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

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

Robert is joined again by Langston Kerman to continue to discuss the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 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

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you get your podcasts. We're back. This is behind the bastards part two. We're not back. We're not back. Sophie, Sophie, it's started. We're not back. Okay, now we're back. My guest again, Mr. Langston Kerman. Langston, how are you doing today? I'm doing fantastic. I'm excited to dig further into the horrors of anti-Semitism and how it stretches across the world. It's fun. It's good shit. It's not fun or good shit. It's a nightmare. One of the things that's most, I guess, ironic would be the term for me is like the Protocols of the Elders' Zion, right? We just talked about it's set up as like the minutes of a meeting about how to destroy Christianity, basically, right? When it comes to the Holocaust, one of the most important

documents we have for sort of because one of the big questions of the Holocaust for historians for years was was it planned ahead of time or did it just sort of evolve out of out of the war, right? Like how early was the Holocaust planned? When did they know they were going to do this? How centralized was it? And how much personal responsibility did Hitler have, right? Because his name... Did they have a big meeting or did they just sort of like come up with this on the fly? And they did have a big meeting. And we have the minutes of that meeting. It's called the Vonsei Conference. It was held in a house in the suburbs of Berlin that I've been to. The house is a museum now. You can go see where Reinhardt-Hydrich and a bunch of other assholes sat in a room and

worked out how were we going to do a Holocaust. How do we... We've tried all these methods of killing people. Shooting them doesn't work because it's too expensive and it fucks our soldiers' heads up. We've tried gassing them in vans, but it's not very efficient. We have so many more people. What are we going to do? Okay. And they arrive at the solution that they use. This is like in 1942. Well, the war in Russia is 43 maybe. The war in Russia is at its height. So there is an actual conspiratorial meeting that we have the minutes to. And again, when I talk about the difference between a real conspiracy and a fake one, that conspiracy has a very clear beginning and a very clear ending. It doesn't extend forward and backwards in time. A bunch of guys

met in a room and planned to commit mass murder. And then they did it. It's not like, yeah. It was strange way. And I love that I keep making hip hop references, but a similar conspiracy theory sort of exists about the CIA planning to basically like create... Destroy the black population. Yeah, with crack. Yeah. But not only crack, but also by adding violence into hip hop. They would force black people to go to jail more often and subsequently break down our communities. And there's a belief that there was an actual meeting of the minds for all the music heads of every sort of company came together and said, how can we add more violence into hip hop so these black people will murder each other? There's like a germ of reality in there, which

is that the CIA, it wasn't as direct as a lot of people think, but the CIA absolutely supported the cocaine trade that led to the crack trade in order to launder money so they could buy weapons for these different groups that were like, it's a thing that happened. Absolutely. The CIA has a huge part in the global cocaine trade. The idea that anyone would need to meet in order to like insert violence into a part of American pop culture is very funny to me. The CIA definitely did it with drugs, but they weren't like, hey, and now we can maybe we should add a beat to this. Maybe if a few fellas freestyled about it, we could really break down there. Yeah. What if we added a beat to this? It's not a thing the CIA ever sat down and asked themselves.

No. They asked themselves, how can we get these planes of cocaine into the country so that we can buy more missiles for our friends in order to let them massacre poor people in Latin America, which is more or less the actual story. Yeah. I mean, we'll do episodes on that at some point. It's a great story because there's a couple of former DEA agents and stuff who turned and who wrote about being ordered not to arrest to let planes in. One of the more consistent things you find is that when conspiracy theories are true, it's because somebody talked. Yeah. Yeah. Almost always someone talks. Yeah. And though times when it's not true, they've never gotten anybody to talk because there is no one to talk about the shit. Yeah. That's kind of where I

land on a lot of stuff where it's like, we know the CIA had a lot of involvement in the fucking cocaine trade because a bunch of dudes talked about it. Yeah. Like not only that, there's documented evidence too. Right. Like we got snitches and stuff. There were people who like believed in something when they got into the CIA or I think it's mostly DEA guys, but who believed in something and then like realized what they were doing and they wrote about it. And anyway, we'll talk about this at some point. This was too much of a digression, although we are talking about Colombia. So I guess it's appropriate that we talk about cocaine because we're talking about conspiracies in Colombia and there have been a lot.

Colombia is a real conspiracy place. You want to do a conspiracy. That's that's one of your top countries to go to. Unfortunately. So yeah, when most people who know about the protocols think about like the consequences of the spread of this conspiracy theory, they think about the Holocaust and for good fucking reason. But the protocols left a trail of bodies wherever they spread. And they didn't always do it in the way you would expect. The way it the protocols led to death wasn't always it leads to pogroms against Jewish people. It was a lot weirder than that in some cases. And today we're going to talk about the spread of the protocols of the elders of Zion in Colombia, because it both kind of explains it. This specific example gives some examples of how

it spread in other parts of the world, but also the kind of unexpected impacts that the spread of this conspiracy theory could have in a country. The protocols first made it to Latin America in the wake of World War One during the first great diaspora for the infamous conspiracy theory. The vector of infection was the Catholic clergy, most of whom were sent to Central or South America from parts of Europe where the protocols had been spreading for more than 20 years. In Colombia, the protocols entered through members of an elite Jesuit order who kept close ties with their brothers across the ocean. The first Spanish language translation of the protocols was printed in Leipzig in 1927. But the version that actually spread most widely in Latin America was a French

translation spread by a journal that had been established by an Augustinian friar titled The Review of International Secret Societies. This friar has like a magazine dedicated to secret societies that he does on like the side. This is this guy's hobby. It had been established in 1909 to investigate the Freemasons and other secret societies. Today, very few people talk about the Freemasons. You could find bits and pieces of it here and there, but it's not in the mainstream of conspiracies anymore. You dig enough to cue it on, you'll find people talking about fucking Freemasons and stuff, but it's not the front rank. But back in the early 1900s, the Freemasons were again like the big fucking thing to be obsessed with. And the Catholic Church

had actually had a whole bug up its ass about Freemasonry for centuries. They believed it was dangerously anti-Christian. It was because Freemasons were like social organizations of rich people, and they did exert a lot of soft power because it's the same like skull and bones of these rich people are hanging out together. They're making plans and they're not, it's not a thing the Catholic Church has any piece of, right? The Catholic Church is a big gang, right? It's a mob. Yeah. And they don't like that there's all these, like that's their issue with the Freemasons. Gangs infamously don't like other gangs. That's sort of how that works. So what's happening here? So basically some weird friar with a side hustle ranting about

