QAA Podcast - Episode 273: The Tartarian Empire

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

According to the Tartarian Empire conspiracy theory there once existed a massive, advanced regime that stretched over much of the Asian continent. This Empire’s power was so great that they built st...ructures all over the world, including in Africa, North America and South America. Buildings such as the White House in Washington D.C. and the Great Pyramids in Egypt were built by the great, globe spanning Tartarian empire. They were able to accomplish this in part thanks to advanced technology that is lost to time, like batteries powered by the Earth which distributed electricity wirelessly. This theory has spawned a community of people who pour through old European maps and pictures of 19th century buildings in search of evidence for this lost empire, then post their findings on Reddit and Tik tok. But was there really a lost empire called “Tartaria?” Or have conspiracy theorists on the internet misinterpreted an archaic European term for parts of Asia then proceeded to desperately search for evidence of a better world that was lost to time? REFERENCES Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-04-27/inside-architecture-s-wildest-conspiracy-theory Shaoxin, Dong. "The Tartars in European Missionary Writings of the Seventeenth Century." In Foreign Devils and Philosophers, pp. 82-103. Brill, 2020. Graff, Rebecca S. "Dream City, Plaster City: Worlds’ Fairs and the Gilding of American Material Culture." International Journal of Historical Archaeology 16 (2012): 696-716. Greenhalgh, Paul. "Ephemeral Vistas: Great Exhibitions, Expositions Universelles and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939." (1989) CIA Document: National Cultural Development Under Communism https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-02771R000200090002-6.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walhalla_(memorial) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmenhaus_(Burggarten) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Hall_Post_Office_and_Courthouse_(New_York_City) The Singer Building https://www.nypap.org/preservation-history/singer-building/

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 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 the 273rd chapter of the QAA podcast, The Tartarian Empire episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakatansky, Julian Field, and Travis View. Tartaria. An ancient land where the birds chirp and people are building amazing things.
Starting point is 00:00:35 Coming through a light mist upon this dewy morning rides a lone traveler. It is, of course, the night gallant Travis View, second prince of Tartaria. And he's looking a little wild-eyed, folks. His hair is unkempt. He has red eyes. He's drooling. I don't think he's okay. I believe that the Tartarians had already invented YouTube,
Starting point is 00:01:02 and it looks like Travis has spent his entire royal night on it, just watching videos of people reinforcing the idea that he exists, his empire is true and real, and that we have misunderstood history, and perhaps all of technological development. So here to bring us a truly cursed community, and one that I've seen kind of infused in almost every conspiracy theory community that I've explored,
Starting point is 00:01:27 is Travis Vue, second prince of the Tartarian Revolution. How's it going, buddy? You don't look so good. It's going, yeah, go it good. Yeah, I am a little scrambled. I did lose a little bit of sleep watching hours of baking videos of people who are trying to claim that there's evidence of a false history or something like that. Well, the Tartarian anphetamine salts have long since run out,
Starting point is 00:01:53 and it turns out that they've invented rock starria or mom. Monster. Monster. Monsterio. The, uh, the, the tonic, the tonic drink. Yeah, exactly. Halt. Halt, Julian. You have been banished to the Tartarian minds. This is, uh, but yeah, this was a nice throwback episode to work on. And remind me of like, you know, pre-January 6th, pre-pandemic when we just, you know, dive into wild communities on the internet. And before it became quite so obviously dangerous and serious. So this is interesting. So, yeah, today we're going to talk about the conspiracy theory of the Tartarian Empire.
Starting point is 00:02:33 And this is sometimes called the QAnon of Architecture. I think that name came from a Bloomberg article about it. But honestly, I think it's more accurate to describe the Tartarian Empire conspiracy theory as a crossbreed between QAnon and Fomenko's new chronology. Now, I understand why people don't describe it that way because people would go, you know, what the hell is new chronology? So we covered the new chronology back in Premium episode 155, but it's essentially like a Russian ethno-nationalist conspiracy theory, which claims that ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece, and Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages, and that we're all being lied about this in order to cover up the true history, which is supposedly about a global empire called the Russian Horde. I want to sit a Tartaria guy down with a Lemuria guy and just see what happens. Like, I love all the kind of competing lost civilizations that actually are history defining. Maybe it's just a question of, hey, we were the first floor and they were the basement.
Starting point is 00:03:32 Julian, I think that would be extremely bad. Well, is it a hollow earth or a hollow moon, Jake? I just need to know. I need to know. So I think the lineage between new chronology and the Tartarian Empire conspiracy theory is more conceptual than direct. like Tartarian conspiracy theorists aren't Russian ethno-nationalists. They seem more fixated on history in the 19th century than the Middle Ages. But like the broad, you know, ideas about like, you know, there's a cover-up, massive cover-up about history is basically there.
Starting point is 00:04:02 So the Tartarian Empire conspiracy theory combines these false ideas about history with crowdsource efforts to dig up evidence about this falsified history. And because of the crowdsource elements, you know, with many people online spinning their own, own conspiracy theories based on old maps or pictures of old buildings, there isn't really a single coherent narrative, much like in Qadon. Unlike mud fossils, which is, has long, long beaten Tartaria is a much more fun thing to bake. You don't just have architecture. You have all statues being real people. You have a rock being the head of a goose. You have whatever you want. And this, this one, it's like, hey, maybe you're stuck in the city a little bit more. Maybe you don't like to walk through nature like Travis does, you know, on his pilgrimages. But,
Starting point is 00:04:47 Yeah, maybe you're just at a cafe, but you still, you still want to bake. You still want to bake the shapes. So the broad strokes of the conspiracy theory are this. Hundreds of years ago, there existed a vast, sophisticated regime that stretched over much of the Asian continent. This is the Tartarian Empire. And this empire's power was so great that they built structures all over the world, including in Africa, North America, and South America. And in some instances, even in like Australia and New Zealand,
Starting point is 00:05:18 buildings such as the White House in Washington, D.C. And the great pyramids in Egypt were built by this great globe-spanning Tartarian Empire. Wow, there was really different schools of construction. You know? Yeah. Between the White House and the fucking pyramids. Although I would like to bear every president we should bury with like all of the like deep state assistance that run around them. Like we should cut those tongues out and bury them.
Starting point is 00:05:45 together, I think. So we need to learn from that aspect of Tartaria. The Egyptian aspect. I mean, are they dead when you bury them? No, you just cut their tongues and you just lock them in there and they just do their thing. Yes. Into the tomb. The deep state,
Starting point is 00:05:59 the intelligence apparatus will carry the presence onto heaven. Yeah, I like it. Imagine David Axelrod opening his mouth, nothing comes out. His tongue, long since cut. As soon as you say that, I just imagine like Brendan Fraser you know, fighting these guys in like, you know, 1930s adventurer gear.
Starting point is 00:06:19 Yeah, Brendan Frazier plays Donald Rumsfeld in ancient Egypt. So the conspiracy theory says that they are able to accomplish all this, in part thanks to advanced technology that has lost to time, like batteries powered by the earth, which distributed electricity wirelessly. Oh, man. I'm going to bring up, like, everything that this offends, you know? I mean, right here, we've got Nikola Tesla erasure.
Starting point is 00:06:45 So we're going to have a lot of conspiracy theorists angry about this claim. So why, you might ask, is the existence of this empire not common knowledge? Now, surely an empire so vast and so great would leave behind just an incredible amount of undeniable archaeological evidence of its existence. They say at some point there was a mud flood event. This was a cataclysm that destroyed the empire and its creations or cover them up. However, there were Tartarian structures that survived the event, but they've been dismantled. Many of them, not all of them, but a lot of them have been dismantled and destroyed by governments so that we can never know about this empire and its wonders.
Starting point is 00:07:26 So that's a pretty succinct way of describing it. But one online promoter of the Tartarian conspiracy theory was even more succinct. Tartaria, the largest most advanced worldwide empire in history, intentionally destroyed by the satanic cabal. Okay. Yeah, that's it. Yep. Now, what is the truth about the Tartarians? Now, it was never a, like, real specific place, or it's never been a group of people who called themselves the Tartarians. The name Tartor or Tartary was just a name that Europeans gave to parts of Asia or some populations in Asia from the 13th to the 18th centuries mostly. This name was always vague, and the meeting of Tartar or Tartary in European texts changed from centuries.
