QAA Podcast - Episode 243: Jewish Space Lasers feat Mike Rothschild

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

For hundreds of years the Rothschild banking family played a central role in conspiracist narratives. In the 19th century the Rothschilds’ massive wealth, war profiteering, connections to powerful governments, and pioneering banking strategies earned them well-deserved scrutiny. But myths about the Rothschilds eventually became a way to promote anti semitic attacks and disguise them as critiques of wealth and power. To help us separate fact from myth when it comes to the Rothschild family, we are joined by repeat guest Mike Rothschild (who, despite his name, is not related to the banking dynasty.) In our discussion with his upcoming book, Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, we cover everything from the origin of anti-semetic canards, how the Rothschilds became a financial force in Europe, the evolution of Rothschild conspiracy theories, and a major 21st century financial scandal involving the Swiss arm of Rothschild & Co. Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like 'Manclan,' 'Trickle Down' and 'The Spectral Voyager': http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous QAA's Website: https://qanonanonymous.com Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz. Mike Rothschild on Twitter https://twitter.com/rothschildmd Jewish Space Lasers by Mike Rothschild https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/733925/jewish-space-lasers-by-mike-rothschild/ REFERENCES Rothschild family to take Paris-listed investment bank private https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/rothschild-family-plans-take-its-paris-listed-investment-bank-private-2023-02-06/ 1MDB: The inside story of the world’s biggest financial scandal https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/28/1mdb-inside-story-worlds-biggest-financial-scandal-malaysia

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listener to chapter 243 of the Q&O anonymous podcast, the Jewish Space Lasers episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rockatansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View. One thing that fascinates me about modern.

and conspiracism is how little of it is original. It typically involves taking storylines and tropes that are hundreds of years old and then remixing them for new audiences, technology, and media. Like Adrenachrome and Pisa Gate are just remixed blood libel. The Seth Rich conspiracy theory followed many of the same beats as 19th century conspiracy theories

about the anti-Mason William Morgan. Conspiracy theories usually just use the same handful of stories that are retold over and over again like folk tales. A core reoccurring theme in conspiracist narratives is that the puppet masters of world history are the Jews generally and the Rothschild banking family specifically.

Now the true story of the Rothschilds is about the birth of modern international banking, war profiteering, the financialization of the economy and all the consequences of those developments. Now, there's plenty of substance to critique there. But even after the Rothschilds became one of a handful of players in the great global game of finance,

conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds became a way to publish anti-Semitic attacks and disguise them as critiques of wealth and power. Now, these tales have continued into the 21st century. In CUNON lore, the Rothschilds are one of three entities who truly run the world, along with the Saudi royal family and George Soros. To help us separate fact from myth

when it comes to the Rothschild, we are joined by Mike Rothschild, and as he's had to point out many times, Despite his name, he's not getting that sweet Rothschild cash. He is unrelated. You may know him as the author of the essential book on Q&N titled The Storm Is Upon Us. His most recent book coming out in September is titled Jewish Space Lasers, the Rothschilds and 200 years of conspiracy theories. Mike, thanks again for joining us.

I am always happy to be here, guys. Well, I mean, it's fun for all, you know, the four of us to, you know, get together and talk. But let's be real, none of us are really happy to be here. No, oh, no. The fact that we have to do this is appalling. But if we do have to do it, you know, might as well do it with you guys. Your family has fallen from high that you would go from an international power broker to someone who has to write books about space lasers that don't exist. To somebody who willingly appears on podcasts.

Yeah, it's especially interesting because the title of your book, what it references, it sort of became, become relevant in the conspiracist world again. So, now, the title of your book comes from a Facebook post made by Marjorie Taylor Green. This was posted all the way back in 2018, about two years before she was elected to Congress. And the post was made in response to the deadly wildfires in California that year. And the post said that the fires were the result of a conspiracy between the energy company PG&E, Governor Jerry Brown, the solar energy company Soleran, and Rothschild, Inc. And further, these fires were actually sparked by satellites that focused the sun's energy, which were shot down to Earth.

