Latest / The Smart Cookies podcast / In the Eye of the Storm: QAnon and (other) conspiracy theories with Mike Rothschild
Transcript
- Zaza: Mike Rothschild is a journalist and author focused on the intersections between internet, culture and politics as seen through the dark glass of conspiracy theories. Since 2018 he has specialized in examining the QAnon conspiracy cult and is one of the first journalists to reveal its connections conspiracy theories. As a subject matter expert in the field of fringe beliefs, he has been interviewed by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, among any others. He is the author of the seminal work on QAnon, a much-quoted book, The Storm is Upon Us, How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything. Mr. Rothschild, welcome to Eurotrash. Mike Rothschild: Thank you for having me. Zaza: Let's dive straight into the current status of the QAnon movement, for lack of a better word. As I understood it, the point of the whole wretched business was centered around Q's prediction, right? Q being the mysterious main man, person, of the whole thing, that Donald Trump is going to win the 2020 election. Actually, it was more of an assurance than a prediction. everything kind of dependent on this going down. The so-called storm would be unleashed, right? And the deep state and its evil acolytes would be defeated in an epic manga style showdown. Now, of course, Joe Biden ultimately won, annihilating the hopes behind this central claim. Did QAnon survive what should have been the ultimate catastrophe for them? Mike Rothschild: It did. QAnon did survive because movements like QAnon are incredibly resistant to disconfirmation. And you see that in a lot of sort of classic cult movements, where the big event, the you know, the great awakening, the great disaster, the you know, whatever it is, it doesn't happen after months or years of buildup. But the people who are enthralled to the idea that it is going to happen are now so invested in it happening. that the fact that it hasn't happened is really just rolled into the next iteration of what the prediction is going to be. And for a lot of these people, you know, if you look at these past kinds of prophetic movements, these are people who have nowhere else to go. They have given up everything. They've given up their families, their jobs, their hobbies, their friends. They don't really have anything left except the movement. So they can't go back. So they just have to keep going with this thing that they've become part of. And you really saw that with QAnon. You know, Trump lost, there was no fraud proven, there was no storm, none of it happened. And you would think that would be the point where most rational people would say, well, I guess I've been had and I just have to figure out what to do next, but people don't do that. People don't admit that they've been fooled. People don't want to believe that they've been conned. So they just keep going forward. So Q continues to go forward, it continues to pull people in. it's changed a lot, but at the same time, fundamentally, it hasn't really changed at all. Zaza: So how do they explain the fact that their hero didn't win after all? Mike Rothschild: Well, there was cheating, there was fraud, there were ballot mules, there were satellites changing votes, there was Dominion, there was Smartmatic, there was Maricopa County, there was Georgia, there's endless excuses. And if you really start to spend a lot of time in the right-wing media, you see these things used as almost shorthand. They'll say Dominion or they'll say Maricopa County. you know, audit the vote, you know, these things that kind of don't mean anything to most people, but to the people who are still in this movement, all of it is proof that there was all of this cheating, that there was all of this fraud. And that's the only reason why Biden is in office. He didn't win. He couldn't have won. He's decrepit. He's senile. He's, you know, he can't, he got 10 people to his rallies. He couldn't beat Trump fair and square. And of course, Trump himself was laying the groundwork for that. a year before the election that there was no way he was going to lose. And if he did lose, it was fraud. Zaza: Are Mike Rothschild: So Zaza: there Mike Rothschild: really Zaza: any... Mike Rothschild: had all of these things Zaza: right. Mike Rothschild: coming together in a way that had been, uh, kind of foretold for a year. Zaza: Are there any new predictions still tumbling on? Mike Rothschild: So the cube drops themselves have really stopped. There was kind of a brief return of them in summer of 2022, so coming up in about a year ago. Q suddenly returned to 8kun, making these very odd posts that didn't really even seem like they came from the original Q poster. And there was all this speculation about the some of the software on 8kun being changed and only Jim Watkins, of course, is the owner of 8kun, could have done it. I think there may have been one or two more Q drops right around the time of the midterms, but they had so little impact that I don't remember what was said in them. But there are really no more Q posts and there's really no need for them. You don't really need prophecies and predictions and cryptic codes. when you have what you think is this giant body of evidence that the election was stolen and COVID is fake and Joe Biden is a Ukrainian puppet. Zaza: Let's run it back to the beginning. Some anonymous troll guy, whatever, presumably it's a man, Mike Rothschild: Yes. Zaza: Q posts a couple of outlandish quasi insider claims and predictions on 4chan, such as the imminent arrest of Hillary Clinton that again, or should we say from the beginning, like you said, turned out to be nothing but hogwash. And yet somehow there's an audience out there, a pack of hungry poor souls. who immediately start pumping life into this cartoonish tale. Did I miss something here? And I hope you say yes, or was that pretty much what happened? Mike Rothschild: You know, that's really how it started. 