Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Jewish Space Lasers, QAnon, and Two Centuries of Conspiracy Theories with Mike Rothschild

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

Joining Sharon today is Mike Rothschild: journalist, author, and conspiracy theorist expert who dives deep into the history of conspiracy theories over the last two centuries. In his new book, Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, Mike Rothschild – who is of no relation to the Rothschilds family referred to in the book – shows how many conspiracy theories today are directly connected to the same antisemitic rhetoric, myths, and accusations reaching back decades. So how did these conspiracy theories originate? What do modern QAnon beliefs have to do with this? And why do the same tropes reemerge again and again? Special thanks to our guest, Mike Rothschild, for joining us today. Host/Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Guest: Mike Rothschild Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month. Every month at Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at fizz.ca. Hello, friends. Welcome. Delighted to have you with me today. My guest is Mike Rothschild, who has written an absolutely must-read book called Jewish Space Lasers. And if you have ever wondered, where does anti-Semitism even come from? Why are people are the way that they are? You are going to want to stick around for this conversation. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets

interesting. I am really excited to be chatting with Mike Rothschild today. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. I added Jewish Space Lasers, your new book, immediately to cart as soon as I saw it on pre-order, in part because I read your previous book about QAnon. And I think we have a lot of shared interests in things that are happening in the world today. This book, though, I learned a lot from because this is like a history of Rothschild conspiracies that have been plaguing humanity for many, many, many hundreds of years. First of all, I'm sorry, you have to put in your bio that you are not related to any, to no relation.

Yep. No relation. No relation. No. They're in the asterisk. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay. First of all,

a lot of people who are just like average, ordinary Americans may not even be aware of what we're talking about. So fill us in. So there is a very prominent, once very powerful, still very wealthy banking family from Frankfurt, Germany named the Rothschilds. And they arose out of the Frankfurt Jewish ghetto. It was a walled city that had about 3000 residents basically just packed into this tiny little space. And there was a banker and a dealer in rare coins and metals named Mayor Amschel Rothschild. And he actually went to rabbinical school, he had to leave when his parents died, he came back, he got into the family business of making small loans, and he worked his way up to being the court Jew of the Crown Prince of Hesse. Now, court Jew is a real title. These were essentially the

bankers to European royalty because Christians were prohibited from lending money at interest, and so they went to Jewish families to do it. So the Rothschilds worked their way up from very small time bankers in Frankfurt to being one of the most powerful families in Europe. And they did it very quickly. When Mayer died in 1812, he was a wealthy and prosperous merchant. When his son Nathan died in 1836, Nathan had moved to London and basically became one of the most powerful textile and mining magnets in the country, Nathan Rothschild died as the richest man in the world. So this was a family that gathered an enormous amount of wealth, an enormous amount of power very quickly. And when that happens, and especially when you are Jewish and when you are very visibly Jewish, myths and then

conspiracy theories and then anti-Semitism follow. Jewish myths and then conspiracy theories and then anti-Semitism follow. When you say things like, yeah, when you have this really prominent, extremely wealthy, obviously Jewish family, conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism are going to follow, ordinary Americans, Mike, are like, but why? Why? Do you know what I mean? Do people ask you this question? But why is that what follows? Right. It is inherently irrational to blame the problems of the world on a very small, historically marginalized and often impoverished outsider religion, it inherently makes no sense. But there is a very lucrative niche of creating books, creating now films and podcasts and all these other things that monetize things that don't make any sense and trying to assign sense to them and trying to impart secret

knowledge and forbidden secrets, what they don't want you to know. And a lot of people have seen Jewish success in the business world, in the media, in academia, and all of that is real and said, these people are overrepresented. There's too many of them. And it's a very odd dichotomy, especially in America, where you pull yourself up from your bootstraps and you can do anything you want. You can go to the moon. You can be president. You can accumulate as much wealth and power as you can possibly grab with both your hands.