Freemasons helped ignite a wave of anti-Semitism in Columbia that led to the deaths of spoilers, a couple hundred thousand people. So yeah, it's some good shit. It is not some good shit. I should get another go-to phrase. Yeah. And I'm going to quote now from a write-up by historian Thomas Williford about the Catholic Church's attitude towards Freemasons. The popes were convinced that some dark conspiracy organized by the masons was driving the faithful away from the universal church truth in order to bring about the collapse of the church, the claim of an international Masonic cabal resonated in all Catholic countries, including Spain and its former colonies in Latin America, where masons were an important presence in politics. In Columbia,

a string of liberal party presidents who implemented anti-clerical policies in the mid-19th century were practicing Freemasons. So in Columbia, the left takes power for a while. They pass laws restricting the power of the Catholic Church. A bunch of these guys are masons. The Catholic Church is like, this is part of the conspiracy. It's great. So these super-Catholic Jesuit weirdos were already obsessed with Freemasons. Then World War One hits and the whole world, their world, the European world, seems to be in freefall. Communists are burning churches and killing priests. In the midst of all that, this friar re-prints a translation of the protocols of the elders of Zion that seems to explain everything. Because the protocols,

we didn't mention this last episode, it should have, the Freemasons are in at a bunch. And the idea is that the Jews are pulling the strings of the Freemasons, right? That's one of the groups that the Jews control as part of their conspiracy. Pre-existing beliefs about Freemasonry were actually how the protocols managed to infect most of the communities they took off in early on. This is why grand conspiracy theories like QAnon are more successful, the more syncretic they are. If you've got this core conspiracy theory about a bunch of child molesters, but you can rope in anti-vaccine conspiracies, you can bring in the JFK assassination aliens, you can integrate all those things into the broader conspiracy theory. You get a bunch of additional vectors through

which you can infect more people. So I'm anti-vax and that's how I first come across QAnon propaganda and it sucks me in. Or I'm obsessed with the JFK assassination. I come across some video about how that ties into QAnon. That's what pulls me in. It makes it more effective. You gotta keep it fresh for everybody out there. Exactly. That means embracing the groups that you otherwise weren't necessarily aiming for the first time you wrote the shit. Exactly. And the way that the protocols do that is you've got all these guys who for centuries, a lot of these Catholics have believed in a Freemason and a Masonic conspiracy. And the protocol say, hey, the Jews are behind that. And Catholics are already not great on Jews. There were some problems there beforehand,

but this is how a lot of like clergy get infected by the protocols of the elders of Zion. Now, the Vatican's official stance in this period was that Jewish people were souls to be saved. But the church supported and endorsed members of the clergy who spread myths about the blood Passover, which we talked about in the last episode. Anti-Semitic Catholics could point to Pope Pius IX, who in 1873 claimed that the synagogue of Satan was drawn from Masonic sects. And Pius was talking about the Masons, but he described them as a synagogue of the devil. So you can see this whole tying Jewish people to the to the Masons. It didn't start with the with the protocols, but that was like the most best organized way it was put together.

Do you think he would use synagogue just on accident? Or was that also intentional of like being like, you know, I also don't fuck with this group, by the way. But yeah, I think it was because for a lot of especially popes in those era, synagogue is like synonym for a bad place. You know, it's the bad religion, you know, other than Protestantism, which is also the bad quarrelsome people. These Catholics like pork. It's the other bad meat that they don't care for. So a significant minority of Catholics had been ranting about a Judeo-Masonic anti-Christian conspiracy for decades by the time the protocols hit Latin America. One of the first Jesuits in Colombia to really dig into spreading anti-Semitic garbage was a

Spanish Jesuit named Jesus Maria Rwano, writing a bulletin for the local faithful. In July of 1922, he urged good Catholics to pray for the conversion of the Jews and then went on to explain at length how since the French Revolution, the Jews had controlled the economies of Europe as well as all leading newspapers. Following this, he made one of the first direct references to the protocols in Latin American history. Quote, years later, when the abominable protocols of the wise men of Israel were known around the world on the occasion of the Zionist Congress of 1897, reflexive historians, moralists and patriots have not ceased giving shouts of outrage. They say that the plan of hegemony and universal conquest dreamt by the Jews is already manifest. It was one of the first

times you see the protocols referenced in Latin America. Now, 1922 was a little early for this kind of rhetoric to spread, especially in Colombia, which had very few Jewish people. Not super successful drumming up race hatred against the Jews, because there's not a lot of them. They don't have a deep history in the country, right? It's fucking Colombia, you know? It's a lot of people being like, what is a Jew? Yeah, what are you talking about? By the early 1930s, the situation in the country had changed. In the early 20s, the economy was great. And this is another reason why this conspiracy doesn't take off then. People are making a lot of money, exports are trending steadily, upward, things are doing well in Colombia. Then in the 30s, the Great Depression hits, right?

And Colombia gets fucked by it the way everyone does. And as a result of the Great Depression, the labor movement explodes. So suddenly, there's all these protests in the street, there's these giant strikes, people are starving. What have we said? Whenever there's a lot of unrest and change in a short period of time, people start to go to conspiracies to explain it all. Sure. The protocol started making more and more frequent appearances in Jesuit publications and in sermons. By the early 1930s, there was significant documentation proving the protocols were a forgery. When I talked about last episode about how it was plagiarized from a piece of plagiarism, that was known at the time. People were aware of this. But in what would become a common justification,

Colombian Jesuits argued that it didn't matter whether or not the protocols were a forgery. And I'm going to quote from a write up in one of their magazines in 1932. An idea occurs to us that we cannot hide from the reader, separating the question of authenticity, in other words, determining whether or not these are the true minutes of the 1897 Zionist Congress of Basel. No one can deny the frightening veracity of the protocols due to their prodigious, almost prophetic exactitude, which saturates all of its pages. So yeah, maybe it's a forgery, but it seems like the things we already, it's right, you know, like you can tell it's right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We couldn't agree more. It's completely made up. It's Melania Trump's

still in Michelle's speech. It's like, yeah, we still agree with it. Or it's the alternative facts thing is that like, yeah, maybe it's not literally true, but it's right. You know, this is what's happening, even if this document is fake, it accurately describes what I know was happening because I'm a racist. Things continue to ramp up throughout the 30s. The Spanish Civil War, which is with its attendant massacres of priests and nuns by anarchists, fueled Jesuit claims that a vast anti-Christian conspiracy existed. Colombian newspapers tended to cover the violence in Spain with what Thomas Williford describes as an, it can happen here attitude. In 1937, inspired by the Spanish Civil War, a Bogota publishing house issued the first