4chan had this tradition and still does to some extent, of these anonymous accounts who would show up and pretend to be in the FBI or pretend to be in British intelligence or pretend to be in the White House. And they would make a bunch of cryptic posts and then they would just sort of disappear. And Q originally, as it started calling itself Q clearance patriot, was really the same. There was very little different about it. except the one major thing about Q that I think is still for some reason kind of under-reported is that Q very specifically focused on Hillary Clinton being arrested. It wasn't a bunch of vague kind of, you know, jargon that could be taken in a bunch of different ways. It was Hillary Clinton's going to be arrested on October 30th. And immediately you had this, this kind of dream that so many of these people had wanted to happen for so long. And it really tapped into this industry. of Clinton conspiracy theories that had really been going around in American politics and far-right media for the last 30 years. Whoever did these posts really did understand the role that Hillary Clinton plays in conservative discourse. Zaza: So the contents of the QAnon conspiracy reads like something out of a particularly cheap comic book title. They Mike Rothschild: Ha Zaza: claim Mike Rothschild: ha. Zaza: there's a cabal of satanic cannibalistic child molesters operating a global sex trafficking ring plotting against President Trump and of course everything that's good and holy in this world. What's holding this wild assortment of completely random storylines together? What's the sort of meta narrative here? Mike Rothschild: The meta narrative is the same one that's powered conspiracy thought for at least the last century. And much of it's stemming from things like the protocols of the Elders of Zion. This idea that there is an all-powerful cabal, an all-powerful super government, the insiders, the hidden hand, this ultra, ultra powerful group of controllers at the very top. And Q is just kind of the latest in a long line authors, sort of self-described journalists, whistleblowers, who are trying to expose this cabal. Q just did it in a much more participatory way. The people who are reading the Q drops could be part of the story rather than just passively consuming it. But really, it's very similar to many, many other things that have come before us. Zaza: Were queues, drops or posts or whatever, were they particularly articulated or why did they take hold? Because you said there were just, you know, ones out of many on 4chan. Mike Rothschild: Yeah, the Q's story, I think, especially very, very early on in those first couple of weeks in October and November 2017, that story is actually really well told. It's very compelling, it moves very quickly, there's a lot happening, there's a lot of heroes, a lot of villains, a lot of twists and turns. I've very quickly thought it reads kind of like a Tom Clancy novel. It's kind of exciting and a lot. happens and you feel drawn into it, because you feel like you want to know what's going to happen next. Now, of course, in the case of QAnon, absolutely nothing happened next there were there were no Hillary Clinton was not arrested on October 30 2017. So you very quickly saw a poster, you know, the person making these posts, who realized that it had become very popular very quickly, and they didn't want to give up on it because it had taken off and you know, everybody wants to be at the center of some sort of viral storytelling thing. So the story very quickly changes and it becomes much more cryptic. It becomes much more expansive. They say, oh, this was just gonna be the first step. All of these things are gonna happen, but it's gonna take a long time. And so the Q poster is really changing this up on the fly, sort of making the story up as they go along. And it's really fascinating to watch because some of it doesn't really work at all and some of it is actually really interesting. Zaza: Do we know anything about the identity of this person? Mike Rothschild: There's a lot of guesses and the most prevailing one, and I think the one that I tend to gravitate towards and the one that a lot of other journalists and researchers in this field gravitate towards is that the initial posts on 4chan were made by a guy named Paul Ferber. And he's a South African, I think he's a web designer, very active in 4chan. He's profiled in the mini-series on HBO, Q Into the Storm. it's his writing style is very similar to the early Q posts. And when Q jumps from 4chan to 8chan, Q starts posting on a board on 8chan that had been started by Paul Furber. So there's really no reason for Q to go to this random guy's board on 8chan, except that the random guy is also making the posts. Now at some point, and we really still don't know exactly what happened here. At some point, Ferber, I think gets kind of iced out of his own creation and it becomes Ron Watkins who takes over. And of course, Ron is now really well known from the HBO series, from his stuff with some of the Dominion conspiracy theories right after the election. He's very doomed run for Congress. And again, the writing styles really, really match up. If you read Ron Watkins' tweets, they read exactly the way Q-Drop's read. Like it is almost clearly the same person doing it. And the prevailing thought is that it was probably Ron who did the vast majority of it. But until there's some kind of a confession from some of these people and they offer proof that they did it, we're never going to 100% know. But if you talk to most of the people in the QAnon world, that's probably who they're gonna say did it. Zaza: One of my favorite stand-up comedians, Frankie Boyle, I don't know if you've heard of him, he's from Scotland. He once said that Donald Trump looks like someone playing a president in a porn film, which was, as far Mike Rothschild: Ha! Zaza: as I'm concerned, one of the most accurate assessments of his presidency I've ever heard. What makes Donald Trump out of all people, or should we say right-wing politicians, a particularly suitable hero? for the QAnon saga. Mike Rothschild: You know, that's a great question. And it's something I think we need to start reckoning with now as we start this sort of endless death march to the 2024 Zaza: Right. Mike Rothschild: election. Trump really came to political prominence not because of any ideas that he had or any particular ambitions, but because he was a conspiracy theorist. He, you know, made his bones politically by questioning whether Barack Obama was born in the United States. Zaza: Right. Mike Rothschild: And that was enormously appealing to a lot of people. You know, the birther movement had already been around for a while. It had picked up a lot of very fringe, very far right influencers, but it wasn't acceptable in kind of polite, moderate society. And then here's Trump and he's saying all of this stuff. He's maybe he's secretly Muslim. He wasn't born in the U S where's his birth certificate. It immediately becomes a license to kind of say whatever you want. And Trump. He crafts himself as the outsider candidate who is willing to say what everybody else is just thinking. And so he becomes this kind of figure for whom he becomes your mouthpiece. He becomes your spokesperson. And that was really appealing for a lot of people who felt very marginalized, who were very traumatized by the idea of America electing a black president whose middle name was Hussein. A lot of people just couldn't deal with it. And as the Tea Party movement started to burn out in 2010 and 2011, a lot of the people who were part of that movement saw somebody in Trump who kind of threw off the last vestiges of respectability. And a lot of these people just decided, Hey, this guy's my hero. This guy, I'm going to put all my chips on this guy. And if he becomes president, Hey, I'm going to become just like him because he's an outsider and I want to be an outsider. And it was this sort of aspiration and these hopes and dreams. all bound up together in this one guy who really couldn't care less about most of the people who voted for him. Zaza: Also, I mean, the man's a billionaire from New York and he used to be friends with the Clintons if I'm not Mike Rothschild: Right, Zaza: mistaken Mike Rothschild: and Jeffrey Zaza: as well, Mike Rothschild: Epstein. Zaza: right? Yeah, right. Mike Rothschild: So you know, and you know, he and has ties to the Rothschild's I talked about Zaza: Oh Mike Rothschild: in my Zaza: really? Mike Rothschild: next book. Oh, yeah, he, when when Trump, when the Trump Taj Mahal was going bankrupt in the early 90s, it was Rothschild Inc, who helped restructure his deal and helped him get out of debt. You know, but you know, you don't hear that stuff from from his fan base because they'll just ignore anything Zaza: Okay, Mike Rothschild: that Zaza: so Mike Rothschild: they Zaza: they Mike Rothschild: don't Zaza: simply Mike Rothschild: want to be true. Zaza: write so people who believe in QAnon, they simply brush aside this they don't talk about Mike Rothschild: They don't talk about it at all. Zaza: his links to Jeffrey Epstein, they Mike Rothschild: the Zaza: just gloss over it or Mike Rothschild: it's the Zaza: do they Mike Rothschild: only Zaza: justify it in some way? Mike Rothschild: they justify the Epstein stuff in particular was oh he was working for the FBI. You actually heard this around the time of Jeffrey Epstein's suicide you heard like Trump was like secretly undercover giving information to the FBI that helps bust Epstein. You know you look at those pictures he doesn't look like he's having a good time. He looks you'll tell yourself anything because you don't want to believe the worst things about this man who you have decided is your hero. Zaza: All right, how do we get from tall tales on obscure internet messages, message boards to actual violence and ultimately the attack on the capital on January 6? Mike Rothschild: Well, my introduction to Q was just a few months after the post started coming. And I realized that it had quite a bit in common with these currency scams that I write about in the book. These things like the Iraqi dinar and these other things where the windfall is going to be, you're gonna be rich. You're gonna have billions and you're gonna live the rest of your life free of control from the new world order because you're gonna be so wealthy. With QAnon, the... the windfall was not money, it was the good feelings you would have when your enemies are brought to justice. And I realized that there is a point where people get very riled up to the point where they decide that if there's not going to be justice, they're going to have to do it themselves. And I started to see some of the signs of, oh, this could lead a lot of people down a kind of mercenary role. And we started to see that. We saw that with the Hoover Dam blockade or this QAnon believer. barricades himself in his truck with a couple of guns and grenades and he's begging Trump to release the unredacted Inspector General report. This came straight from QAnon. There is no unredacted Inspector General report that doesn't exist. Q made it up. And so here's just a guy this is summer of 2019. This is the one most people weren't even paying paying attention to QAnon. Here's a guy who's ready to kill because QAnon gave him his orders. You saw more murders being committed by Q believers, more acts of vandalism, domestic, domestic terrorism, child kidnapping. So when the Q believers set upon the Capitol, I wasn't surprised. You know, I just thought, oh, this is the natural endpoint for a movement that is that is soaking in violent ideation. Zaza: Now, one would have rightfully thought that QAnon is a distinctly American conspiracy theory made in the US for a US audience. However, this monstrosity somehow managed to spill all over the world. I live in Berlin and I don't know if you've heard, but in December 2022, German authorities prevented an actual coup Mike Rothschild: Yes. Zaza: by an extreme right wing group called the Reichsburger movement, led by Prince. Heinrich XIII, I believe, a Mike Rothschild: Ha Zaza: real Mike Rothschild: ha ha! Zaza: estate peddler that has all the charisma of a boiled potato. Anyway, Mike Rothschild: Hehehehe Zaza: this movement borrowed a lot of elements from QAnon, including the central claims transplanted into the German context, as well as a planned attack on the Reichstag. Is the era of local conspiracy theories, if they are successful, kind of over? Mike Rothschild: Well, Q is, you know, it's built upon a number of very America-centric elements. You know, there's certainly all the Clinton stuff and a lot of the, you know, a lot of Q drops about like the Supreme Court and stuff. But Q also is very appealing to people around the world. And what happens is the more America-centric aspects of QAnon are really sanded off and you will find extremist movements in other countries are very comfortable with the idea of a movement that is about getting rid of global power structures. You know, a lot of this is kind of classic anti-Semitism taken to another level. You know, the idea that there is a cabal, there is a vast conspiracy of people at the very top and we're gonna get rid of them. We're gonna march and we're gonna take them out. And Q is very good at appealing to that. So it will focus in every country on some aspect of that country's politics and culture. So you saw something like the Yellow Vest Movement in France adopted Q. Q is very popular in Australia with a very far right anti-government element. It's very popular in Japan, where conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism have always been very popular. So every country grabs the parts of QAnon that worked the best for the extremist movements in those countries. So when that coup attempt was foiled, I really wasn't surprised to see this kind of weird monarchist faction. grab on to this kind of anti-elite conspiracy theory, because the particulars of it don't matter. It's just about distrust of experts, distrust of politicians, distrust of banking, distrust of the media, and grabbing your version of power to do whatever you want with it. Zaza: Again, anti-elite and then your leader is a prince. Mike Rothschild: Yeah, they tend to not see the irony in movements that are based upon bringing the high, low, and elevating the low to the high, being built around billionaires and oligarchs and princes and the sons and daughters of wealth. They really don't ever grasp the irony that they are embracing the thing that they are also fighting. Zaza: Yeah, not exactly championing the working class hero, are Mike Rothschild: No, Zaza: they? Mike Rothschild: not at all. Not at all. Zaza: If we move on from QAnon to conspiracy theories in general, one thing I always wondered was the following. Each of us can do a quick little surf on the internet only to discover that there's all kinds of loony ideas floating out there. However, some suddenly take off and become full blown conspiracy theories that people actually believe in. while others simply kind of fizzle out. What ingredients make for a successful conspiracy theory? Or is it actually more about timing than ingredients? Mike Rothschild: That is a really, really good question. And there's a lot. The conspiracy theory that really takes off has to be the right thing at the right time. And QAnon, in a lot of ways, really was the you know, you had this president who, who spoke very cryptically, you know, you kind of didn't always know what he was talking about. And had enemies that were the enemies of a lot of his biggest fans, you know, these people hated the Clintons, they hated Obama, they hated George Soros. This isn't Trump era stuff. They hated the Clintons in 1991. They hated George Soros in the late 90s, certainly going into the 2004 election. None of this stuff was new, but it's repackaged in a way that is very appealing, feels very fresh. So a successful conspiracy theory has to have the right message. It has to be about the right enemies. It has to present it in the right way. It has to have the right influencers. It has to be kind of weird and outsiderish, but it can't be too weird and too outsiderish. And you kind of don't even know if it's successful until it's really started. And that's one of the biggest problems in journalism right now and in debunking and pushing back against conspiracy theories that it's really hard to see what's gonna take off. I think with QAnon, very few people really thought it was gonna stick around past a couple of months. And then it just keeps going year after year after year. And some of this stuff bubbles up and you never see it again. So it really is about timing and the right kind of story told in the right way. And of course, that's why you see so many conspiracy theories that fall back on certain groups of people who can always be demonized. It will always be lucrative to demonize Jews. It will always be lucrative for certain subsets of American culture to demonize Muslims. That's always going to work. You know, maybe the particulars change, but the basics of it are always going to be the same. Zaza: Throughout the years, I've talked to quite a few people who wholeheartedly believe in various often kind of supernatural conspiracies. What struck me the most was the fact that even though they championed a particular one, let's say, chemtrails or something, that didn't prevent them from mixing kind of others into the pot. Quite the opposite. The whole thing reminded me of some sort of a demented jam session. Mike Rothschild: Ha Zaza: You Mike Rothschild: ha ha Zaza: know, Mike Rothschild: ha. Zaza: I would, you know, I would ask this chemtrail believer What about reptilians? That's not like a real thing is it? And they would say oh yeah they're in there somehow you know up to up to no good. They would somehow find a way to mix reptilians into the chemtrail story as well. Is there any logic at play here or do you only understand the logic once you already believe in all of this stuff? It's Mike Rothschild: The Zaza: quite Mike Rothschild: law, Zaza: fascinating. Mike Rothschild: yeah, no, it is, it's totally fascinating. And the logic really is, well, if they're doing this, why wouldn't they be doing that? So, you know, you really would think, well, what would chemtrails and reptilians have to do with each other? But if you believe that there is a secret cabal using passenger jets to spray chemicals in the air and make us all sick and we all see that it's happening, but no one does anything about it, why would you also not believe that there are reptilians? that are wearing human skin suits and running all of the governments. I mean, if you really, you know, you really look at the books of somebody like David Icke. And if you, and I read a lot of David Icke books for Zaza: That's Mike Rothschild: my next Zaza: the English Mike Rothschild: book. Zaza: guy, right? Mike Rothschild: Yeah, yeah. Zaza: Yeah. Mike Rothschild: The Rept... Basically, people know him for the Reptoids. Zaza: Yeah, Mike Rothschild: But there are a million Zaza: that's Mike Rothschild: other conspiracy Zaza: what they're called, Mike Rothschild: theories. Zaza: the Reptoids, Mike Rothschild: Yeah, Reptoids, Zaza: not Reptilians. Mike Rothschild: Reptilians, it's all the same thing. Zaza: Sorry, since we're here, what's Mike Rothschild: Yeah. Zaza: the central claim of the Reptoids conspiracy theory? Mike Rothschild: There are a couple but the biggest one is that a bunch of reptile aliens Their home planet is different is given with different names depending on who you talk to came to earth and Ming mixed themselves into human genetics and that the leaders of the world's governments of the royal families of the banks are all Reptilian aliens, but they also have human DNA and they either shape-shift or they wear the skins of humans to pretend to be humans. But if you photograph them at the right way, you can kind of see their eyes blinking and you can see their tongues flick out. It's a pretty powerful conspiracy theory. And this was the big one that David Icke really got famous for. But he's also incredibly anti-Semitic. And if you read his books, and I don't recommend anybody read his books, they bounce from theory to theory just like that. Well, if... The Reptoids are real. The Illuminati have been running a secret government with the Jewish power and they funded the Nazis. And also we're hiding free energy. It goes from theory to theory to theory and it never sticks long enough in one where you go, oh, that doesn't really make any sense. It moves so frenetically that you just keep hoovering up information and it just scrambles your brain, completely rewires the way you think. but it really does make you susceptible to all of the conspiracy theories because if one of them is true, why aren't they all true? Zaza: Do you have any theories as to how that first crucial leap happens into this stuff? Because it seems like once you open the door, like you just said, you're in this, and then you can just mix it up, whatever, anything goes. But how Mike Rothschild: Yeah. Zaza: does that first leap happen from being Mike Rothschild: Yeah. Zaza: a reasonable human being to just believing in all of this stuff at the same time? Mike Rothschild: For a lot of people, it is trauma. There is a traumatic upbringing, there is a traumatic relationship, Zaza: That's interesting. Mike Rothschild: a disease, an injury. You know, you see it a lot with modern conspiracy theories where, you know, a person is just kind of living their life and then they get a medical bill that they can't pay. And suddenly their life starts to spiral out of control. They're in a car accident, they have a brain injury, they lose their job and they can't get another one, their wife leaves them. their kids suddenly cut off contact, something happens to them. And rather than look either inward, it may be something they did wrong, or look at the systemic issues