But wait a minute, not if you're Jewish. If you're Jewish, it's suspicious. There is something about Jewish success that brings up the idea that it is too much, that they've done too well relative to their size, and there must be something else going on here. Too many of them are Einstein. Right. Too many of them are like running movie studios. Too many of them work in banking. There has to be some other explanation. And when people's minds can't come up with a reasonable explanation that they understand, they will often substitute irrational explanations for things.

Right. And if they don't understand the explanation or if they think the explanation is boring, there is a need to inject interest and intrigue into a lot of these things. When you have Jewish success in finance, there are real reasons for this. And I get into that in the first chapter of the book, that Christians were not allowed to lend money at interest. It was considered sinful, but somebody had to do it. Those palaces, those castles, the armies, they didn't pay for themselves. There had to be money. You went to the Jewish community to get it. That ended hundreds of years ago. But the idea that Jews are still innately better with money, they have wisdom, they have power to get it, and they have secrets in their religion and secret objects, that

is very appealing to a certain type of person. Same thing with the film studios. You know, Hollywood in the early days of filmmaking was like the Wild West. There were no rules. And there's an entertainment background in Judaism. You have vaudeville, you have the cat skills. There's a performance aspect in a lot of Judaism. So a lot of Jewish writers and actors went out West because it's like, hey, we're being marginalized here in New York. Let's go out there and start over. So there are real reasons for these successes. They're just not steeped in conspiracy theories. And a lot of people really just need that

conspiratorial explanation. They need to be part of the secret, the group that knows the real truth, the secret truth that is being hidden. And they don't like the explanation that Jews were historically kept from many mainstream professions and kept from being able to own property and things of this nature. And so it led to greater representation in more risky business ventures like entertainment, like banking. Like banking. Yep, absolutely. And of course, most people during,

particularly the Middle Ages, but even after that, worked in agriculture. They were tenant farmers. And if Jews couldn't own land, they had to do something else. All right, I want to talk a little bit more about the Waterloo Canard, because this is such like the myth to end all myths

when it comes to the Rothschilds. Tell us about what this is such like the myth to end all myths when it comes to the Rothschilds. Tell us about what this is. So if people have any knowledge of the Battle of Waterloo other than the Abbasong Waterloo, which I'm not going to get stuck in my own head, it's the myth that the Jews in general, or the Rothschilds in particular, made some vast profit off it. And this is a myth that's been repurposed over and over and over in slightly tweaked forms. It was used in Nazi propaganda in the 1940s. It's in all the big crank books of the Cold War.

Alex Jones talks about it all the time. The crux of the myth is that Nathan Rothschild, who was the head of the London branch of the Rothschilds, the middle son of Mayor Omschel, was at the Battle of Waterloo, watching it all happen. There are accounts that he was so close, he could smell the smoke and he could see the faces of the dead men. And he saw that France was losing. And he jumped on his horse, rode across Belgium in the middle of the night, got to the port of Ostend, bribed a terrified sailor to take him across the English Channel in a once in a century storm, got to the London Stock Exchange

just in time for it to open, slumped against his favorite pillar at the stock exchange. And by his exhausted and defeated affect, the other bankers knew that Wellington and his forces had lost, that Napoleon had won, and they started dumping all their stocks. But of course, Nathan knew what had happened. He's making secret hand signals to his agents who are buying, buying, buying, buying up all the depressed stocks. Then the news of Waterloo's actual outcome, the news of the French defeat comes, the stocks explode in value, and Nathan Rothschild is suddenly the richest man in the world and controls the British Empire. Now, none of that happened. Literally none of that. From like minute one to the very end. All of it is a myth. But it's a very powerful myth. And it's a very cinematic myth. You can see it in your head. You can see the horse. You can hear the clomping and see the waves