And so the summary of this conspiracy theory is that the fires were caused by Jewish space lasers. So it's interesting because, you know, recently we've been following the horrifying news coming out of Hawaii, in which thousands of acres are burning and really devastating, lots of homes, you know, lives upturned. And as of this recording, the death toll is 96, making the deadliest U.S. wildfire more than a century. And I certainly hope, you know, as that gets under control, we get more information about what exactly went wrong there. Now, the precise spark of the fire isn't known, but the National Weather Service of that mix of dry vegetation, strong winds, and low, humidity fueled the fast moving flames. Of course, the effects of climate change have helped create the conditions for wildfires that are this hard to control. But conspiracists online

appeared with basically the same theory that Marjorie Taylor Green promoted years ago. So here's one popular post from TikTok. This was a direct energy weapon assault on the people. And I say that because my friend in Hawaii, which I'm going to show this picture here, showed a laser beam coming out of the sky directly targeting the city. This is really important to be aware of because when we look back at Paradise Valley when they had their fire, we see a lot of similarities such as the trees still standing, which is very interesting for a fire. Now, with this whole entire thing, the mainstream media is going to say that this is climate

change and that we need to do better, but what's not going to be talked about is the weather modification projects which take place in the United States every single day, spraying aluminum and barium and strontium up into the sky, which if you think about it, aluminum, is a very flammable material, which could result in something like this. Aluminum is flammable. I mean, there's a lot here. Yeah. Also, the guy misspelled barium in his TikTok video.

So, you know, maybe not dealing with top-level geniuses here, maybe mid-level geniuses. Yeah, trees famously do not contain moisture. Why would they not burn down? In an alternate universe somewhere, an alternate timeline parallel to this one, Somebody from far away took a picture of the fires and they went, wow, look at that. The refraction of the light in the camera makes it look like there's like a beam coming down. That's crazy. Isn't it crazy how light can distort photographs and stuff?

Wild. I hope everybody's okay. And then that's the end of it. But in this reality, it's no, it actually is a laser beam coming from the heavens, a la some Roland Emmerich flick. Yeah. It doesn't really make sense to me. me because like if I was a member of the cabal that secretly ruled the world, and I wanted to start

some fires because this would help my agenda towards a one world government, I would just send in the minion with a bottle of kerosene and a bick lighter. That seems like it would be like a sneakier plan than a light coming from the heavens. That's a little bit showier and like, you ostentatious. I feel like people would notice that more than the kerosene bottle guy. Some of the young Rothschilds like to take the space laser satellites for joy rides. And, you know, they've been warned, like, please do not use the laser. We only use that for massive wars where it can be easily covered up. You can't just do it randomly on Hawaii.

And, of course, youth, you know, the folly of youth. They don't listen. You know, I also hate this because, like, when they finally do, like, master this, like, the space laser technology, no one's going to believe them. No one's going to leave him when, like, you know, we've got a real boy who cried wolf situation here. I don't know. I'll still believe it. I miss the days when conspiracy theorists were like crusty old guys in a camper, you know, out in the middle of nowhere on a, you know, ham radio broadcast.

But we've got this like young, good looking guy, you know, nice, nice haircut, like clean white tea, you know, on TikTok now sort of doing the same thing. It's The kids, they're not all right. No, they're not. Now, there was another viral tweet. This one came from a woman who claimed that she personally witnessed the attacks and she doesn't offer a lot of details or evidence

but she does have a very emotional delivery which probably helped her popularity. I have been trapped in Lahaina for the last four days and I experienced firsthand what was going on there. What I went through is not important. I need to get this message out. This was not a natural disaster. This was a direct energy attack on the people and the place of Maui.

If you know what lives there, what descendants live there, you know why. And you know why it happened on 8-8. And if this is not something that you believe, it's time to stop being a sheep. Unsurprisingly, you don't see a lot of native Hawaiians involved here. Just like a bunch of, like, random. I know this young woman is wearing a sweatshirt that has, the font is kind of like live, laugh, love sort of font, but the text is, let's grow, girl. Yeah, let's grow.

I mean, this whole situation sucks because it does feel like we're debating what caused the fire as the flames consume us. I feel like that's really going to be the history of the future. humanity. It also sucks good because it feels like everyone, everyone kind of like is really debating over the degree of telology involved in the fires. Like a lot of people might say that, you know, what happened was is that because of, you know, decades of geoengineering, we've been spewing a lot of extra carbon into the atmosphere, which is causing the climate to change in ways that are very unpredictable and hard to control. And that was done deliberately by people who knew what they

are doing. And maybe they didn't know this exact fire would happen, but they were negligent or indifferent. And so that is the human intervention in these kinds of fires. But they take it a little bit more direct approach. It's like, no, no, someone pressed the big red button that said fire laser. And that's why, you know, all this devastation happened in Hawaii. Well, sure. It's, it's anything to not talk about the real conspiracy, which is the oil companies and the mining companies and the manufacturing companies. It's a cooler conspiracy with lasers and fire and secret evacuations and Oprah's burning down the forest so she can gobble up more land. And it's a conspiracy to explain a conspiracy that just lets most people off the hook for turning away from what's really been

happening to the climate. Yeah, not to mention, you know, I mean, if we're talking about Hawaii, of course, we got to bring up the military bases and the fact that the American military is the single largest contributor to carbon emissions in the world. So it's fun to look at the Rothschild family and the Jewish space lasers instead of, you know, like you mentioned, the actual structures that are suicidally pushing humanity to the brink. I think there's a feeling of helplessness, you know, when your average environment comes up against these, you know, massive corporations or, you know, these industrial entities. And it's almost like they, want to feel even more helpless. And so, you know, when you, when you place the blame on a giant

super weapon that is floating above the atmosphere that is controlled by the government or, you know, the secret cabal of elite, there's even less that you can do about that, you know. Yeah, and that's what's really sad, I think, about essentially starting to become a literalist about the metaphors you could use to talk about the people who have power who don't care about us who are basically preparing for global warming but they're preparing by making sure that they are going to be safe and that other people will be the you know the front lines of like the devastation it's like if you wanted to make a metaphor it's like yeah they don't care about us like they are sacrificing us essentially and then it's like well what if the metaphor was real and we had giant space lasers

and then it's like well fuck how are we going to organize against any of this shit? if this is where we're at. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's much less attractive if the solution is getting more involved in your local politics or your, you know, or activism regarding the environment or, you know, speaking out against these, these large entities. That requires work. That requires refocus. That requires pulling your community together. Whereas if the enemy is this unseen, unstoppable sort of global force, you can't do anything. You can make a lot of videos and you can be very upset and you can convey, you know, this desperate sense of helplessness. But there's really nothing to do there, which I think to some people in a way is a more

attractive explanation because they get to be mad, but they don't have to change, you know, they don't have to change their focus or re-evaluate their politics or re-evaluate their beliefs on climate change, for example. Yeah, it's like, well, you know, it's Chevronstein. Oh, it's the Shelberg Corporation. Hey, the Shelbergs are beautiful people, and I do not hear any kind of slander against them. The Sherbergs are great people. They're great people. They've got a great logo.

A big shell. Big shell, very expensive gas in Los Angeles But a great logo, good people, great family Yeah, have you ever met the The The God damn it Shmule Saudi Arabia

Have you ever met? Well, there was some cheating at Mahjong Last time, so Things are a little delicate right now But I'm sure we'll fix it all I mean this isn't anything new It's like even if you look back to You know, like the whole blaming Jewish people and, you know, blood libel and, you know, keeping them outside of the city walls.

It's like, well, it can't be the king. It can't be the king who set up a hierarchy of oppression that kind of rains down on the rest of us. It's got to be these weird new guys in town. They look different. They sound different. They sing a lot. They sing a lot. They sing before they drink the wine.

They sing before they eat the bread. There's something going on here. Mike, before we start talking about. talking about the content of your new book. I got to ask, what inspired you to write about Rothschild conspiracy theories as a man named Rothschild who isn't related to the financial dynasty? Um, masochism, apparently. Okay. Um, you know, growing up, nobody thought that we were rich, you know, I lived in a, you know, the north suburbs of Chicago. We all had the same sort of housing design. Like, nobody ever thought that. And then when I started getting into

conspiracy theories, I'd, you know, I'd start writing about this stuff. And I would hear, oh, a Rothschild writing about conspiracies. And it never really occurred to me to maybe, you know, use like a pen name or something because people are going to figure it out anyway and then it looks like you're hiding something. But with the idea of really specifically writing about the Rothschilds, you know, the Rothschilds come up a lot in QAnon. And what I really wanted to learn was why do we keep talking about them? What is what is the truth with these people? What is what is fiction? What is the reality? And I what I really wanted to know at the beginning was what do they think about? And of course, that was the first big road blog I hit was they don't talk about any of this stuff.

They don't mention these things. They don't give a lot of interviews, period. And when they do, it's usually related to finance or art or banking or things like that. And, you know, these aren't things that usually come up. So what I wanted to do is take this bigger view of, why do we keep talking about this family? What did this family actually accomplish versus what do conspiracy theorists think they accomplished? where is the line between the truth and the myth, and why does this stuff keep getting recycled? And once you start going down that road, there's so much material there.

There's so many references to them. They're interweaved throughout history in a way that is very interesting without all of the conspiracy theories. And then the conspiracy theories themselves are a fascinating picture of sort of worldwide paranoia of the last two centuries. As you point out in the book, you really can't understand Rothschild conspiracy theories without first understanding sort of stereotypes about Jews being good with money or greedy. And you talk about how these stereotypes stem from the fact that Jews did make up the majority of the money lending business in Europe.

But this happened due to a combination of Jewish cultural values and the fact that they were shut out of Christian society. So how did that develop? Yeah. The early sort of union between Judaism and finance really happened. out of necessity. A lot of Christian communities believed in the canon law prohibitions on lending money at interest. But at the same time, these big communities, and especially their royals, needed a lot of money. They needed money to build these churches. They needed money to build

fortresses. They needed money to equip armies. So when you need money, but you can only get it from a certain group of people, that group of people tends to take on an outsized amount of power and an outsized amount of myth. So Jews were able to lend their own community's money. They were able to borrow from other wealthy Jewish families. A lot of them got into things like dealing in coins and medals. There was a lot of money changing going on. All of these different Holy Roman Empire states all had different currencies. So somebody needed to swap out this Dutchie's currency for that Dutchie's currency. And then it'll take a little bit off the top as well. You know, that's just how you make money. That's just business. So the Jewish communities had this sort of two-faced

reputation as the people we go to when we need money, but we also resent them because they have the money to lend us. And it very quickly stops making a lot of sense. And you have these prohibitions against usury, which is, of course, lending money at what's deemed outrageous interest rates. But then at the same time, a lot of Christians started to get into banking and finance, and they were allowed to lend money at interest. So that line between interest and usury was always moving around to the detriment of Jews. But it really was Jewish communities being shut out of other professions. And the one place that they were allowed to go was finance. Yeah, it's funny that the Knights Templar never brought up because they were allowed to kind of cross the borders

of Christendom. And they did set up the first banking networks, you know, but they just get they get left out, man. They get no credit. Yeah. The patriarch of the Rothschild banking family is Mayor Amthschel Rothschild. Now, he is someone who is genuinely, profoundly influential. in the history of banking and business. So how did he get into the finance game? Sure. So mayor and his descendants lived in the Frankfurt Jewish ghetto, literally called the Eudengas, the Jews Lane. It was a ghetto. It was essentially a very small, tightly packed, walled city. There were about 3,000 people living in it. And this became a center of commerce and finance in the free city of Frankfurt, which was one of the major parts of the Holy Roman Empire.

So mayor's family had started off as sort of small-time financiers. They sold coins. They sold textiles. Mayor's father, Amschel, had come up a little bit in business, and then mayor went off to rabbinical school, but his parents both died. So he had to move back. And at very young age, he essentially became the patriarch of the family. And he got into dealing coins, medals, making small loans, and he would become the court Jew for the crown prince of Hess. So this was the son of the leader of the Holy Roman Empire State of Hess Casal. And as such, he began to get access to more money. He began to make bigger loans. He began to expand his trade. outside of Frankfurt, he got to travel a lot, and he started to slowly accumulate a small

but growing financial empire. And he then brought his sons into it. He had five sons and five daughters. His oldest son, Amschel, essentially worked hand in hand with him in Frankfurt. And they were in a position when the Holy Roman Empire went to war and the Napoleonic War started, Mayor and his sons were in a position to essentially take care of this gigantic amount of money that the leader of the state of Hess had. And of course, one of the ways that that the elector of Hess had compiled all this money was through the selling of mercenaries, and in particular to England. The Hessians who fought in the American Revolution, one of the grievances specifically listed in the Declaration of Independence, were mercenaries sold

by the Elector of Hess, and the court Jew to the Elector of Hess was Mayor Rothschild. Interesting. I mean, they were involved in basically financing, you know, war early on. In fact, you talk a lot about, particularly it was a, James Rothschild in France, right? He was his involvement in Napoleonic Wars that really sort of like helped solidify, you know, I guess, you know, Rothschild's business into a multi-generational kind dynasty. So I mean, like, what was his involvement in the Napoleonic Wars? Sure. So in the early 1800s, mayor's other sons began to leave Frankfurt and go to the other financial capitals of Europe. James went to Paris. His son Nathan first went to Manchester to get into the textile business,

there and became extremely wealthy very quickly and then moved to London. So when the Napoleonic wars really hit their stride, France was blockading the continent. And the armies fighting against Napoleon desperately needed money, in particular to pay a lot of their mercenaries. These guys wouldn't fight if they weren't paid. So the Rothschild essentially set up a system to funnel the treasure of the elector of Hess and to make loans to powers on the continent through gold. So gold was being smuggled back and forth across the English Channel in a system put together by mayor and by Nathan. And the Rothschilds made a gigantic amount of money doing this. They made commissions on the gold they sold. They bought and sold bonds. You know, all of this was,

was above board because the forces fighting Napoleon desperately needed money. They needed a huge amount of money. There were millions of men on each side. So the Rothschilds essentially put themselves in a place where they were the financial backers to the opposition to Napoleon. And they made a very large amount of money, really in the first 10 years of the 1800s. Now, the most enduring legend about the Rothschild family centers around the Battle of Waterloo. So there are lots of variations of the story, but the core of the story is that Nathan Rothschild somehow got early news of Napoleon's defeat at that 1815 battle and then capitalized on this information before the rest of the world learned about it, kind of international war insider

trading and all the specific details about how he learned it and how he capitalized it, apparently is told differently in different variations of the story. But like, how exactly has this myth been expressed? And like, is there any substance to it? So there are a number of different versions of this story. And the first is also probably the most implausible, but it's also the one that really caught on the most in the conspiracy world, which was that Nathan was actually at the battle. He was watching the combat between the forces of Napoleon in the forces of Wellington. He was so close, he could smell the cannon smoke,

and he could, you know, see the anguish on the faces of the wounded men. And he was looking at the battle and he saw the Napoleon was about to lose. So he, you know, as this story goes, he jumps on a horse, rides at midnight across Belgium, gets to the port of Ostend, bribes a terrified sailor to brave a once-in-a-century channel storm to take him to London. He, you know, he lands in England, he gets to London. He's so exhausted that he goes to the, the London Stock Exchange and he slumps against his favorite pillar. And the other bankers look at

his disaffected affect and his exhaustion. And they say, oh, Napoleon has won. We have lost the Battle of Waterloo. And they panic and they start selling their bonds. But of course, Nathan, being the crafty Jewish financier, knows what's going on. He's giving secret signals to his agents to buy up all the depressed bonds. He buys all of these completely devalued bonds. Then the real news comes that the forces of Napoleon have been defeated and the British and the Prussians have won. These bonds skyrocket in value. And Nathan Rothschild is suddenly the richest man in the world and he controls all of the British money supply. Now, none of this happened.

There is no historical record that any of this took place. Oh, shucks. That's such a good story. Yeah. I know. It's a great story. It is a great story. And it's a very cinematic story.