in our society that certainly for Americans can push a person to bankruptcy because of one medical bill that you can't pay. You know, these are systemic problems that are a real deal of reflection on a society that doesn't function particularly well. But- people want to believe that there's something else going on. They really want someone to blame for what happened to them. And so often when you start looking for somebody to blame, you find Jewish power, you find Bill Gates, you find the Illuminati, you find Big Pharma, you find people who did something to you. And I think there's a very innate sense in a lot of conspiracy believers of powerlessness that they don't matter. that nothing they've done in their life is important. And suddenly when you start believing conspiracy theories, you feel more important. You feel like you've cracked something open. You feel like you've discovered the reasons why things are happening. And if you are really good at it, if you are prolific and you become kind of a well-known person in that world, you start to feel like you have powerful enemies. And those enemies want to crush you because you are exposing their evil plans. You know, it's the difference between you're walking down the street and an air conditioner falls on your head and crushes you. You don't want to believe that that was just bad luck and if you'd taken one step further or were one step behind, it wouldn't have hit you. You want to believe somebody pushed it. You want to believe somebody wanted to take you out because you were a problem. And conspiracy theory thinking really revolves around that sense of powerlessness and grievance and anger. So it really can be just one thing that goes wrong in your life and opens you up to believing that there are global forces at play who are trying to keep you down. Zaza: That's actually kind of sad. Mike Rothschild: Oh, it's incredibly sad. I have a lot of pity for a lot of conspiracy believers. I feel real sympathy for a lot of them. Not the ones who kill people or storm the Capitol, and certainly not the gurus, the promoters of these theories who are making enormous amounts of money. But there is something very, very deeply affecting and sad in people who have turned to these movements. for comfort and lost so much else in their life because they just couldn't stop. Zaza: Yeah, I just thought it was maybe more of a like a general political sense of being despondent or feeling powerless, like like you said, but it makes sense that there's some personal trauma mixed in there. It makes a lot of sense. Yet it makes it quite sad and tragic. I'm certainly not a psychologist, but it seems to me that, you know, one of the appeals at the heart of every conspiracy theory is that mechanism that kind of simplifies this overwhelming complexity of the world and turns it into a black and white kind of morality tale and places the believer with the good guys. And it becomes kind of like, you know, we're the fellowship of the ring fighting the evil forces of Mordor, you know. Mike Rothschild: Yeah, no, it's a lot of what what is so appealing about QAnon is we're the digital soldiers we're fighting back we're Zaza: Right. Mike Rothschild: we're all in this together where we go when we go all it's a sense of brotherhood and community it's totally Zaza: In the previous episode, I hosted Professor Augustin Fuentes on the pod. He's an anthropologist from Princeton who wrote a book about why we believe what we believe. It was a really interesting conversation. He explained that our beliefs, in fact, do become our reality in more ways than one. And not only that, our beliefs determine how our brain and our bodies behave in the world, actually. So how do you think? we can reach someone whose reality is little gray man and the illuminati, you know, a reality that is so far removed from our own reality. Mike Rothschild: It's very difficult. It's and in fact, it can be almost impossible if that person is so committed to this reality that that they don't want to leave. They they have found something that explains the world and explains the way things are and why. Why why we're living like this? You know, why so many people struggling so much? Well, it's not these these social socio economic forces. It's not the sort of American inequality that's sort of baked into our system. It's the Illuminati, it's the Jews, it's Bill Gates. It is, and these theories are incredibly complicated, but they are also very simple. And the appeal of the simplicity is what keeps a lot of people in it. If you're in that conspiracy movement, it's almost like you don't have to engage with the outside world. And it's scary and hard, and that's what keeps a lot of people in it. And unless somebody sees that, unless somebody kind of realizes that this movement is not valid, it's not true, it's just keeping them away from actual people who care about them. As long as they want to be in it, it's almost impossible to get somebody out. They have to want to leave, they have to want to see the cracks in it and want to do something about it. And you can't make someone do that, unfortunately. Zaza: Since you mentioned them a couple of times, I have to ask you about Bill Gates. Mike Rothschild: Mm. Zaza: I'm originally from the Balkans, from Slovenia, and the whole Bill Gates saga exploded during Corona. You know, Mike Rothschild: Sure. Zaza: the whole 5G's and microchips, Mike Rothschild: Sure. Zaza: Bill Gates is inserting microchips with the vaccines and all that stuff. You could see it on Facebook with particularly the older generation, they had it everywhere, pasted all over Facebook. It was quite incredible to see. How did that begin, this whole Bill Gates business? Mike Rothschild: Well, the Bill Gates stuff has really been going on for quite a while. Zaza: Okay. Mike Rothschild: You know, when he started to get more into philanthropy, when he started supporting things like vaccinations, really was the big one. And I can't remember what year, but it was at least 10 years ago, there was some quote from Gates about reducing births in the developing world by introducing vaccines, because there's a lot of research that says, of families that lose a child will have more children. So a family that maybe loses a child will have two or three more. And what Gates wanted to do was basically prevent that first loss from happening. So what he was talking about was reducing overpopulation. And this quote got twisted around to people believing that he was going to reduce the population through vaccines. So you've got all these other theories, you know, he's trying to... blot out the sun, he's trying to buy up all the farmland. If you can blame something on Bill Gates, somebody will do it. And when COVID hit, it was absolutely a natural reaction of people who were suddenly thrown out of whack by this disease that we really didn't know what it was, our understanding of it was changing by the day. And a lot of people were confused. The first weeks it was like, oh, you gotta wipe your groceries down, you gotta wipe your door handles down. masks don't work. Then it was like, no, you don't have to wipe your groceries down. Masks do work. And when that happens, people stick to the first thing they heard and go, oh, they're changing. Why are they lying to us? Were they lying then or were they lying now? And that's a very fertile environment for conspiracy theories. So very early on in lockdown, I started seeing all of these theories about where this came from, who was doing this to us, what they really wanted. And that's going to happen when you have people who are suddenly cut off from their communities and their jobs, bored, have a lot of time on their hands and don't have much to do other than just go down rabbit holes on the internet. And then one of the first things they were finding was Gates. And then when you find Gates, you find all this other stuff. Zaza: I've seen a YouTube video recently of a reporter visiting the Flat Earth convention somewhere in the States. While there he interviews people who are believing in different things and as he grills them just slightly, just pushing very slightly about who's behind the many layers of different conspiracies, they always end up admitting that behind all of these very contorted storylines about Flat Earth and Inside Earth and aliens and reptilians, Like you said, it's always the Jews in Mike Rothschild: Mm-hmm. Zaza: some form. It's always Mike Rothschild: Yeah. Zaza: a Jewish cabal Mike Rothschild: Yeah. Zaza: running things. Do all of these underlying threads that people have apparently picked up on essentially just run back to the protocols of the elders of Zion? I believe you mentioned them already, which was an infamous, of course, fabricated document, a hoax describing the supposed plan for the Jewish domination of the world. Is that it? Mike Rothschild: That's really it. In a very simple term. Yeah, Zaza: Right. Mike Rothschild: it's, you know, it really, when you need somebody to be running a world domination plot, it's going to be the Jews, because they've been accused of it so many times before. There's a reason why the protocols of the elders of Zion took off in the way that it did. The reason why it became enormously popular in countries that don't even really have a Jewish population. The protocols were hugely popular in places like Japan. South America, you know, places that there is really no Jewish footprint, because you want to believe that you have found the answers to all of the world's problems. And so it is just, it's almost a reflex to blame wealthy, powerful Jews. And that you have all of these authors and all of these, you know, we'd call them content creators now who have made careers out of just blaming the Jews for things. So when you have a vast conspiracy to mislead people about what the earth looks like, well, What do you need to run a vast conspiracy? Well, you need a lot of money. Who has a lot of money? Oh, the Jews. So it's really, you know, you don't want to over complicate it. It's just, it's the simple, it's the most simple explanation. And it's the one that people are the most used to hearing. And it doesn't take a lot of convincing for some people that, you know, the Jews, whoever they happen to be, are running things. I mean, nevermind that all of these horrible things have happened to the Jews. powerful Jewish cabal runs the world. Why do so many powerful things happen? How many? Why do so many terrible things happen to the Jews? And of course, they make up excuses. Well, they're not really Jews. They're fake Jews. They don't have anything in common with, you know, real salt of the earth Jews. We don't hate all of the Jews, just these rich ones, who are this family, this family, this family, this family, and this family. And, you know, you find a lot of anti semitic rhetoric. where people are just twisting themselves into knots to prove, oh, it's not antisemitic, except it is. Zaza: It's slightly worrying that maybe I remember it wrong with sort of a nostalgic patina. But when I was growing up, if you said stuff like that publicly, you were immediately ostracized. You know, you're an outcast. So people weren't saying that stuff openly like they do now, maybe because of the Internet. But it seems like now if you say something anti-Semitic or crazy like that, you can find an audience somewhere, which is slightly worrying. Or was it always there? And yeah, and I'm just remembering it with sort of rosy tinted glasses. What do you think? Mike Rothschild: You know, it's always been there, but it's, but I think you are right in that there is a level of acceptability of anti semitism now that there really wasn't even maybe 10 or 15 years ago, you when you had how you know well known figures who were making anti semitic statements, they would fall back on well it's not all the Jews, I wasn't talking about Jews, I was talking about the European bankers, I was talking about the globalists. you had that veneer of excuse that people could fall back on. And now I think you do have a lot of, you know, conspiracy influencers and especially like younger fascists who will say, you know, we got to get rid of all the Jews. It's all of them. They're all a plague. They've all got to go. So what was something that would get you ostracized, unless you set it in a more publicly acceptable way, I mean, anti-Semitism has always been acceptable, but it wasn't always as, outwardly expressed. Your anti-Semitism was, you know, you would hire a Jewish person. You didn't allow Jews to live in your neighborhood. It was kind of a very acceptable kind of anti-Semitism. And now it's like, you know, passing out Nazi flyers. It's, it's, and you always had people doing that too. But now it's, it's much more, it's just much more mainstream. And it's become okay, for some reason. Zaza: Most of the well-known conspiracy theories are decidedly on the extreme right-wing spectrum. As a lefty, I sometimes feel left out a little bit, you know? Are there any quote-unquote far leftist conspiracy theories out there? Mike Rothschild: sure. You know, Zaza: Really? Mike Rothschild: every Oh, yeah, every, you saw a lot of it with Trump, you know, a lot of people who were just absolutely convinced that Trump has been a Russian intelligence asset for the last 30 years. And I mean, look, I'm certainly no fan of Trump. And I think he probably has a lot of links to some really dirty money. But that doesn't mean he's like, getting his orders from Moscow, that those two things don't have to go together necessarily. And you find conspiracy theories can appeal to anybody. And I think that's one of the things I've really focused on in my work is everybody's susceptible to something. Everybody will believe something unevidenced and that dovetails with the beliefs that they already have, as long as it's the right thing and it hits them at the right time. We saw this during COVID, so many progressives went down the QAnon rabbit hole, not because they loved Trump. A lot of it was because they hated Hillary. But a lot of it was also distrust of medicine, distrust of big pharma, distrust of doctors. You saw spaces which were normally seen as progressive, holistic health, wellness, yoga, those kinds of spaces were getting absolutely pulled into conspiracy theories that there was a giant pedophile ring running the country and that they created COVID. It just hit them in a different way. It wasn't so Trump-centered. So yeah, the far left is absolutely susceptible to conspiracy theories. You didn't see far leftists mostly storming the Capitol and committing murders and spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric, but it definitely happens. And a lot of the earliest socialists, people who we would think of as far left, were rapidly anti-Semitic. The founder of anarchism wrote in his diary in the 1840s that he thought Jews should be exterminated. It definitely, it is something that anybody can get pulled in by. And I think the moment you think you're not susceptible to it is probably the moment you are the most susceptible. Zaza: Right, right. To be fair, a couple of I mean, some real conspiracies do exist out there Mike Rothschild: Sure. Zaza: throughout history, Mike Rothschild: Oh Zaza: although Mike Rothschild: sure. Zaza: they're usually pretty underwhelming compared to what we're talking Mike Rothschild: Hehe. Zaza: about today. Not enough reptilians, reptoids, excuse me, in there, Mike Rothschild: Hahaha Zaza: like mass surveillance or the government lying about weapons of mass destruction. Mike Rothschild: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Zaza: MK Ultra as well Mike Rothschild: Sure. Zaza: as probably the most infamous one. How do we know when we're being just, you know, really alert citizens and when we are entering? sort of a conspiratorial rep. Mike Rothschild: Yeah, it's a good question. And I get a lot of believers who are like, Oh, you don't think conspiracies exist. You just trust what the media and the banks tell you? No. You know, I try to think for myself as much as I possibly can, you know, and conspiracies are real. They're, you know, just any group of powerful people who are plotting to do something that will advance their own aims. I mean, you look at everything from the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was a conspiracy. The cigarette companies conspire to hide the harmful effects of tobacco. All those things are real. I think it, to me, is when you start looking for problems that require magical things to be happening and that focus on certain ethnic groups and certain religions. So if your distrust of government is really focused on Jewish power or revolves around kind of secret agencies lying to you about everything and doing so in ways that really would very quickly be discovered, you're probably in the realm of conspiracy theory. You know, if you look at something like 9-11, you know, the idea that 9-11 was this controlled demolition. Well, I understood why people got so pulled into 9-11 conspiracy theories. It was this thing that wasn't supposed to happen and it was this hugely traumatic event. But rather than focusing on kind of the... abuses of personal liberty that happened because of 9-11. I'm certainly focusing on the attacks on the Islamic community. Yet people are like, well, it was, they blew it up. It was a controlled demolition. And you think to yourself, well, okay, if the Twin Towers were full of explosives, who planted them? Who put them there? When were they planted there? Who decided to plant them? How was it done? And you start to realize that if there were if the World Trade Center was full of explosives, that's not a secret that would be kept for very long. People like to brag, and if somebody was telling their buddies at the bar, yeah, I wired up the World Trade Center with plastic explosives, somebody's gonna figure it out pretty quickly. And so to think that something like that happened, you really do need to be in the conspiracy theory realm rather than the reality realm. Zaza: Yeah, I mean, I think what gets me the most is that the reality is at least at least it's how I experience it is so messy, you know, every time I leave my apartment, I'm like, did I leave the stove on even though I checked 10 times before I left that I, you know, that I left it off. And these conspiracy theories, they require such a degree of synchronicity, everything has to align just perfectly out there for this to work. You know, everybody has to be quiet and it just seems quite impossible. It seems like people are not leaving, living in the same world that I'm living in. Like so many things can go wrong and we're messy and we forget stuff and, you know, we get drunk. But in all of these conspiracies, everything just aligns just just perfectly and stuff. I'm like, are you guys not? Mike Rothschild: Yeah, and nobody figures Zaza: Yeah, Mike Rothschild: it out. Zaza: nobody figures it out. It's pretty fascinating. Anyway, yeah, time is on us. The title of this podcast is You are Trash, so I have to ask you something trashy at the end. You also wrote a book called The World's Worst Conspiracies. What's the wackiest, silliest conspiracy theory you've ever heard of? Mike Rothschild: Oh, that's a good Zaza: What's Mike Rothschild: one. You Zaza: your Mike Rothschild: know, Zaza: personal Mike Rothschild: so, Zaza: favorite? Mike Rothschild: so many of these are like, totally bizarre. I think my favorite, my favorite conspiracy theory, because I think it shows kind of exactly what the forces are, that are that are conspiring against this is the one about the mattress stores. So Zaza: What? Sorry? Mike Rothschild: mattress stores like Zaza: A Mike Rothschild: the Zaza: mattress stores. Mike Rothschild: mattress, Zaza: All right. Mike Rothschild: like, you know, like Zaza: Yeah. Yeah. Mike Rothschild: what you Zaza: Of Mike Rothschild: sleep Zaza: course. Mike Rothschild: on. If you I don't know if it's like this in Europe, but If you go to any major American city, you're going to find a street corner where there are mattress stores on every corner Zaza: Yeah, we have the same. Mike Rothschild: okay, and they're huge and no one's ever in them and They if you go to one, you know, there's gonna be like five salesmen there there's nothing there's like it's all just empty land basically Zaza: same Mike Rothschild: and Zaza: here. Mike Rothschild: and There's been these conspiracy theories about like why are there so many mattress stores? And people think, oh, it's tax evasion, it's drug money, it's like money laundering. Well, what it really was is that the company mattress firm bought up all of these other mattress chains, but kept their names on them. So if you went to sit and sleep and you didn't like the deal you were getting at sit and sleep, you'd say, screw you. And you go across the street to mattress firm, mattress firm selling the same mattresses to sit and sleep. And the thing is, is that mattresses, everybody needs a mattress and they