#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies

0:00:06 The following is a conversation with Rick Spence, a historian specializing in the history of
0:00:13 intelligence agencies, espionage, secret societies, conspiracies, the occult and military history.
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0:01:36 miss Austin. I miss Texas. I miss Boston. Walking the halls of MIT, released the university I
0:01:43 intimately know now, and there’s something about a university where you can shut off all the mess
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0:03:16 there is a San Francisco bubble. Yes, there’s a bit of a tunnel vision going on in many ways.
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0:03:29 I don’t know. That’s a truly inspiring desire. But of course, sort of from my perspective,
0:03:36 I share in that desire, but there’s a great cost to it as well. And it’s something that
0:03:42 is a constant tension in my heart. I would like to do more building than talking. And I’m reminded
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0:05:09 to understand what’s going on inside. And there is just wonderful breakthroughs in that field.
0:05:17 But whenever I’m reading the papers, I can’t help but be caught by the thought that I wish we had
0:05:26 this kind of rigor or the possibility of rigor in studying the human mind. Sort of neurobiology,
0:05:30 neuroscience is too messy. There’s too many variables. There’s too much going on and you
0:05:37 can’t do control experiments like you can on neural networks. So anyway, the human mind is a
0:05:42 beautiful and mysterious thing. And if you want to untangle the puzzles going on in there, check out
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0:08:59 And now, dear friends, here’s Rick Spence.
0:09:09 You have written and lectured about serial killers, secret societies,
0:09:15 cults, and intelligence agencies. So we can basically begin at any of these fascinating
0:09:20 topics. But let’s begin with intelligence agencies, which has been the most powerful
0:09:26 intelligence agency in history? The most powerful intelligence agency in history.
0:09:33 I mean, it’s an interesting question. I’d say probably in terms of historical
0:09:42 longevity and consistency of performance, that the Russian intelligence services,
0:09:46 notice I didn’t say the KGB specifically, but the Russian intelligence services going back
0:09:54 to the Tsarist period, are consistently pretty good. Not infallible. None of them are.
0:10:02 Of course, there’s a common Western way of looking at anything Russian. Very often,
0:10:06 I think it’s still the case, Russians are viewed in one or two ways. Either they are
0:10:13 bumbling idiots, or they are diabolically clever. No sort of middle ground. And you can
0:10:18 find both of those examples in this. So what I mean by that is that if you’re looking at
0:10:25 the modern SVR or FSB, which are just two different organizations that used to be part of the one
0:10:34 big KGB or its predecessors, the Cheka, you’re really going back to the late 19th century and
0:10:43 the Imperial Russian intelligence security service, generally known as the Ocrana or Ocranka.
0:10:50 It’s really the Department of Police, the special corps of gendarmes. Their primary job was protecting
0:10:58 the imperial regime and protecting it against imperial or other interior enemies, revolutionaries
0:11:04 for the most part. And they got very, very good at that by co-opting people within those movements,
0:11:11 infiltrating and recruiting informers, agent provocateurs. In fact, they excelled at the
0:11:16 agent provocateur. Person you place aside in an organization to cause trouble,
0:11:25 usually maneuver them into a position of leadership. And they provoke actions that can then allow you
0:11:32 to crack down on them. That is to sort of lure or bring the target organization into any legal
0:11:37 or open status that it can be more effectively suppressed. They were very good at that.
0:11:44 So good that by the early 20th century and the years preceding the Russian revolution in 1917,
0:11:50 they had effectively infiltrated every radical party, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs,
0:11:56 great and small, and placed people in positions of influence and leadership.
0:12:05 To the point that arguably, that is, you can debate this, and I think in the whole, they could
0:12:13 largely dictate what those parties did. Nothing was discussed at any Central Committee meeting
0:12:19 of any revolutionary group that the Akrona wasn’t immediately aware of. And they often had people
0:12:25 in positions to influence what those decisions were. Of course, that raises an interesting
0:12:30 question is that if they were that good and they had infiltrated and effectively controlled most
0:12:36 of the opposition, then how did the regime get overthrown by revolutionaries? The answer to
0:12:42 that is that it wasn’t overthrown by revolutionaries. It was overthrown by politicians.
0:12:48 That would then take us into a detour into Russian history. But I’ll just leave it with this. If you
0:12:54 look at 1917, and you look closely, this is one of the things that I’d always tell my students,
0:12:59 is that there are two Russian revolutions in 1917. There’s the first one in March or February,
0:13:06 depending on your calendar, that overthrows Nicholas II. Revolutionaries are really not
0:13:10 involved with that. Bolsheviks are nowhere to be seen. Trotsky and Lenin are nowhere to be seen.
0:13:15 They have nothing to do with that. That has to do effectively with a political conspiracy within
0:13:22 the Russian parliament, the Duma, to unseat an emperor they thought was, you know, bungling the
0:13:28 war and was essentially a loser to begin with. And it was a coup d’etat, a parliamentary coup d’etat.
0:13:37 The temporary or provisional government that that revolution put in power was the one overthrown
0:13:44 by Lenin eight months later. And that government was essentially one dominated by
0:13:49 moderate socialists. It was a government that very quickly sort of turned to the left.
0:13:56 You know, the guy we associate with that is Alexander Kerensky. Alexander Kerensky was a
0:14:02 Russian socialist, a politician. He was the quasi-dictator of that regime. He’s the person,
0:14:11 not the Tsar, who’s overthrown by Lenin. So the revolutionaries, they did not prove to be the
0:14:17 fatal threat to the Tsarist regime. It was the Tsarist political system itself that did that.
0:14:24 What then transpired was that the Ocrana and its method and many of its agents then immediately
0:14:29 segued over into the new Soviet security service. So one of the first things that Lenin did in
0:14:38 December of 1917, within a month of seizing power, since the hold on power was tenuous at best,
0:14:43 was that, well, you’re going to need some kind of organization to infiltrate and suppress those
0:14:47 pesky counter-revolutionaries and foreign imperialists and all of the other enemies that we have.
0:14:53 And so the extraordinary commission to combat counter-revolution and sabotage
0:14:59 the Checa was formed. You put a veteran Bolshevik, Felix Dzerzhinsky,
0:15:06 at the head of that, someone you could politically rely upon. But Dzerzhinsky built his organization
0:15:10 essentially out of the Ocrana. I mean, there were all of these informers sitting around with
0:15:20 nothing to do, and they were employed. In the early 20s, the kind of rank and file of the Checa
0:15:27 might have been 80 to 90 percent former imperial officials. Those were gradually decreased over
0:15:31 time. So why were they doing it? Well, they were professionals. They also needed to eat,
0:15:38 and things were somewhat precarious. So if your job is to be an agent provocateur,
0:15:42 if your job is to infiltrate targeted organizations and lead them astray,
0:15:48 you do that for whoever pays you. That’s part of the professionalism which goes in.
0:15:54 And under the Soviets, the Soviet intelligence services are also very good at that. They are
0:16:00 very good at infiltrating people into opposing organizations. And I guess the one example I
0:16:08 would give to demonstrate that are the Cambridge Five, the British traders,
0:16:16 Soviet standpoint, heroes who were recruited, most notably, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald
0:16:24 McClain, Anthony Blunt. And there may have been well more than five, but I wasn’t bad out of just
0:16:30 Cambridge. And then placing those people in high positions, the ultimate goal, of course,
0:16:35 is to get your people into positions of leadership and influence in the opposing
0:16:42 intelligence service. And so they did. Of course, it all fell apart, and they ended up in, you know,
0:16:46 Philby ended up living the last part of his life in exile in Moscow, but
0:16:54 they got their money’s worth out of him. And you can also find this in KGB infiltration,
0:17:03 the CIA, the FBI, the Aldrich Ames, Hanson cases. Of course, we were infiltrating by we,
0:17:06 I mean, the Americans in the West, managed to infiltrate our moles as well.
0:17:11 But if it came down, you know, someone could dispute this, but I would think if you were
0:17:20 going to come down to kind of like a who had the most moles Super Bowl, probably the Soviets would
0:17:26 come somewhat ahead of that. So the scale of the infiltration, the number of people,
0:17:37 and the skill of it, is there a case to be made that the Acrona and the Chaka orchestrated
0:17:40 both the components of the Russian Revolution, as you described them?
0:17:45 Well, there’s an interesting question for me. I mean, there are all kinds of questions about
0:17:50 this. I mean, one of the questions is whether or not Lenin was an Ocarina agent. Okay, I’ve just
0:17:56 said heresy. Some people, I’ll do that quite often, because I am a heretic
0:18:04 and proud of it. Great. Why would you possibly say that Lenin could have been an Ocarina agent?
0:18:11 Well, let’s look what he managed to do. So you had, coming into the 20th century, a
0:18:21 single, well, nominally, a single Marxist movement, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.
0:18:31 And Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, majorityites and minorityites, are merely factions of that party,
0:18:37 and they always agreed that they were all Marxists, and we all believe in dialectical
0:18:44 materialism and the rise of, we’re all socialists, Comrade. The difference was the tactical means
0:18:52 by which one would attain this. And what Lenin wanted was a militant, small-scale vanguard party,
0:18:59 wanted a revolution, wanted to seize power, seize control of the state, and once you have the state,
0:19:08 then you induce socialism from above. Whereas the majority of the people, the so-called Mensheviks,
0:19:15 the minorityites, who are oddly enough the vast majority of the party, that’s one of the first
0:19:22 things, how do you lose that argument? Okay, how does the minority get to grab the name majorityites,
0:19:31 but Lenin did that. So what Lenin wanted was a conspiratorial party of committed revolutionaries
0:19:36 that would plot and scheme and undermine and eventually seize control of the state and induce
0:19:42 socialism from above. There were other Russian Marxists who thought that that sounded vaguely
0:19:49 totalitarian and not really democratic and not even terribly socialist, and they opposed that
0:19:59 ineffectively from the beginning outmaneuvered every step of the way. The Mensheviks are a case
0:20:05 study in failure of a political organization. That too will be heresy to some people, but look,
0:20:13 they lost. Now, so what Lenin managed to do, starting around 1903, continuing onto this,
0:20:21 is he managed to divide, to take what had been a single Marxist party and split it into angry,
0:20:29 contending factions, because he and his Bolsheviks were on one side advocating a much
0:20:36 more militant conspiratorial policy. The discombobulated Mensheviks were over on the other,
0:20:40 and in between were a lot of people who really didn’t know where they stood on this. I mean,
0:20:45 sometimes they kind of agreed, and he seems to making sense today. No, no, I don’t think he’s
0:20:51 making sense in that day. But he managed to completely disunify this organization. Now,
0:20:58 who could possibly have seen benefit in that? The Ograna. Now, whether or not they put him
0:21:05 up to it, whether or not in some way they helped move him into a position of leadership or encouraged
0:21:11 it or encouraged it through people around him, whether he was a witting or unwitting agent
0:21:17 of the Tsarist secret police, he certainly accomplished exactly what it was that they
0:21:26 had wanted. And I find that suspicious is one of those things that it’s so convenient in a way
0:21:36 is that I’m not necessarily sure that was an accident. There’s also this whole question to me
0:21:43 as to what was going on within the Ograna itself. Now, this is one of these questions when I come
0:21:52 to you later about how intelligence agencies interact or serve the governments to which they
0:21:58 are theoretically subordinate. They do tend to acquire a great deal of influence and power.