lapping up against the ship. Now, there was no storm. There was no horse ride. Nathan Rothschild was not there. But this myth took off 30 years after the battle at a very particular time in history, at a time when socialism was on the rise. And a lot of people, particularly in France, were looking very askew at wealth accumulation and thinking there was too much money at the very top of the pyramid. And at the very top of that was represented by the Rothschilds who were extremely visible in France, particularly because of their expansion of the railroads. So a pamphlet emerges in 1846 written under the pen name Satan that accuses Nathan Rothschild of having been at the Battle of Waterloo, exploited the news for his own gain, and then accuses another one of the Rothschilds, Nathan's younger brother James, of running the French railroads into the ground, building cheap and shoddy lines that caused a train crash where a bunch of people died. And of course, this was a real crash. And the pamphlet is full of these lurid, horribly violent descriptions of all these horrible things that happened to people. And the pamphlet says,

basically, this is who did this. The Rothschilds are killing French people. They've exploited our deaths on the battlefield to take control of England. This is who your enemy is. And a couple of years later, Europe breaks out in revolution. The revolutions of 1848 are a massive socialist uprising, and they completely rewrite the map of Europe's governments. And this pamphlet starts a massive spike in antisemitism. There's also a blood libel panic going on at the same time, based around the disappearance of a monk in Damascus. So it's kind of a perfect storm of real life events and needing to scapegoat somebody for these real life events. And this really is the birth of the Rothschild myth. You mentioned the Satan pamphlet and this imaginary author, and of course, written by Satan that then began to, for some people,

associate Jews with Satanism, with this idea of blood libel, which people also associate with satanic entities. And it's difficult today to imagine the impact of even like one pamphlet. It's difficult today to imagine the impact of just the writings of one person who captures the imagination of people who don't want to make sense of the world because human nature has not changed, right? Like our desire to make sense of the world has always been there. Our desire for novelty and interesting explanations for things, that's not new. Conspiracy theories are not new. These are not new concepts in humanity, but the ways that they manifest themselves changes as technology changes. So what was once a little pamphlet written supposedly by Satan has now morphed into the

information superhighway and now morphed into podcasters and now morphed into televangelists writing bestselling books. But before we got to today, there were several stops along the way in the United States as the Rothschild conspiracy theories and myths came across the pond, didn't just exist in Europe anymore. I would love to hear more about how they manifested in 18th, 19th, 20th century America. things that I discovered writing the book and that I wasn't really aware of is that the Rothschilds themselves had no particular footprint in the United States. There was no American Rothschild branch. It just never happened. The early generations of the family didn't want to leave Europe. They had their palaces there. They had their gardens there. Why would they come here? This is the backwater. They were also really confounded by American law and the differences between federal law,

state law, local law. The Rothschilds operated in a world where if the prime minister of England or the king of France or the Vatican needs a bunch of money, they go to the Rothschilds. The Rothschilds just give them a bunch of money at a competitive interest rate. That's not the way American banking works. We're very distrustful of central banks. We were for a long time. We still are. So the Rothschilds never had a real foothold here.

But what they had was a name. And so when Jews crossed the Atlantic during the diaspora and they fled Europe for America, they carried with them the Rothschilds, the idea of going out into the world and making something of yourself. And one day, maybe your name will be mentioned with the Rothschilds. Maybe the Rothschilds will come idea of going out into the world and making something of yourself. And one day, maybe your name will be mentioned with the Rothschilds. Maybe the Rothschilds will come to your door one day. And so where that myth started, it became a legend. And that very quickly curdles into anti-Semitism because Jews in America did what Jews in Europe did,

form their own communities, their own customs, their own language. They spoke Yiddish, they dressed differently. So immediately there was the same suspicion on Jews in America that there was in Europe. And when those suspicions come, the myths and the antisemitism follows. So very quickly, you have this idea that Jews are being sent over here, that they're coming over here to take control of America, to influence American politics with their money and their power. Now, nevermind, the vast majority of Jews who came to America had no money, had no power. They were fleeing impoverishment, which is about as American as it gets, but it doesn't matter because of what we've talked about earlier, those suspicions that come with being a community of outsiders. And you see this even in the second rise of the KKK. When the KKK was