Starting point is 00:08:11 to century and eventually fell out of favor as Europeans got a more complete and sophisticated understanding of the nations and people in the Asian continent. I read a couple of different accounts regarding the etymology of tartar, and so the term probably derived from the word tatar, without that first R, which means mounted messenger in both Turkish and Persian language traditions. However, Europeans seem to have added an extra R in the middle changing Tatar to Tartar. This was done to make a connection. connection to the word to the lowest level of the underworld in Greek mythology, which was called Tataris. And also, of course, beef d'artar, which is a very tasty way to consume beef, and of course tartar sauce.
Starting point is 00:08:53 Of course. Actual evidence of this wordplay comes from a letter sent to King Louis 9th of France in 1270 AD, which says this. In the present danger of the Tartars, either we shall push them back into the Tartarus whence they are come or they will bring us all into heaven so this is a reference to uh probably the mongolian people and it's basically saying like oh the the tartars we're going to push them they're going to push them back into hell from once they came it's very very xenophobic very 300 you know yeah i get it gangis con he was fucking he was cool man like he chopped some people up so tartar may have been a pun to denote you know that hellish place or those people from the hellish place
Starting point is 00:09:41 One of the first texts referred to the Tartars was written by an Italian explorer in Catholic Archbishop, named Giovanni De Pian del Carpine, in the 1240s. And the text that he brought back to Europe in exploring these lands was called this. Historia Mongolorum, cuos not tartaros appellamos. So that means history of the Mongols, which we call Tartars. So, yeah, already being like, yeah, we're... Listen, we're... I love that the racism is baked into the title of the book. Like, duh, and now I present to you our sacred text, the slur that we will use from now on.
Starting point is 00:10:24 Okay, I got a new bit. Woke Genghis Khan. The T word is ours. You actually can't use it. Yeah. So apparently in the text, he actually mentions, like, well, they don't like it when we call them the Tartars. That's really what you want out of a slur is like the group of people to really just dislike it. That's like the subheader of the book.
Starting point is 00:10:42 It's like, the slur we will use, and they don't like it. But I feel like this is like really important to know. So this is the oldest European account of the Mongols. It says right in the title, it says which we call the Tartars. Does it claim to have discovered a people or a nation call the Tartars? It's very explicit. That's just we, the Italians in this case, call these people. History of the Italians, which we call Wops.
Starting point is 00:11:07 They don't like it. They do not like it very much. Now, there were other accounts of people that were called Tartars over the century. For example, in the 16th century, the Portuguese apothecary and diplomat, Tomei Pires, wrote a book known as Somo Oriental, but its full translated name is an account of the East from the Red Sea to China. It was the first comprehensive European account of Asia to the east of India, a region that was basically totally unknown to Europe at the time. That's awesome. Portuguese apothecary Nick Mullen gave some nice drawings
Starting point is 00:11:42 to go with the language in his book. So that account describes some land called Tartary and people called Tartars, but he doesn't claim to have met these Tartar firsthand. Rather, he's repeating some hearsay. So this is what this 500-year-old book had to say about
Starting point is 00:11:58 the Tartars in China. They say that there are people from Tartary in the land of China, and they call them Tartars. And these people are very white with red beards. They ride horseback, they are warlike, and they say that they go from China to the land of the Tartars in two months, and that in Tartary, they have horses shod with copper shoes. In the mid-17th century, the Italian writer Martino Martini wrote the book called,
Starting point is 00:12:24 Hey, the great writer, a wapo Italian. I wonder if him and Richard Martini are related. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's such a deep cut, but I remember him, man. I love him. So he wrote a book called De Bello Tatarico about his travels in China, and this work was translating to a bunch of other language who was right across Europe and helped vaguely apply the term tartar to a wider region of people than just the Mongols.
Starting point is 00:12:52 Eventually, as Europeans gained a slightly better understanding of geography, they divided tartar into sections like Siberia, which is called Great Tartor, or the Russian Tartar, and Manchuria, which was called the Chinese Tartar. In 2020, the historian Dong Xiaoxin at the University of Exeter published a description of how the use of the term tartar changed over time. Generally speaking, the term tartar was applied to the people living in the northern parts of Eurasia. In the 13th century, the name tartar was used in Europe for the golden horde of Genghis Khan, while Marco Polo's term, tartary mainly refers to the Mongols. Later, the word was applied to the different Turkic or Mongolic-speaking peoples who were encountered by the Russians.
Starting point is 00:13:35 Before 1600, Europeans had not known about the Jurchin, so the term Tartary in European literature before the 16th century does not include them. Only by the 17th century, the word tartar in European texts usually refers to the Manchus. So it's like inconsistent over time, and like each time the Europeans learned more about Asia, and they would just, like, name a chunk of tartar after the people they encountered. Here's where things get a little bit complicated. Currently within the Russian Federation, there's a republic called Tatarstan, which is occasionally called Tataria. It's pretty small. It takes up about 26,000 square miles.
Starting point is 00:14:13 It has a population of about 4 million people. And it's named after the Turkish ethnic group, who are the Tatars or the Volga Tatars, who predominantly practice Sunni Islam. And their native language is called Tatar. But in the Western text, these specific people in this region were sometimes called Tataria or the Tartars well into the 20th century. So that's kind of messy and confusing. But it's just an issue of like naming conventions. Yeah, it's just an issue of they basically just thought, oh, there's all those people over there, that whole continent of weird people.
Starting point is 00:14:46 These facts about the origin of the concept of Tartary or the Tatarian Empire are basically everything you need to know to debor. monk the Tartarian Empire conspiracy theory. These terms, Tartar, Tartary, Tartarian, they're just used inconsistently in European texts revert to various people in regions in Asia, and they just fell out of favor over time. But in the 20th century, the term Tartars might have been used to refer to the Volga Tatar's in Russia. So that's it. But if you approach these old texts without that context, it might seem like Europeans were
Starting point is 00:15:18 constantly discussing this country called Tartary. And then at one point in history, they just stopped. You could believe that European writers were simply, you know, started using new, more precise terms to discuss the nations and people of Asia. Or you could believe that it's evidence that there was once a nation called Tardy whose existence has been covered up. As one Tatarian Empire conspiracies put it, when discussing the history of the concept of the Tartars. I don't know who it is, and I don't know why. But somebody is telling a lie. You're trying to tell me that Tartario was the name given by Europeans for an unknown region.
Starting point is 00:16:02 Come on, brother. That don't even make no sense. Well, I mean, that's true. That's the case. You got it. Yeah, I mean, there's nothing to argue with there. That's just truth. Okay.
Starting point is 00:16:13 But where did the conspiracy theory originate? So its precise origins are a little fuzzy. The earliest known appearance on the English. internet comes in early 2018 on the forum stolen history.org. Stolen history, like the name implies, is mostly a forum dedicated to uncovering, you know, serve unconventional, unorthodox theories about history. Yeah, there's the Tartarian board, there's the Fomenko board, there's the Lemurian board, there's all the, all the, the Atlantian board. So there are some claims I was bouncing around the Russian internet for a few years prior to that. I obviously not able to
Starting point is 00:16:51 verify that, but it wouldn't be surprising given that that a significant chunk of the Russian population are very fond of alternate history theories. So the first known comprehensive outline of the Tartarian Empire conspiracy theory comes from a stolen history post made in April of 2018 from a username Corbyn Dallas, so the user, of course, God's name from a character played by Bruce Willis in the film, Fifth Element. Of course, I could have told you that. And this basically means that, you know, that at least on the English internet, the Tartarian conspiracy theory is younger than QAnon. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:17:26 Well, and it's also interesting because the whole sort of like, you know, premise of Fifth Element was that these ancient aliens built the pyramids and had been in contact with human beings, you know, that were passing down their secret for centuries. So there's a little bit of bleed over. I can see why he chose that name. Yeah. So the post title is Tartary. an empire hidden history.