0:22:05 After all, their main job is to collect information. And that information could be about all kinds of
0:22:11 things, including people within the government structure itself. And they also know how to
0:22:16 leverage that information in a way to get people to do what you want them to do.
0:22:24 So an argument can be made, again, an argument, not a fact, merely an opinion, which is mostly
0:22:32 what history is made out of, opinions, is that at some point between about 1900 and 1917,
0:22:38 people within the Ograna were playing their own game. And that game took them in a direction
0:22:44 which meant that continued loyalty to the emperor, specifically to Nicholas II,
0:22:54 was no longer part of that. To me, in a way, it seems almost during the events of 1917 that,
0:22:58 one, you had an organization that was very effective when it did that suddenly just
0:23:04 becomes ineffective. It doesn’t really disappear. These things don’t go away because it will
0:23:12 reappear as the Ochocha basically fairly quickly. But it raises the question to me as to what degree
0:23:20 there were people within the organization who allowed events to take the course they wished.
0:23:29 I always wonder how much deliberate planning there is within an organization like Ograna,
0:23:33 or if there’s kind of a distributed intelligence that happens.
0:23:37 Well, one of the key elements in any kind of intelligence, organization,
0:23:45 or operation is compartmentalization, need to know. So rarely do you have an occasion where
0:23:49 everybody, everybody in an executive position are all brought into a big corporate meeting,
0:23:54 and we discuss all of the secret operations that are going on. No, no, you never do that.
0:24:03 Only a very limited number of people should know about that. If you have a person who is a case
0:24:06 officer who is controlling agents, he’s the only one who should know who these people are,
0:24:12 possibly his immediate superiors. But no way do you want that to be common knowledge.
0:24:20 So information within the organization itself is compartmentalized. So you don’t need
0:24:26 everybody to be in on it. You don’t even need necessarily the people who are nominally at the
0:24:32 top. First is the Ograna, the real boss of the Ograna was the Imperial Ministry of the Interior.
0:24:36 The Minister of the Interior, in fact, but the Minister of the Interior had no real
0:24:41 effective control over this at all. I mean, to the point was that at one point early on,
0:24:44 they actually organized the assassination of their own boss.
0:24:50 They have their agents among the Revolutionaries kill the Minister of the Interior.
0:24:57 Because he’ll just be replaced by another one. He is an Imperial bureaucrat. He’s not really part of
0:25:04 their organization. It’s like a director of an intelligence agency appointed by the President.
0:25:11 Maybe he’s part of the organization. Maybe he isn’t. Maybe he is not one of us.
0:25:22 So you’ve got different levels, different compartments within it. And who’s actually
0:25:27 running the show? If anyone is, I don’t know. That’s never supposed to be apparent.
0:25:32 Well, that’s a fascinating question. And you can see this with NKVD. It’s obviously
0:25:41 an extremely powerful organization that starts to eat itself, where everybody’s pointing fingers
0:25:48 internally also, as a way to gain more power. So the question is, in organizations like that,
0:25:52 that are so compartmentalized, where’s the power? Where’s the center of power?
0:26:01 Because you would think, given that much power, some individual or a group of individuals will
0:26:06 start accumulating that power. But it seems like that’s not always a trivial thing. Because if
0:26:14 you get too powerful, the snake eats that person. Well, we go back again to the founder of Soviet
0:26:22 secret police, Felix Duzhinsky. Duzhinsky dies in 1926. Heels over after giving a
0:26:30 heated speech to a party meeting. Now, the common view, what you usually read, which is,
0:26:34 was key for the time, is that, you know, clearly Stalin had him whacked, because anytime someone
0:26:42 died, it was almost always that, and I think a lot of times he did. But in some cases,
0:26:50 Stalin’s probably getting blamed for things that he didn’t actually do. Duzhinsky wasn’t even opposed
0:26:54 to Stalin. So it’s not clear why he would. But this was the, you know, Stalin died. You know,
0:26:59 obviously he was poisoned. Something happened. It was an unnatural death. Somebody goes in for an
0:27:06 operation. You know, it gets a little too much anesthesia. Stalin killed them. Somebody tips
0:27:11 over in a canoe in upstate New York. Stalin killed them. There’s actually a case about that.
0:27:20 So that itself can be kind of useful where every time someone dies, they think you killed them.
0:27:26 That’s kind of an interesting method of intimidation in that regard. But the suspicion is nonetheless
0:27:35 there. Duzhinsky had been, he was the grand inquisitor. He was seemingly firmly in control
0:27:41 of the organization. Of course, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was, my guess would be is that if Duzhinsky’s
0:27:48 death was not natural causes, that he was probably eliminated by someone within his own
0:27:56 organization. And then you look at the people who take over. His immediate successor is
0:28:03 Jacheslav Menzhinsky, who’s really kind of not really a secret policeman, more kind of intellectual
0:28:12 dilettante. But if you look behind him, you’ll notice the fellow is Henrique Yagoda. And Yagoda
0:28:19 will really sort of manage things from behind the scenes until Menzhinsky dies in 1934. And then
0:28:29 Yagoda will hold on until he’s a victim of the purges, I think in 37 or 38. Yagoda is ambitious,
0:28:38 murderous. And if I was going to point the finger to anybody who possibly had Duzhinsky whacked,
0:28:42 it would be him. And for the purposes simply of advancement.
0:28:51 The person to look out at any kind of corporate organization is your immediate subordinate,
0:28:56 the person who could move into your job, because more than likely that’s exactly what they’re
0:29:03 planning to do. Yeah, just one step away from the very top. Somebody there will probably accumulate
0:29:09 the most power. You mentioned that the various Russian intelligence agencies were good at
0:29:18 creating agent provocateurs infiltrating the halls of power. What does it take to do that?
0:29:28 Well, there’s an interesting little acronym called mice, M-I-C-E. And it’s generally used. And it’s
0:29:34 just the way in which you would acquire. How do you get people to work for you? Well, M stands for
0:29:41 money. You pay them. People are greedy. They want money. If you look at Aldrich Ames, he had a very,
0:29:51 very expensive wife with expensive tastes. So you wanted money. I is for ideology. So during,
0:29:55 particularly in the 1920s and the 1930s, the Soviets were very effective in exploiting
0:30:03 communists, people who wanted to serve the great cause. Even though that’s initially not
0:30:08 really what they wanted to do, because the idea was that if you recruit agents from among, let’s
0:30:14 say, American communists, you compromise the party. Because exactly what your enemies are going to
0:30:20 say is that all communists are Soviet spies. They’re all traitors in some way. So you would
0:30:26 really want to keep those two things separate. But ideology was just so convenient. And those
0:30:32 people would just work for you so well. You could get them to do anything, betray their grandmother.
0:30:38 They would go ahead and do that for their greater good. So ideology can be a motivation. And that
0:30:46 can be someone who is a devoted Marxist-Leninist. It can also be someone who’s a disgruntled
0:30:54 communist because there’s no anti-communist like an ex-communist. Those who lose the faith
0:31:04 can become very, very useful. For instance, if you look in the case of American intelligence,
0:31:11 the people who essentially temporarily destroyed much of the KGB organization in the US
0:31:19 post-World War II were people like Whitaker Chambers, Lewis Boudin, Elizabeth Bentley.
0:31:25 All of those people had been Communist party members. They had all been part of the Red Faithful.
0:31:33 They all, for one reason or another, became disillusioned and turned rat or patriot,
0:31:40 whichever case you may want to put in that regard. What is the C in the east end for?
0:31:47 The C is for coercion. That’s where you have to persuade someone to work for you. You have to
0:31:53 pressure them. So usually, you blackmail them. You know, that could be they have a gambling habit.
0:31:58 You know, in the old days, it’s very often because they were gay. Okay,
0:32:02 get them in a position where they could be compromised and you can get them to do your
0:32:07 bidding that those people usually have a certain amount of control. Here’s an interesting example
0:32:13 of how the O’Krona tended to handle this. I think it’s still largely used. You’d round up a bunch
0:32:21 of revolutionaries on some charge or another, distributing revolutionary literature, running
0:32:26 any legal printing press. You bring a guy into the room and you say, okay, they’re going to work
0:32:35 for us. Of course, we refuse to do so. And they go, well, if you refuse, we’ll keep the rest of
0:32:38 your comrades in jail for a while, you know, maybe beat them with a rubber truncheon or so.
0:32:43 And then we’re just going to let you go. We’re just going to put you back out on the street.
0:32:50 And if you don’t work for us, we will spread the rumor through our agents already in your
0:32:56 organization that you are. And then what will your comrades do? How long are you going to live?
0:33:00 So you see, you have no choice. You’re ours and you’re going to cooperate with us.
0:33:11 And the way that that effectiveness would be ensured is that you have multiple agents within
0:33:17 the same organization who don’t know who each other are. That’s very important. And they’ll all
0:33:26 be filing reports. So let’s say you have three agents inside the central committee of the SR
0:33:30 party, and there’s a committee meeting, and you’re going to look at the reports that file,
0:33:35 they all better agree with each other, right? If one person doesn’t report what the other two do,
0:33:41 then perhaps they’re not entirely doing their job and they can be liquidated at any time.