It's a story that lends itself to a lot of really unnecessary detail. But this is the story that really. emerged in the second half of the 18th century. And as it kind of grew, as it mutated, as the Rothschild started to push back against it a little bit, some of these details kind of got sanded off. People stopped believing that Nathan himself was at the battle, but that one of his agents was at the battle. There's all these stories of like sea captains and storms and midnight rides and none of this stuff happened. It is entirely fiction. And the best that Nathan did was probably make a very small amount on buying up bonds, probably in the aftermath of the battle.

But there is no evidence that he made, he or anybody, made this gigantic fortune off of the news from Waterloo. It's just, it's just totally implausible. Mel Gibson's Nathan, the real story. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, Mike, this is, this is one thing that I noticed while I was reading your book. I haven't finished it yet. I'm sorry, but I've been reading it. And one thing that I notice is how cinematic So much of it feels, especially when you, you know, your talk, even in the opening, when you're talking about this story about, you know, Anna de Rothschild sort of, you know, it feels like, you know, it felt like I was reading like the Great Gatsby. And you really get a sense when you start reading these conspiracy theories in text, like within, within the book, you know, before you go on to debunk them, just how much like a action movie or a spy movie or a, yeah, or a. Mel Gibson, you know, a Civil War era epic, these stories feel like. And, you know, it was striking to me, sort of coming to the realization that so much of these things, it's like, oh, man,

well, that would have been cool. Oh, that's like, that's an interesting story. Like, oh, that makes things feel more exciting and meaningful. And you really get a sense for the power that the mere story generators of a lot of these conspiracy theories sort of, they thrive off of. Yeah, there's a reason why these conspiracy books sell in such big numbers. There's a reason why these conspiracy movies do so well. These stories are big and they're epic and they're involving like battles and money and palaces and gold and storms and horses. This isn't kind of small town chintzy stuff. This is big world-changing stuff and the Rothschilds are are at the center of a lot of because they really were at the center of a lot of it.

So it feels plausible, and it's fleshed out with these very big, epic details, and it's great storytelling. I mean, you mentioned that the Rothschilds really were at the center of some major historical events, and, I mean, that's very interesting to me, because, like, whenever I explore conspiracy theories, I always, like, I always want to be charitable and try to understand if there's, like, a version of truth that's sort of, like, somewhere within the grand conspiratorial narrative that they're trying to tell. And in the Rothschild story, there's a pretty significant one, is the fact that they really were the wealthiest family of the 19th century.

And unsurprisingly, this wealth and these connections gave them influence in a way that cross borders. You write in that book, quote, by the 1820s, the Rothschild's dominated European finance, almost single-handedly developing what would become the international bond market. They were counselors and lenders to European royalty, the Vatican, prime ministers, and King George the Fourth himself. And they were now bankers to the Holy Alliance, the treaty group of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. They emerged to combat future French militarism. So, I mean, if you just remove anti-Semitism from the equation, if there's anybody you should be sort of conspiracy theorizing about, it should be the people who control all the money and how it

flows, right? So, I mean, like, couldn't you just like take a look at this and say, maybe it's bad that one family holds so much sway over an entire continent because they control the flow of money? Oh, sure. You know, there was a lot of writing and satirical cartoons about the Rothschilds in the early part of the 1800s that really did, you know, posit them as these kind of controllers of Europe's destiny. They were satirized in some of the biggest works of the time. They were written about almost as like kings of kings. There was a lot of ambivalence about how powerful they were. You know, they had this role, not just as lenders, but as peacemakers. And if the, you know, if two nation states are going to go to war with each other,

we'll just get the Rothschilds involved, and they'll broker some kind of deal. And there is an enormous amount of power. And with that kind of power comes scrutiny, comes rumor mongering, comes whispers, and especially because they were so conspicuous in their wealth. You know, they had these giant palaces. They had these giant gardens. Their name is everywhere. So it's totally understandable why there was a lot of ambivalence about the Rothschilds.

but with a powerful Jewish family, and especially one that is very public in their Judaism, they didn't convert, they didn't push aside that part of their life, the whispers and the rumors very quickly curdle into anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, and it's a very almost natural process when that happens. I mean, another element of truth to the Rothschild conspiracy theory is that they use their wealth in ways that were abusive and shaped history on multiple continents, though sometimes in ways that anti-Semites might not have a problem with. So in your book, you specifically discuss their role in the colonization and plundering of

Africa through the financing of the white supremacist Cecil Rhodes and the De Beers Diamond Company. So how did they assist those projects? Yeah, it's another, I think, under-discussed aspect of their history that they were involved in a lot of colonization and a lot of the plundering of these nations. You know, there's a lot of sort of grabbing at resources that this family did. You know, they had the biggest copper mine in the world. They had diamond mines, they had ruby mines, nickel mines.

Now, they don't anymore, but they did at the time. And with Cecil Rhodes and De Beers, N.M. Rothschild, which was the British firm that sort of emerged in the mid-1800s, they were one of the biggest financiers of Rhodes' excursions into the diamond business. They were a big financier of De Beers. There's letters that are written by Rothschilds, you know, going back and forth to what was then known as the Cape Colony in South Africa, sort of giddy with these fines that they made and the cracking down on dissent. You know, it's very ugly stuff. Now, the Rothschild eventually did kind of wash their hands of Cecil Rhodes when there was an incident called the Jameson raid where Rhodes's troops, basically, militarized police attacked a group of natives, essentially. There was a, there was a riot and there were a bunch of people were killed.

The Rothschilds kind of backed off. They really didn't share his kind of all-out colonial ambition. But, yeah, there's a lot of financing there of some very, very ugly stuff. You traced the origin of Rothschild's conspiracy theories to a deadly train derailment in 1846 in France, as well as an anonymous pamphleteer who just went by the name Satan. Apparently, because of the Rothschild's actual financing of the war against France, there was a lot of a bad blood between many of the French people. and, I guess, Jewish people generally.

So how did Rothschild conspiracy theories, as we know, kick off? Yeah, and it happens in 1846 in Paris, and it's a very particular time in place because a couple of years later, you would have the revolutions of 1848, which were these socialist spasms against ruling governments and against the wealthy. And in particular, there was a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment in France

and a lot of anti-Rothschild sentiment. So in, I believe it's in May of 1846, a train derails north of Paris, and it's on the Nord line, which is a line that was founded and owned by James de Rothschild. And the numbers of people who die kind of vary, but there's a number of death, there's a number of injuries. The accident is written about in these very lurid, almost kind of pornographic details in the papers of the time. You know, there's severed limbs and like a son holding his mother's guts and things like that. You know, it's kind of very graphic, very attention getting kind of detail. And that incident is then mixed up with the Battle of Waterloo by this French pamphleteer named Dernvale who went by the name Satan.

And this guy was basically, I mean, you could maybe call him like a blogger of the time. I mean, very anti-rich, very scaborous, making a lot of accusations. This pamphlet that accuses James de Rothschild of this cheapness and this pettiness and not caring about people who die on his train line. and then adding Nathan Rothschild, having attended the Battle of Waterloo and exploited it to take control of the British economy, mixed very well with a lot of the anti-Jewish and anti-wealth sentiment that was going on in France at the time. And this exploded. This kicks off a pamphlet war in Paris. This pamphlet, the curious and edifying history of James the King of the Jews sells like 60,000 copies. There are response pamphlets to it.

there are anti-Rothschild responses to the responses. It goes all over Europe. So this really starts this spasm of anti-Semitism that also gets wrapped up in this sort of strange quasi-occult incident called the Damascus affair, where the Rothschilds get involved in a blood libel incident in what's now Syria. So there's a lot of historical animosity that boils over to the surface, and you find that these spasms are very cyclical. They will explode, then they'll die down. Then in another generation, they'll explode again, and then they'll die down. And you can see that happening over and over and over as we go on as the public kind of needs a scapegoat. They're always going to come back to Jews, and they're always going to come back to the wealthiest of the Jews. Yeah, I think it cannot be

overstated enough how your conspiracy.