Starting point is 00:17:49 It was bigger than Russia once. So this text is often the basis for a lot of the claims made by other Tartarian conspiracy theorists who came afterwards. So I think it's worth going over some of the statements made in this post specifically. The first piece of evidence in this post is an entry from the 1771 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. That Encyclopedia entry discusses Tartary and specifically mentions that it is a country. Tartary, a vast country in the northern parts of Asia, bounded by Siberia on the north and west. This is called Great Tartary. The Tartars who lie south of Muscovy and Siberia are those of Astrakhan, Circassia, and Dagestan, situated northwest of the Caspian Sea.
Starting point is 00:18:34 The Kalmuk Tartars who lie between Siberia and the Caspian Sea, the Uzbek Tartars and Mughals, who lie north of Persia and India. And lastly, those of Tibet who lie northwest of China. Were they trying to say Mongols and wrote Mughals? Yeah. That's awesome. It's already just busted. It's that thing where like the names and spellings of things were very inconsistent, you know, in this era. That's all.
Starting point is 00:18:59 So the post on stolen history later specifically says tartary was not a tract. It was a country because it says tardy, a vast country. So here's a problem with that. The word country is not synonymous with nation. The word country can refer to a general area, which is clearly what's going to. on with this encyclopedia entry. So it's not evidence that there was an actual nation called Tartary. Another piece of evidence is a declassified 1957 report by the CIA titled National Cultural Development Under Communism. So this report was made public in 1999. The report
Starting point is 00:19:34 essentially says that while the Soviet Russian leaders claim to respect the beliefs and right to self-determination of the Muslim minority population of Russia, they were in fact oppressive towards Muslims in the country. So that's just what the CIA document says. I'm not going to bother attempting to unpack was actually known about the relations between Soviets and Russian Muslims, because that would be a detour, Julian, from the actual main topic of this episode. I wasn't going to say nothing.
Starting point is 00:19:58 I wasn't going to draw any, like, modern equivalents or anything like that. Right. But within that document, as Corbyn Dallas of Stolenhistory.org points out, there is a passage which claims that the Russian government was attempting to rewrite the history of the Tartars. Here's what that document says. Let us take the matter of history, which, along with religion, language and literature, constitute the core of a people's cultural heritage. Here again, the communists have interfered in a shameless manner.
Starting point is 00:20:27 For example, on 9 August, 1944, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, sitting in Moscow, issued a directive ordering the party's Tartar Provincial Committee, quote, to proceed to a scientific revolution of the history of Tartaria, to liquidate serious shortcomings and mistakes of a nationalistic character committed by individual writers and historians in dealing with Tartar history. In other words, Tartar history was to be rewritten. Let it be frank, was to be falsified in order to eliminate references to great Russian aggressions and to hide the facts of the real course of Tartar Russian relations.
Starting point is 00:21:04 So a lot of Tartarian Empire conspiracies, they take this document and go, oh my God, the CIA, the 1950s, in a document that was seen, secret for 40 years, admitted that the Tartarians were real and that this history was being covered up. But in context, the CIA in this document is accusing the Soviets of rewriting the history of relations between Russia and the Tatars, not people from some ancient lost republic, rather the Volga Tatars, the mostly Muslim ethnic minority, who currently exists in whose existence is not in doubt and was never in doubt. Obviously, this document should not be considered a reliable source of information about relations between Russian government
Starting point is 00:21:42 and minorities in Russia, regardless of what the truth may be. But again, this is just a instance in which they kind of like, they read, they read the literal words. They eliminate, you know, ethnic, geographical, historical context, and then they take it to mean something they would like it to mean. I've watched a few videos in which, like, Tartarian Empire believers will read this passage from the CIA document and go, well, there you go. That's all they say. They just move on. No, there's more to learn. Just search for the terms being used in this document.
Starting point is 00:22:09 You could learn some context. The stolen history post also claims that there was evidence of Tartarian royalty. To that effect, he posts an image of an 18th century French map and family tree, and is titled Genealogy of the Ancient Tartan Emperors, and it shows this massive branching family tree that includes dozens of people. So if you don't bother thinking very much, this seems very convincing. So here's a 300-year-old document that makes references to tartan emperors, And you can't have emperors without an empire.
Starting point is 00:22:40 Ergo, the argument goes, the Tartarian Empire existed. That's if you don't read the very next line. This is the funniest part. This is the funniest part. It's like there's this big word. It says, genealogy of the ancient. And you're right. The very next line, it says in slightly smaller text, still very large and readable text.
Starting point is 00:22:58 Oh, yeah. It says a slightly smaller text. It says, Descendants of Genghis Khan. Okay. So that means when this text refers to the Tartars, it's just an archaic way to refer to the Mongol Empire, not any sort of like secret empire. Yeah, it was just the French being kind of racist. What's new?
Starting point is 00:23:14 So just about all of the textual evidence in favor of the existence of the Tartarian Empire is like this. So the Tartarian Empire proponent will go, so this old document seems to make reference to the Tartarian Empire, and it'll just be an archaic way referring to a region or a people in that region. And they'll go, but this other old document also refers to some Tartan country. And you can respond in the same way as basically just as good of a debunk. And since there are thousands of old documents that refer to Tartan or, you know, Tartaria in some way, they can basically do this forever.
Starting point is 00:23:49 And some people do go on for a very long time. There are videos on YouTube that go on for hours pouring over just dozens of old documents that make reference to the Tartars and just ignoring the broader context of how that term was used. That StolenHistory.org post ends this way. I think there is enough circumstantial evidence to justify a deeper look into who fought who and why this Tartary country is so little known about. And the main question out of this all should be, what is the purpose of misleading generations of people? It appears there is something tremendously serious hidden in our recent history. But this is just the base conspiracy theory. You notice what's missing from that post.
Starting point is 00:24:31 It's like any claims that the Tartarian Empire built buildings all over the... the world, or the claim that they used advanced technology, or the claim that the civilization was destroyed in a mud flood. These claims were developed later by the wider Tartarian Empire conspiracy theorist, who heeded Corbyn Dallas's call to take a deeper look into Tartary. Corby, my man, man. So one of the hottest hubs of activity for crowdsource conspiracy theorizing is the subreddit R. Tartary, which was formed in December of 2018.
Starting point is 00:25:04 a few months after that stolen history post. One of the most important orders of business for this conspiracy theory is explaining where the civilization went. Because even if there was some sort of, you know, real conspiracy to stop talking about the Tartarian Empire, or even if the textual records were, like, destroyed in the cover-up, there would still be archaeological evidence. There would still be lots of evidence of the cities and structures that the civilization built. So where are the Tartarian cities?
Starting point is 00:25:34 Where are the Tartarian buildings? Well, according to the Tartarian conspiracy theorists, they're everywhere, but also possibly beneath our feet, because they claim that all the buildings were covered by dirt in a cataclysmic mud flood event. They sometimes refer to this global deluge as the last great reset. Now, obviously, mudslides do happen, and very old buildings do get covered by dirt if they've been abandoned for a long time. But the Tartarian Empire conspiracy theorists are proposing something like on the scale of Noah's flood that just covered up. buildings of the Tartarian Empire all over the world. Well, the Noah's flood believers usually claim that this flood happened like, you know, 4,000 years ago.
Starting point is 00:26:12 The Tartarian people, they usually claim that this flood happened somewhere like the 19th century. In fact, there are people who believe in both the Tartarian mud flood and the literal Noah's flood and claim that they are, you know, they're similar but separate floods. I'm a firm believer of the world flood, the great flood of Noah. but unless they had factories at the time in NOAA, I think this is a separate yet linked event. The mud flood was just the most recent event, which seemed to happen in the last 200 or so years.
Starting point is 00:26:47 And you see this reflected in the age of structures. The more modern-looking structures, if it was built around the 1800s, chances are it's mud-flooded. They're just showing construction sites sometimes. I don't know how that. relates to mud flooding? Is it just because you see a bunch of mud when they do an excavation for a construction site? So what they're showing, so there are lots of clips of basically they're showing the foundations of these buildings. And they're very confused. And they think that, think that when the
Starting point is 00:27:18 foundation of a building is exposed, that's not actually the foundation of a building. That's a partially excavated lower level of the building that was covered by the mud flood. Incredible. And so the Tartarian Empire conspiracies claim civilizations didn't build their most notable buildings. They actually dug the Mal of the Earth and claimed that they built them. Thus, all these modern civilizations are taking credit for the achievements of the Tartarian Empire. Right. So you might think that can be true because, like, people over the world would like write about this event if it happened. There would also be like geological evidence.
Starting point is 00:27:52 Well, today I say, yeah, it's thoughtless. Like, it's like there's, it doesn't make any sense. The evidence is super flinsey. So here's how one Tartarian conspiracy theorist on Instagram who goes by the name, The Star Child, explained it. The mud-flut theory describes the idea that a couple of hundred years ago, mankind was almost completely wiped out by a cataclysm that put mud and dirt over all the buildings and streets
Starting point is 00:28:17 that were actually not built by us, but the global civilization that lived before this event. And we just ducked those buildings out and are now reusing them. Man, white European twinks are really calling themselves De Star Child. So let's talk a little bit about the evidence that Da Star Child presents. So he first discusses the presence of insane asylums in 19th century America, which were often in low population areas.
Starting point is 00:28:47 Just have a look at these insane insane asylums. They were everywhere in the young USA, the new world. But besides them, looking as good as any European castle out there, why would a city that doesn't have that many people living in it built an insane asylum that could basically fit their entire city in it? Check out these insane insane asylums. Next up, we've got the wildest wild dogs. So it's like the argument was, is basically that, well, you know, these insane asylums, Why were they built in these, like, these low population areas?
Starting point is 00:29:27 Well, obviously, a country that forcibly interned some of their citizens wants to place those, you know, those facilities away from the populated centers. It's not, I don't think it has that much of a riddle to solve. Plus, I mean, the writing's on the wall. I mean, clearly they were looking at where things were going and saying, well, we think a lot of people are going to be going insane. So we better make enough rooms to handle the high demand. So, okay, let's see what else he has to offer. So the Star Child is bewildered about, like, why government buildings all over the world would look similar? Why do government buildings look very similar all over the world?
Starting point is 00:30:06 I mean, I personally doubt that China and the U.S. would just hire the same architect. Why does Chicago look like Rome in 1893? I mean, this is beautiful. Yeah, so what he's doing is that he's showing, like, a few buildings, like, the U.S. Capitol building and the Cuban capital building, which are built in the neoclassical style. So they didn't have the same architect. They were just built in the same style that was designed to, like, you know, draw inspiration from the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. It's not, again, not that complicated. Why are underwear in a similar
Starting point is 00:30:42 shape in both China and the United States? So he has one last point in this short video. So Let's hear it. Why are domes that feature metal on the top everywhere in the world? And even on many different religious buildings like churches, mosques, temples, what's the point to it? Is a dome with metal on the top just a connection to God in every religion? At the end, it just says Tesla or free electricity. Could be that. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:31:15 This guy literally behind him has kind of like a watered down version of the, uh, the meme from Always Sunny of the photos taped to the wall with yarn going between them. So obviously, like domes on buildings are just generally, these are like one of the oldest architectural features. There were domed buildings in ancient Mesopotamia. And when civilization got good at working with metal, they started making some of those domes metal. So pretty straightforward on this one.
Starting point is 00:31:43 But like, he's trying to imply that there's some sort of like secret technological, global sort of reason for these metal domed buildings. Yeah, we made a hat. We made hats. And they were shaped to our skulls. Then the hat and a bowl, those are both things. And then when we flipped the hat, we kept the hat the right way up, we flipped the bowl. Boom.
Starting point is 00:32:06 Your buildings have a hat bowl. Other evidence that the Tartarian conspiracies will cite will be like, if you look at old landscape photographs of cities from the 19th century, the entire city, looks empty. And, you know, the implication is that these were actually abandoned Tartarian cities, and they could, and then they were later repopulated more recently. Well, let me tell you something, my friend, about photography back then. If there were people, they would have fucking made blurs. So they tried to probably tell everyone, like, we're doing the photo. Everybody stay inside for like two hours. Well, I think it's even dumber than that. So here's one woman looking at a 19th century photograph of Paris. And she zooms in and out of
Starting point is 00:32:47 different parts of the photo to show that despite the fact that is obviously this you know extensively constructed beautiful city there aren't any people in the photograph so once again we see that there's nobody nobody on the streets nobody on the bridges is this nobody see plenty of boats plenty of buildings but it's like these cities are empty and this is from france but we can look all over Or it's like playing Where's Waldo Except you never find him You don't find anybody That's a lot like Where's Waldo
Starting point is 00:33:26 You know, when I think of Where's Waldo I think of a picture full of people And what is this picture? Empty of people My brain works There's so many people You can't find Waldo That's the whole point
Starting point is 00:33:37 But in this one there's no people So if Waldo were here He'd be really easy to spot But I don't see Waldo anywhere But I don't see him I don't see him I'm looking for the book I'm looking for the cane.
Starting point is 00:33:47 I'm looking for the hat. Nothing there. Jake, okay, you have permission to do Trump saying, where is Waldo? Where's Waldo? Everybody's looking for Waldo, but he's not there. Okay. And we look at the picture. There's a lot of people.
Starting point is 00:34:00 There's a lot of people from a lot of different civilizations. Some not so good. Some, very good. But we're not finding Waldo, okay. We're seeing his book. We're seeing his hat. And we're seeing his cane. Okay, folks.
Starting point is 00:34:11 But we're not finding Waldo. Waldo, nowhere to be found. Where's Waldo? everybody's asking nobody knows so like julian mentioned the explanation for why there are no people in this photograph is pretty straightforward it's just related to how photography works so primitive photographic technology required a very long exposure time in order to get enough light to make the photograph the shutter had be opened for like a few minutes depending on how much natural light there was and when you have a long exposure time you can only photograph things that are standing
Starting point is 00:34:45 perfectly still, like buildings or docked boats. So the people, or even maybe the horses that are moving across the street, they're just moving too fast, and so the camera will only photograph the street behind them and not, you know, the people themselves. Now, apparently this woman has heard this explanation before, but she is unconvinced by it. But I know a lot of people will say, well, that's just how the cameras were, you know, that the cameras were a certain way that didn't catch people if they didn't stand still for 10 minutes.
Starting point is 00:35:16 But I think that's pretty absurd for a lot of reasons. You can clearly see the tracks made by wagons. You can literally see the traces of the people who were like fucking making their way through that dirt before and after the photo. Jesus Christ. This is pretty disturbing. I mean, in the video, I cut it off, but she didn't elaborate on what those reasons were. She just didn't agree.
Starting point is 00:35:43 It's like, I think it's just absurd for a bunch of reasons. And then she moved on to looking at another photo. Too many to list. That's the whole like, seems kind of weird thing that they love doing. Yeah. Yeah. I don't agree. And this thing is like, it's weird.
Starting point is 00:35:56 It's like, this isn't just a quirk of like how old cameras work. This is just how photography technology works. You could test it by yourself. You're so inclined. It's like, if you took a modern DSLR camera and you captured like a low light photo that required like a like a 30 second exposure time and you walked across the frame while the photograph is being taken, the resulting photograph would pick up the background, but not you, because you're just moving too quickly. And she could test it if she was so inclined, but she just,
Starting point is 00:36:21 there's something in her brain that just says, I heard this, and I don't want to think about whether or not that explains what I'm seeing, so I'm just going to dismiss it as absurd. Now, despite all that, she insists that the pictures of empty cities are unexplainable. But I think, as you could see, from a lot of these panoramas, is that's just clearly not true. but these cities were made to hold hundreds of thousands of people and there's barely anybody explain it you can't I see like 15 wagons in that photo
Starting point is 00:36:54 am I am I are my eyes deceiving me or yeah no I think she's I think she's just sort of like filtering them out in her brain because she's attracted to this idea that all the great cities of the world were at some point in the last couple hundred years or just sitting totally empty because they were built by some sort of previous great empire and they're only merely discovered by modern people.
Starting point is 00:37:17 Oh, look at this. A perfectly good thousands of year old wagon. Hey, Frank. Hey, come on up over the hill. You got to see this. It's a completely empty city. Nobody's living there. Think we should move in? I think this lady's like archetype of
Starting point is 00:37:33 what cities should look like. I think she got it from the Where's Waldo books. I think that she's, you know, when you see a picture of a city, it's got to be packed. It's got to look like the running of the bulls or something. Another frequently cited piece of supposed evidence of the mud flood theory is urban buildings with basement windows. So when Tartarian Empire conspiracists encounter a building with a partially sunk floor with windows peeking above the ground, they don't go, oh, I guess the people who
Starting point is 00:38:02 constructed this building must have dug down in order to increase the total floor space or it's possible like in some areas that are near body of water like in Seattle. The building appears to be sunk because these city streets were elevated in the past. Instead, they think that these buildings were once covered by the mud flood, but they were dug up later. But for some reason, the people who dug up the buildings didn't dig up the whole building. They just kind of stopped at one point. So here's one Tartarian conspiracy theorist showing off a building with sunken windows near him. Here, this is my humble hometown, 15 minutes outside of Pennsylvania, where you see the windows coming out of the ground.
Starting point is 00:38:37 Now, these windows coming out of the ground, it's almost like southeastern Pennsylvania being most Clay had a mud flood and when it settled these windows that were on the second story, third story, who knows, are now subfloor windows or it was built that way. You'd be a judge, don't kill the messenger. So, I mean, what's neat about the Tartarian conspiracy theory is that it doesn't just involve baking things you see on the internet. It can also involve walking around the buildings near you and snapping pictures of the buildings and baking that.
Starting point is 00:39:07 You know, I'll say that, you know, that's a lot better. At least when you're baking the buildings near you, you're getting some exercise, you're getting to know the neighborhood. Maybe you'll meet a few people. It's preferable to just baking Q drops. They're both bad, but if I had to pick one, this one's better. Yeah, it's true. You don't need Google Maps, like with mud fossil stuff. So here's another Tartarian Empire promoter who goes by the name One Fowow on TikTok, where he has 1.3 million followers.
Starting point is 00:39:36 I don't know how to explain that, but this particular video was viewed. 34,000 times and has over 500 comments. All over the world, he can find these buried structures. And we literally had to dig them out from the mud. And every now and then, we stumbled across sinkholes uncovering buried buildings. And this is the reason why so many buildings have windows partly buried in the ground. If you notice with this one, the windows get smaller and smaller. And sometimes you see buildings with windows like this.
Starting point is 00:40:09 Trust me, that's not a basement. Because if you keep digging, you will see the original front door. Oh, my days. So any time you come across buildings like this, you're dealing with mud flood. So the story goes, all the great cities that appeared in the 19th century were not built. They were just discovered. And then the populations that discovered them took credit for building them. So another Tartaria explainer put it this way.
Starting point is 00:40:36 The history of the world is a lie. a complete fabrication and everything we know is wrong in the 1800s something happened the population was reset and the new population began the oldest photos are of people finding these grand cities finding these unbelievable towns and then passing it off as their own narrator too good backtrack to good, I believe. Yeah, I know. It's very hypnotic. I feel like this is the best way to experience the Tartarian conspiracy theory.
Starting point is 00:41:17 You watch hours and hours and hours of video with hypnotic background music and turn off your mind and just accept and just, you know, allow yourself to believe. Because you start, you know, thinking too much, then, you know, it will stop making sense. What I like is that he's picked photos where there are dirigible visible. So he clearly also thinks dirigible are like a Tartarian technologically. of some sort. Yeah, that's another big element is that, like, they had much more advanced, sophisticated, sort of like, you know, travel balloon technology than we had, and this was also covered up. These people, they built these amazing cities.
Starting point is 00:41:51 They traveled by balloon. It's unimaginable that the world governments would cover up these people. So this brings me to the next major piece of supposed evidence for the Tartarian Empire, which is Tartarian architecture. There's even a special. subreddit that is separate from R. Tartaria called R. Tartarian Architecture. Now, when you say Tartarian architecture, they're not referring to a particular recognizable style. You know how like ancient alien theorists, they'll claim that like, hey, you know, the ancient Egyptians built
Starting point is 00:42:25 pyramids and also the Meso-Americans built pyramids. Therefore, these two civilizations, which did not have contact with each other, must have had the same inspiration. For some reason, this inspiration has to be extraterraceous. Obviously, that's making sense. It seems like more sensible that the pyramids were just a natural kind of building to make out of stone. But even that, as false and incoherent as it is, is more sensible than the Tartarian architecture theory. So when they say Tartarian architecture, they just mean any building that looks beautiful or cool or out of place in some way, and then the conspiracists will simply assume that
Starting point is 00:43:01 was built by this ancient law civilization. Now, to show you what I'm talking about, I'm going to play a clip from the most popular Tartarian conspiracy theorist on YouTube, who goes by the name John Levi, and he has over 300,000 subscribers on YouTube, and he has made nearly 300 videos, which are in the neighborhood of like 20 to 30 minutes long each. In this clip, John Levi marvels at a few buildings he has seen on the Tartarian architecture subreddit, and he shows a neoclassical building in Germany called the Valhalla, and this building serves as a Hall of Fame and honors notable people. in German history. And then John Levi takes a look at the Palman House, which is a massive
Starting point is 00:43:43 greenhouse in Vienna, Austria that was built in 1882. And then he takes a look at a since-demolished city hall post office and courthouse in New York City, which was completed in 1880. And what is implying by being wowed by these buildings that they're so wonderful and beautiful that they could not have been constructed by any modern civilization, but they must have been built by some sort of elevated civilization that has since lost. Look at this amazing, amazing Greek-Roman-Parthenon-style building in Germany. Beautiful. Vienna, Austria.
Starting point is 00:44:18 Now, this was a fascinating thing, and we see this style in all parts of the world. And, you know, we don't build like this anymore. And this is just an amazing building. To me, it's like a greenhouse. It's like utilizing, you know, the sun and you can have atrium in here and it's just super futuristic and we don't see it anymore and most of them had been torn down. Now here is my favorite designations, the post offices. You know, how many stamps did you sell to build yourself a post office like this?
Starting point is 00:44:59 Absolutely ridiculous. And, you know, I have to. I think we all knew. We really all did know. But I think we needed permission in some way to believe it. Again, how many stamps would they have to sell to build a building like this? Well, let's take these one by one. So the Valhalla in Germany. So it's not weird for buildings in Europe to be made in the neoclassical style. This one in particular is explicitly modeled after the Parthodon. It was built under the supervision of the architect Leo von Klens, who is the court architect of Ludwig I first of Bavaria and was completed in 1842. And he talks about like, well, these buildings are torn down. This one still exists. You can go visit it. The Pullman
Starting point is 00:45:43 house in Austria was constructed by the architect Friedrich Oman and it is an old, beautiful greenhouse that also still exists. He talks about buildings being torn down. It kind of implies that it was. It wasn't. You can go visit if you're so inclined and you're in the area. So it's not even the largest greenhouse in Vienna. There's a larger and more famous one called Palm House Schoenbrun which is at the show and broom palace. This whole thing is such a good example of just reality not being enough. Like, why wouldn't you just honor the actual people
Starting point is 00:46:13 who built the building and go into the history of, you know, how it came to be or whatever if you're enjoying the architecture? The idea that it has to have come from, it's so beautiful that it must have come from like a wiped out, covered up civilization, and these are the relics left over. It's like everything has to have.