first formed, it was predominantly an anti-Black organization. But when it re-emerged in the 19-teens, they added Jews and Catholics to the list of their targets. And again, because the wave of immigration that was happening during that time period, as you mentioned, many Jews lived in insulated communities, they spoke different languages, they dressed perhaps differently, and it made it very easy to target them as an other. They could never be 100% American. That's what the KKK, the language they used. Right. They will never be one of us. They will never assimilate. They're bringing their genetic impurities here. Of course, the 1920s and early 30s was a time when eugenics was a very popular fad. They are polluting our genes. They're polluting our bloodlines. And there was a lot of fear of that

at that time. There was also the economic disaster that was going on, which was very easy to blame on Jews and particularly on Jewish banks. And as I write about in the book, the first major bank in Europe that failed was Credit Anstalt in Austria. It was a bank founded by one of the Rothschilds. And it was very easy to blame this financial contagion on the Jews. Very easy to blame this march to war that was going on as the 30s progressed on Jews, that Jews are trying to get us into their war. This isn't our conflict. This is a Jewish conflict.

Let's stay out of it. That America First movement, which was very popular in the late 30s and early 40s, it is isolationist. It's pro-America, but it's also extremely anti-Semitic. And so all of these things come together. And we just stood there and watched as Europe fell into this horrifying war. And America, on a personal level, a lot of people just didn't want anything to do with it. We just didn't feel like it was our conflict. And it took several years for the United anything to do with it. We just didn't feel like it was our conflict. And it took several years for the United States to finally get involved.

And of course, then all of the isolationism, all of the America first stuff immediately stopped with Pearl Harbor. But it took a long time and a lot of needless dithering before America really did anything. And that time period that you're talking about, it's a great example of how just a couple of popular figures can impact public opinion. Popular figures like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, who were both so wildly anti-Semitic, openly anti-Semitic, writing in newspapers that had circulations of hundreds of thousands of people and promoting protocols of the elders of Zion and just giving speeches that were

very, very openly anti-Semitic. And also thinking about like Father Charles Coughlin and people like him who had the ear of so many Americans. All it took was a small handful of people to legitimize this type of rhetoric in the public square. And that legitimacy, as you just mentioned, is part of what kept us out of World War II for so long, part of what let Hitler march all over Europe, what let him ultimately kill 6 million Jews, you can't blame it entirely on Charles Lindbergh, of course. Can't blame it entirely on Henry Ford. Their rhetoric certainly had a very significant impact that promoted this isolationist tendency

of like, we're not going to get involved in these Jewish conflicts. It's not our business. America is a Christian nation. I say that in air quotes. It's not our conflict. And I think it's an important thing to note when we're talking about the rise in anti-Semitism today, how all it takes is a small handful of well-placed individuals, and we can look back on history and see what happened. Right. And these were hugely influential people. Henry Ford was putting copies

of the Dearborn Independent with its ideation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the glove compartments of every Ford that was sold. Father Coughlin spoke to millions of people. These were not just guys on street corners shouting. There were plenty of those, but these were hugely influential people. Their nativism and their desire for America to keep out immigrants, particularly Eastern European immigrants, who it was felt would not contribute to American society. That had a lot of pull in the public. And it had a lot of pull with politicians. I mean, America was very closed off to refugees in the lead up to the Holocaust. And it had devastating consequences. And we are seeing the same kinds of things now where you have people with massive, massive platforms who are saying this stuff. They're not calling for the extermination of Jews. They're

just saying, we don't want to get involved. They're saying, we don't want these people. These people are distrustful. These people are suspicious. It never starts with, we have to kill them all. It didn't start that way in Germany. Nazi propaganda didn't start with Auschwitz. It started with, these people are not us. These people betrayed us. These people can't be trusted. And then when the Nazis started to take over other countries, then it became, well, we need to do something about these people. These are not proper people. They're subhuman. We don't want their genes polluting us. They have to be dealt with. And the German population had to be coaxed along to genocide and to this sort of drastic societal action. And propaganda and people like Coughlin, people like Lindbergh, that kind of propaganda

is immensely powerful. It still is. This stuff works. It's why it's done over and over and over again. It's because it really does have the power to influence large masses of people. Absolutely. And when you see people like Kanye West saying we need to go DEFCON 5 on the Jews, it speaks to this underlying belief among certain segments of American and also broader global society that underneath what plagues the world, the idea is that people latch

onto that underneath all of society's ills are the Jews who are pulling the strings and controlling the money and trying to bring about a new world order and creating the World Economic Forum and all the myriad ways that the Jews are behind everything that's wrong with us. Yeah, it's the puppet master trope. It's the invisible string puller, the one who's directing everything, who's keeping us down. And of course, the Jews have that position in general. And the Rothschilds are seen as the string pullers of the string pullers. There's the Ben Garrison cartoon that I write about in the book, where George Soros is manipulating two of Trump's generals. and the puppet hand that's manipulating

Soros is labeled Rothschild. I mean, it sounds insane, but for a lot of people, that is their view of the world, that there is just an endless series of puppet masters. And at the very top are the Rothschilds who own all the banks, who have all the money, who've dictated both sides of every war since Napoleon or the revolution or whatever. And this is a worldview that a lot of people have. And it is extremely powerful. It's really, really compelling to think that there is somebody who is manipulating things. My misfortune is not my fault. It's their fault. I didn't do it. They did it. And therefore, I can be absolved of all my own failings. I'm Jenna Fisher.

And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together, we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's Steve Carell in the studio. stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand

new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Most people who are white nationalists also would not say that they're racist. Right. And they don't believe they're racist. And most people who are anti-Semitic would not admit to it.

But this is one of the things that I found interesting in your previous book about QAnon too, which I've brought up many times in which people always push back on me when I bring this up, that many of the tenants of QAnon, which is of course this ridiculously large umbrella term that incorporates everything from JFK Jr. is not really dead and is coming back to be Trump's vice president to there's tunnels under the Capitol where we're bloodletting children, blah, blah, blah. That so much of what underpins QAnon are just anti-Semitic tropes that are thousands of years old. I can't believe anybody would push back on you. Oh, no, they're like, what?

That's not possible. That's not possible. I know to you it're like, what? That's not possible. That's not possible. I know to you, it seems like, yeah, of course they are. Of course they are. But when you look at the statistics of people in the United States who believe some form of QAnon, they believe in some aspects of it, right? Like there's a deep state. There's these cabals of sex traffickers.

They may not even be willing to say, I'm a Q believer, but they believe some aspects of Q beliefs. Sometimes they don't even understand that what they are espousing is inherently anti-Semitic. Have you found this in your research? I found a lot of denial and a lot of people who swear up and down, I'm not a racist. I'm not anti-Semitic. I have friends that are whatever. I just think that there's a cabal of wealthy pedophiles who run the world. And if you dig into it at all, it's really just a repurposing of these same tropes. The idea of the deep state, that didn't start with Donald Trump. None of this stuff started with Donald Trump.

That's why it's so powerful. Trump didn't pull this stuff out of thin air. This was all here. Americans love secret societies. We love the idea that there's a shadowy group pulling the strings somewhere. Before we called it the deep state, we called it the New World Order. We called it the insiders. Called it the Federal Reserve, Mike.

Federal Reserve. Some people call it the Federal Reserve. Yeah. It's just the Fed and it's run by Jews. All the Jews were at the meeting. Well, no, they weren't. There was like one Jew at the meeting. There were six people at this meeting.

But we love the idea that there are these interlocking groups that are all working against us. And everything they do is secret, but also we know about all of it. The logic falls apart very quickly. Because if you think, well, if Jews control the world, why do horrible things keep happening to Jews? And of course, they say, well, because it's not the Jews, it's just these powerful Jews, and all Jews should hate the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, the Guggenheims, you know, these names that we know from our culture, from our business, from philanthropy. So there's always a reason, there's always an explanation, and there's never a reason to look inward and say, hey, I have some prejudices that I don't think I've ever dealt with. Maybe I should stop blaming the Trilateral Commission and the Rothschild Rockefeller Alliance and maybe start looking at my own life. But people don't want to do that.