0:33:47 All you do is drop the dime on them. And this was done periodically. In fact, in some cases,
0:33:52 you would betray your own agents just to completely discombobulate to the organization.
0:33:59 This happened in one particular case around 1908. The fellow who was the head of the chief
0:34:05 revolutionary terrorist organization, which wasn’t Bolshevik, but the so-called socialist
0:34:11 revolutionaries. They’re actually the biggest revolutionary party, the SRs, who are even actually
0:34:17 Marxists, more anarchists. But they went all in for the propaganda of the deed. They really like
0:34:22 blowing people up and carrying out quite a campaign of terrorism.
0:34:28 The fellow who was the head of that terrorist organization was a fellow by the name of Yevno
0:34:38 Azef. And Yevno Azef was, guess what, an Ocarana agent. Everything he did, every assassination
0:34:47 that he planned, he did in consultation with his control. So he’d kind of run out his string.
0:34:52 There was increasing suspicion of him. He was also asking for a lot more money.
0:34:59 So the Ocarana itself arranged to have him write it out. And what did that do? Well,
0:35:04 what do you do in your party when you find out the chief of your terrorist brigade
0:35:12 was a secret police agent? It’s consternation and mistrust. Nobody in the party would ever trust
0:35:18 them. You couldn’t tell who you were sitting around. I know that a fellow I wrote a biography on,
0:35:24 Boris Sevinkov, who was a Russian revolutionary, and the second in command within the terrorist
0:35:29 organization. By the way, the guy that wanted Azef’s job so bad he could taste it.
0:35:35 Well, on the one level, he expressed absolute horror that his boss was a police agent,
0:35:42 and well, he should because Sevinkov was a police agent too. See, they already had the number two
0:35:48 waiting in the wings to take over. But he was legitimately shot. He didn’t really suspect that.
0:35:53 So it’s a way of manipulating this. And then finally we come to the E.
0:36:05 That I think is the most important ego. Sometimes people spy or betray because of the egotistical
0:36:14 satisfaction that they receive. The sheer kind of Machiavellian joy in deceit.
0:36:21 An example of that would be Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Five. Now, Philby was a communist,
0:36:26 and he would argue that he always saw himself as serving the communist cause. But
0:36:35 he also made this statement. I think it’s in the preface to his autobiography. And he says,
0:36:43 one never looks twice at the offer of service in the elite force. He saw him by his recruitment
0:36:50 by the NKVD in the 1930s, and he was absolutely chuffed by that. The mere fact that they would
0:36:57 want him, what he considered to be a first rate organization would want him, satisfied his ego.
0:37:05 And if I was to take a guess as to whether it was ideological motivation, whether it was the
0:37:09 romance of communism, or whether it was the appeal of ego that was the most important in
0:37:16 his career treason, I’d go with ego. And I think that figures into a lot. People don’t,
0:37:22 someone doesn’t get the promotions that they wanted. Again, if you look at something like
0:37:31 Aldrich Ames’ career in particular, you’ve got these kind of, his career in the CIA was hit or
0:37:39 miss. He didn’t get the postings or promotions that he wanted as a valuation. He never felt
0:37:43 that he got credit for doing that. And that’s the type of thing that tends to stick in someone’s
0:37:50 craw and can lead for egotistical reasons and added incentive to betray.
0:37:53 Yeah, that there’s a boost to the ego when you can deceive,
0:38:02 sort of not play by the rules of the world and just play with powerful people like they’re at
0:38:07 your pawns. You’re the only one that knows this. You’re the only one that knows that the
0:38:14 person who is sitting across from you to which you have sworn your loyalty, you’re simultaneously
0:38:20 betraying. What a rush that must be for some people. I wonder how many people are susceptible
0:38:27 to this. I would like to believe that the people have, a lot of people have the integrity to at
0:38:35 least withstand the MI, the money and the ideology, the pull of that and the ego. It can also be a
0:38:42 combination of the two. I mean, you can create a recipe of these things, a certain amount of money,
0:38:47 ego and a little push of coercion that if you don’t,
0:38:57 will rat you out. You’ll be exposed. What are some differences to you as we look at the
0:39:02 history of the 20th century between the Russian intelligence and the American intelligence in
0:39:08 the CIA? If you look at both the Ocarina and the KGB, one of the things that you find consistent
0:39:17 is that they, a single organization handled foreign intelligence that is spying upon enemy or
0:39:25 hostile governments and also internal security. That’s all part of it. Whereas if you look at the
0:39:32 U.S. models that evolves, you eventually have the FBI, Linda Hoover, quite insist that he’s going
0:39:37 to be the counterintelligence force. If they’re commie spies earning around America, it’s the FBI
0:39:45 who’s supposed to ferret them out. The CIA is not supposed to be involved in that. The Charter,
0:39:53 the basic agreement in 1947, did not give the CIA any, it’s often said they were barred from spying
0:39:58 on Americans, which isn’t quite true. You can always find a way to do that. What they don’t
0:40:03 have is they don’t have any police or judicial powers. They can’t run around in the country
0:40:09 carrying guns to use on people. They can’t arrest you. They can’t interrogate you. They can’t jail
0:40:15 you. They have no police or judicial powers. Now, that means they have to get that from someone else.
0:40:21 That doesn’t mean that other agencies can’t be brought in or local police officials,
0:40:27 corn, whatever you need, you can eventually acquire. But they can’t do that directly.
0:40:32 So, you’ve got this division between foreign intelligence and domestic
0:40:42 counterintelligence, often split between hostile organizations. The relationship between the FBI
0:40:49 and the CIA, I think it’s fair to say, is not chummy. Never has been. There’s always been a
0:40:56 certain amount of rivalry and contention between the two. It’s not to say that something like that
0:41:04 didn’t exist between the domestic counterintelligence and foreign intelligence components of the KGB.
0:41:09 But there would be less of that to a degree because there was a single organization. They’re
0:41:19 all answerable to the same people. So, that gives you a certain greater amount, I think, of leeway
0:41:27 and power because you’re controlling both of those ends. I remember somebody telling me once that,
0:41:36 and he was a retired KGB officer. There you go, retired. One of the things that he found amusing
0:41:43 was that in his role, one of the things that he could be is that he could be anywhere at any time
0:41:51 in any dress, which meant that he could be in or out of uniform and in a place at any time.
0:41:57 He was authorized to do that. So, more freedom, more power. I think one of the things that you
0:42:05 would often have the view is that the Russians are simply naturally meaner. There’s less respect
0:42:16 for human rights. There’s a greater tendency to abuse power that one might have. I mean, frankly,
0:42:22 they’re all pretty good at that. It is fair to say that there’s probably some degree of
0:42:28 cultural differences that are not necessarily for institutional reasons, but cultural reasons.
0:42:37 There could well be things that Americans might bulk it doing more than you would find
0:42:43 on the Russian or Soviet side of the equations. The other aspect of that is that Russian history
0:42:51 is long and contentious and bloody. One of the things that certainly teaches you never trust
0:42:59 foreigners. Every foreign government, anywhere, any country on your border is a real or potential
0:43:05 enemy. They will all, at some point, have given the chance, invade you. Therefore, they must always
0:43:12 be treated with great suspicion. It goes back to something that I think the British observed was
0:43:20 that countries don’t have friends. They have interests, and those interests can change over time.
0:43:24 Well, the CIA is probably equally suspicious of all other nations.
0:43:28 That’s your job. You’re supposed to be suspicious. Your job is not to be trusting.
0:43:34 The basic job of an intelligence agency is to safeguard your secrets and steal the other guys
0:43:40 and then hide those away. Are there laws, either intelligence agencies,
0:43:48 that they’re not willing to break? Is it basically lawless operation to where you can
0:43:55 break any law as long as it accomplishes the task? I think John Le Carré gave his pen name.
0:43:58 I was talking about his early recruitment into British intelligence,
0:44:03 and one of the things he remember being told upfront, well, if you do this, you have to be
0:44:12 willing to lie, and you have to be willing to kill. Now, those are things that in ordinary human
0:44:20 interactions are bad things. Generally, we don’t like it when people lie to us. We expect that people
0:44:27 will act honestly towards us, whether that’s being a businessmen you’re involved with,
0:44:34 your employers. We’re often disappointed in that because people do lie all the time for a variety
0:44:42 of reasons, but honesty is generally considered to be it. But in a realm where deception is a rule,
0:44:51 dishonesty is a virtue. To be good at that, to be able to lie convincingly,
0:45:02 is good. It’s one of the things you need to do. And killing also is generally frowned upon.
0:45:09 You know, put people in prison for that. They’re otherwise executed. But in certain circumstances,
0:45:15 killing is one of those things that you need to be able to do. So what he felt he was being told
0:45:19 in that case is that once you enter this realm, the same sort of moral rules that apply in general
0:45:27 British society do not apply. And if you’re squeamish about it, you won’t fit in. You have
0:45:34 to be able to do those things. I wonder how often those intelligence agencies in the 20th century,
0:45:41 and of course, the natural question extending it to the 21st century, how often they go to the
0:45:47 assassination? How often they go to the kill part of that versus just the espionage?
0:45:57 Let’s take an example from American intelligence from the CIA, 1950s, 1960s into the 1970s, MKUltra.
0:46:06 That is a secret program, which was involved with what is generally categorized as mind control,
0:46:13 which really means messing with people’s heads. And what was the goal of that? Well,
0:46:21 there seem to have been lots of goals, but there was an FBI memo that was, I recently acquired,
0:46:29 quite legally, by the way, it’s declassified, but it’s from 1949. So this is only two years after
0:46:35 the CIA came into existence. And it’s an FBI memo because the FBI, of course, very curious what the
0:46:40 CIA is up to. And the FBI are not part of this meeting, but they have someone in there sort of
0:46:47 spying on what’s going on. So there was a meeting which was held in a private apartment in New York.
0:46:55 So it’s not held in any kind of, you know, it’s essentially never really happened because it’s
0:47:02 in somebody’s house. And there are a couple of guys there from the CIA. One of them is Cleve Baxter.
0:47:10 Cleve Baxter is the great godfather of the lie detector. Pretty much everything that we know
0:47:15 or think we know about lie detectors today, they go to Cleve Baxter. He’s also the same guy that
0:47:21 thought that plants could feel, but which somehow was a derivative of his work on lie detectors.
0:47:27 So these guys are there and they’re giving a talk to some military and other personnel. And
0:47:32 there’s certain parts of the document, which are, of course, redacted, but you could figure out what
0:47:37 it is that they’re talking about. And they’re talking about hypnotic suggestion and all the
0:47:43 wonderful things that you can potentially do with hypnotic suggestion. And two of the things they
0:47:49 note is that one of the things we could potentially do is erase memories from people’s minds and
0:47:55 implant false memories. That would be really keen to do that. Just imagine how that would be done.
0:48:01 So here to me is the interesting point. They’re talking about this in 1949.
0:48:07 MK Ultra does not come along until really 1953, although they’re all sorts of, you know, artichoke
0:48:13 and others. Everything is sort of leading up to that. It’s simply an elaboration of programs
0:48:19 that are already there. I don’t think that it ultimately matters whether you can
0:48:27 implant memories or erase memories. To me, the important part is they thought they could
0:48:34 and they were going to try to do it. And that eventually is what you find out in the
0:48:42 efforts made during the 1950s and 60s through MK Ultra, MK Surge, MK Naomi and all the others that
0:48:49 came out. That’s one of the things they’re working for. And among the few MK Ultra era documents
0:48:54 that survived, there’s that whole question is that can you get someone to put a gun to someone’s
0:49:01 head and pull the trigger and then remember it later? Yeah. You could, interestingly enough.
0:49:08 So non-direct violence, controlling people’s minds, controlling people’s minds at scale
0:49:11 and experimenting with different kinds of ways of doing that.
0:49:15 But one person put it that the basic argument there or the basic thing you’re after was to
0:49:20 understand the architecture of the human mind, how it worked, how it put together,
0:49:24 and then how you could take those pieces apart and assemble them in different ways.
0:49:31 So this comes, this is where hypnosis comes in, which is a
0:49:36 was then still is fairly spooky thing. Nobody’s ever explained to me exactly what it is.
0:49:42 The idea was that could you, you think of the whole possibilities in this case,
0:49:44 could you create an alternate personality
0:49:56 and use that alternate personality in an agent role, but then be able to turn it on and off.
0:50:01 So subsequently the person, which that personality inhabited was
0:50:07 captured and interrogated, tortured, and their fingernails torn out,
0:50:12 they would have no memory of it. They couldn’t give any kind of secret away because it was
0:50:16 embedded in some part of their brain where there was a completely different person.
0:50:24 I mean, you can just imagine the possibilities that you can dream up. And again, it’s not,
0:50:29 I think the question is to whether that is possible or whether it was done.
0:50:35 Well, I suspect that both of those are true, but that you would try to do it. Then imagine the
0:50:41 mischief that comes out of that. And one of the big complaints from a legal standpoint about MK
0:50:47 Alter and the rest is that you were having medical experiments essentially being carried
0:50:51 out on people without their knowledge and against their will, which is a no-no.
0:50:56 Yeah, the fact that you’re willing to do medical experiments says something about
0:51:02 what you’re willing to do. And I’m sure that same spirit, innovative spirit,
0:51:13 persist to this day. And maybe less so, I hope less so in the United States,
0:51:17 but probably in other intelligence agencies in the world.
0:51:23 Well, one thing that was learned and the reason why most MK Alter and similar records were destroyed
0:51:28 on order in the early seventies, around the time the CIA became
0:51:33 under a certain amount of scrutiny. The mid seventies were not a good time for the agency
0:51:37 because you had the church committee breathing down their neck. You had all of these assassins.
0:51:43 People were asking lots of questions. And so you need to dump this stuff because there’s
0:51:50 all kinds of it because you were committing crimes against American citizens. So let’s eradicate
0:51:54 it. And the important lesson to be learned is that never do these type of thing again,
0:52:01 where at least in any way in which the agency’s direct fingerprints are placed on it.
0:52:11 You can pay people. You can subsidize research. You can set up venture capital firms. You’ve got
0:52:16 plenty of money. And you can funnel that money into the hands of people who will carry out this
0:52:22 research privately. So if something goes wrong, you have perfect deniability.
0:52:30 On the topic of mice, on the topic of money, ideology, coercion and ego. Let me ask you about
0:52:38 a conspiracy theory. So there is a conspiracy theory that the CIA is behind Jeffrey Epstein.
0:52:44 At a high level, if we can just talk about that, is that something that’s at all even possible?
0:52:50 That you have, basically this would be for coercion. You get a bunch of powerful people
0:52:57 to be sexually mischievous. And then you collect evidence on them so that you can then have leverage
0:53:06 on them. Well, let’s look at what Epstein was doing. He was a businessman who then also developed a
0:53:13 very lucrative sideline in being a high level procurer, basically in supplying young girls.
0:53:29 And he also filmed much of that activity. I think his partner is Gelaine, and I hope I’m
0:53:34 pronouncing her name correctly. I think it’s Gelaine. I’ve heard it both ways. Gelaine or Gelaine,
0:53:38 whichever it may be. I think her argument at one point was that, well, we did this to protect
0:53:44 ourselves. But this type of thing has been done before. There’s nothing new about this. Getting
0:53:52 influential people in compromising situations and filming them. I could give you another historical
0:54:01 example of that in late 19 to actually early 1930s, just pre-Nazi Berlin. There was a very
0:54:09 prominent sort of would-be psychic and occultist by the name of Eric Jan Honesen. He had a private
0:54:15 yacht. I think it was called the Seven Sins. And he hosted parties. He also had a whole club called
0:54:20 the Palace of the Occult, which hosted parties where things went on. And there were cameras
0:54:28 everywhere. He filmed. Important people. You know, guys like the brown shirt chief of Berlin
0:54:37 in various states of undress and sexual congress. And he did that for the purposes of blackmail.
0:54:53 So in Epstein’s case, he is a procurer of young girls to wealthy men, largely. And many of those
0:55:01 events were recorded. Now, even if it wasn’t his intention to use them for blackmail, think of
0:55:08 what someone else could do it because people know about this. So what you could raise a question is
0:55:16 that it’s not, you know, Epstein is just kind of a greedy pervert. But through his greedy perversion,
0:55:21 he’s now collecting information that could be useful. Who could that be useful to?
0:55:29 Who would like dirt on Prince Andrew? Think of all the people who were there. And these, you
0:55:35 know, they were important people who, you know, went to Lolita Island. So if it isn’t Epstein
0:55:40 directly, he might have been being, I’m not trying to let him off the hook because they have anything
0:55:45 for him. He was either running his own blackmail business or someone was using him as a front
0:55:50 for that. I mean, I think we’re kidding ourselves. We’re trying to pretend that’s not what was going
0:55:58 on. So you think even American intelligence agencies would be willing to swoop in and take
0:56:05 advantage of a situation like that? Well, you know, American politicians could ultimately
0:56:11 end up in a position to oversee things like intelligence budgets. One of them might even
0:56:16 become director. You never know. It can never tell what some crazy president might do.
0:56:22 It could be very, one of the guys who understood the part was J. Edgar Hoover. J. Edgar Hoover
0:56:27 spent a long time collecting dossiers and politicians. How do you think he’d remain
0:56:36 director of the FBI as long as he did? Because he systematically collected dirt on people.
0:56:44 So there is a history of this type of thing. And again, he could argue that’s partly for
0:56:50 his protection to keep his job, to protect the sanctity and security of the Bureau.
0:56:58 You can find a million different ways to justify that. It’s really dark. Well,
0:57:06 there is that side to human nature. Let’s put it that way. Whether it’s the CIA or the Acrona,
0:57:11 maybe that’s what the president of the United States sees when they show up to office is all
0:57:20 the stuff they have on him or her. And say that there’s an internal mechanism of power that you
0:57:25 don’t want to mess with. And so you will listen. Whether that internal mechanism of power is the
0:57:29 military industrial complex or whatever, the bureaucracy of government.
0:57:35 Kind of actually the deep state, the trenched bureaucratic. Well, it’s been said, and I think
0:57:40 it’s generally true, that bureaucratic creatures or like any other creatures, it basically exists
0:57:47 to perpetuate itself and to grow. I mean, nobody wants to go out of business. And of course,
0:57:54 you get all of these things like Pizza Gate and accusations of one for another. But here’s an
0:57:58 interesting thing to consider. Okay. And I want to argue that I’m not saying that Pizza Gate in
0:58:02 any way was real or QAnon had to say that. But where do they get these ideas from?
0:58:07 So let’s ask ourselves, do pedophiles exist?
0:58:16 Yeah. Do organized pedophile organizations exist?
0:58:21 Yeah, they share information, pictures. They’re out there on the dark web.
0:58:34 They cooperate. So does child trafficking exist? Yeah, it does. So in other words,
0:58:42 whether or not specific conspiracy theories about this or that group of organized pedophile
0:58:51 cultists is real, all the ingredients for that to be real are there. Pedophiles exist. Organized
0:59:02 pedophilia exists. Child and human trafficking exists. At some point, at some time, someone
0:59:07 will put all of those together. In fact, certainly, they already have.
0:59:15 We’ll jump around a little bit, but your work is so fascinating, and it covers so many topics. So
0:59:21 let’s see if we jump into the present with the Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberg group.
0:59:28 So the elites, as I think you’ve referred to them. So these gathering of the elites,
0:59:35 can you just talk about them? What is this? Well, first thing I have to point out is that
0:59:43 Bohemian Grove is a place, not an organization. It’s where the Bohemian Club meets. It’s that
0:59:54 2700-acre, old-growth redwood near north of San Francisco. The Bohemian Club began back in the
1:00:03 1870s. Its initial members were mostly journalists. In fact, supposedly, the name itself was a
1:00:07 term for it. An itinerant journalist who moved from paper to paper was called the Bohemian.
1:00:17 And although I think there may be other reasons why that particular term was chosen as well,
1:00:22 but I think the original five members, there were like three journalists. There was a merchant,
1:00:26 and there was a vintner guy owned a vineyard. It’s California, how surprising.
1:00:31 None of them terribly wealthy, but they’ve formed an exclusive men’s club.
1:00:38 Was and still is. Nothing terribly unusual about that at the time. But it became fashionable. And
1:00:42 as it became fashionable, more wealthy people wanted to become part of it. And the thing
1:00:47 about getting rich guys to join your club is what are rich guys have money? And of course,
1:00:54 it’s one of those rich guys that bought Bohemian Grove, where now you build your old boy summer
1:01:01 camp, which is what it is. They got cabins with goofy names. They go there. They perform skits.
1:01:07 They dress up in costumes. True, some of those skits look like pagan human sacrifices,
1:01:12 but it’s just a skit. What’s really going on there? So, on the one hand, you can argue,
1:01:18 look, it’s just a rich guy’s club. They like to get out there. The whole motto
1:01:24 of the place is weaving spiders come not here. So, whenever we’re going to talk about business,
1:01:29 we just want to get out into the woods, put on some robes, burn a couple of effigies in front
1:01:35 of the owl, have a good time, probably get drunk a lot. What’s with the robes? Why do they
1:01:41 do weird creepy shit? Why do they put on a mask and the robe and do the plays and the
1:01:49 owl and the sacrificing? I don’t know. Why do you have a giant owl? I mean, why do you do that?
1:01:53 Well, what is that in human nature? Because I don’t think rich people are different than
1:01:59 not rich people. What is it about wealth and power that brings that out of people?
1:02:07 Well, part of it is the ritual aspect of it. And that clearly is a ritual. Rituals are pretty
1:02:13 simple. Rituals are just a series of actions performed in a precise sequence to produce
1:02:21 an effect. That describes a lot of things. It describes plays, symphonies, every movie you’ve
1:02:28 ever seen. A movie is a ritual. It is a series of actions carried out in a precise sequence
1:02:33 to produce an effect, but then added soundtrack to cue you to what emotions you’re supposed to be
1:02:37 feeling. It’s a great idea. So the rich people should just go to a movie or maybe just go to
1:02:44 a Taylor Swift concert. Why the owl thing? Part of it is to create this kind of sense,
1:02:52 I suppose, of group solidarity. You’re all going to appear also a way of sort of transcending
1:03:00 yourself in a way. When you put on the robe, it’s like putting on a uniform. You are in some way
1:03:08 a different or more important person. It’s a ritual. The key ritual at Bohemian Grove is a
1:03:13 thing called the cremation of care. And that’s what it’s supposed to be. We’re going to put all
1:03:18 of our rich, important people. We have to make all of these critical decisions. Life is so hard.
1:03:21 So we’re going to go out here in the woods and we’re going to kick back.
1:03:28 And we’re all going to gather around the lake and then we’re going to carry. It’s wicker. It’s
1:03:37 not a real person. And how would you know? And this is the cremation of our care, but it’s a
1:03:42 ritual which is meant to produce a sense of solidarity and relief among those people who are
1:03:50 there. The question comes down with the rituals is how seriously do you take them? How important
1:03:55 is this to the people who carry them out? And the interesting answer to that is that for some
1:03:59 people, it’s, you know, for some people, it’s just boring. I mean, there are probably people
1:04:04 standing around the owl who think this is ridiculous and can’t wait for it to get over with.
1:04:07 There are other people who are kind of excited about it and get caught up into it,
1:04:13 but other people can take it very seriously. It’s all the matter of the intention that you have
1:04:23 about what the ritual means. And I don’t mean to suggest by that that there’s anything necessarily
1:04:31 sinister about what’s going on, but it is a, it is clearly a ritual carried out for some kind of
1:04:37 group reinforcing purpose. And you’re absolutely right. You don’t have to do it that way.
1:04:43 That’s not an, I mean, I’ve gone to summer camps and we never carried out mock sacrifices in front
1:04:48 of an owl. All right. Yeah, we did all those other things. We didn’t even have any robes either. So
1:04:55 it goes beyond merely a rich guy summer camp, although that’s an aspect of it.
1:05:04 But it also, I think, often obscures that focusing on Bohemian Grove at the getaway of the club
1:05:09 ignores that the club is around all the time. That’s what’s at the center of this. It is the club
1:05:17 and its members. So despite all the talk about, no, no weaving spiders coming around here,
1:05:21 one of the other features of the summer meeting are things called lakeside talks.
1:05:26 And this often people are invited to go there. And one of the people who was invited,
1:05:31 I think around 1968 was Richard Nixon, who was making his political comeback.
1:05:40 And he was invited to give a talk where very important people are listening. And Nixon,
1:05:44 in his memoirs, realized what was going on. He was being auditioned just whether or not he was
1:05:49 going to be bred. He recognized that that was really the beginning of his second presidential
1:06:00 campaign. He was being vetted. So one of the main theories, call it a conspiracy theory or not,
1:06:06 about the Bohemian club and the gatherings is that people of wealth and influence gather together.
1:06:12 And whether or not it’s part of the agenda or not, inevitably, you’re going to talk about
1:06:17 things of interest. But to me, the mere fact that you invite people in, political leaders,
1:06:21 to give lakeside talks, means that there are weaving spiders, which are going on.
1:06:30 And it is a perfect private venue to vet people for political office.
1:06:34 I mean, yeah, where else are you going to do it? If you’re interested in vetting,
1:06:37 if you’re interested in powerful people selecting?
1:06:41 Well, see, here’s the question. Are these guys actually picking who’s going to be president?
1:06:46 Is that the decision which is being made? Or are they just deciding what horses they’re going to
1:06:52 back? I think the latter is the simpler version of it, but it doesn’t mean this the other way.
1:06:58 But these are the kinds of, I mean, Nixon was, there was the whole 1960 thing.
1:07:07 So he’s the new Nixon. And this is where the new Nixon apparently made a good impression
1:07:15 on the right people because he did indeed get the Republican nomination and he did indeed become
1:07:22 president. Well, there could also be a much more innocent explanation of really it’s
1:07:25 powerful people getting together and having conversations and through that conversation
1:07:30 influencing each other’s view of the world. And just having a legitimate discussion of
1:07:36 policies. But why wouldn’t they? I mean, why would you assume that people are not going to do that?
1:07:42 It’s the owl thing with the robes. Why the owl and why the robes?
1:07:50 Which is why he becomes really compelling when guys like Alex Jones, forgive me,
1:07:54 but have not watched his documentary, I probably should at some point, about the Bohemian Grove
1:08:04 where he claims that there is a Satanist human sacrifice of, I think, children.
1:08:12 And I think that’s quite a popular conspiracy theory. Or is lost popularity, it kind of like
1:08:20 transformed itself into the QAnon set of conspiracy theories. But, I mean, can you speak to that
1:08:24 conspiracy? Let’s put it this way, the general public rich people are inherently suspicious.
1:08:31 Yeah. Great. Let’s put it that way. First of all, they’ve got all that money and exactly
1:08:39 how did one obtain it. And I do not, of necessity, adhere to the view that behind ever great fortune
1:08:45 there is a great crime. But there often are. There are ways in which it’s acquired. But I think it’s,
1:08:53 one of the things I think that can happen is particularly when people acquire a huge amount
1:09:01 of money. And I won’t name any names. But let’s say there are people who perhaps in the tech sphere,
1:09:06 who, coming from no particular background of wealth, suddenly find themselves with $600 billion.
1:09:14 Well, what? This is the question you would have to ask yourself. Why me? Because you’re one of the
1:09:18 rare, tiny group of human beings who will ever have that kind of wealth in your hands.
1:09:26 Even if you are a convinced atheist, I think at some point you have to begin to suspect that
1:09:31 the cosmic muffin, providence, whatever it is, put this money in your hands to do what?
1:09:36 Achieve great things. Just think of all the stuff is. So you’re going to start a foundation and you’re
1:09:43 going to start backing all the things that you like. I think there’s an element of ego that comes in
1:09:53 with it as well. And again, it may not be so much what the rich person with a huge amount of money
1:10:04 at their disposal and a lot of fuzzy ideas about what to do with it can be influenced by others.
1:10:15 It’s always that question as to who’s actually manipulating these events? What’s going on in
1:10:19 that regard? I think in some way, they can be a very useful sucker. Find somebody with a lot of
1:10:29 money and get them to finance the things that you want them to do. The Bohemian club is, I don’t
1:10:35 think, in and of itself, inherently evil or sinister, but it means that there are lots of
1:10:39 different people in it who have different agendas. It goes back to what I said about how somebody
1:10:44 feels about the cremation of care ritual. This is either just a waste of time. It’s just some sort
1:10:56 of silly thing that we’re doing, or it is something of great importance, perhaps even mystical or
1:11:02 religious importance, because that’s ostensibly what it’s pretending to be. It’s always this
1:11:09 question as to what degree you begin to play and the play becomes serious. That tends to happen a
1:11:17 lot. You’ve studied a lot of cults and occultism. What do you think is the power of that mystical
1:11:24 experience? Well, what is broadly referred to, what’s occultism? What’s the occult? The occult is
1:11:34 the hidden. That’s all it really means, specifically hidden from sight. The basis of it is the idea
1:11:41 that what is hidden? Well, what is hidden from us is most of the world, most of reality. The basic
1:11:47 concept within occultism, the basic concept within most religions, which are approved forms of
1:11:55 occultism, is that the physical world that we are aware of is only a very small part of a much
1:12:09 larger reality, and that what the methods and practices of occultism arguably do is to allow
1:12:17 someone to either enter into this larger reality or to access that larger reality for purposes to
1:12:23 be exploited here. The most interesting statement about, and a key element of this, becomes the
1:12:28 thing called magic. Now, we all know magic. It’s a guy standing on stage performing a trick.
1:12:35 But the interesting thing about a stage magician is that a stage magician is,
1:12:44 we know when we’re watching this, that it’s a trick. Yet, we can’t really figure out,
1:12:50 if he does it well, how that trick is being accomplished, because it seems to defy
1:12:56 physical laws, and that’s what’s fascinating about it. So even though you know it’s a trick,
1:13:01 if you can’t figure it out, it has this kind of power of fascination, but it’s mimicking something.
1:13:11 Stage magic is mimicking real magic. So it’s real magic. Well, let’s go back
1:13:15 to Alistair Crowley, because he always has to come. We knew he was going to come up at some point
1:13:21 in this earlier than that, because he always does. All roads lead to Alistair Crowley.
1:13:26 Alistair Crowley, and I’ve said this enough, so I should be able to get it right, but I’m paraphrasing
1:13:36 here. He goes, magic, which of course he spelled with a K, or CK, is the art and science of causing
1:13:44 change to occur in conformity with will. So in a way, that’s sort of mind over matter,
1:13:50 but it’s the idea that one can, through will, through intention,
1:14:01 bend reality to make something happen. Somebody once put it this way, it’s tipping the luck plane.
1:14:07 So you know, you got some kind of a level plan. We’re just trying to do just tip it just a little
1:14:14 bit, so the marble rules rolls over one side or another. Now that presupposes a lot of things,
1:14:19 that is there a luck plane? I don’t know, but you know, it’s a good sort of idea to have. But,
1:14:27 and here again, don’t become overly bothered trying to figure out
1:14:35 whether you actually can bend reality. Become bothered by the fact that there are people who
1:14:43 believe that they can, and will go to great efforts to do so, and will often believe they have succeeded.
1:14:55 So it’s this effort to make things occur in a particular way, maybe just to sort of nudge
1:15:00 reality in one little way or another. And that’s where things like rituals come in.
1:15:06 Rituals are a way of focusing will and detention. We’re all there, we’re all thinking about the
1:15:13 same thing. And you have to imagine just how, you know, the pervasiveness of what could be called
1:15:18 that, that’s kind of magical thinking every day I was everywhere. So let me give you an example.
1:15:24 Have you ever attended a high school football pep rally? Think of what’s going on there.
1:15:32 Okay, your team is going to battle the other team. You’ve now assembled everyone in the gymnasium.
1:15:39 You’ve got people who are dancing around in animal totem costumes. And what are you chanting?
1:15:43 Everyone is supposed to chant that, you know, that the other team dies. Okay,
1:15:46 that you’ll be horribly defeated and that our team will be victorious.
1:15:54 That is a magic ritual. The idea is if it comes into this idea, it’s very popularly about
1:16:01 visualizing things, visualizing manifesting, I love this term, you need to manifest your success.
1:16:11 Well, that’s just magic. That is trying to cause change in conformity with will. So these things
1:16:19 can happen without you being even consciously aware of what’s going on. And you don’t need to be
1:16:26 because if you’re all a part of the, of the mob, which is there in the gymnasium,
1:16:33 and you, you get into this and you get worked up and occultists would argue what you’re doing is
1:16:37 that you’re creating a huge amount of energy. All of these people are putting energy into
1:16:44 something and that energy goes somewhere and maybe you can maybe just maybe you actually can
1:16:51 slightly increase the chances of your team’s victory. Of course, your opponents are having
1:16:56 their own ritual at the same time. So whoever has the bigger mojo will apparently win on the team.
1:17:04 So that’s a, I would say, trivial example of that, but a clear one. I do believe that there’s
1:17:10 incredible power in groups of humans getting together and morphing reality. I think that’s
1:17:17 probably one of the things that made human civilization what it is. Groups of people
1:17:21 being able to believe a thing and bring that belief into reality.
1:17:28 Yes, that’s your exactly right. Bring to conceive of something and then through intention
1:17:39 will to manifest that into this realm. And of course, the, that power of the collective mind
1:17:45 can be leveraged by charismatic leaders to do all kinds of stuff where you get
1:17:52 cults that do horrible things or anything. There might be a cult that does good things.
1:17:59 I don’t know. It depends. We usually don’t call those cults. Exactly. Without endorsing this
1:18:03 entirely and interesting, one of the questions, what’s the difference between a cult and a religion?
1:18:11 And it has been said that in the case of a cult,
1:18:19 there’s always someone at the top who knows what’s going on. Generally, who knows it’s a scam.
1:18:25 In a religion, that person is dead. So, see, I’ve just managed to
1:18:32 insult every single religion. But it’s an interesting way of thinking about it,
1:18:38 because I think there is some degree of accuracy in that statement.
1:18:43 Do you think, actually, the interesting psychological question is, in cults, do you think the person
1:18:49 at the top always knows that it’s a scam? Do you think there’s something about the human mind
1:18:54 where you gradually begin to believe your own bullshit? Yes. That seems to be the…
1:18:57 That again is part of magic, I think, is believing your own bullshit.
1:19:03 It doesn’t necessarily mean that the head of the cult realized, but there’s someone,
1:19:08 maybe the second, you know, always sort of looking in the lieutenant. Someone
1:19:19 probably has an idea about what’s going on. The other thing that seems to be a kind of
1:19:25 dead giveaway for what we would call a cult is what’s called excessive reverence for the leader.
1:19:32 People just believe everything these people say. I give you an example. The first time I ever
1:19:39 encountered anything like that was in Santa Barbara, California in the 1970s. I was going
1:19:46 to grad school, and there was a particular cult locally, which I think was Brotherhood of the Sun.
1:19:55 And it was the same so there was some guy who was… Among the other things, followers were
1:20:01 convinced to hand over all their money and personal belongings to him. I believe he used
1:20:09 part of that money to buy a yacht with. Anyway, a lot of it went to him. And then, of course,
1:20:14 working for free upon different cult-owned business enterprises, of which there were several.
1:20:19 And there was a person I knew who became a devoted follower of this, and it was…
1:20:25 All I could think of at one point was ask them, “What the hell is the matter with you?”
1:20:34 I mean, have you lost your mind? Why would you… What is it that this person can possibly be
1:20:39 providing that you essentially are going to become a slave to them, which is what they were doing?
1:20:45 And I actually give that credit in a way of sort of sparking my whole interest in things like
1:20:51 secret societies. And here, again, as a disclaimer, I am not now nor have I ever been
1:20:55 the member of any fraternal organization, secret society, or cult that I know of.
1:21:05 And that’s what interests me about them, because I’m just always trying to figure out why people
1:21:15 do these things. Like I said, why the robes and the owl? Why? Why do you do that? And it’s trying
1:21:19 to figure it out. I mean, I couldn’t even hack the Boy Scouts. Okay, that was too much of that.
1:21:22 Because to me, you join an organization, and the first thing that comes along is there’s
1:21:27 somebody, there are rules, and someone is telling you what to do. Okay, I don’t like people telling
1:21:33 me what to do. I spent much of my life trying to avoid that as much as possible. And join a cult,
1:21:39 there’s going to be someone telling you what to do. Join the Bohemian Club, and there’s going to be
1:21:47 someone telling you what to do. And obviously, a lot of people really get something out of that.
1:21:53 It becomes, in some ways, it’s sort of necessary for them to function. But I do not understand it,
1:21:58 and my study of it is a personal error to try to understand why people do that.
1:22:07 And there are so many reasons, primary of which I would say is the desire in the human heart
1:22:17 to belong. And the dark forms that take throughout human history, recent human histories,
1:22:23 something I’d love to talk to you a bit about. If we can go back to the beginning of the 20th
1:22:29 century, on the German side, you’ve described how secret societies like the Tulee Society
1:22:35 lay the foundation for Nazi ideology. Can you, through that lens, from that perspective, describe
1:22:41 the rise of the Nazi Party? Well, I guess we could start with what on earth is the Tulee Society?
1:22:53 So the Tulee Society was a small German occult society, that is, they studied metaphysics.
1:23:05 Another fancy word for occultism, that appeared in Munich around 1917, 1918.
1:23:16 The key figure behind it was a German esotericist by the name of Rudolf von Zabotendorf.
1:23:24 Okay, not his real name. His real name was Adam Rudolf Glauer. He was adopted by a German nobleman
1:23:31 and got the name von Zabotendorf, and I like to say that name. So I had this real thing about
1:23:37 vague, mysterious characters that show up and do things, and trying to figure out who these people
1:23:42 are. So we’re working up in the years prior to the First World War, so the attack after
1:23:49 so prior to World War I, he spent a lot of time in the Ottoman Empire. Turkey. There was none, and the
1:23:59 Ottoman Empire, which was a fairly tumultuous place, because in 1908 and 1909, there was the
1:24:08 Young Turk Revolution. And you had a kind of military coup, which effectively overthrew the
1:24:16 Ottoman sultan and installed a military junta, which would go on during the First World War to
1:24:22 make its greatest achievement in the Armenian genocide. Eventually, he created a genocidal
1:24:27 military regime, which would lead the country into disastrous First World War, which would
1:24:32 destroy the Ottoman Empire, out of which modern Turkey emerges. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
1:24:38 And by the way, we should take a tiny tangent here, which is that you refer to the intelligence
1:24:43 agencies as being exceptionally successful. And here in the case of the Young Turks being
1:24:54 also very successful in doing the genocide, meaning they’ve achieved the greatest impact,
1:25:00 even though the impact on the scale of good to evil tends towards evil.
1:25:03 It’s one of those things that often comes out of revolutionary situations. Revolutions
1:25:09 always seek to make things better, don’t they? We’re going to take a bad old regime.
1:25:22 And the sultan was bad, I think it’s fairly safe. Abdulhamid II wasn’t called a red sultan
1:25:29 because of his favorite color type of thing. And the idea is that they were going to improve,
1:25:36 they were now going to, the Ottoman Empire was a multinational empire, they’re going to try to
1:25:42 equalize and bring in the different groups. And none of that happened. It became worse.
1:25:48 In the same way that you could argue that the goal of Russian revolutionaries was to get rid
1:25:54 of the bad old incompetent medieval Tsarist regime and to bring in a new great shining future.
1:26:03 And it became even more authoritarian. And the crimes of the imperial Russian regime
1:26:08 pale the significance of what would follow in the same way that the crimes of Abdulhamid
1:26:13 pale to when you get to the Young Turks. But that wasn’t necessarily the intention.
1:26:20 But von Sabantendorf is a German businessman who’s working in this period. And the whole
1:26:26 point here is that the Ottoman Empire in this period is a hotbed of political intrigue.
1:26:32 You know, all kinds of interesting things about it. The Young Turk revolution is essentially
1:26:41 a military coup, but it is plotted in Masonic lodges. Okay, I know technically Masonic lodges
1:26:48 are never supposed to be involved in politics, but they are. Or, you know, the lodge meeting
1:26:53 breaks up and then you plot the revolution. So, same group of people, but it’s not technically.
1:27:00 But yes, and there’s the Macedonia resort lodge in Tessaloniki was ground zero
1:27:08 for plotting this military coup that was supposed to improve the empire.
1:27:14 Sabantendorf is in one way or another mixed up in all of this, or at least he’s an observer. Plus,
1:27:22 he’s initiated into the Masonic lodges. And interestingly enough, the fellow who initiates
1:27:27 him into one of these Eastern lodges is a Jewish merchant by the name of Ter Moody,
1:27:38 and who’s also a cabalist. And also, Sabantendorf is very, very interested in the occult. He’s
1:27:43 initiated into Eastern Masonic lodges in a period when those same lodges are being used
1:27:52 as a center for political intrigue. He also apparently is involved in gun running,
1:27:57 which in revolutionary periods is, you know, there’s a lot of money to be made off of that.
1:28:04 So, he’s connected to various dark businesses in a tumultuous time
1:28:12 with connections to politicized Freemasonry and the occult.
1:28:23 Now, in the course of the First World War, he returns to Germany. He just shows up.
1:28:35 And it would be my operative suspicion or theory that Sabantendorf was working for someone.
1:28:41 I don’t think he just pops up in Munich on his own accord. Why does he leave the Ottoman Empire
1:28:52 and return to that place? Who’s behind him? Well, maybe no one, but maybe someone,
1:28:57 because he does seem to have money at his disposal. And he comes into Munich and he basically takes
1:29:02 over this small sort of occult study group. Now, the interesting thing is that the Tully Society
1:29:12 is really just a branch of another existing, what’s called an Ariosophist order,
1:29:18 a thing called the German order or the Germanin-Ordn, which is centered in Berlin.
1:29:27 But for some reason, he doesn’t want his group to be connected by name with the Germanin-Ordn,
1:29:31 so Tully Society. Tully, in this case, is a reference to supposedly
1:29:40 a mythical arctic homeland of the Aryan race. Apparently, they’re all snow people who wander
1:29:44 out of the snow at some point. It’s kind of like a frozen Atlantis.
1:29:52 So I mentioned these people, the Ariosophists, who have to practice saying that. So what are
1:30:04 they? Well, they’re a kind of racist, Germanic offshoot of theosophy. And I know I’m explaining
1:30:09 one thing to explain something, but there’s no other way to do this. So theosophy was 19th century,
1:30:14 very popular and widely modeled occult belief that was founded by a Russian woman by the name of
1:30:23 Helena Blavatsky. She was a medium psychic. She supposedly got channelings from the ascended
1:30:28 masters. The basic story there, they’re all of the ascended masters, which are mystical beings
1:30:33 that may or may not have once been human. They live inside the Himalayas or they float among them
1:30:42 on a cloud, and they guide the spiritual evolution of humanity. But Blavatsky did was to take
1:30:49 Western esotericism and blend it with Hindu and Buddhist esotericism, which became very,
1:30:53 very sexy in the West still is. Buddhism attracts a lot of people because, well,
1:31:01 it’s Buddhism. It’s different, see? So the Mahatmas, the ascended masters were sending
1:31:05 your messages, despite the fact that she was later proven pretty much to be a fraud and writing the
1:31:11 letters herself. Nevertheless, people still went along with this doctrine and it’s been widely
1:31:19 modified and copied since then. So an idea in theosophy was that human spiritual evolution
1:31:28 was tied to physical evolution. So in the case of Blavatsky, Blavatsky never said
1:31:35 that Aryans, white people, anything out this were superior. She talked about the different
1:31:41 root races, but it’s just a version of it. It’s just total gobbledygook that seems to include
1:31:48 everyone. I defy you to make much sense out of it. But in the early 20th century, there were
1:31:54 different sort of, you know, one of the things that became fashionable, you know, not terribly
1:32:00 popular. These are small movements with the idea that, well, you know, Germany is a new
1:32:06 upcoming country. And part of this, I think, was really trying to define who the Germans were.
1:32:15 Because, remember, the German Empire, Germany as a political state, doesn’t come into existence
1:32:23 until 1871. Prior to that, Germany was a geographic expression, a Vaguen, which described a large
1:32:32 area in central Europe where a lot of people who wore leather shorts or something like that,
1:32:39 and spoke similar German dialects, were nominally Germans. But they might be Prussians or Bavarians
1:32:44 or, you know, they came in all sorts of varieties and religions. There was no
1:32:50 German identity. Something very similar happened in Italy in the same period. I mean,
1:32:54 there weren’t Italians. There were Sardinians, and there were Romans, and there were Sicilians,
1:33:01 Umbrians, spoke, again, dialects of a similar language, but had never lived, you know, not
1:33:06 since the Roman Empire under a single state and really didn’t think of themselves as the same.
1:33:12 So you have to create this artificial thing. You have to create Germans. There’s now a
1:33:20 big Germany with an emperor, and so we’re all going to be Germans. Well, exactly what is that?
1:33:29 Much of it is an artificial creation. You know, you have to decide upon some sort of standard
1:33:35 dialect. Okay, we’ll decide what that is. You know, often dialected, only a few people
1:33:39 actually speak, and then it will be drilled into children’s heads through state schooling programs.
1:33:45 So I think this is the kind of milieu that it comes out of. People were trying to figure out
1:33:51 what on earth Germans actually were and the need for some sort of common identity.
1:33:59 And, you know, that leads to everything like Wagnerian opera. Richard Wagner wanted to create
1:34:04 a German mythical music, so he went back and stripped mind old German myths and cobbled them
1:34:10 together into a lot of people standing on stage singing. And that was his purpose. He was a
1:34:15 nationalist. He was, in many ways, a kind of racialist nationalist. And this was his idea of
1:34:22 trying to create, out of bits and pieces of the past, a new fangled form of German identity.
1:34:29 So on the more mystical end of this, you had the idea is that, well, Germany must have been
1:34:32 created for some special purpose because the Germans must be very special people.
1:34:37 And we must have some sort of particular destiny. And then out of this, you know,
1:34:41 the direction this is heading, well, we’re all part of some sort of master race
1:34:48 with some sort of ties to some sort of great civilization in the past. Call it Tully,
1:34:52 don’t call it whatever you want to be. They basically just invent things
1:34:58 and try to attach those to the past. And so
1:35:07 Ariosophy was the Aryanized version of Theosophy. And what this did was to take the idea that
1:35:13 spiritual and physical evolution had led to the most advanced form of human beings,
1:35:18 which were the Aryans and the most advanced group of them were, of course, the Germans.
1:35:25 And this attracted appeal, I can keep in mind, again, this was not a mass movement.
1:35:30 This is very much a fringe movement. Most people weren’t aware of it and weren’t particularly
1:35:35 interested in it. But it had an appeal for those who already had a kind of esoteric bent in some
1:35:43 form or another. And this is where things like the German Order and their other groups, it was
1:35:53 only one of many sort of grew out of. And what it was that the Tully society as a branch, the Tully
1:36:02 Gesellschaft was supposed to do was to study this. It was an esoteric study group. And so people
1:36:08 would get together and they’d talk about things, probably make more stuff up and all sort of work
1:36:16 around this idea of German Aryans as the most advanced type of human beings and all the wonderful
1:36:22 things that the future would hold. And the fact that this was in the midst of a war in which Germany
1:36:31 was again fighting, they saw it for its existence, heightened those kinds of tensions as well.
1:36:43 So my suspicion, again, is that Zbottendorf, in terms of who was behind him, that he was
1:36:50 essentially called back to Germany to work either for the Prussian political police or for some
1:37:00 aspect of German intelligence or security to try to mobilize occultism or esotericism for the war
1:37:08 effort. Because again, this is 1918, the war has gone on way too long. Within a few months,
1:37:14 Germany will collapse and it will collapse simply from the psychological exhaustion of the population.
1:37:19 So this is almost like to help the war effort with a kind of propaganda,
1:37:24 a narrative that can strengthen the will of the German people.
1:37:30 It would strengthen the will of some people. You have to try to appeal to different aspects of
1:37:36 this. But the mystical aspect is one of those things that can be. It can have a very powerful
1:37:46 influence. The idea is that we can come up with some kind of mystical nationalism, maybe that’s
1:37:51 one to put it, a kind of mystical nationalism that can be exploited for the workers. At this
1:37:57 point, you’re kind of grasping at straws. And this is a whole period when the Germans are
1:38:02 marshaling the last of their forces to launch a series of offensives on the western front,
1:38:07 the peace offensive, which will initially be successful, but will ultimately fail and lead
1:38:14 to a collapse in morale. But among the leadership of Germany, it was a recognition was that national
1:38:23 morale was flagging. And one of the other things that was kind of raising its head was what had
1:38:29 happened nearby a year. Well, the Russian Revolution, which had now brought the idea,
1:38:33 which put another solution to all of this, the idea of revolutionary Marxism.
1:38:39 Here we need to remind ourselves as to where Marxism comes from, not Russia, Germany.
1:38:48 Where was the largest Marxist party in Germany? And Marx probably expected the revolution to
1:38:53 begin in Germany. Where else? I mean, it’s the Soviet Union is not very industrialized,
1:38:59 Germany is. And so that’s where it would probably. Russia 5% of the population is industrial workers
1:39:04 in Germany. 40% of the population isn’t that. So if any place was like made for Marxism,
1:39:09 it was Germany. I think that’s why it caught on in East Germany so well, because it did kind of
1:39:18 come home. And it was a local belief. It wasn’t something imparted, imported by the Russians.
1:39:27 It was a German invention. So the Tuley Society, one of the things you can see in this is the
1:39:34 Tuley Society was particularly involved in sort of anti-Marxist or anti-Bolshevik agitation.
1:39:41 They saw themselves, the Bolton sources, saw them as this whole movement. It was a counter to
1:39:49 this. It was a kind of counter Marxist movement. Can we sort of try to break that apart in a
1:39:58 nuanced way? So it was a nationalist movement. The occult was part of the picture. Occult racial
1:40:05 theories. So there’s a racial component, like the Aryan race. So it’s not just the nation of
1:40:12 Germany. And you take that and contrast it with Marxism. Did they also formulate that in racial
1:40:18 terms? Did they formulate that in national versus global terms? Like how do they see this?
1:40:23 Marxism formulates everything by class. People are categorized by class. You’re
1:40:28 either part of the proletariat or part of the bourgeoisie. You’re either part of the proletariat
1:40:33 or just some sort of scum. Really? It needs to be swept into the dustbin of history. Only workers
1:40:43 count. And that was what would take someone who was a nationalist would sort of drive them crazy
1:40:47 because their idea is we’re trying to create a German people. We’re trying to create a common
1:40:52 German identity. But what the Marxists are doing is they’re providing Germans against each other
1:41:00 by class. German workers hate the German bourgeoisie. German proletariat is opposed to German
1:41:11 capitalists. We’re all trying to fight this war together. So that was why Marxism, particularly
1:41:16 in the form of Bolsheism, was seen as unpatriotic and, of course, was opposed to the war as a whole,
1:41:23 the idea that Perrin and Lenin was that the war was an imperialist war. And the only thing that
1:41:29 was good that was going to come out of it is that the imperialist war through all of the crises it
1:41:34 was creating would eventually lead to a class war. And that would be good because that would reconcile
1:41:41 all of these things. But think of this, the two very different versions of this. The Bolshevist
1:41:47 version, or let’s just call it the Marxist version of Germany, was going to be a class society in
1:41:51 which we’re going to have to have some kind of civil upheaval which will have Germans fighting
1:42:00 Germans. Whereas the kind of mystical nationalism, the almost kind of religious nationalism,
1:42:07 the Zabotendor from the Tulli society had hitched its wagon to, held that Germans are all part of a
1:42:15 single racial family, and that’s what must be the most important thing. And that these can be
1:42:21 different ways of trying to influence people. It comes down to a matter of political influence.
1:42:28 So in a sense, I think that what Zabotendor from the Tulli society was trying to do,
1:42:35 at least within Munich, was to use this idea of mystical nationalism as a potential rallying
1:42:41 point for some part of the population to oppose these other forces, to keep people fighting.
1:42:49 The war is lost, though, in November. The Kaiser abdicates, and essentially,
1:42:57 the Socialists do take over in Germany. Things come very, very close to following the Russian
1:43:06 model. And you even get the Russian version or take on the Bolsheviks, which are the Spartacists,
1:43:13 who try and fail to seize power early on. But you do essentially end up with the Socialist Germany.
1:43:21 And that then leaves in the aftermath of the war, the Tulli society is sort of the
1:43:26 odd man out, although they’re still very closely connected to the army.
1:43:30 And here’s one of the things that I find interesting. When you get into 1919,
1:43:34 who is it that’s paying Zabotendor’s bills? It’s the army.
1:43:44 The one thing the German army is absolutely determined to do is to preserve its social
1:43:50 position and power. And they’re perfectly willing to dump the Kaiser to do that.
1:43:58 That’s sort of this deal which is made. In November of 1918, Kaiser’s abdication,
1:44:05 the proclamation of a German Republic, which you just had this guy declare it,
1:44:13 it wasn’t really planned. There’s the Abert Groner Pact. Groner is the Chief of Staff,
1:44:22 General Staff at this point. Friedrich Abert is the Chief Socialist politician,
1:44:28 basically, and they make an agreement. And the agreement basically is that the army will support
1:44:37 Abert’s government if Abert supports the army. And particularly, that means the continuation
1:44:43 of the officer corps and the general staff in one form or another. So a deal is made.
1:44:48 And that, of course, is what will eventually help defeat the Spartacist uprising.
1:44:52 Now, was the army doing the similar kinds of things that we’ve talked about with the
1:44:58 intelligence agencies, this kind of same kind of trying to control the direction of power?
1:45:06 The German intelligence landscape in the First World War is obscure in many ways. There are lots
1:45:13 of things that are going on. Germany has a military intelligence service called
1:45:19 Abteilung or Section 3B. That’s just plain military intelligence. They’re constantly
1:45:24 trying to collect military information before the war about the weaponry and plans of the enemies,
1:45:30 and then about what the operational plans were during the war. It doesn’t really go much beyond
1:45:43 that, though. The German foreign office runs a kind of political intelligence service. And that’s
1:45:50 the one which is much more involved in things like subsidizing subversion in Russia,
1:45:56 which is one of the things that the Germans sign on to fairly early.
1:46:05 Little Diversion here in 1915, there is a Russian revolutionary who’s lived much of his life in
1:46:16 Germany who goes by the code name of Parvus. And he essentially comes to the Germans in Constantinople,
1:46:20 interesting enough, in Turkey. He’s hanging around there the same time as Bottendorf is there,
1:46:28 which I find curious. So Parvus or Alexander Helpand to give his actual name.
1:46:32 Kind of so many goes, “Look, there’s a lot of revolutionaries in Russia, and there’s a lot
1:46:37 of mistrust with the regime. We think that the war will increase the contradictions in Russian
1:46:45 society. And if you give me a lot of marks, I can finance this revolutionary activity. And through
1:46:51 subversion, I can take Russia out of the war.” Well, the Germans are facing a two-front war.
1:46:58 That sounds great. We’ll use money in order to, but notice what they’re doing. The German General
1:47:06 Staff, a very conservative organization, not a bunch of revolutionaries, are going to finance
1:47:12 revolution in an opposing country. They are going to finance revolutionary subversion
1:47:24 to take Russia out of the war, which basically works. So that gives you another idea as to what
1:47:30 the German military is willing to do. They’re not revolutionaries, but they’ll pay revolutionaries
1:47:38 to subvert another regime. Now you’ve got the problem is that the revolutionary regime
1:47:45 that your money helped bring to power is now threatening to extend into your country.
1:47:54 So the whole question for the army and for others in Germany in 1919 is how to keep Germany
1:48:02 from going Bolshevik, from in a sense being hoist by your own batard. So the Tully Society,
1:48:08 I don’t think is a huge part of this program, but it is a part of it. And it’s all an effort
1:48:12 to try to keep control. And that’s why the army is financing them. That’s even why the army at
1:48:19 some point then supplies them with its own propagandists. So the Tully Society begins to
1:48:24 create under Subotendor’s leadership what he called the rings of Tully. And these are
1:48:33 satellite organizations that aren’t the society as though, but they’re kind of controlled and
1:48:41 inspired by it. And one of those is thing called the German Workers’ Party. And the German Workers’
1:48:48 Party, again, is local. It’s not large. It’s not terribly influential. But what does it aspire
1:48:58 to be? It aspires to be a party that will bring German workers away from the seductive influence
1:49:05 of the Bolsheviks and into a more patriotic position, a patriotic. And the way that I
1:49:13 describe this is that it’s not an anti-communist organization. It’s a counter-communist organization.
1:49:19 So you don’t create something which completely opposes it. You create something which mimics it,
1:49:26 which is ultimately what the German Workers’ Party will become is the National Socialist
1:49:34 German Workers’ Party, known as that term “socialist.” And that is, in my view,
1:49:39 what Nazism is from the beginning. It is a counter-communist movement.
1:49:46 And by the way, for people who don’t know, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party is
1:49:54 also known as the Nazi Party. So how did this evolution happen from those that complicated
1:50:00 little interplay? We should also say that a guy named Adolf Hitler is in the Army at this time.
1:50:06 Well, he’s going to come into this because, remember, he said the Army was going to supply
1:50:11 its own propagandists, develop the German Workers’ Party and the Tule Society do their work,
1:50:16 and the propagandists they supply them with is a man who the Army trains,
1:50:25 sends two classes to learn the art of public speaking and propaganda, and that fellow
1:50:32 is Corporal Adolf Hitler. So how does Adolf Hitler connect with the German Workers’ Party?
1:50:37 Well, he’d been in the Army during the war, the only regular job that he’d ever had,
1:50:41 kind of liked it. So you often get the view is that, well, at the end of the war,
1:50:46 he joined millions of other German soldiers who didn’t have jobs. No, no, he stays in the Army.
1:50:53 He stays in the Army until 1921. He’s on the Army payroll at the very time in which he’s
1:50:59 held to set this up. What appears to have happened is this. Sabotin Dorf had organized
1:51:06 the Tule Society. That didn’t have, you know, that had tried to oppose. There’s actually a brief
1:51:14 period of time in which the Communists actually take over Munich, the Bavarian Soviet Republic,
1:51:20 which doesn’t last very long. And eventually the Army and volunteers put this down.
1:51:24 Well, that’s going on, by the way. Hitler is actually sitting in the
1:51:32 barracks in Munich wearing a red armband because he is technically part of the soldiers who have
1:51:39 gone over to the Bavarian Soviet Republic. He seems to have had flexible interests in this case.
1:51:47 So once order is restored, so to speak, the Army comes in and decide that, well, one of the things
1:51:56 we need, we need to have people who can lecture soldiers on patriotic topics. And so there is a
1:52:01 particular captain by the name of Karl Meyer, who sort of spots Hitler. He later describes
1:52:07 him as like a stray dog looking for a master. Hitler has a knack for public speaking. Other
1:52:12 soldiers will listen to him. Now, some people can do that. Some people can’t.
1:52:19 Meyer decides that he’s a good candidate for further training. So yes, they bring him in,
1:52:28 they turn him into a voice called the Weymann, a kind of liaison man. He’s an Army propagandist.
1:52:36 And then you’ve got this little outfit called the German Workers’ Party.
1:52:41 And essentially what happens is that Hitler is sent in to take over leadership of that,
1:52:46 which is what happens. He shows up, he attends a meeting, there are like 50 people there.
1:52:53 By the way, the topic of the first meeting he’s at is how and why capitalism should be abolished,
1:53:01 which is not what you might well expect. And because remember, the German Workers’ Party
1:53:08 is trying to cast itself as a counter-bolshevism. So it’s not saying that capitalism is great,
1:53:12 but it’s important. Now, capitalism is evil. We agree upon that. We just agree it has to
1:53:18 be destroyed from a nationalist point of view as opposed from some sort of strange internationalist
1:53:25 point of view. So Hitler is essentially, as I see it, sent in by the Army as their trained man
1:53:34 to assume leadership within this small party and to use it for the Army’s patriotic propaganda
1:53:41 campaign. And it’s a season doing so, even to the name change, to the National Socialist
1:53:45 or German Workers’ Party. I mean, really, what sounds more red than that?
1:53:55 So the interesting thing here is, from where did anti-Semitism seep into this whole thing?
1:54:02 It seems like the way they try to formulate counter Marxism is by saying the problem with
1:54:12 capitalism and the problem with Marxism is that it’s really Judeo-capitalism and “Judeo-bolshevism.”
1:54:20 From where did that ideology seep in? Well, that’s a huge topic. Where does anti-Semitism
1:54:26 come from? Let’s start with that term itself, a term which I have really grown increasingly to
1:54:37 dislike because it doesn’t actually say what it means. