about how he didn't like Jewish people. Real bad guy. I never, I never trusted his haircut. So for me, it was a no from the start, but I've only heard

good news and this is bad news on the whole Martin Luther front news. You hear bad news about a couple of people in this. It was we again, the Holocaust really changed a lot of this because after the Holocaust, people started feeling some shame for saying bigoted things about Jewish people in public. But man, everybody was racist against Jewish people right up until that moment, right? There's these, there were a couple of big myths in Christendom. One of them was the idea of like the blood Passover is how it's referred to, which is that rabbis kidnap Jewish babies and use their blood to make like matzah bread, basically, like to celebrate the Passover and the other and you'll see there are churches in Europe today with stained glass reliefs of rabbis killing

Christians. Like to this day, are still like that. They refuse to take down or like history or whatever. Yeah. I mean, nobody's going to these churches. Yeah. It's one of those things like it's often framed because of how kind of rapidly society changed after the Holocaust. It's often framed as like the Germans drummed all of this hatred up. No, they didn't. It went back. There were ethnic cleansings in every country in Europe against the Jews in the centuries prior to the Holocaust, you know? Right. Yeah. And the other big myth is the Judean sow, which is like a pig that is Jewish babies are suckling at its breasts. And you'll see this, there are stained glass reliefs of Jewish babies like nursing from pigs in the great old cathedrals of Europe.

It's deeply woven in the history of Christianity is what I'm saying. We don't talk about it. But again, these aren't conspiracy. There's conspiracies about like, yeah, rabbis murdering kids and stuff like that. But there's not nobody's talking about Jews running the world. Right. There's this idea. These are aliens that are missed. They're dangerous because they're different. There's not this idea that like there's the secret masters of the universe. That really got started after the French Revolution in the 1700s. When the French Revolution hit, conspiracies were immediately woven to lay blame for it on the Jews. A couple of years after the revolution, Edmund Burke published a manifesto on the French Revolution where he declared the

revolutionaries Jew brokers and old Jew. Now, this is one of history's great ironies because you have seen a quote from Edmund Burke. If you've watched documentaries about the Holocaust, if you've watched documentaries about the Nazis, there's a specific Edmund Burke quote that shows up fucking constant. I probably saw it 100 times as a kid. The quote is, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. And that is often used in like Holocaust documentaries in the never again sense is that like, if only good people had done something, we could have stopped this. And the people who use that quote, I don't think generally know that Edmund Burke helped found modern antisemitism. They don't know that he wasn't including Jews.

He was not. He was like, listen, good men should do something, not you Jews, stay out of it. You're not good people. That's the that's the feel you get from Mr. Burke. And yeah, his Burke's attitude towards the French Revolution is very similar to Adolf Hitler's attitude towards the Russian Revolution, because Hitler blamed it on Judeo Bolsheviks. That was always the term he would use. They're the same. It's the same basic idea, right? This cataclysm has changed Europe forever. This dynasty has been swept from power. It can't just have been because they were shit and they made people angry. It has to be the Jews, you know. Obviously, the fact that the idea

that Jewish people had been pulling the strings was not the only or even the most prominent conspiracy theory in the wake of the French Revolution. In 1797, a French Jesuit named Abbe Barwell wrote a treatise blaming the revolution on a cabal of Freemasons. Barwell was a reactionary, one of the French aristocrats who opposed the revolution because it took his friend's stuff. His argument was nonsense, since many of the nobles who had been massacred in the French Revolution had been Freemasons themselves. It was not like a poor dude thing. But there were a lot of conspiracies about the masons. And Barwell did not initially blame Jewish people for the revolution. He just thought the Freemasons did it. But he's got this conspiracy theory out

that the Freemasons were behind it. Guys like Burke are blaming it on Jewish people. And both of these conspiracy theories start circulating at the same time, which meant the two were bound to cross pollinate. Now, it's worth noting that throughout this period, Jewish communities lived very much on the margins of most European communities. They were legally second or even third class citizens in most countries, as historian Richard Levy writes, quote, Jews living in European lands and in those parts of the world where Europeans settled had gradually become a pariah people, the embodiment of evil instincts, a false religion, and inferior physical traits. Until the late 18th century, with few exceptions, they lived apart, wrapped in their

own self-sufficient religious culture, subject to severe legal disability, special taxes, occasional expulsion, and outbursts of popular fury. Although much on the minds of other peoples, Jews were left to themselves for long periods. Their only connection to the larger societies in which they lived was in the economic sphere, where a few amassed legendary fortunes while the great majority pursued marginal, obnoxious occupations, such as money lending, peddling, rent collecting, and tavern keeping. There was segregation against Jewish people in a lot of Europe. You couldn't do certain jobs. You weren't allowed in public. You couldn't join the army. You couldn't do all of the things that Christians could do. One of the few things Jewish people

were allowed to do was lend money, which is where like this, the idea of the Jewish banker comes from is that, and this is the same thing when in Islamic society, you're not allowed to charge interest if you're like an Islamic banker. So in both Christendom and the Muslim world, a lot of banking is done by Jewish people because that's all they're allowed to do. Like you haven't given us any other option. What the fuck else are we supposed to do? You know, right? You took away every other job. Here we are. And then you made fun of us for it and built a big old conspiracy theory around it. Yeah, you can't win with, you know, racism. Tail is old as time. So as the modern world came into building, being and secularism went

vogue among intellectuals, some of the prescriptions against Jewish people started the fate. Christianity stops being like dominant in government. And a lot of reasonable people are like, well, why are we restricting Jewish people if we're not, we don't govern based on Christianity. We shouldn't oppress these people just for being Jewish. And so campaigns for emancipation started to pick up in the 17 and 1800s. And these are these are campaigns by Jewish people and their allies for equal rights under the law. A lot of this was driven by the French Revolution, because in the French Revolution, after the king was overthrown, Jewish people gained on paper, at least equal rights. It didn't really work out that way as it never does with emancipation

campaigns, but things got a lot better for them. And this is part of why guys like Edmund Burke were so certain that Jews were behind the whole thing, right? There's a revolution, a lot of prescriptions and laws against Jewish people doing stuff are repealed. Of course, it must have been them that orchestrated it because they benefited, right? That's a key aspect of conspiracism. You see a group that benefits, you assume they caused the thing. It's the way human brains work, I guess. In 1789, when the National Assembly of France approved the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, one prominent French representative called upon his fellow citizens to acknowledge Jews as free French citizens. He argued that

they were due everything any other citizen was due, which sounds great. But then he went on to say this, Jews should be given everything as individuals and nothing as a nation. Basically, I like a few of these guys. Yeah, I just don't like them as a group. Yeah, exactly. I'm fine with Jewish people as individuals. We're all humans. Their religion is bad, and they need to give it up to integrate into society. That's what he's saying, right? Like, you need as long as you assimilate, then you get equal rights. If you continue to be Jewish, then I'm not cool with you. And this was very common among, I guess, what you'd call the woke left at the time, that we shouldn't restrict Jewish people from doing anything, but they

should stop being Jewish. That's a common idea. Give it up. Just come over here. Be like us. Be like us. We love you if you do everything we do and never argue with us. Yeah. Again, a story that has never been repeated in history. So a major move towards mass emancipation of European Jews came courtesy of a guy you might not suspect, Napoleon Bonaparte. He's actually a huge figure in Jewish emancipation. In the early days of his empire, he was one of the things that made him noteworthy is he welcomed Jewish men into his army as soldiers, which was not done in a lot of Europe. He was like, because he wasn't doing this because he was particularly woke or a good person. He was doing this because you're a body's a body.

I need people to die for me. You guys die just as... Do Jewish people respond the same to get him shot as white? Bring him in. You Jewish dude, stand in front of me. Yeah, stand in front of me. I've got a good feeling about you. I don't care what you believe as long as you hold a gun for me. That's Napoleon's attitude. And again, he's not doing this because he's a nice man, but it has really positive impacts on a lot of Jewish communities in Europe because Napoleon conquers fucking everything. When his armies conquered the city of Padua in Italy, they knocked down the walls of that city's ghetto, basically to say that like this, your restrictions like your life as second-class citizens is over. We're destroying the wall

that separates you from the rest of society, which is a huge moment for Italian Jews, right? Like Italian Jewish people who had been oppressed for centuries see French Jews carrying guns, giving orders and liberating them from bondage. It's a big fucking moment and a messianic fervor begins to sweep through Europe, which is this idea, you know, Jewish people are still waiting for the Messiah, right? Like that's this, he's going to come, he's going to come. A lot of them become convinced in this period that Napoleon's coming was a sign that the Messiah is about to come. Napoleon was sent by God to liberate us and our time of struggle and trial was almost over. Oh boy, they were a little off on that one. A little bit off on that one.

This really feels like when Shug Knight went to the source rewards and told everybody to come to death row, you know what I mean? Yeah, he's offering an alternative option, but it's not going to be good for anybody. You know, a lot of Italian Jewish historians compare Shug Knight to the seizure of Padua. It's an extremely common. Like Shug Knight, Napoleon was shot twice at the VMAs. Like Shug Knight, Napoleon ran a dude over with his car and then backed over the guy again. Classic comparisons. You know who else is a lot like Shug Knight? We're supported by Shug Knight. This podcast, right? He backs us, doesn't he? He backs us. He goes forward. He backs us again.

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 not in the good 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 defending

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, and we're just appreciating Shugnight and Napoleon. Two dudes just racking up the W's at this point. Both of them have a fall from grace, right? Napoleon and Shug both end up in prison. I stand behind my comparison. I think they both did really well and then not well at all immediately after. If you could bridge the language gap between them, I actually do think they would probably have gotten. All empire builders are the same kind to do. So yeah, Jewish people,

as a result of Napoleon's liberatory rhetoric and the fact that he really does improve things for Jewish people in his empire, start to feel like the messianic period is here. We're about to be freed. And for a few years, you can see why they felt that way. Between 1808 and 1815, Napoleon's conquest of Warsaw led to a mass liberation of Polish Jews who overnight received full civil rights for the first time in their history. There were even whispers during the Egyptian campaign that Napoleon meant to reconquer the Holy Land for diaspora Jews and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. Napoleon meant nothing of the sort. He was never going, get Napoleon, give land to people. You have misunderstood Napoleon, sir.

But he recognized the propaganda value in what he was doing, especially since the Jewish communities all throughout Europe and the countries he's going to war with. If I can get these people on my side, if I can get them to think I'm going to liberate them, maybe they will back me when I fight their governments. It's a smart thing to do if you're a guy like Napoleon. It's the thing the British Empire does all throughout the area as they control. As you find these different groups, these marginalized groups in the countries that you're trying to conquer and you support them against the people they have an issue with, and if you're a conqueror coming in, it's a smart thing to do.

Well, the sad part is governments are never nice to everyone. And so, subsequently, some dude coming in looking to take over is going to find some folks that are pretty unhappy with the way things have been going this entire time. Yes, exactly. So, Napoleon in reality was, number one, pretty racist against Jewish people. He was just better than the king had been. And he didn't, he was like these guys we were talking about, these early French revolutionaries. He thought Jewish people had equal rights. He didn't think they had the right to be Jewish. He wanted them to join secular French culture. He actually called a meeting of this like Jewish religious Congress, the Sanhedrin,

that hadn't met in centuries. And they think that he's calling the meeting to be like, you know, it's time, you know, the Messianic periods here, like I'm going to liberate like your homeland for you and take you back. That's what they think is happening. Napoleon is basically going to force all these Jewish representatives to vote that they're loyal Frenchmen who will fight for him. You know, that's what he wants to do is he wants to get, he wants to like, he's running a show vote to like get all of these people on his side. And his in reality, a lot of what he did for Jewish people was really shitty. One of the things he did was he canceled all debts owed by Christians to Jews,

and he didn't only do that, but he legally punished all Jewish people in the French empire by burning them with a communal debt to Christians that they had to repay. Basically, it's wrong that you were doing the only job we let you do, and you owe all Christians money in order to pay back like the like the loans and stuff that you like it's it's it's bad. He's a piece. I mean, he's he canceled Christian debt and then put that debt on Jewish people. Yeah, basically. Yes. Jesus. I mean, he's Napoleon. He wasn't a good guy, you know. And what was more fucked up the really the most toxic aspect of this, because even with that and even with that taken into account, life got a lot better for Jewish people under

Napoleon. What was most fucked up about what Napoleon did was the way that his enemies reacted to his supposed pro-Jewish leanings. See, Napoleon went to war with basically everybody. The rulers of Europe knew that all of these Jewish communities in their countries were talking about how the Messiah was nigh and Napoleon had been sent to free them. And they responded with a propaganda blitz that tied the dreaded Napoleon to the untrustworthy Jews, trying to tear down the old order of Europe for their own nefarious ends. One of these propagandists was Abbe Barowal, who'd initially blamed the French Revolution on free masons. But in 1806, he started circulating a forged letter probably sent to him by members of the state police who resented Napoleon's

liberal attitude towards the Jews. The Jewish Virtual Library writes that this letter, quote, called attention to the alleged part of the Jews and the conspiracy that he had earlier attributed to the masons. This myth of an international Jewish conspiracy reappeared later on in 19th century Europe in places such as Germany and Poland. So this is where this this is where this myth starts, right, is this guy who had first blamed the revolution on the the free masons. He sees Napoleon doing some nice stuff for Jewish people. He loops them into that conspiracy, the Jews and the free masons over through the King of France. And now they're trying to destroy the order in Europe. That's how this evolves. Now, the group in Europe who most

dove into this new conspiracy theory were the czars of Russia. Their empire had a massive downtrodden Jewish population. There there had been massive genocides in both Poland and Russia against the Jews for for centuries, this point, including one that Kalmenitsky massacre in eastern Poland that killed like three quarters of a million people. Just like really, really bad stuff. So obviously, the czars have reason to be worried that these people are loyal because they've been killing them. You think they remember what we did? Yeah, I remember, right? Right. And they're worried because Napoleon's coming for them, or they think it. I mean, he did eventually, but they think at the time he's coming for them, right? He's been beating

his way through the Germans, which were kind of our bulwark against France. And he's going to be in our territory soon enough. In 1806, they launched an unprecedented propaganda blitz that would somewhat inadvertently create the basic ideas of modern anti-Semitism. The whole effort represented a massive propaganda reversal for Russia, who needed both to justify an alliance with their ancestral enemies, Prussia, and also introduce a new enemy, the alien evil lurking within, preparing to tear the country down. The culmination of this work was a mass produced propaganda pamphlet called The Appeal. And I'm going to quote now from an essay written by Johann Petrovsky Stern, quote, the document climaxes with the entry of the Jews and the

expansion of the Jewish theme. Outwitted by a cunning Napoleon and disappointed by only partial emancipation, the gullible Jews of Napoleonic France are portrayed as perfidious accomplices of France and true friends of Bonaparte, a Satan who insolently revolted against the Holy of Holies. The embodiment of absolute evil, Napoleon Bonaparte convened the Jewish synagogues in France, demanding an insulting public homage to the rabbis. He established a new Jewish Sanhedrin, which the Russian document saw as the same godless institution which in its time conspicuously condemned our Lord and the Savior Jesus Christ to the cross. Napoleon maintained the appeal, intended to unify the Jews, whom divine rage dispersed throughout the land, and most importantly,

to proclaim Napoleon a false messiah. And the Jews, those alleged haters of Christ, were more than eager to assist Napoleon in his infamy. So the real focus of this propaganda is still on Napoleon, but it's tying. This is like the the first real document that throws all of this together, all the stuff that becomes modern anti-Semitism. It's so strange that they're both, he's both calling them idiots and like these sort of like powerful figures in this whole thing. He's like, yeah, they're big dumb idiots, but we gotta watch out for them because they're super dangerous. I mean, it's this thing, it's particular in anti-Semitism, but you see it always in conspiracies. The enemy is simultaneously all powerful and

incompetent, you know? Like it's dumb enough that like you're able, like he doesn't, like they can't stop us, they can't stop us from what we're doing, but also like they control everything. It's the thing you see, you know, I keep going back to Alex Jones, but he's a good modern example. It's the thing with like QAnon, where the conspiracy is worldwide, but also everyone is 10 steps behind Donald Trump, the perfect genius. Joe Biden can't read, but he also is somehow running this cabal and taking down their great savior. Yeah, it's, it's, it never makes much sense is the point. Great savior. The Zars wrote this appeal, but it didn't stay like the official propaganda line for long because right after it gets published, Napoleon signs a peace

treaty with Russia. The Zars backpedal and they issue a like a new pro-France propaganda campaign to try to get everyone on board with the fact that now we're friendly with France and obviously this doesn't last, they eventually go to war, but the government abandons this anti-Semitic line of attack almost as soon as they began it, but the appeal made a terrible impact during its brief period of circulation. Russia had always been a land of pogroms and distrust of Jewish communities ran deep. The appeal had provided a justification for violence and confiscation of Jewish property. It was an act of self-defense against an embedded alien enemy. So the appeal gives all these people who had always been violent to Jews a justification for why they're

defending themselves by carrying out these pogroms. Independent newspapers started printing their own follow-ups to the appeal, imitating its key motif, the idea of a vast Jewish conspiracy against the Russian people. For the first quarter of the 19th century, Russian literature increasingly depicted Jews differently from European literature. Russian literary scholar Mikhail Vyskov writes, already in the 1820s, it becomes visible in Russian prose and the idea of a secret Jewish government, which together with other evil powers is participating in a plot against all humanity. It's almost like the appeal is a virus, right? And once it gets out, it starts to spread throughout Russia, throughout like the Russian intellectual community. And it becomes by the 1820s, it's

all throughout their fiction, it's all throughout their literature, this idea of a vast Jewish conspiracy. It's broken containment, you know? It's not in control of the Czar's anymore. And it doesn't stay trapped in Russia. We see variants arising throughout the rest of Europe in the mid-1820s. A good example of kind of one variant of this that's a little, it's different from what's happening in Russia, but it has similar roots, is the kind of anti-Semitism that you saw expressed by Karl Marx. Despite having Jewish ancestry himself, Marx's early career involved some pretty rough claims. And this is his early career, but there's some bad stuff in here. In 1843, he blamed the existence of modern capitalism on the Judaism, or Judaism,

you know, on Christian society being made more Jewish. Capitalism comes from the Jews. Karl, I know, right? You always are referenced as a good guy. Why, Karl? He was right about a lot, not this. He was wrong about stuff, too. He wrote a lot, you know? We were all rooting for you, Karl. That's disappointing. Yeah. It's so common, though. It's the same thing if you look at like a lot of the founding intellectual minds of modern anarchism, guys like Kropotkin and Prudhon, super anti-Semitic. Really, really racist. Just because everyone, like all of Christendom was really bigoted against Jewish people was extremely common. It seems like it's like the one thing that can kind of bring

everybody together at this point is just like, well, we all hate Jews, right? That's why the Nazis pick it, you know? You find the common enemy and you rally everyone around them, even though the enemy is actually has no power and isn't responsible for any problems. It's what works. And again, with Marx, we see because kind of this Russian propaganda hasn't reached to England yet where he's writing, Marx is more in kind of lying with those old French revolutionaries. He doesn't hate Jewish people. He doesn't like the Jewish religion, right? He thinks that in his ideal society, Jewish people will emancipate themselves by giving up Judaism, right? And he's not a fan of like Christianity in particular either, but he believes

that Jewish people are like their religion is capitalist, so they have to give it up in order to like become part of the rest of the world. In 1844, Marx wrote an essay with the deeply unfortunate title on the Jewish question. He's not the only one using this phrase. That's why Hitler uses it, right? It is called that by a lot of people. And the Jewish question is, what do we do with Jewish people? And of course, the answer is never listen, just let them just let them do their thing. Just chill the fuck out. They seem fine. Let's invite them over and have a nice brunch. Yeah, cool. I don't know, maybe stop being shitty to him. But no, that's never the answer. In this pamphlet, he described the Jewish religion as huckstering and the Jewish

God as money. He concluded that in the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism. And again, this sounds extermination is he's not saying that he's saying the man kind will be emancipated when they give up their religion, right? We want the people, we don't want their faith, which isn't good, but it's different from like the Nazi arguments that you're going to hear later. This is kind of the standard liberal line at this point in time in history. And yeah, it's interesting. You'll see people declare Marx anti-Semitic over this. And Marx was again, had Jewish ancestry. But one of the people who will disagree with the claim that Marx is anti-Semitic is Jonathan Sachs, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom. And Sachs's argument

is simple. The word anti-Semitism didn't exist when Marx wrote his essay. And the bigotry he expressed in that essay was against a religion. It did not have a racial component. And he did not believe in a conspiracy of Jewish people. Marx was bigoted against the Jewish faith, but he didn't see there be. He didn't think Jewish people were inherently involved in a plot. The building strains of Russian anti-Semitism hadn't crossed over into the West yet. And so the utterly commonplace bigotry against Judaism that Marx expressed hadn't been cross pollinated with conspiricism yet. That process wouldn't really get underway until the late 1800s. The actual word anti-Semitism was popularized by a German journalist named Wilhelm Maher in 1879. Now,

Maher was an anti-Semite. He's the guy who came up with the word, you know, like you're high on the list. He wasn't pointing it out in someone else. He was like, no, this is what I am. We have a word for the shitty stuff, I think. And you're as awesome as me. You need a title. You got to put a title. So Maher coined the term in an unhinged screed, he wrote, titled the victory of Jewry over German them. That was about what you'd expect it to be about. And it has some real Nazi strains in it, you know, you can draw a direct line from Maher to the death camps. And one of the things that's interesting about Maher's bigotry and about the idea of anti-Semitism that he crafts is that his hatred of Jewish people was not based in

Christianity because he was secular, right? He didn't, he didn't hate Jewish people because he thought they were responsible for killing Jesus. He rejected myths about the ritual murder of Christian babies by rabbis. Instead, according to an article in the conversation, quote, he drew on the fashionable theories of the French academic Ernst Renan, who viewed history as a world-shaping contest between Jewish Semites and Aryan Indo-Europeans. Maher suggested that the Jewish threat to Germany was racial. He said that it was born of their immutable and destructive nature, their tribal peculiarities and alien essence. Yeah. Alien essence. Oh, man. He was like, listen, I'm not falling for any of that previous propaganda. I know they're not suckling at pigs.

I know they're not. Their religion is fine. I don't like them at their core. Their essence is what's broken in them. You don't understand. Let me tell you where the other racists fall short. You guys are so focused on the book. Forget the book. It's in their spirit. It's in their blood. Yeah. No, that like he really is a terrible man. And one of the things that's so dangerous about guys like Maher, guys like Renan, is that their bigotry isn't based in like provincial like religious stuff. They're not like a bunch of old hillbillies who are superstitious against the Jews. They're intellectuals. They're secular. And their hatred of Jewish people, their anti-Semitism is intellectually respectable. They get articles published in journals.

Scholars have to debate their racism. And that's a big step forward. This isn't, you know, because the world's secularizing. We're leaving the old bigotries in the past. And Maher finds a way to be like, we don't have to leave this in the past. I've modernized it. Sure. This iPhone got an update. This iPhone got an update. Yeah. No planned obsolescence for racism. Now, one thing we've seen throughout the last couple of decades of history that we've been covering today is that all of the stages of this growth and anti-Jewish sentiment were a reaction to emancipation, right? Which, again, we see this throughout history. This oppressed, marginalized group starts to get equal rights. They don't even get them. They start to get them.

They start to agitate for them. And people who are oppressing them freak the fuck out that this is a plot against the oppressors. In Russia's case, it was a panic that Jewish communities might back Napoleon in a coming war. Marx's essay on the Jewish question was a reaction to the growing emancipation movements across Europe. Renan and Maher were both trying to stop Jewish integration into Christian civilization. This happened throughout the Christian world, as Richard Levy writes, quote, only after Jews had begun to emerge from their isolation did anti-Semitism begin to surface in Europe. Instead of episodic repression and violence, followed by decades of calm, anti-Semites endeavored to make persecution of the Jews permanent.

Convinced that Jews had already gathered enormous power and that, as one pamphlet of the time put it, the victory of Jewry was imminent, anti-Semites determined that constant struggle against the enemy was an absolute necessity for the survival of Christian civilization. They founded political parties, voluntary associations, newspapers, and periodicals to this end. In the last quarter of the 19th century, the word anti-Semitism expressed a new way of dealing with the problem of the Jews. So in the olden days, the medieval period, right, when Christianity dominates everything, it's enough to just be racist against the Jews. It's enough to just be bigoted. It's enough to just share myths about them eating babies. When the world modernizes and Jewish people

start to integrate with society, that's where bigotry isn't enough because bigotry isn't modern. What you need is a theory that there's a war. We're engaged in a battle with the Jews. They're trying to take over our society. These campaigns for equal rights, they're fighting to oppress us, and that's modern. You can have that in a scientific, industrial society. They're managing the hate just fine. We have to create some sort of hidden extra layer to this bad boy. Exactly. While Marx's proof that there was a lot of anti-Jewish bigotry on the left, the vast majority of the growing anti-Semitic movement was conservative in nature. This was due in part to the fact that, as Jews gained political rights, most of them wound up as

liberals or socialists because those were the movements most effectively fighting for the emancipation of all people. A lot of Jewish political activists in this period, because they're oppressed, understand the oppression of other groups and fight to liberate them and fight not just like racial groups, but like liberate the poor and stuff. The reactionary right sees this and they fold anti-Semitism into their propaganda against socialists. This brings us once again to Tsarist Russia. The late 1800s were also a period of increasing left-wing resistance to the Tsarist dictatorship. The People's Will, a left-wing political organization, we might call accelerationist terrorists, although I think they were rad, embarked on a campaign of direct

violence aimed at destroying the Tsarist regime. This culminated with their successful assassination by bomb of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. They just blew him up. They threw a bomb at his carriage and exploded him. Whoa. Was he alone? It's some intense shit. No, he had guys with him. They fuck up a lot of people. It's a big old thing. You know? And there had been a... Do you know who else would be very into that? You know who else would assassinate the Tsar of Russia? Our sponsor, Raytheon? Yeah, I mean... Yes, they would, Sophie. Honestly, yeah. Yes, they would. Yeah. If there's one sponsor of ours that's good at assassinating Tsars, it's Raytheon. You could

really draw a direct line. The People's Will is just a precursor of Raytheon. They couldn't shoot knives out of the sky from drones, so a guy had to throw a big comical, spherical bomb to carriage. But it's in Raytheon's DNA. You know, that's why their motto is, Raytheon, fuck the Tsar. Here's products. 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 gotta 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 not in the good 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 happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, 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 Podcast, 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 defending 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So a bunch of Russian revolutionaries in this period, a lot of the people who were trying to overthrow the Tsar were Jewish men and women. And this was both because a lot of Jewish people were heavily represented in socialist movements at this period, and also because

the Tsars had massacred Jewish people for centuries. It makes sense. Again, I'm thoroughly on the pro-murdering the Tsar side of things in case people are curious. They are terrorists. This is terrorism. They're just justified. If you live under a Tsar, it's fine to do that. These are cool terrorists. I'm down with it, right? These terrorists are turning their chair backwards to throw their bombs. You know what I mean? AC Slater style. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So the waves of anarchist and socialist terrorist attacks, and a lot of these terrorists in this period in Russia are anarchists, right? This is idea from Bakunin of propaganda of the deed. The best propaganda is like killing the fucking Tsar. We don't want a Tsar. What is the best way

we can tell people we don't want a Tsar? What if we kill him? And the people's will was kind of more just like, I don't know. I'm not an expert on this. I don't think, I don't know if it would be right to call them anarchists. Definitely left-wing and socialistic. But they killed the Tsar, and this freaks the fuck out of the government, right? So there's, as you would expect in the wake of the head of state being killed, this massive wave of repression, not just against the actual group that had killed the Tsar, but against anyone doing socialist organizing in Russia. And there is this kind of unhinged panic among Russian conservatives that there's a conspiracy not just to kill the Tsar, but to overthrow the government, which there is, but they convinced themselves not that

this is happening because we're terrible at ruling Russia, and we've oppressed people horrifically, and they have good reason to want to overthrow the government. They're convinced it's the Jews, right? Because this propaganda started circulating in 1806, right? This has been going on for a while, this idea that there's a conspiracy to destroy our government, and it's the Jews behind it. Now, for some context, this is a bloody period in Russian history, not compared to modern Russian history, but compared to, I don't know, most places. About 17,000 people are killed or wounded in terrorist attacks in the last 20 years of the Russian Empire. There is a lot of violence. Yeah. Like some bad shit going on. And it was a time of tremendous

upheaval and rapid change. Tsar Alexander II, before his death, had freed the Serps, right? So like Russia is industrializing rapidly. They end serfdom. There's a lot of political changes. There's also all this terrorism and violence. There's these military defeats and Crimea and again against Japan. And as we discussed at the top of the episode, when things are changing rapidly, when people, particularly conservatives, feel like they don't have any solid ground beneath their feet, that's the kind of situation in which conspiracism really breeds most effectively. Because you need something to explain it. You don't want to think that like, well, all of these economic and social forces have come together to cause rapid change and unrest,

and we need to adapt to it. No, no, no. There's an evil cabal responsible for everything I don't understand. And if we can kill them, we'll solve all of our problems. Sure. It's hard to believe that the world just played out the way that it played out and you got fucked. So it's easier to like blame a specific party for you getting fucked. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a story as at least a couple hundred years old. And this brings me finally to the protocols of the elders of Zion. We had a long prologue this episode. I love it. So most people who write about the protocols, and we'll talk about exactly what they say in a little bit, most people who write about them will authoritatively state that they were created initially by the Ocrana, which was the czarist

secret police. The Ocrana are like the precursor to the Gestapo and the KGB, even like the FBI and the CIA, you could argue. They're one of the very first like secret services. And their whole job is to keep the czar in power, right? They infiltrate. We're supposed to infiltrate left wing movements. We're supposed to stop assassination attempts. We're supposed to stop people from changing the order. So I will say everyone says any article you read is going to say like, you know, Khrana created the protocols of the elders of Zion. They probably did. But there's zero conclusive evidence that they did. Historians who know this shit heavily debate the origin of the protocols of the elders of Zion. We do not have a comprehensive, utterly proven example for

like why they were made in the first place, right? There's a chain of custody. You can tell kind of like how they evolved over time. We don't know at whose order they were crafted or if they were anyone. So that's just not, that's not clear. I'll attach an article by a great historian who kind of breaks down why, because there's a famous comic book about the protocols of the elders of Zion by a great Jewish Stanley Siegel, I think it was, a great Jewish comic book artist. And it's a good comic. It gets a lot of historical details about the people who we know were involved in the creation of the protocols wrong, because there's a lot of myths about them. Again, the protocols are a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories arise to explain how they came into being. There's a

lot of disinformation out there. That said, broadly speaking, the Akhrana are the most likely culprit for the creation of the protocols of the elders of Zion. If they didn't make it or order its creation, they certainly had a major hand in its early distribution. But before we talk about how the protocol spread, I should explain precisely what they are. In short, the protocols of the elders of Zion are a fake document that purports to be the minutes of a meeting of the global Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity. Yeah, right. Like we had this meeting to talk about our evil world domination schemes, and we wrote it down in case like, you might not have been able to make the meeting. We got to get this memo to you, you know. Bring back the minutes for me real

quick. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I want the minutes of our plan to destroy civilization. Yes. Very funny that you would think it works that way. But yeah, that's kind of how this is framed. I am, and it's kind of, the document is written not just as minutes, but as like kind of, oh, you missed the meeting, but you're a part of this organization. This will get you up to speed on our plan to destroy Christianity, you know, like it's like you were on vacation the week we had the Global Conspiracy Conference. Take a look at this. Yeah. Anybody who missed the reading, it's all available here. Yeah. You fell asleep during the meeting. We get it. It goes on a while. Here's the minutes. It won't be good enough for a book report, but you'll at least be caught up.

You can get the bones. Yeah. You can find the quote separately, but everything else is in there. It's very funny. It's not funny. Millions die. But it's patently ridiculous, right? Any reasonable person be like, of course, if there's a grand world conspiracy, they don't just have a document that says, here's what we're doing. But this is a lot we talk about in our Bill Cooper episode, a bunch of Bill Cooper's conspiracy theories. We're based on leaked military documents talking about their plans to destroy the world as if that would get written down. Right. Anyway, I'm not going to read huge excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for obvious reasons, but it's necessary to read some pieces of it so you can understand how the arguments in

it were framed. Here's how it opens, according to a 1970 edition of the Protocols, based on an early 20th century British translation. Quote, protocol is from protocol number one. If there's like a bunch of them, right lies and might freedom and idea only liberalism, gold, faith, self-government, despotism of capital, the internal foe, the mob, anarchy, politics versus morals, the right of the strong, the invincibility of Jew Masonic authority, in justifies means, the mob, a blind man, political ABC, party discord, most satisfactory form of rules, despotism, alcohol, classicism, corruption, principles and rules of the Jewish Masonic government, terror, liberty, equality and fraternity, principle of dynastic rule, annihilation of the privileges of the

Goy aristocracy, i.e. non-Jew, as if they need to write that in there, right? Like you've got, like, I should remind you that the words that we use. Putting aside fine phrases, we shall speak of the significance of each thought, like comparisons and deductions, we shall throw light upon surrounding facts. What I am about to set forth then is our system from the two points of view, that of ourselves and that of the Goyim, i.e. non-Jews. They keep putting that in there. I was in my head. I was hoping that they were going to end that list by going, we didn't start the fire. Just let that bad boy roll. That might be a cover of Billy Joe we don't need. It must be noted that men with bad instincts are in more number than the good and therefore the

best results in governing them for them are attained by violence and terrorization, not by academic discussions. Every man aims at power. Everyone would like to become a dictator if only he could and where indeed are the men who would not be willing to sacrifice the welfare of all for the sake of securing their own welfare. What has restrained the beasts of prey, the beasts of prey who are called men? What has served their guidance hitherto? In the beginning of the structure of society, they were subjected to brutal and blind force afterwards to law, which is the same force, only disguised. I draw the conclusion that by the law of nature, right lies in force. So the author of the document, who is a rabbi standing in for the whole Jewish conspiracy,

argues that because people are dumb and evil, they should be ruled. And of course, they should be ruled by the Jews. The rest of the document goes on to propose ways to do this. It claims that for centuries, the white world was governed by a mix of the church and monarchs. And as long as the church and monarchs were in power, the Jewish conspiracy couldn't succeed. I mean, the first half of that was like a Trump tweet, just like keywords. It's nonsense. And they're all different. There's a bunch of different editions of the protocols. They're all a little bit different. This is the only one I found that has that weird little yeah, like Trump tweets at the start of it. Yeah. So the fake author of this fake document

continues to argue that the Jewish conspiracy, in order to get off the ground, had to destroy faith and religion. So secularism and socialism were invented by Jews to destroy the church because the church was standing in their way of power. After they got rid of the church, they had to overthrow the crowned heads of Europe because the kings are the last protection people had from the conspiracy. The final and this is again, this is why he gets drawn to the French Revolution, right? The French Revolution is bad because they got rid of the king. The Jews got rid of the king because the king was standing in the way of them succeeding. One of the protocols are really pro monarchist document, right? Like if we just had kings,

everything would be better. Yeah. I think those bloodlines are the thing that we need to hold closest and cherish the most. Yeah. Let's line up our city based off of incest babies. Let's do that. Yeah. Just some cousins with weird arms. That's what we need in charge. There's a conspiracy to destroy our freedom. So we have to have kings. It doesn't make a lot of sense when you think about it. So yeah, the first version of the protocols came out around 1896. So they were largely talking about the end of the French monarchy in this. Like that was the initial thing that the protocols are focused around. The monarchs have been overthrown. That's the big problem. And the protocols are basically

a roadmap purportedly written during this convention, laying out the plan to conquer and govern the world. I'll give a brief summary. Protocol one is to break down the national power of non-Jewish states by fomenting internal revolutions. Appeals to class hatred are key to this. I.e., socialists are doing the work of Jewish people by convincing the poor that the rich are fucking them over, right? Poor people would be happy with their lot in life if it weren't for this conspiracy. If only these socialists were convincing them that their lives suck. They'd be happy. They'd be happy. And then our nation would be strong. These internal revolutions would be fomented by having Jewish agents convince groups of people

to agitate for liberty, equality, and fraternity. If you remember, liberty, egality, and fraternity are like that was the motto of the French Revolution. Like that's what we're fighting for, is we want to all be equal citizens under the law as opposed to having like a king and a class of nobles who rule over us. And the argument of the protocol is that this is a Jewish conspiracy because people aren't equal and liberty is a bad idea. It's just a plot in order to make our governments weaker so the Jews can take over. Again, it's a shitty argument by bad people who think that having a czar is the best thing you could possibly have. And the basic idea is that the Jews are behind the global campaign for equal rights, which are evil.

Autocratic governments are weakened by this, first by liberalism, then by socialism, and finally by anarchy. The second protocol was that all laws, all wars would be shifted to an economic basis, ensuring that territorial advantages for one side or the other didn't really happen. Basically, the author of this book took the by then obvious fact that economics won wars and used that to claim that the way conflict worked in industrialized society was the fault of the Jews because they control the economy. So wars aren't noble and good anymore. They're just like these industrial butcheries because of the Jews. Next is the strengthening of Jewish international rights, i.e. emancipation, which the author claims comes at the expense of Gentiles because that's

their argument racists always make. The idea is that part of their conspiracy is agitating for equal rights because if they have equal rights, then Christians have less rights. That's a huge part of this document. And there's other shit, right? Which is solid math. The math is checking out for me. I'm over here calculating. That makes perfect sense. It's the same argument that powerful groups always make in the face of an oppressed group agitating for more equal rights. And there's other shit in there. They argue that alcohol was introduced by Jewish people to numb the minds of Christians, like race poisons, all this Nazi shit. It's a lot of Nazi shit, you know? And it's very basic today. There's a million conspiracies, not all of which are on

their surface anti-Semitic, that have this same basic thing, right? There's this conspiracy. They're weakening your minds with television and with popular music and with drugs and alcohols that you don't notice that you're being controlled by this evil cabal. And most of the people who believe that do believe the cabal is the Jews, but they don't say it anymore usually, right? Now, in the late 1800s, this idea was revolutionary. This is the first conspiracy theory like this, right? It's the father of them all. And the fact that the early 1900s were a period of calamitous wars that led to economic collapse in the fall of several governments, including the czarist monarchy, convinced a lot of people that the protocols had been perfectly accurate. In the

years after World War I, a growing core of conspiracies would claim, we know the protocols are real because everything they predicted is coming true. I actually found a 1920 edition of the protocols that argues a remarkable similarity between the protocols and acts of the Bolshevik government, which it claims is under the control of Jewish leaders. And it's true that there were a lot of Jewish Bolsheviks, but you'll notice the guy who wound up in charge of the USSR was Joseph Stalin, who was not at all Jewish. And in fact, Jay Stahl's chief rival for power was a Jewish man, Leon Trotsky, who he forced into exile and then assassinated when he had a guy stab him to death with an ice pick in Mexico. Like, oh, yeah, it's a pretty boss story. Ramon Mercator is the name

of the guy who killed Trotsky. Jesus, that's not a nice assassination at all. I mean, it's Stalin. Yeah, Stalin, Stalin, better than, I guess, Hitler when it comes to treating Jewish communities, not great on treating Jewish community like in USSR, a rough deal for Jewish people during Stalin's era, including like near the end of his life, he became convinced that a cabal of Jewish doctors were planning his assassination, which is why he didn't have any when he had his stroke. There was no medical aid because he'd purged all of these doctors because he was afraid of a Jewish conspiracy. The idea that the USSR was like Jew is just nonsense. It's completely a historical and ignores a lot of suffering of Jewish people under Stalin's government, you know.

Anyway, so I just, I just like your low bar. You're like better than Hitler. The sad thing is, when you're talking about like that particular war, Stalin does look a lot better because he's standing next to Hitler, you know? He's a real Beyonce next to Michelle. You know what I mean? Yeah, I do. It also looks better because he was handsome. And I mean, there's a lot of similarities between Beyonce and Stalin. We've all talked about this a lot. I'm gonna jump off this train. I'll let you, I'll let you go, Robert. You know, you know who I've noticed a lot of similarities between Stalin and is Conan O'Brien. Because Stalin, big lover of pranks, huge lover of pranks, Conan O'Brien, legendary prankster. I was just reading, this is completely off topic,

but there's this amazing thing that there's actually nobody named Conan O'Brien. What? What do you mean? What? Conan O'Brien? She's saying he pronounces Conan O'Brien. Whatever, whatever, whatever. C.C. Langston, Robert likes to mispronounce very famous people's names and doesn't realize he's doing it and then gets roasted for it. So I'm just gonna do it for everybody now. I think we have to accept that no one knows how he existed so long ago. No one can tell. It's like Latin. We don't know how it was pronounced. It was so far in the past. Conan? Yeah, yeah. Famed late night shows. Scholars have their theories about how his name was pronounced, but no one knows for certain. Anyway, look up Conan's history of incredible pranks.

We just had this conversation. Yeah, we did, Sophie. And I just said, scholars debate like the origin of the protocols of the elders of Zion. Scholars still debate his, the pronunciation of his name. Yeah, no. You know it's true. He's probably hanging out with your favorite singer, Ariana Grande. Sophie, it's pronounced Grande. Oh, good to know. I know you miss these things a lot because you're not keyed into pop culture like I am. All right. So the protocols were written well ahead of the fall of the Tsarist government, but they were written about the fall of another monarchy. And so a lot of the stuff written about the French Revolution sounded like it was talking about the Russian Revolution, right?

This book is about how the Jews are going to overthrow kings. They're writing about something that had already happened and blaming it on the Jews. Then there's another revolution that overthrows the Tsar of Russia. And a lot of people see like, oh, this is proof the protocols are true, right? Everything that they've predicted is coming true. Look, like this is the only reason people would want to overthrow the Tsar, not that he got them into a war that killed eight million people. It must just be the Jews, not the fact the Tsar tried to invade Germany and got his ass kicked in one of the most epic beatdowns in military history after getting his ass kicked by the Japanese and another one of the most epic beatdowns in military history. It's not that the

Tsar had his soldiers fire on crowds of people protesting for bread. It was it was it was the Jews. It was the Jews. No other reason to want the Tsar out. Anyway, not a pro-Zar podcast. I do apologize. So, yeah. Now, the actual facts of world history did not matter in the least. The people of the early 1900s were living and dying through the greatest war in history, a terrible plague that killed millions right after the war and the collapse of the largest land empire on earth. The Russian Empire is like a seventh of the world's land mass. Like it's fucking huge. Yeah. We don't talk like Russia fucking big, big, big, big, big, big, big country. And suddenly, you know, in the 20s or late teens, early 20s, it's just this massive pile of people murdering each other.

The Russian Revolution is horrifically bloody. And it just the entire period of time up to during and after World War One is just this this period of violent chaos that hopefully we will never see the like of again, right? Unless it happens next month. So the fact that all everything was falling apart seemed to be explained by the protocols and millions of people bought into them. Now, the reality is that the protocols of the Elders of Zion wasn't just a forgery, it was an act of plagiarism. And it wasn't just an act of plagiarism. It was an act of plagiarism of an act of plagiarism. Well, and yeah, it's it's meta. I'm going to I'm going to read again from the Jewish Virtual Library here. Quote, the direct predecessor of the protocols can be found

in the pamphlet dialogues in a hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, published by the non Jewish French satirist Maurice Jolie in 1864. In his dialogues, which make no mention of the Jews, Jolie attacked the political ambitions of the Emperor Napoleon III, using the imagery of a diabolical plot in hell. The dialogues were caught by French authorities soon after their publication, and Jolie was tried and sentenced to prison for his pamphlet. Jolie's dialogues, while intended as a political satire, soon fell into the hands of a German anti-Semite named Herman Getch, writing under the name of Sir John Retcliffe. Getch was a postal clerk and a spy for the Prussian secret police. He had been forced to leave the postal work due to his part in forging

evidence in the prosecution against the Democratic leader Benedict Waldeck in 1849. Getch adapted Jolie's dialogues into a mythical tale of a Jewish conspiracy as part of a series of novels entitled Biarets, which appeared in 1868. In a chapter called The Jewish Cemetery in Prague in the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, he spends the fantasy of a secret centennial rabbinical conference which meets at midnight and whose purpose is to review the past hundred years and make plans for the next century. So this satirist writes a book, like Throw in Shade on fucking Napoleon III, and like he frames it as a dialogue between these two dead guys. But he's just being silly. He's just having. He's just being silly. Yeah.

Yeah. He gets sentenced to prison for this. Oh boy. And it must have been a good joke. That's how you know it was a great joke. It probably was a pretty good joke, right? And a German secret policeman finds his dialogue and writes it into an anti-Semitic novel about a Jewish conspiracy because he thinks that like the wording of the dialogue, which this guy had meant to be about like how the king of France is power hungry. He makes it about how the Jews are trying to seize power. So that happens. Now, the most plausible theory for the origin of the protocols as we know them is that Getch's novels, which are again a plagiarism, wound up in Russia. They were translated in 1872. And in 1891, a new edition was published. And the Council of

Representatives meeting in Prague were consolidated under the name Rabbi's speech. So the whole dialogue between Montesquieu and Machiavelli is like putting them out of a rabbi. This translation probably wound up in the hands of the Ocarina. And specifically the Ocarina in France, because they have foreign offices just like the CIA. And the Ocarina see a use for this when the Dreyfus affair convulses France from 1893 to 1895. Now, we talk about Dreyfus in detail during behind the insurrections. The short of it is that he was a Jewish French military officer, falsely accused of selling secrets to the Germans after France's defeat in 1870. The case became a massive culture war issue in France. Dreyfus was acquitted, but the whole period spawned a bunch

of fringe newsletters that blamed French defeat on this Jewish man. At the time, Russia was allied with Germany and France was her enemy. The same story we saw in 1806 repeated itself. The Tsar secret police created the protocols in order to pop up his conservative stances against a wave of liberal sympathy that kept pushing for reform. Since many prominent liberals were Jewish, a nice anti-semitic conspiracy would help to divide the left and make regular Russians less likely to trust any reform. And that is more or less where the protocols of the elders of Zion came from. The Ocrana plagiarizes a work of plagiarism by oppression in order to, like, prop up the Tsar against liberals. And it's, again, like that first appeal in 1806, that first piece of big

anti-semitic propaganda, it's not meant to go worldwide. It is meant to have a very specific impact within France and Russia on a specific series of political issues. But it fucking gets out of here. It breaks containment, right, like a virus, and it goes viral immediately. And within a few years, the elders of Zion, the protocols of the elders of Zion have spread all over the world. We're going to talk about fucking Columbia in our next episode and provided went on to provide, like, inspire slaughter and all over the planet and provide a lot of the fuel for what became the Holocaust. Well, that's, that's the question I have is like, how does it spread like that? Like, this isn't the internet doesn't exist. And I'm an idiot. So I don't know how things,

uh, we're going to break that down in part two. I mean, we're going to talk about specifically the nation of Columbia, and I'll walk you through exactly how it's spread throughout Columbia and the impact that it has, because it's very interesting. And the story in Columbia, similar things happen all over the world in different countries. I got you. Spread. Don't worry. We bring it. We bring it back to the Midwest, too. Don't worry. A little bit. Don't worry. A little bit. Just a little bit of Henry Ford first. Just a teeny bit. There's a lot to say about him doing this. I didn't include a whole lot in here just because there's so much else to get over, but we'll do a Henry Ford episode at some point. Be a long one. A guy.

No good. No good. Not a, not a nice dude. Well, you've got any pluggables to plug Langston? Yeah. Yeah. You can listen to my podcast. It's called My Mama Told Me. It's available everywhere. We talk about conspiracy theories, and I'm going to use a lot of this information to apply to my own nonsense. So this is exciting. Yeah. Well, I love, I don't know. I don't know. I don't love anything. Just Raytheon and Killin' Mazar. I do love Killin' Mazar. So why don't you all go out and while you wait for part two, find a czar. You know, deal with him. Kill him. Fuck it. Kill a fucking czar. Go find a czar. Take him out. Get an old timey bomb and take out that czar. Yeah. One of those, you know the kind. Like it's a big sphere. It's got like a little knob on the

top. Yeah. Very long wick. Just extremely long wick that burns pretty slow, but not slowing off of that czar to get away. You kill him. Yeah. You fucking take that czar out. Anyway, this is behind the bastards. Once again, inciting violence against the Russian royal family, as is our want. 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 Bullock. 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. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. 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 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.