No, no, because I'm not the problem. It feels much better in our brains to be able to blame an external actor for whatever the issues are. It feels way better to be able to do that than to actually have any accountability for your own self. And of course, I think we need to fill people in on what a Jewish space laser is. Sure. So obviously, this is the title of the book. The reason why I wanted to go with that title is because I wanted something that would feel familiar to people, but that also would challenge their assumptions. Because when you hear that term, Jewish space laser, you think Marjorie Taylor Greene. Except Marjorie Taylor Greene never actually said that. She never used that phrase. In that Facebook post where that whole thing comes from,

she never uses the word Jewish. But what she does do is concoct an absolutely insane conspiracy theory that a solar generator company was using its space-based energy transmission lasers not to transmit power, but to burn off a large section of California forest so that Jerry Brown, Rothschild Inc., and I think it's Dianne Feinstein's husband, could build a high-speed rail line. Now, this was the alternate explanation for the 2018 Camp Fire in California. It was one of the most devastating wildfires the state's ever had. So rather than accept the explanation that maybe climate change could have had something to do with this, and maybe climate change means this will be happening more, well, we don't think climate change could have had something to do with this. No, that's not. And maybe climate change means this will be happening more.

Well, we don't think climate change is real. We think that's a scam. But the fire happened. So there has to be some other explanation. And so that's when you blame the vast conspiracy and who's at the controls of the vast conspiracy, but Rothschild Inc. Because there's a PG&E, a Pacific Gas and Electric, who was responsible for the fire. There's a board member who's also a vice president at the

Rothschild Inc. banking firm, and isn't that interesting? So that's the conspiracy theory. That term Jewish space lasers comes a little bit later. Now that Facebook post is from 2018. It was only discovered in 2021 after Marjorie Taylor Greene had been sworn later. Now that Facebook post is from 2018. It was only discovered in 2021 after Marjorie Taylor Greene had been sworn in. Now, wouldn't have mattered. She ran in a Republican district that is so red, a Republican pudding cup could have won that seat. But she very quickly rose to prominence as this out and proud conspiracy believer, out and proud stolen election truther. She goes on the floor of the house on January 6th in a mask with Trump one stitched on it. We know what's going on here. She's gunning for attention. And here comes this old Facebook post that gives her this attention. So the crux

of the story is not, oh, ha ha, it's a satellite laser controlled by Jews. It's here is a conspiracy theorist who is injecting her ideas into the mainstream. And it's being looked at as a joke. And yes, it's funny. Yes, it's stupid. But it's also very indicative of the problem that our society has is that we give attention to the worst people. And then we share their stupid ravings, because they're so dumb. And we want everybody to think, oh, haha, we're smart. We know this is stupid. So we retweet Marjorie Taylor Greene and her typos and her dumb memes, and she gets more attention. She gets more clicks on Twitter. She gets to say, oh, they think we're stupid. We know what's going on. We're just asking questions.

So it is indicative of a much bigger problem while also being mockable in and of itself. We have to talk before we close this out, though. We have to talk about George Soros and how he has become such a target for certain groups of people. You see his name bandied about by anybody who opposes any liberal cause. You recently saw like presidential candidate Ron DeSantis talk about how he had to remove Soros-backed prosecutors that were elected, had to remove them from office. And people ask me questions of like, what does that even mean? What does Soros-backed prosecutor mean? So fill us in on how George Soros got to be the boogeyman. Really, this was the role that the Rothschilds had. He was known in financial circles. He was known as this Hungarian immigrant who had

made a huge amount of money in his hedge fund. In the early 90s, he became the man who broke the Bank of England because he made a billion pounds or something, shorting the pound. It brought him some notoriety in England, but he was not well known in the United States until 2004. Soros is nominally a Republican. He's talked about his admiration for Ronald Reagan, but he very, very vociferously opposed the Iraq War. And he donated to the John Kerry campaign because this was the time when all these campaign finance laws were falling away and suddenly you could give any amount of money that you wanted to a presidential candidate. So George Soros did that. And nevermind that it was not

enough money for John Kerry to win the election. Soros became the, out of almost nowhere, became the Democratic Party's biggest benefactor, supposedly, became the most powerful progressive in America. And his philanthropy done through his open society foundations started to be scrutinized. So he was giving away a lot of money to criminal justice reform groups, drug law enforcement groups, for know, for reforming of sex work laws, things like that. All of this suddenly became George Soros is using drug money to fund crack pipe distribution in the ghetto. George Soros is funding prostitutes.