Colombian edition of the protocols of the elders of Zion. The late 1930s and 40s also saw intensifying violence between Colombian liberals and conservatives. Again, political order in Colombia is starting to break apart at this time. By 1942, the liberals were ascendant and the head of the conservative party, a guy named Laureano Gomez, decided to launch an anti-Masonic crusade, claiming that the masons were using the liberals as a vehicle for the Jews to take control of Colombia. Gomez had a right-wing party newspaper that he edited start printing up a booklet, which he claimed to be a secret account of Masonic rituals and secrets. Thomas Williford writes, quote, it also claimed that Colombian liberals were part of a worldwide Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, especially in their

attempts to control public instruction. A series of government and political documents were cited at length to make this point. A long quote from a publication supposedly called Revista Judeo Masonica, Masonic Jew Magazine, described diabolic instructions to pervert women in schools through gymnastic exercises and revealing clothing. It was rather pornographic reading for a pamphlet, which also stated that it should be like a second catechism in the home. So he publishes this booklet that is purporting to have excerpts from a magazine that doesn't exist called Masonic Jew Magazine. This is like, the conspiracy has a magazine that they call the, and part of the thing is like, these guys are conservative, right? They're doing too much stretching. Yeah,

women are doing gymnastics. It's the Jews. You know, Jewish people are known for gymnastics. Yeah, forcing gymnastics on us. Yes. So obviously, like all of the stuff we're talking about, this is nonsense, but the propaganda campaign was a wild success. It welded militant conservatives with Catholic clergy in a unified front against this Judeo-Masonic liberal conspiracy. When a liberal president was elected in August of 1942, Gomez's magazine did not even acknowledge his inauguration, instead publishing more anti-Semitic propaganda. Now, this was the same period where the Holocaust was ramping up in Europe. And Gomez's party newspaper actually reported on the early stages of the extermination, publishing an article about 18,000 French Jews being detained, sterilized,

and deported. This was in the same issue where a priest, Fr. Diaz, editorialized about the struggle against Jewish Bolsheviks. The obvious contradiction between hysterical rants about an all-powerful Jewish conspiracy and the reality of Jewish oppression under the Nazis did not seem to strike anyone in the Colombian right wing as being a little bit inconsistent. Four days later, Loriano Gomez would go on to give the most anti-Semitic speech of his career, defending a bill that would have denied Masonic lodges the right to exist in Colombia as corporate entities. His speech defending the bill was an unhinged conspiracist rant, explaining how the Jews had manipulated the Colombian middle class through freemasonry while controlling the

working poor through communism. He claimed that his time working as Colombia's ambassador to Berlin had made it clear to him how toxic the Jews were to society. He claimed, the lesson of history is that when the Jewish phenomenon presents itself, there are only two solutions, handing the nation over to the Jews or expelling them. Oh boy. Yeah. Now, Gomez did not succeed in passing his bill, but he succeeded in welding the Colombian conservative party into a unified conspiracist block, blaming all of their electoral defeats on an alliance of Jews and freemasons who were manipulating liberals and communists. His most fanatical supporters were the middle class, small business owners, priests and professionals. Again, none of this sounds familiar.

A right wing party refusing to acknowledge that they lose an election, turning to conspiracy theories, the middle class backing them in order to explain economic downturns. None of this has ever happened since. Thank God. Can you imagine? We've learned our lessons. Now, Colombia never had the kind of widespread anti-Semitic pogrom seen in Europe, but the charged and often violent rhetoric pushed by Gomez succeeded in making any kind of compromise between left and right impossible. If the other side were literally the puppets of a genocidal conspiracy to eliminate Christendom, collaboration was impossible. This became a problem when the right finally made its way back to power. And I'm going to quote from a write up on the website

E International Relations here. After 1946, traditional party competition had broken down in Colombia. Mariano Espina Perez, the newly elected president and his conservative party government used the police and the army to repress the liberal party. The liberals then responded by arming peasants to fight back against the government. This created pressures within civil and political society and violence began on a small scale. It didn't stay small. The next several years of Colombian history are known widely as la violencia, which I don't think I need to translate. It would be too much to blame the protocols or Gomez for all of this, but they and the conspiracism he fueled had a major impact on how la violencia played out,

as Thomas Williford writes. When the violence began in earnest in 1946, it was they, the conservatives, believing that the liberals were part of a worldwide anti-Christian plot would encourage or even take part in the massacres of liberal civilians throughout the countryside. Although la violencia would quickly take on unforeseen socioeconomic aspects, the discursive structure that provided the pretext for militants to commit murder was already in place by 1942. After the conservatives won the 1946 presidential election against a divided liberal party, they sought to guarantee a conservative majority around the country, as the liberals had done 15 years earlier. However, this time, partisan militants were armed with a conspiracy theory

as well as machetes and felt that their duty to physically eliminate the opposition in order to save the country. By some accounts, more than 200,000 people would die over the next few years of political massacres in Colombia. Boy, just machete. Yeah, it's ugly shit. Yeah. And what I think is there's a lot there. What I think is so interesting about this is that the protocols enter in and anti-Semitism is a huge part of it. But the violence they inspire isn't primarily anti-Semitic. What it is is that this conspiracy so infects political discourse in Colombia that it makes anything but mass murder impossible as a political outcome. Because the right wing got addicted to the idea that these people aren't your political opponents. They're trying to

exterminate you as part of this conspiracy. And if that's the case, there's nothing to do but kill them, you know? Yeah, you're fighting for your life. Exactly. And you're associating even even beyond anti-Semitism. You're associating anybody who's even connected to the idea of the opposition with a threat to your very existence. Yeah, it's amazing. And that's why I wanted to talk about Colombia, because it's not like it is with the Holocaust. We're about to talk about the Nazis. It's pretty straightforward, right? This propaganda convinces a lot of people in Europe that there's a Jewish conspiracy, so they murder all the Jews. It's horrible, but it's not shocking. What happens in Colombia is it says a lot more, I think, about the way conspiracies

infect cultures and about broadly the impact even today that the protocols still have as opposed to the much clearer impact they had on the Holocaust. They also created a type of thinking that has spread virally throughout the world and caused violence in Colombia and a bunch of other places and probably will continue to inspire violence in the future. It's good stuff. It's just it's wild to think that so many of these seeds are permanent. You would think that, like, all right, you killed all those people. Maybe a lesson was learned. Maybe we moved on and grew from that, and now we don't do that anymore. But nope, that's not how this works. It's like, you killed all those people and we verified that the document was fake, but like, go off. Like, what?

We like your style, my man. Keep it going. The lesson of history is that nobody has ever learned a single lesson from history. But you know who has learned a lesson or two in their time? The products and services that sponsor the show. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. The products and services that sponsor the show have learned a lot and played only, I think we can confidently say, played only a minor role in inspiring the violence. 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.

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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 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 podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. So the protocols of the elders of Zion in the early 20th century spread absolutely everywhere. We could talk at equal length about their impact in Japan, where they were translated and had a huge influence or in Argentina, where they would influence a popular Catholic novelist named Hugo Vost to play a similar role in his country that Gomez played in Colombia. Vost wrote a really bigoted novel inspired by the protocols, which itself inspired hordes of anti-Semites to assault Argentine Jews in the street. So it violates everywhere. The protocols have likewise spread through the Arab world,

particularly as a result of Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people. We could do a whole episodes on that. There's a lot to say about these. We have limited time, obviously. This is not a comprehensive study into the impact of the protocols of the elders of Zion, although I have a good book to recommend called The Global Impact of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, edited by Esther Webman, where a number of different essays that we've used as sources for this episode come from. If you want a broader understanding, you can read that. I think for the closing chunk of this episode, we kind of have to talk about the Nazis, the OG Nazis, you know, like we got to like we got to get like the original motherfuckers, not like the new one episode

and didn't bring them up. That'd be pretty impressive. It would be weird, right? I mean, I could. We could go straight into Japan and we could go talk about the Middle East. We could talk about like we wouldn't don't have to talk about the Nazis. And no one else was mean to Jews. Everybody else was. Everybody else was fine. Yeah. I feel like we have to talk about the Nazis because we're talking about anti-Semitism. Now, you may be surprised to learn that most of the big Nazis or maybe not after that part of Columbia, most of the big Nazis, the head Nazis knew the protocols were a forgery and didn't particularly like them. They were not dumb men. And it was obvious that they were fake. Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1924, I believe that the protocols of the Elders

of Zion is a forgery that is not because the worldview of Jewish aspirations expressed therein are too utopic or fantastic. One sees today how one point after the other of the protocols is being realized, but rather because I do not think the Jews are so completely stupid as not to keep such important protocol secret. I believe in the inner, but not the factual truth of the protocols. He's kind of saying we were saying earlier, he's like, yeah, the grand conspiracy just left their minutes out, which is funny because the grand conspiracy, well, not grand, but the conspiracy he was a part of did leave their minutes behind. They tried to burn most of the copies of the vaudeville. He's like, listen, those Jews are way smarter than I am. I'm going to leave my junk

out, but they would never. I'm going to leave that shit in a file folder. They never make that error. They're brilliant. Yeah. They're brilliant. Not like us. Jesus. We're dumb. So Goebbels wrote this at the same time. Friend of the pod Adolf Hitler was in prison writing Mein Kampf. The protocols heavily influenced what? What? What? What? Friend of the pod doesn't mean the object. You didn't object to friend of the pod, Timothy McVeigh. I probably I'm just letting you know I most definitely probably did. Well, that's probably fair. So at around the same time, Goebbels wrote that stuff about not believing in the literal truth of the protocols. Adolf Hitler was in prison writing Mein Kampf and the protocols

heavily influenced how he wrote his manifesto, even though he too knew that they were fake. And I'm going to quote from Hitler. Yeah, this is a Hitler. This is a Hitler classic coming up. This is a Hitler classic. I mean, this is like Hitler's white album when we're talking about Mein Kampf, you know. So here's Hitler. To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on this people being Jewish people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the protocols of the wise men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung mourns and screams once every week, the best proof that they are authentic. What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously exposed. And that is what matters.

It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brains, these disclosures originate. The important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty, they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner context as well as their ultimate final aims. So like Gomez, Hitler and Goebbels knew the protocols were fake, but felt they were authentic as a result of their inner truth. And I'm going to quote from a study on the protocols of the elders of Zion in Nazi propaganda by R. L. Byte work, quote, 19 years later, the two discussed the protocols just before Goebbels launched one of his periodic anti-semitic campaigns. Goebbels, who had been rereading it, commented that his propaganda colleagues maintained that it was not useful

for contemporary propaganda. But he reflected, I conclude from my reading nonetheless, that we can put it to very good use. If the Zionist protocols is not genuine, it was produced by a brilliant contemporary critic. Having talked it over with Hitler, the propaganda minister wrote in his diary, the furor standpoint is that the Zionist protocols can claim absolute genuineness. No one could express Jewish plans for world domination as well as the Jews themselves. The furor is of the opinion that the Jews do not need to follow an established program. They follow a strong racial instinct that always leads the great actions shown throughout their entire history. Yes. So they don't need a game plan. They don't need a game plan. They

will figure it out. They'll inherently do this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's racism. He's Hitler, you know? Yeah. And nobody does it better. It's like Hitler. And then like a couple steps, maybe Nathan Bedford Forrest, a couple steps below him. Henry Ford's on that list. If you're doing the all stars of racism, you know, I got you. I'm not, but go off. Not doing the all stars. No racism Olympics here. Yeah. I mean, Hitler would win. It's a foregone conclusion. So the furors. Yeah. Hitler never referred to the protocols in one of his public speeches, and Goebbels only mentioned it in public once in 1943. It was never mentioned in Das Reich, the high end intellectual Nazi magazine founded by Goebbels in 1941. But the protocols were

extremely popular and more low brow propaganda meant for the common man. The Volkischer Baobachter, the most mainstream Nazi publication during the Third Reich, referenced them on a near weekly basis. They were particularly influential in the magazine of Julius Stryker. So Julius was basically the gutter punk version of Goebbels. Goebbels was the state propagandist. He was the high thinking, the intellectual propagandist of the Nazis. Julius Stryker is the the fucking he's the guy whose job is to rile up the criminals and street fighters. We're beating people in the streets, right? We don't need intellectualism for them. I want crude cartoons and racist jokes, you know? Yeah. Stryker is like the gutter level. The expendables. Just very

expendable. Yeah, he's the grimy propagandist. And his main propaganda arm was a magazine called Der Stürmer, which existed mainly to radicalize the kind of street thugs who joined the brown shirts and beat up Jews in the street during the late 20s. Bytewerk writes that Der Stürmer, quote, alternated between elaborations of the protocols and lurid stories of German maidens raped by Jews and German children ritually murdered. So we can see all these different strains of anti-Jewish anti-Semitic propaganda kind of coming together in Der Stürmer. And he's using the protocols to make these street fighters. It's a mix of here's these stories about German women being raped. Here's these little excerpts from the protocols to like

convince you that what you're doing is that you going into the street and murdering people is part of a noble crusade, right? That's what these guys need. They need to believe their knights when they're stabbing people in dark alleyways. So while Hitler and Goebbels knew the protocols were fake, they recognized that it had tremendous value in convincing regular working class people of the reality of a grand Jewish conspiracy. There were two major and slightly different versions of the protocols distributed by the Nazis after 1933 when they came to power. The official Nazi party variant was just a copy of the original German translation from 1920. The Nazis gained the rights to this translation in 1929. And by 1934, they had sold

150,000 copies of it. Holy shit. Yeah, it sells all right. And there were other German versions often annotated that also sold tens of thousands of copies. The party subsidized these publications to try to get them out to as many hands as possible. But like Mein Kampf, most of the people who bought these probably never read them in their entirety. The main value of the protocols to the Nazis was not as a document itself. It was not something that a lot of people would just read. It was a source to cite and quote from liberal. You're writing some unhinged rant about how Jews are raping a woman. Throw in a couple of quotes from the protocols to really pop things off because it feels like it's got some weight to it, you know. And so they they acknowledge

for themselves that they know these are fake, but they're not telling the people that good Lord. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, okay. They're like, hey, we found some shit, y'all. Yeah, we found some. Check this out. Yeah. The Nazis came to power in 33. There was a broad understanding around the leadership that while the protocols weren't they weren't sophisticated enough to be super useful domestically, right? The street fighting portion is over. It's time for better propaganda, higher propaganda. But they recognized there was a value in spreading the protocols internationally. The basic idea was that if you could make more anti-Semites and the rest of Europe, that will help you make more fascists who will have more people in other European countries

who sympathize with the Third Reich. This will also cut down on outrage internationally. Once Nazis start, you know, doing the things they were always going to do. European anti-fascists were not ignorant of what was happening. In Switzerland, two organizations, the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities and the Bernese Jewish Community, quickly realized that the Swiss National Front, their local fascist party, had started distributing the protocols of the elders of Zion in German, a Nazi translation, alongside other anti-Semitic propaganda. They didn't want to just let this lie. They felt like they had to fight it somehow. In 1935, these activists decided to sue the National Front using a 1916 law meant to ban pornographic movies and books as the basis for

their lawsuit. Now, I'm not an expert on Swiss law. Historians seem to agree that these activists were kind of reaching by trying to punish Nazis with an anti-porn law. The specific wording of the law banned what was called schund literature, which roughly translates to trash or pulp fiction. And it was meant to ban like erotic stories like in comics and stuff that were being printed in this period. But it was like the way it was defined is just like anything that's like not true and is filthy. And I guess they were kind of trying to argue that like Nazi propaganda falls under this definition. So it's banned by the anti-porn laws as well. It was. Yeah. They're reaching. It's just a weird diagram of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It is weird. And it's it was a weird

venn diagram of stuff. And it was a bad idea. It would prove to be actually a disastrous idea. They had noble intentions, right? You're trying to stop Nazis from spreading propaganda in your country. But it wound up being one of the worst things they could have possibly done. So this becomes a huge court case that's covered internationally. And it kind of becomes an international referendum and whether or not the protocols of the elders of Zion are real. Because they're arguing that because this is fake, it falls under these pornography laws. Because the whole case wound up around revolving around four questions asked by the judge. Number one, was the protocols of the elders of Zion a forgery? Number two, was it plagiarized?

Number three, if it was, what was its source? And number four, do the protocols fall under the category of trash literature? Now, you and I know the answer to a lot of those questions. But at the time, they became a massive debate all around Europe. The Bern trial, as it became known, was front page news. And even though Hitler and Goebbels knew the protocols were a forgery, they saw value in pumping out propaganda around the trial to defend its veracity of the document. The propaganda ministry was unwilling to make the trials a defense of the authenticity of the protocols. Instead, the ministry treated them as attempts by international Jewry to attack national socialist Germany. Newspapers and radio carry daily summaries of the trial's progress,

praising the testimony of those supporting the protocol's legitimacy and attacking those who did not. The official party newspaper, Volk Schoberbachter, for example, commented on the testimony of a prosecution witness in a less than unbiased way. Dr. Baumgarten said little about his own subject, but rather made confused remarks about various points. He seemed less interested in speaking to the point than in having a rhetorical effect. The fascists lost the case technically, receiving a slap on the wrist punishment that amounted to a small fine. But the judgment was overturned two years later on appeal. And the Nazi Nazi propaganda ministry presented this to the German people as a huge victory. Now, the actual ruling had declared

that the authenticity of the protocols was irrelevant. They didn't count as pornography. But the Nazis ignored this. They presented the ruling as a defeat for Jews and a de facto acknowledgement that the protocols were legitimate. The Volk Schoberbachter released a five page special to celebrate the appeal titled Jewish defeat at the Burden trial. World Jewries efforts fail again. The Freiberger newspaper also released a five page story titled a defeat for world Jewry. Both articles celebrated the fact the court had ruled the protocols, not obscene literature. Can I I do want to say that that I am proud of us today. Even our races are no longer using the word Jewry. That feels like you don't hear it much, right? That is a win. Yeah.

You got to take the wins where you can get them. Let's count progress where progress exists. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Jewries. One of those like cringe words was like, uh, you know, that's that's that's not a good sign that I'm seeing that somewhere. Yeah. If we start seeing that again, we know we've got to know we're backsliding. Yeah, we are not doing good. Yeah. You know who is doing good? Raytheon. They are they are doing great with right in the White House with the with the Defense Department headed by a former Raytheon employee executive. Yes, they're doing wonderful. Oh my gosh, nailing it. Oh, that's so depressing. It's only depressing if you don't like missiles destroying school buses. I don't for the record. But Raytheon does.

Okay, Sophie, everyone is entitled to their opinion. You don't like that Raytheon does. So the answer is that we'll continue buying Raytheon's products and corporations are people now. So you got their people that corporations feelings. Yeah. Don't be mean to Raytheon. Fuck Raytheon. What have they ever done to you? I mean, I'm sure we could figure out something. Sophie does not speak for the rest of us here. We'll be back after these messages. 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 good bad ass 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. We're back. People don't say that much anymore. We'll be back after these messages.

Remember when they used to frame ads as messages? Yeah, Robert, because it's 2021, bro. Yeah. I know, but I miss it. It was just so much classier than being like shouting products. It's back when they didn't want us to know that they were tricking us into buying into sales and capitalism and shit. It was like, oh, these are just people trying to tell you little secrets. You should listen. Yeah. Oh, messages. Those sound valuable. I love a message. So what we're saying here is Robert misses the scam of it all. I do. I miss the scam of it all. Nowadays, it's just such naked, unrestricted. I wish I could be a little more cunning about it. I wish I could be like, you know, Langston, today I'm shaving with

my dollar shave club razor right after a wonderful sleep in my purple mattress. And let me tell you, I saw a school bus and I knew the thing to do was to launch an R9X knife missile at it because I wanted to take out the driver because he looked shifty, but I wanted to spare most of the children. And thanks to that wonderful Raytheon missile, more than 30% of the kids in that school bus made it out alive. And that's the Raytheon guarantee. And I'm sure you slept well that night on your purple mattress. On my purple mattress. Absolutely. I don't think purple mattress ever gave us a sponsorship. They never did. And we will delete this entire episode if they give us a dime.

Thank you, Daddy Purple. Thank you. It is weird. One of my worries early on in podcasting was it just like, seems like the whole industry is supported by like three mattress companies and razor blades. Things have broadened. Now there's a wider variety of for sure. It feels a little bit less like a shell game. I'm sure it'll all come crashing down. There is the trifecta of mattress, food delivery, and then dick pills. That was the holy trinity. I mean, okay. I will argue that the only ethical form of consumption under capitalism is dick pills.

I'm listening. There's no downside to dick pills. They do what they say they're going to do. They do what they say they're going to do. And somebody needs them. Science. Science. Not speaking of science. Let's talk about racism. So, yeah, the Nazis make a huge deal about the the burn trial. It becomes like this massive moment in the history of anti-Semitism. And this thing that had started as an effort to discredit the Nazis and punish people for spreading Nazi propaganda in Switzerland winds up spreading the protocols all around the world, right?

This huge trial comes up. People are debating how real the protocols are. There's all these articles and different newspapers talking about whether the protocols are true or not. And more than anything, talking about like how, boy, all the Jews really seem to want these this court case to go one certain way. That seems kind of shady. Maybe there's something to these protocols. It it was the worst thing they could have done was bringing this trial. It winds up. It's a it's a fucking disaster. Probably no single moment in prewar history did more to spread mainstream awareness of the protocols of the elders of Zion than the burn trial. It's tragic because it was a noble goal,

right? They were trying to fight fascism the best that they could. They're trying to shut that bad boy down. But it it it back the fuckfires, you know, when World War Two started in Germany, quickly found itself at war with more or less the world. It seemed to many that the protocols had been proven accurate again. The seventh protocol stated, we must be in a position to respond to every act of opposition by war with the neighbors of that country who which dares oppose us. But if these neighbors should also venture to stand collectively together against us, then we must offer resistance by a universal war.

So the protocols claim if a country finally wisest up to our conspiracy and goes to war with us, we have to get everyone else to go to war with that country, which the Germans claim at the start of World War Two. This is the Jews getting all of the world against us, right? That's why everyone is at war with us because the Jews made them be. Now, the reality of the situation is that Germany invaded Poland, whose sovereignty was backed by both France and England. Russia and Germany actually had a treaty which they split up with by which they split up Poland and Russia sent raw materials into the Third Reich. Germany didn't go to war with Russia until they chose to invade a country that was giving them

oil on a weekly basis. Likewise, the United States did not jump into war against Germany. We were neutral. The Nazis enjoyed a huge base of support among the American electorate. It was Hitler who declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor, which was a bad call. The fact that Germany went to war with the entire world was no one's fault but Germany's. They're blaming it on this. It's like, no, you kept declaring war on people. What do you think it would happen? Well, they had a guy that liked to talk a little spicy and they couldn't like say he was out of control. So yeah, it's everybody else's fault. You thought you could beat the whole world at a war. And I guess you came pretty close. They did pretty good, but like, yeah, it was not

anyone else's fault, but you're fucking own. Now, the fact that, yeah, so even though obviously to any person actually observing things, this was all Hitler's fault, right? He was starting all of these wars. Even so, strikers der Stürmer used the outbreak of hostilities as evidence that the Jewish conspiracy was real and dedicated to Germany's downfall. Quote, at the end of the past century, world Jewry believed that it was on the threshold of world domination. The world's leading Jews gathered in Basel in 1897. They decided to follow a systematic and criminal program to reach their final goal. They wrote the program for a total and complete achievement of world domination. It is known under the name of the Zionist protocols. Do they ever mention who these

world leading Jews are? Do they ever? No, not by name. You're left to assume Rothschilds are probably a part of it, right? That's an old one, but like, no, that's part of why it's a good conspiracy. Throwing a name in means it's falsifiable. We can actually disprove that if we start using real names. Yeah, we can prove this guy was in a different place in 1890s or whatever. Striker argued that the war had not begun because Hitler had misjudged France and England and assuming they wouldn't go to war over Poland, or that he had again misjudged the USSR when he assumed that country would collapse after a few months of Blitzkrieg. No, the greatest war in history had started because the Nazis dared oppose world Jewry's plans for world domination. When the

protocols were written, the monarchs of Europe had been the great bulwark against Jewish schemes. Now that they'd fallen, Striker argued, the Nazis were all that was left. As German tanks rolled into France, the Nazi government sent an official statement to the World Wire Service. Could the war plans of Jewry be more clearly expressed? Non-Jews read the protocols of the learned elders of Zion and recognize the secret plans and methods and means Jews adopt to seize for themselves unlimited power over the world. This is like an official government statement sent out at the osprey of hostilities. Yeah, this is this is so interesting, because I think for forever, I've always understood it being like, oh, Hitler just didn't like Jews. Like,

he wasn't a fan. He didn't like their faces. So they they killed them all because he didn't like them. And instead, he's like made a hero story out of it, where he's like, yo, if we don't kill them, they're going to destroy the planet. Yeah, you cannot get people to do things like the SS men who ran the death camps did or like the the Einsatz group and the special task groups, the first organized like genocide acts were taken in the east and Ukraine and in western Russia by these these special units of mostly cops, like the Germans would take cops and send them to the eastern front. And they would massacre Jews by guns. And it was there was one massacre, Bobby Yar, where they killed like 30,000 people in a day, just lining them up and shooting women and

children and babies. You can't do that. If you don't believe you're fighting in some sort of you have to at least have a lie to tell yourself about why this is a noble act. It's too hard. And part of why they moved the extermination camps is that most of those guys killed themselves, right? Like, even if you're a hardcore Nazi doing that just destroys you. You can't people. There's like maybe a 1% of a percent of people are just so broken that it doesn't damage them. But even Nazis were destroyed doing there's no purple mattress that's going to help you. You know, thank you for tying our sponsor to the insats group and something we always seek to do here. So yeah, you need this if you're going to convince a large body of men to do the worst

thing a group of men has ever done in history. Because there's I mean, there's other genocides. There's other horrible acts of racism. No one kills as many people as quickly intentionally as the Nazis do in the last two years of World War Two. There's like it's like there is a degree to which it deserves to stand on its own. And it's it is a mix of the speed and the intentionality of the murder. And that's only possible when you can convince people there. There's a crusade that they're a part of, you know, shortly before the worst war started in early 1941, Hitler gave a speech before the Reichstag that is often seen as one of the first pieces of evidence that the Holocaust was planned ahead of the war and directed by Hitler. Again, his name isn't on

anything authorizing the extermination of the Jews. And this part because Hitler was not a dumb guy, right? You don't you don't put your fucking name on that shit. It's like you just don't. That's a bad idea. Right. But so historians have tried to piece together things that he said that shows he was thinking about extermination well before the death camps got operational. One of the pieces of evidence that people will use for this is a speech he gave in 1941 before the Reichstag. This was right before the outbreak of war. Today, I will once more be a prophet if the international Jewish financiers in and outside of Europe should succeed in plunging nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and this victory

of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. So again, here's Hitler saying, and this is after I mean, the war has started. This is after the all of the players are involved before all like Russia is not in it yet. The U.S. isn't really in it yet. This is the early hostilities. Hitler says, if these if this Jewish conspiracy brings the world to war, brings everyone to war against Germany, we will annihilate the Jewish race. That's why it's used as evidence that he directed the Holocaust because here's him saying, here's him saying, if there's a war, we're going to kill all these motherfuckers. Now, we know Hitler was not a believer in the protocols, but he did believe that what they claimed was internally true. And the millions of Germans

listening to him at home during the speech had been primed to believe him by years of excerpts from the protocols in Volker Behrbachter, Der Sturmer and other Nazi publications. In September of 1942, Nazism's armies evidently ascendant in the entire world at war with Germany, Hitler addressed his people again. In my speech before the Reichstag on the first of September 1939, I spoke of two matters. First, since we are forced into war, neither the threat of weapons nor a period of transition shall conquer us. Second, if world Jewry launches another war in order to destroy the Aryan nations of Europe, it will not be the Aryan nations that will be destroyed, but the Jews. Once the German Jews laughed at my prophecy, I do not know whether or now they are

still laughing or whether they are laughing on the other side of their faces. I can simply repeat, they will stop laughing altogether, and I will fulfill my prophecy in this field too. Oh, that's just, yeah, he just needed to learn to be made fun of a little bit. That's a guy who really took himself super seriously in a way that was hugely detrimental to the world. Yeah, there's a lot about his early life that we talked about. We're like, yeah, he's not good at, he's not good at, I mean, he thought he was, he was enraged by the idea that he would dance because dancing would make him look silly. He was enraged by the idea that a girl he liked might dance because he thought dancing was silly. And yet he chose that mustache. Come on,

my guy. Yeah. I mean, so did Charlie Chaplin. And sorry, that first speech was in 1939. Don't forget, Michael Jordan. Dude, I know. What a choice. He must have just been thinking like, you know what, I think I'm famous enough to rehabilitate this mustache. All right, listen, I'm the head of basketball. Let's do this. I mean, speaking of conspiracy theories, there's so many around, Michael Jordan. Sure. Are there? Yeah. There's a lot of people who claim that he murdered his father, or not murdered, but is the cause of his father being murdered. There's like conspiracy theories that he had to leave basketball for gambling debts. There's conspiracy theories that he was throwing

games. There is a ton of stuff. I can't speak to most of it, but I have trouble imagining that Michael Jordan couldn't have made enough money in basketball to cover his gambling debts. Yeah, they often skip that part. I think he was doing all right. I think the theory is more that he had gambling debts that went unpaid and people wanted vengeance in a way that would actually hurt Michael Jordan, which the money would not. And then subsequently killed his dad. And then he quit basketball because he couldn't get past the shitty feeling. There's a lot. There's a lot going on besides that questionable mustache is what I was alluding to. All I know about him is that he was real damn good at basketball, less good at baseball and golf.

Oh, he's a mean, mean man, but the best to ever do it. But Space Jam was pretty rad. He was nice to Bugs Bunny. You don't want to piss off Bugs Bunny. You don't get on the wrong side of Bugs Bunny. No, Bugs Bunny will fuck you up. Speaking of a cabal by Mooney Tunes. Oh, boy. So, yeah, I don't know, man. That's more or less it. I mentioned those two speeches both because they clearly have some of the DNA and the protocols in them, and they're often seen as direct evidence that Hitler personally directed the Holocaust. I think the majority, I will say the question of Hitler's direct direction of the Holocaust is debated to some extent. I think

there's very broad agreement that it was instituted at his command and largely with his understanding, even though he was a delegator, right? He wasn't like mapping out how the death camps would work. He had guys like Reinhardt Heidrich and Adolf Eichmann to do that stuff, but he ordered it. Which is the way that all governments work, right? Yeah, it is. Like at the end of the day, even the bombs that get dropped on another country, the president didn't pick the spot. He just sort of gets a guy to pick the spot and do the thing. Yeah, he'll hand him a couple of spots and he'll say, okay, let's do that one. My experience writing the Amtrak has prepared me to nowhere to bomb. Maybe the way our government works

doesn't make a lot of sense is what I'm saying. But yeah. So I don't know. It's, I think one of the things, again, there's a lot, and it's much more debated the degree which the protocols would have influenced Hitler. I think because they influenced so much of the propaganda that he would have consumed as a young man, they had an impact on him. You can see shades of them in those speeches he was giving. I think their bigger impact on the Holocaust was in preparing the people of Europe to accept and cheer on the extermination of their Jewish neighbors. In our Holocaust remembrance media, we tend to focus on the happiest stories that exist from that time, stuff like Schindler's List, right? Stuff like the story of like the

neighbors who protected Anne Frank and her family or at least attempted to, stories of good people risking or sacrificing their lives to protect their Jewish neighbors. This happened a bunch. It's the stories of what the Israel calls the righteous among nations, the non-Jews who protected Jews during the Holocaust, very important stories. But they were not the norm. That's why they're highlighted because most people were not just willing to let this happen. They eagerly turned in their Jewish neighbors. In France, when the Nazis took over, French citizens handed over so many Jews to the Nazis, the Nazis had to tell them to stop because they couldn't, they couldn't handle that many people that quickly. And France is where the protocols of

the Elders of Zion first appeared. That had an impact on why that was the case because a lot of people thought, and there's more to it than that, but it was the same in Ukraine and Poland in Russia, villagers massacred their neighbors. This happened a lot in Poland. The Germans would come in and they would find the Jews in a village already dead because people would kill them to take their stuff. And a lot of times it's more complex than the protocol scrambled these people's brains. Most of them probably had heard excerpts from the protocols over the years. Most of them had never read it. But in many cases, the most direct motivation for the genocide was economic. It's the same thing with, for example, the internment of Japanese American citizens,

which was directly lobbied for by white farmers in California because they wanted to take those people's land. A lot of times when you're talking about Jews being turned in by people in Europe, it was because the people turning them in or even just murdering them wanted to gain access to their farms or businesses. The Nazis had a policy of Aryanization where they would take businesses from Jewish people and give them to quote unquote Aryans. But the protocols and the propaganda that the protocols inspired provided a moral justification for this process because people don't want to just think I killed my neighbor because I'm greedy. It's much easier to think my neighbor was conspiring against me. So it's right that I take his shit, you know?

That's a lot easier to square yourself with. It changes murdering or turning in your neighbor from a venal act of slaughter for profit to an act of racial self-defense. We needed the Native Americans to be savages. Otherwise, this doesn't work. The whole plan is faulty. If in fact it was common for white settlers to like leave white society and join Native American tribes because it was much more pleasant to live that way than it was to live in fucking New York City in 1680. We have to just depict them as like scalping people and stuff because that's the way it goes. The protocols of the elders of Zion still spread today. Americans like Henry Ford played a significant role in spreading it here. We haven't even talked about

him, but he published the protocols in the United States. Henry Ford spent huge amounts of money trying to get the protocols of the elders of Zion into as many people's hands as possible. He only stopped doing this when World War Two broke out. Like a lot of Western anti-Semites, the sheer brutality of the Holocaust forced him to at least pretend that he hadn't agreed with everything the Nazis did. I just published it. I didn't read it. I was just saying they were trying to kill us all. I didn't think we'd murder them. Oh my God. Yeah. Henry, you dick. So the wake of the Holocaust led to a collapse in public support for outright anti-Semitism, but the protocols didn't go away, nor did they become only the purview of fringe neo-Nazis.

Instead, they became sublimated into the American mindset. In a lot of cases, stripped of the direct anti-Semitism, but not stripped of its power to kind of convince people of a rubric of violence that was being planned against them. I laid out this process in detail when we talked about Columbia, but it happened here, too, right? It starts as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. The anti-Semitism never gets fully stripped out, but the conspiracy theory and the way it changes how people think, that's what has the greatest impact in the United States. We have not yet, in this country, had our equivalent of la violencia. But over the last several decades, we have watched a series of conspiracy theories spread in subcultures right and left wing.

The New World Order and Illuminati conspiracy theories are both direct descendants of the protocols of the elders of Zion. In fact, they are the same conspiracy that a tiny and ancient cabal of wealthy families are working together to destroy humanity. When you scratch these theories deep enough, a well of anti-Semitism always rises up. It's why George Soros is such a big part of so many people's conspiracy things, you know? Not like he's a billionaire, they're all bad, but like he's not trying to destroy the world. He's different than those other billionaires. It's just a guy who needs to be taxed more. Yeah, it's why a lot of non-racist believers of the New World Order back in the 90s would, once they had a couple of drinks in them,

call it the Jew world order. Because again, the anti-Semitism has never stripped out entirely. Alex Jones is a great example of this. He is not a dumb man, and he is careful enough to never call his globalists Jews. But his collars are not so careful. On the show Knowledge Fight, one of my favorite podcasts, Dan Friesen has documented repeatedly collars into info wars asking Alex his opinion on the Jews, and he will generally push back on this and just move on very quickly to the next collar. But he has an employee named Harrison Smith, who is Les Coy. On Harrison Smith's show, Smith will regularly talk about Jewish domination of the media and the government for hours with his collars because they all know what Alex is saying. QAnon also holds within it

the DNA of the protocols of the elders of Zion. I found a write up by Gregory Stanton on the website Just Security that lays this out well enough. Gregory worked for genocide watch and the alliance to prevent genocide. And as a result is one of those folks who spends his life trawling the underbelly of the Internet looking for the telltale fingerprints of the protocols. He writes, QAnon pervades the fantasy that a secret Satan worshipping cabal is taking over the world. Its members kidnap white children, keep them in secret prisons while run by pedophiles, slaughter and eat them to gain power from the essence in their blood. The cabal held the American presidency under the Clintons and Obama, nearly took power again in 2016,

and lurks in a deep state financed by Jews, including George Soros, and in Jews who control the media. They want to disarm citizens and defund the police. They promote abortion, transgender rights and homosexuality. They went to open borders so brown illegal aliens can invade America and mongrelize the white race. QAnon true believers think Donald Trump will rescue America from the Satanic cabal. At the time of the storm, supporters of the cabal will be rounded up and executed. The QAnon conspiracy theory has now spread to neo-Nazis in Germany, where over 200,000 German QAnon accounts infest the Internet. A faction known as Reichsberger, or citizens of the Reich, orchestrated a brief storming of

the German parliament on August 29. Oh, man. Jesus Christ. I've also never heard it explicitly stated as stealing white children. They don't say that because they want to deny that it's racism, but their their their focus on illegal aliens is very they're trying to change the character of this nation. They're trying to change the way this nation looks, you know? Yeah. Don't say they're trying to make replace white people. QAnon doesn't. Yeah. But that's what they're saying. But their interpreters get to it. They'll find their way to that part. Yeah. And you can find Nazis saying like, hey, QAnon's a great way to convince people of white genocide conspiracy theories. They're already halfway there, you know? Boy, oh boy. It's great. It's good.

My favorite part is how even if you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's fake, people will still believe it. That's the thing that gives me hope. Yeah. The conspiracies are so layered now that it's like to prove it wrong is only to prove that the conspiracy theory is deeper than we even knew it was. Yes. And one of the reasons why arguing with conspiracy theorists is basically pointless is that if you're not one of them, they will always spend more time thinking about this. And as soon as you point out one thing that's false, they'll bring up something that you've never even considered and you won't be ready to counter it. Right? Because this is their whole life, is thinking about all the different branches.

Okay, well, what about this? What about this? It's the same thing like Ben Shapiro does, not in a conspiratorial way. It's a debate tactic. And it's not an ethical debate tactic, but it's how you win debates. It's by bringing up more things than your opponent can refute, you know? Right. The Gishgalup is another term for it. Yeah. He also employs this strategy that I think is now becoming super effective of being like, well, debate me. And it's, well, what are we debating? I've already proven you wrong, but it's like, no, let's bring this to a public forum so that I can distract you. And then if I don't debate you, now I'm the idiot who couldn't debate Ben Shapiro on his

public platform. And it's not enough to show like, OK, you lied about this one thing. He's already moved on to the next lie. And like, if you're not ready to counter every single lie, you're going to, it's the same way. That's why that's another reason why the syncretism of conspiracy theories, being able to pull everything into this grand conspiracy theory makes it stronger. Because you like, start to argue about one thing, like, OK, well, what about this? What about this? What about this? And like, you'll never be ready to. That's why facts, facts are not the answer to beating conspiracy theories, providing people with the things that they're missing that cause them to believe in the conspiracy theory is the

only real long term solution to to to deradicalizing them. Yeah. And that's hard. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody is worried about the cabal when they're happy in their home. Exactly. It's like in the 20s, they tried the shit in Columbia. It didn't spread because people were doing good. It's when shit's fucked up that these things have a lot easier time spreading. Thankfully, everything's getting better in the world. We can all agree on that. Well, Langston, we did it. How are you doing? I'm doing good. I had a lovely time. This was great. Well, I'm glad you had a lovely time talking about the protocols of the elders of Zion. I learned a lot. I don't feel better. No, no, that's what happens on our show. You never feel

better at the end. Yeah. Learning things about the world never makes it easier. There was no healing for me personally, but no, no. Maybe maybe someone at home will feel a little bit of catharsis at the end of this bad boy. So our job here isn't to heal people. It's to just stick a finger in the wound a little bit deeper. You know, that's that's apparently why four million times a month people download this show. They all have they all have wounds that they want fingers stuck in. Stick that finger in me, please. Stick that finger in. All right, we'll be back next week when we'll talk about, I don't know, Will Wheaton. No, I've banned that. Remember? He's a monster. Yeah. Well, before we go, Langston, is there anything you want to plug for our listeners?

Oh, yeah. Please listen to my very silly far less research podcast. It's called My Mama Told Me. We talk about conspiracy theories specifically in the black community. It's it's a it's a good time. I recommend. Hell yeah. Well, so do I. And I don't know. What do we have? What's a good joke to end on, Sophie? I don't know, Robert. Well, I don't have any jokes. That's not my job. Yeah. I guess the joke is that the degeneration of society is largely inevitable. Great. Anyway, we have fun. Bye. Bye. 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 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.