Starting point is 00:46:33 this kind of like Indiana Jones sort of undertone and I just wonder why couldn't you just appreciate the architecture for what it really is? Yeah, I don't know either because it's like this information about like when it was constructed and who constructed it and who the architects were was very easy information to come across. But John Levi, he seemed, you know, he sort of postures as I said, admirer of architecture, but he doesn't do any actual research into the buildings he's marveling at. He just likes the pictures. They just, they just, seem beautiful to him. He just marvels at them. And then he creates this fictional story in his head about how they came to be. Yeah, because it's not like this thing where there are like
Starting point is 00:47:12 ancient drawings of the pictures and they're not there or nobody knows who actually built the buildings. And so there's space for conspiracy theory to come in and and create a narrative or explain. But these things seem to be all easily researchable. And if that's what it's about, if it's about actually appreciating the architecture and appreciating the craftsmanship of these of these, you know, admittedly gorgeous buildings. Why wouldn't you celebrate the reality of that? And instead, it's just this one is so weird to me because it seems like that the space for where a conspiracy theory
Starting point is 00:47:47 can sort of squeak in is very slim. It's very slim. You almost have to force it. Finally in that video, he talks about the City Hall Post Office and Courthouse, which was designed by the architect Alfred B. Mullet in an architectural style called the Second Empire Style, which is also called the Napoleon the Third Style. And the way that John Levi talks about this building,
Starting point is 00:48:07 you get the idea that was merely a post office. And, you know, get the idea, it's like, wow, that's larger and fancier than the post office of my hometown. You know, he says, like, how many stamps was you need to sell as if the post office needs to get a return on investment? It's not just like a public service. But what he doesn't mention is that this was a multi-function building.
Starting point is 00:48:25 In its five floors, it housed the main New York post office and also housed courthrooms and federal offices. So this was a building that served multiple government functions. And, you know, courthouses, they frequently have, like, interesting architecture. Now, this building was demolished. It was demolished in 1939. And Tartarian conspiracy theorists, they often, like, point to old beautiful buildings or buildings they consider to be beautiful that were demolished.
Starting point is 00:48:50 You know, why would you destroy it if it, like, took so much time and effort to build? In this case, it wasn't because of any secret project to destroy beauty or cover-up, its connection to any lost civilization. but rather because it was universally deemed to be a hideous building, and according to the people who used it, it didn't serve its functions very well. In fact, while the building existed, it was frequently referred to as Mullet's monstrosity. The New York Times wrote this about the building in 1912. The Mullet Post Office has always been an architectural eyesore and has, from the first, been unsatisfactory to the Postal Service and the federal courts beneath its roof. But John Levi, he doesn't bother looking up any actual information about the history of these buildings.
Starting point is 00:49:31 buildings. He just looks at pictures of them and then gets wowed and then moves on to the next one. On the Tartarian Architecture subreddit, they frequently, they post a picture of a building that was built in the 19th century and ask, you know, does anyone have a photograph of this building being built? And the implication being that if there's no photograph of the construction, then the official story of how the building was constructed is a lie and therefore the building was actually discovered. And not that, you know, in the 19th century, you know, photography was a rare expensive thing and maybe they didn't want to waste it on a construction zone. This is like that tweet that was making the rounds about like you never see pregnant women
Starting point is 00:50:07 anymore. It's like what the fuck are you talking about? It's like the baby pigeon conspiracy theory. I think this, yeah, it's sort of based on this modern belief that every moment of everyone's life and everything that happens all the time needs to be documented and surveil so we can all see it. Guys, do you see any TikToks by the guys and the people who built this building? Yeah, if it doesn't exist on TikTok, I mean... Show me the emails they were sending around, okay? You can't. Tartarian conspiracy fears are especially fixated on old buildings that have been demolished.
Starting point is 00:50:38 The most significant one is the Singer building in New York City. It opened in 1908 as the headquarters of the Singer's sewing machine company. It stood at 612 feet tall, which made it the tallest skyscraper in the world for about a year when it was surpassed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower. Now, the problem with the building is that it became outdated as the decades passed and the land sat on became too valuable. In the 1960s, the Singer Sewing Machine Company sold the building and its eventual owner, the United States Steel Company,
Starting point is 00:51:12 demolished it piece by piece in 1967 in order to make way for a more updated 50-story building. The Singer building is the tallest building to ever be peacefully demolished. Now, this is a genuine loss of architectural history. You know, why wasn't preserved and made a landmark? A 1967 New York Times article about the destruction of the building said that the economics at the time didn't make landmark status practical. Alan Burnham, the executive director of the Landmark's Preservation Commission, was quoted as saying this in that report.
Starting point is 00:51:45 If a building were made a landmark, we would have to find a buyer for it or the city would have to acquire it. The city is not that wealthy. and the commission doesn't have a big enough staff to be a real estate broker for a skyscraper. But for people who believe in the Tartarian conspiracy theory, there's something more nefarious going on, the merely financial incentives leading to the Singer Building being demolished. They believe it was a Tartarian building that had to be destroyed so that we can't know our true history. Now, the funny thing about this one is that there actually are a few photographs of the Singer Building being constructed in the early 20th century.
Starting point is 00:52:21 There's a post on the Tartarian subreddit, which addresses this. It's titled Photos of the Singer Building, which some claim to be Tartarian in New York being under construction. And this seems to refute the idea that it was merely discovered. There are actual photographic evidence of being built in New York. And the comments from the writers are full of skepticism that the photographs are real, like this one. Looks suspicious to me. These pictures were allegedly taken in 1907. The weather looks clear and warm.
Starting point is 00:52:51 The pictures seem to be taken in the middle of the day. Where are the people? Where are the workers? I'm not buying these pictures. Another comment says this. Could also be a Photoshop. There's some blurry parts in the pick. I have seen clear Photoshop's with the same kind of blur. Okay, so you know that 1907 photography probably was not perfect.
Starting point is 00:53:12 There wasn't 4K yet. I'm going to say that much. To which another Reddor responded this way. It doesn't even need to be Photoshop. They could have just used miniature buildings like a lot. in the original Godzilla movie. God, for people who like architecture, they're doing a lot of explaining a way
Starting point is 00:53:27 to ensure that whoever actually built this thing doesn't get the proper credit. I really don't understand this one. Yeah, Jake wants ethics and architecture. It seems to me that, like, essentially all it boils down to is, like, government shouldn't be trusted, they're covering up everything, even this. Oh, you don't think the government is covering up stuff?
Starting point is 00:53:47 Let me find, like, the most esoteric bizarre thing, and tell you how the government is covering it up, like this society, like this ancient civilization of architects. Well, I think it's because they don't really care about architecture. Their interest in architecture is incidental. What they want to prove is that there was a great, wonderful civilization that everything figured out.
Starting point is 00:54:09 It was beautiful, and they had all this free energy, and they had advanced technology, but it was covered up. And their interest in architecture only stems from that presumptive belief. Tartarian conspiracy fairs are also fixated on the world's fairs, which are also called Universal Expositions, or just Expos. So these are events that have been held since the 19th century, which are designed to showcase the achievements of nations. So the people, you know, the organizers of these events, they constructed these impressive seeming buildings and statues that showed off the latest technology or, you know, technology of the future. But the fairs and structures were mostly designed to be temporary.
Starting point is 00:54:48 They were often made of like cheap material, but there were exceptions, for example, the Eiffel Tower was constructed for the 1889 World's Fair, and even though that was constructed with wrought iron, and it was actually supposed to be temporary, it was later permitted to remain permanently. Paul Greenhall, in his 1988 book, Enfemoral Vistas, describe the world fairs this way. Imagine an area the size of a small city center, bristling with dozens of vast buildings set in beautiful gardens, fill the buildings with every conceivable. type of commodity and activity known in the largest possible quantities surround them with miraculous pieces of engineering technology with tribes of primitive peoples reconstructions of ancient and exotic streets restaurants theaters sports stadiums and bandstands spare no expense invite all nations on earth to take part by sending objects for display and by erecting buildings of their own after six months raise this city to the ground and leave nothing behind, save one or two permanent landmarks.
Starting point is 00:55:50 Boy, would he be disappointed with Burning Man, which is like the modern equivalent, I think, of the world's fair nowadays. So the construction of these world fairs, you know, were similar to the construction of an Olympic city. You know, when the city hosts an Olympics, they build all this infrastructure in order to allow the athletes to compete and show off to the world. And perhaps most of it just gets dismantled after the Olympics are over. But let's not miss that Jake just did one of the best, this is not that, by bringing up Burning Man. Incredible. He's like, no, no, this is that. They build and then they unbuild. It must be like Burning Man. No, this is that because Burning Man, they go out into the desert, they erect these elaborate structures.
Starting point is 00:56:31 It's art, it's technology. It's all of these people. They dress up as, you know, older civilizations. They do all this. And then after a month or whatever or however long, they take the city back down, save one or two land. I'm sorry, but people are going to have to write in and say if this is that. But I would say, if Burning Man were an event held inside a city that generated monuments and that then was partially taken down, leaving some of these monuments and landmarks, you might be correct, but we don't have that anymore. We don't have that. All we have is Burning Man.
Starting point is 00:57:03 I'm going to let the people decide. Is this that? Which you got to go to, man. Actually, you got to go. Is this that? You have to go to Burning Man. It's, oh, man, dude, out in the desert on our bikes. You can't escape through the.
Starting point is 00:57:13 through imitating a burning man guy cornering you at a party. An old Jake trope. Nope, nope. Write in, write in, is this that? Is this that? That is the question that I pose you today. So the designers of these world's fairs
Starting point is 00:57:32 would be tasked with creating something impressive looking that could stay up from, you know, in the neighborhood of five to eight months. And this sometimes led them to literally use plaster in their constructions. This is described in a 2012 article published in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology called Dream City, Plaster City, World's Fairs, and the Gilding of the American Material Culture. In this passage, the author Rebecca S. Graff describes how a kind of plaster material called staff was used to create structures that had the appearance of marble.
Starting point is 00:58:03 The temporary nature, coupled with the monumental scale of fairs, created the conditions for the development of both innovative and spectacular buildings, where builders were forced to, quote, awkward architectural problems, while at the same time keeping the public entertained. Moreover, as in the case of the Chicago 1873 Interstate Exposition, financial considerations forced fair architects to use the cheapest materials and employ the most cost-effective solutions in creating their dream city. The solution to this dilemma lay in an unassuming construction material called staff. Alternatively described as counterfeit marble, plaster mixtures like staff
Starting point is 00:58:40 were employed to form the marble-like facades of Exposition buildings at least by 1883. But for some Tartarian conspiracy theories, the world's fairs are actually uncovered buildings from the world of Tartaria. Well, it's good world. The world's fairs were one last time for the people to see the old world of Tartaria. After the world's fairs, they were destroyed, never to be seen again except for in pictures. It is the Great Reset. Interesting, now it's been folded into the Great Reset. Well, now here's the thing, is that they often talk about.
Starting point is 00:59:12 they call it the last great reset. They call this event in which the populations of the world sort of recapture these cities and sometimes destroy the Tartarian buildings, the Great Reset. And it was, you know, they do connect it to the modern concept of the Great Reset, but they think it's the separate 19th century event that happened. In one video on TikTok, a Tartarian conspiracy theorist watched its footage of the 1915 World's Fair in San Francisco and marvels at the structure. that were built. And what we see here is absolutely breathtaking. The San Francisco World's
Starting point is 00:59:49 Fair of 1915. Tell me anybody's building that tower with plywood and stucco or any of these buildings in less than two years, all the fully grown trees and shrubbery, the over-the-top architecture, all to be torn down in six months, except for the ones they decided to keep around, of course. Perhaps a trophy of the old world. Dude, okay, let me explain how this works. We extract the wealth of the rest of the world, then we bring it to the core of empire
Starting point is 01:00:21 to have a big fancy party where we blow shit tons of money to make the most racist human zoo you've ever fucking seen. It's not that hard. They were literally like, oh, and here's the African area, and they would have literally enslaved black people and brought them over to play savages for them
Starting point is 01:00:37 for some months. Like many people that were using these exhibits it's died. Oh, man. Also, in many cases, you know, the structures and statues that you're being impressed by were literally, you know, crumbling plaster. The design to, you know, be destroyed is certainly as soon as it was no longer useful. The plaster, it crumbles like your belief system. It's me, Travis Vue. I'm the debunker. I'm the debunker. I'm the debunker. And castles made of sand. Let me tell you, they sink into the sea eventually. I love also that these videos, instead of using your sort of the standard like TikTok conspiracy theory background song,
Starting point is 01:01:15 like we've now heard two that use Adagio, which is so funny that they're like, well, when discussing such elegant architecture, we must use this well-known classical piece, which I'm not complaining. I think that's much nicer than your average sort of like whatever that kind of weird whistle tune is. It's kind of like an off-brand X-Files theme music that every. other conspiracy TikTok video uses. You know, I'm glad to see some classics making their way into the soundtrack. But it's funny that like, these guys are like, no, we are a cut above the flat earthers. We use classical tunes.
Starting point is 01:01:52 God, I can't wait. In 200 years, they're going to look back and be like, hmm, the Olympics, like signs that actually the real civilization were Olympic villagers? Look, perhaps a trophy has been left behind, a soccer stadium. Yeah, that's how you do it. if you blow this much fucking money, the least you can do is leave behind some usable architecture, which is often not the case. It's often useless. In college, I lived in a building that was constructed for the, I think it was the 86 Olympics that took place in Los Angeles, and it was a
Starting point is 01:02:22 fucking dump. There were things that were constantly going wrong with it. It probably should have been condemned, but yet they kept it, and I lived there. I'd love to hear the stories of, yeah, like people going through like the World's Fair and being like, dude, I live right down the street from this. it just turned my life into hell for six to eight months. I think, no, I think actually life was generally hell for them. And so the World Fair might have been a much-needed respite. Yeah, you think the human zoo is cool for like three months.
Starting point is 01:02:51 Then you start to go, well, okay now. When are we clearing this up? The plaster dust is everywhere. Yeah, there's the real conspiracy. Let's see how much asbestos was breathed in, you know, over the course of all of the world fairs. No asbestos was in existence back then, but that's... Oh, well, whatever the 1800s equivalent was, I'm sure they had something.
Starting point is 01:03:12 Yeah. That video maker also mentions his belief that these worlds fairs were away for the conquerors, the people who supposedly covered up the Tartarian Empire, to show off. Almost there. You're almost there. It was a way for the colonial conquerors to show off, like, the world they had mapped out and fucking taken control of. Even if it was temporary, to what purpose? purpose. Why would you go through such scales to tear something down shortly after? And why can't
Starting point is 01:03:41 we do it today? That statue alone, there's nothing temporary about that. I believe these world's fairs to be the parades of the conquerors, showing off the lands inherited. God, if we do this now, like, it'd be like, we left behind the Pepsi house. Like, we left it would suck shit. Man, this, don't bring this guy to South by Southwest. He's going to have a fucking aneurism. He's like, I don't get it. You're telling me that it's not always like this here? He's like, but look at the construction of this spicy pie booth. The Wienersnitzel and Vodafone Pagoda is still standing. Oh my God, I was thinking about taking the family to see the monster energy drink hot. God damn it. We do live in a shittier world.
Starting point is 01:04:31 Rumor is, once you step in the booth, you get a short amount of energy and then a headache shortly thereafter. There's also a claim amongst Tartarian Empire conspiracists that some architectural features of these old buildings, especially like the spires, are sources of free energy. So this is just a way to claim that like the old Tartarian Empire was more than just aesthetically or architecturally more advanced than us. that are also technologically advanced. Why do we see no wires on the pylons of the old world? Today, our streets are filled with these pylons with wires. But the ancients seem to have no wires. In fact, they were harnessing free energy.
Starting point is 01:05:16 Have you ever noticed the metal bulls which are on all of the ancient buildings? You'd probably still have them now. These metal balls were filled with mercury. And on top of them was an antenna which was harnessing the electromagnetic energy. This energy was then sent to the mercury and watch what happens with mercury. This would cause the mercury to spin and create free energy. The word cathedral comes from cathodral, anode and the cathode, because it's creating electricity. All of these buildings around the world all had the same antennas.
Starting point is 01:05:51 This is because it was the great Tartarian Empire. Cathedral? Cathedral! Cathedral. The well-known cathedral. Cathedral, son of grimbly. This motherfucker is pointing to wires saying, why don't you see wires? There are wires right where your finger is.
Starting point is 01:06:12 This is also my least favorite. I ranted about this in the other episode, but this is my least favorite TikTok trend. If people just appearing in green screen at the bottom of their shit and they're not saying anything, but they're just pointing like, like it makes you some kind of a thing. authority by pointing to a picture that's not even behind you. Oh, God. Oh, I don't know why. That just makes me so lazy and it's
Starting point is 01:06:35 so, uh, you think you're so cool, but you're not, you're just pointing. Oh, here we go. Old man yells at clouds. I do, I do, I do like how it's like that crappy, like, you know, simulated green screen effect around him. And then he just bends over and kind of disappears like he's going to
Starting point is 01:06:51 repack a bowl, like off screen. He can't even sit through like 40 seconds of pointing up. So first off, obviously, you can't make free energy by spitting mercury. And there's no evidence that the spires of old buildings contain mercury. And free energy isn't real. It's not a thing that can happen. You ever feel like you're getting dragged down in the mud here being a debunker for a spitting mercury being free energy?
Starting point is 01:07:17 I mean, yeah, this is some pretty chinty shit. This is not the prestige job, I'll say. I don't feel good about this. I do like it when we fuck you over like this. So, and second of all, I looked up the etymology of Cathedral and Cathode and discovered that their origins are very different. So Cathedral comes from a specific early Christian use of the classical Latin word cathedral, meaning a teacher or professor's chair.
Starting point is 01:07:42 And cathode comes from the Greek cathodos, meaning a way down. So just absolute nonsense that these two words are somehow related. It just kind of sound similar. But this theory about free energy also encourages people to like walk around their town. and point out architectural features which they falsely claim are energy gathering devices. And again, we see Tartarian design.
Starting point is 01:08:04 But look at this one. Let me cross the street. Again, a very ancient design. And this is the free energy device. Let's zoom in so you can see it. Family, there was an ancient civilization, and they are not telling us about it. But the evidences are everywhere around us.
Starting point is 01:08:22 He is standing in front of a building that has a flagpole. Yeah, it's just, you've got to be able. little more selective here. You got to at least pick something a little more esoteric. No. Yeah. It's just he's like literally pointing at flagpoles and claiming up their secret free energy devices from an ancient lost civilization. But again, he's out. If you're going to be baking and conspiracy theorizing, at least get some fresh air, get some exercise, get your legs moving. There's any good way to do it. This is it. This is the same approach my mom had to me when I was reading Stephen King when
Starting point is 01:08:52 I was 10. It's like, is this really appropriate? I don't know, but at least you're reading. No, in every fringe community, there is, you know, the fringe of the fringe. And this exists in the Tartarian Empire community, too, because there's a section of that community who believes that the Tartarian Empire had giants in it. And sometimes the evidence of this belief comes in the form of the existence of giant doors, which they assume must have been used by these giants, or very often they'll present straight up Photoshop images of stuff like giant skulls. This is like, you know, the JFK Jr.
Starting point is 01:09:27 lives kind of community of the Tartarian Empire community. So here's one Tartarian believer talking about the supposed giants of our forgotten past. Giants were very much real. And they walked this realm with us. The evidence can be found all around us. You just have to open your eyes and stop listening to the mainstream lies. It's hard for some to imagine. Why would they lie about giants?
Starting point is 01:09:55 But the problem is, it's not just giants they've lied to us about. That is just one link, a small link in the much larger chain of lies that have completely erased our history, our true history. To find out where a lot of this cover-up began, research the mud flood and fall of Tartaria. Yep, we make big stuff sometimes. And sometimes we just Photoshop it if we don't have actual pictures of it. I was wondering which one of those were photoshopped. Oh, really? Yeah, you mean like the giant human skull on display in a big official-looking museum?
Starting point is 01:10:37 I was like, I think that's an AI drawing. Or the Charlie Chaplin-looking guy who was three times the size of a Volkswagen Beetle? So, I mean, like, this is the risk of a, like, of a crowdsource conspiracy theory. It's like when you give people permission to just bake and make connections, that don't exist, then just let their imagination go wherever they want. There are going to be some people who take it way farther than most of the other community. And also, look, giants still exist. I just saw a video on TikTok the other day of like an 8-foot-8 guy playing basketball.
Starting point is 01:11:09 He's like some high school kid who's like 8-8. So they do. I mean, the conspiracy is that they've gone away. I mean, shit, Jake's accused me of being a giant just for being over six foot. I mean, the man is 5-2. Yeah, I mean, I'm five, I'm five and a half. So. Years old.
Starting point is 01:11:30 So that's really all there is to the Tartarian conspiracy theory is based on a misunderstanding of an archaic term using an old European text about Asia and then baking these documents and pictures of buildings on the assumption that there was some sort of glorious old world which has been covered up from us. But there's just this massive community who, like I said, spend hours and hours and hours showing these documents and talking about these pictures of building and lamenting some sort of, you know, glorious past that never existed. Well, you could argue that they were wasting their time, or you could argue that collectively they are demoralizing Travis' view. Now, your belief that that is a good project will vary. Yeah. But there's nothing worse for Travis than diving into a somewhat interesting architectural ancient civilization. conspiracy like this and finding out that it's just so stupid and finding out that there were giants boy surely travis it can't be that stupid so i think that underlying the tartarian
Starting point is 01:12:32 conspiracy theory as stupid as it is there are a few very sympathetic impulses you know firstly is this notion that there's something very wrong with civilization as it is when the you know tartarian empire conspiracy theory community there's this general refusal to believe that This, as we live now, is actually the best way that human civilization has ever functioned. I would say to them, check out the 10th wonder of the world, the Taco Bell Live Moss porta-potties. So because they're dissatisfied, they look to the past and construct this fictional civilization, which must have done it right. They must have constructed a beautiful, abundant, advanced world that has powers that, you know, beyond what we could possibly know about. And we don't know about it just because the powers that be don't want us to know how good we could have it.
Starting point is 01:13:25 I'm going to start a conspiracy theory that like 700 years ago, the video games were way better. You know, it's very weird. One of the weirdest things about this community is that I kept waiting for them. I watched a lot. I kept waiting for them to, you know, blame the Jews for the cover up. Because whenever you dive into a community, a conspiracist community, that happened. It just happens every time. So, like, I brace myself.
Starting point is 01:13:52 But for some reason, I didn't, I'm not saying it. I haven't, didn't watch every single video. I'm not saying it never, ever happens. But it's very weird because it always skirts towards sort of like fascist idealism in the sense of like idealization of a past that wasn't real and this focused on the aesthetics. Like, oh, the past is so much beautiful. And we are like an uglier degenerate society. But, you know, fortunately from the videos I saw, they don't really cross that threshold.
Starting point is 01:14:19 Yeah, maybe it is good to hold a few of these fascists in a state of ketamine-doubt pareidolia. You know, it's actually good. Actually, let's start our own. I mean, you said that there wasn't any anti-Semitic elements really that prevalent. Why not start it? The Qasarian Mafia is covering up the Tartarian Empire, guys. Let's go. No, but I sort of agree that this is a good...
Starting point is 01:14:39 It's like, you know, an ancient folklore, you know, they would say to ward off ghosts. You know, you would have to bury a jar of salt or sugar, something that would... The ghosts would sort of feel compelled to count the grains. And this Tartarian conspiracy theory, I think, is like that. Let's bake the architecture, bake the world's fairs, bake the old photographs, ignore the wires. If that keeps you from going, you know, further, you know, extreme to the right, you know what? What's the harm? Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast.
Starting point is 01:15:12 You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and sub for five bucks a month. you will get all of our premium episodes plus a premium episode for every main and access to our 50 different episodes that we've now completed that are part of our various mini-series. Also, hey, this is the last week where you'll hear the old theme and we're looking forward to a little refresher and see you on the other side, folks. In the meantime, we've got a website, QAAPodcast.com.
Starting point is 01:15:43 Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you. It's not a conspiracy, it's fact. And now, today's AutoCube. The world around you is a lie, and the history of us has been covered up. We are the new population of the world, and a one-world, unified race of people used to exist all across. The Tartarians, they built all these buildings that you see, and they designed them in order to obtain the free. energy from the atmosphere. No matter where you look, you'll find the same thing. People attribute that to design styles and architecture. And the story has been greatly falsified,
Starting point is 01:16:31 most likely by artificial intelligence that we know nothing about. But it's clear, and if you look around long enough, you'll see that there is much more to this story. What happened? If we did build these, how have we gone so far downhill? Why are the doorways so massive? One of the old stories of giants being dug up from the ground.

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