All of this stuff got pushed by people like Bill O'Reilly, like Glenn Beck, who suddenly had this new boogeyman to go after. Of course, this is pre-Obama, but it's post 9-11. So the Islamophobia is starting to die down. You kind of need a new enemy. And here's George Soros. He's really old. He speaks in a very thick Hungarian accent. He sometimes says things that are a little easy to take out of context. And he is now public enemy number one. So Beck and O'Reilly, all these people are doing hour long specials on the influence of Soros and his puppet master

tendencies, his funding of all these liberal front groups. And now we're at the point where any link to anything Soros has ever done is enough to tar somebody as Soros-backed. A prosecutor who, when they were in law school, took a $1,000 grant from some foundation linked to something that's linked to Soros. Ah, Soros is in their pocket. Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the national anthem. Soros is paying him. Hillary Clinton wears purple to the DNC convention.

It's Soros paying her to promote color revolutions in Ukraine. It is so outlandish that if George Soros really were spending the amount of money that they think he's spending, he would have gone broke 10 times over. But he makes a very effective boogeyman for these people who are looking for a prominent Jewish person to be the puppet master, and maybe it's not the Rothschilds anymore. Now it's this guy. It is bizarre the way Soros' Panic on the Right has completely rewritten how these people see philanthropy, how they see influence. It is truly disturbing. What do you hope the reader who picks up Jewish Space Lasers, which is such an interesting book and a very quick read, I might add, Mike, like I flew through it. It was very

entertaining. I learned a lot. I felt like I picked up some very valuable information from having read it. What do you hope the reader takes away when they close the book? Well, I've definitely gotten people sort of joking about, well, you know, not much of an optimistic ending here. And I'm thinking, really? You think anti-Semitism has an optimistic ending? I mean, great. I hope so. I don't think it's going to happen in this millennium. What I do hope that people take from it is to be able to recognize certain terms and certain jokes and certain references for what they really are. When people talk about Jewish greed, Jewish cheapness, understand that it's not a joke. It's not a harmless jibe that even other Jews do. It has an insidious history. When people

just throw around the name Rothschild or throw around the name Soros or throw around terms like globalist or London banker, that means something. It's tapping into a very ancient and very powerful prejudice, a prejudice that is very easy to exploit, very easy to monetize, and very easy to weaponize against vulnerable people. So what I hope people take away from it is the recognition of what these terms mean, and to hopefully stop using them in their own lives, to call them out when other people in their immediate circles use them. We cannot do anything about global anti-Semitism, but we can do something about anti-Semitism in our own lives and in the lives of the people around us. So good. Thank you so much for being here today. I really loved reading Jewish Space Lasers. But we can do something about anti-Semitism in our own lives and in the lives of the people around us. So good.

Thank you so much for being here today. I really loved reading Jewish Space Lasers. I wish I didn't have to read it, Mike. Wish I didn't have to write it. But I'm glad I read it. Yeah. Wish you didn't have to spend your life being like, I'm not related to the Rothschilds of Europe. I wish I didn't have to read it, but I am glad that I did.

And I'm really grateful for your time today. Thank you very much. This was great. You can find Mike Rothschild's book, Jewish Space Lasers, wherever you buy your books. And you can also order it on bookshop.org if you would like to support independent bookstores. Thanks for being here today. The show is hosted and executive produced by me, Sharon McMahon. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. And if you could leave us a review or share this episode on social media, those things help podcasters out so much. Thanks for being here today.