are marked up. so much. And they're so fairly inexpensive to make that one of these stores really only needed to sell like two mattresses a week to stay afloat. So what you had was this kind of overbuying of this industry, gouging people in the name of fake competition. So it's an actual conspiracy, but it's buried in a conspiracy theory. Now, of course, mattress firm massively overbought a bunch of their stores had to close. And I think the parent company of mattress room actually just got bought by somebody else. So what you had is kind of a lesson in how ridiculously unnecessary so many conspiracy theories actually are. Just look for how a big company can make the most money possible. And that's your conspiracy right there. Zaza: The worst or should I say the best conspiracy theory I've ever heard was that JFK actually shot himself. Mike Rothschild: I've heard that too. Yeah. Zaza: The dude just had enough and he was Mike Rothschild: He Zaza: like, yeah, that's Mike Rothschild: that Zaza: it. Mike Rothschild: he accidentally grabbed a Secret Service assault rifle and shot himself. I mean, it's I mean, if you go to Kennedy, I mean, I read somewhere that there's something like 70 different theories about who fired the shot that killed him. And if and if you think like, well, there weren't 70 different people firing at Kennedy in Dallas. So you think well, if if all of them aren't real, what makes any one of them more compelling than another one? And you just, what you actually do is you just go back to the explanation that makes the most sense, which that it was Oswald. Zaza: Another one that I heard back home in Slovenia, I was talking to a gentleman who was really deep into all of this stuff. And he was talking about the Second World War. And he said that Adolf Hitler made a deal with with aliens about acquiring some sort of technology from them Mike Rothschild: Oh yeah, I've Zaza: to Mike Rothschild: heard Zaza: win Mike Rothschild: that Zaza: the Mike Rothschild: one Zaza: war. Mike Rothschild: too. Yeah. Zaza: And the deal was that he had to sacrifice a thousand pure Aryans to them in order to get this technology. But then, you know, he kind of felt bad when the deal was approaching and he switched the thousand Aryans with the thousand Romani, he called them gypsies. But the aliens figured that out. So you know, they withheld the technology and that's how he proceeded to lose the war in Mike Rothschild: Yeah, Zaza: the end. Mike Rothschild: well, you know, I've also heard that Hitler and Churchill made a deal to allow the British to evacuate their troops from Dunkirk. I've read conspiracy theories that Hitler was secretly Jewish, that he was secretly the grandson of a Rothschild Baron. You know, people will go to the most absurd lengths to talk themselves into these things that are just not even necessary. and not at all supported by any kind of historical evidence. I think it's just because it makes things more interesting. Zaza: Speaking of the Rothschilds, you are writing a book with a very interesting title right now. What is it about and when does it come out? Mike Rothschild: So it's called Jewish Space Lasers, the Rothschilds and 200 years of conspiracy theories. I'm not related to the Rothschild family. If I were, I wouldn't be doing podcasts. I wouldn't be talking about any of this because they don't, I reached out to a number of them. And basically they're like, we're not interested. We don't talk about these things. And it's not because they have anything to hide. There's just no reason for them to talk about it. It's about how the Rothschild conspiracy theory industry has fueled the last couple of hundred years of anti-Semitism, of hoaxes, of how culture depicts Jews, Jewish money, Jewish power, and how all of those things have been replicated in a much faster way for George Soros. So it's coming out September 19th. You can pre-order it now. And I think people are going to really get something out of it. I think it really is going to go a long way, sort of explaining... the relationship that most people have with depictions of Jewish wealth and of conspiracy theories. Zaza: Sorry, where does the title come from? Because it's a fantastic story. Mike Rothschild: Oh, Zaza: The Mike Rothschild: sure. Zaza: space lasers. Mike Rothschild: So, sir. So, so the Marjorie Taylor Green is this American congresswoman, who is a hardcore conspiracy theorist. And in she was elected in 2020. And in 2018, before she had any any for anybody knew who she was, she wrote this Facebook post about how a space laser controlled by California Power Company had started this huge forest fire. And she knew that because one of the people who was on the board of directors of the California Power Company was also a banker for Rothschild Inc. So here is the Rothschild family being connected to this forest fire using a, you know, space beam weapon. And the, the term Jewish space laser came out of that. And people were like, oh, Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks a Jewish space laser started the 2018 California forest fire. And I felt like it was a term that people would understand and would tell you what the tone of this book is. I mean, it's very serious, but it's also really leaning into how bizarre and absurd a lot of this stuff is. Zaza: Fantastic. Probably people can get your books on Amazon everywhere, Mike Rothschild: Yes, Zaza: like Mike Rothschild: Amazon, Zaza: in all decent bookshops everywhere, Mike Rothschild: yeah, bookshop.org, Zaza: should we say. Mike Rothschild: your local bookstore. Yeah, it's available in hardcover and Kindle. Yeah, pre-orders are super important. So if you're interested at all, go ahead and order it. That would be terrific. Zaza: Right. And where can people find you? Do you have any social media? Mike Rothschild: I do, I'm still on Twitter, still fighting the good fight on Twitter for now. I'm at RothschildMD. Zaza: I saw that on Twitter you have written no relation Mike Rothschild: Yeah, Zaza: in parenthesis. Mike Rothschild: it's also on the cover of the book. Zaza: OK, Mike Rothschild: Just, Zaza: did you Mike Rothschild: you Zaza: have Mike Rothschild: know, Zaza: to Mike Rothschild: I Zaza: do Mike Rothschild: don't Zaza: that Mike Rothschild: want any, Zaza: or is that like a joke? Mike Rothschild: no, I'm not related, but I don't want, Zaza: Right. Mike Rothschild: I've had so many people say Zaza: Yes. Mike Rothschild: to me, oh, a Rothschild debunking conspiracy, ha ha ha. So I wanted to make it very clear from the beginning that I have no link to the famous family. We're not, I mean, and I looked, I've got a family genealogy that I use for the book. We're not, you know, we're not even from the same part of Germany. So just to make it clear, no misleading anybody, but people will think so. Zaza: Mr. Rostschild, thank you so much. This was Mike Rothschild: Thank Zaza: absolutely Mike Rothschild: you. Zaza: amazing. Thank Mike Rothschild: Now, thank Zaza: you. Mike Rothschild: you. Thanks.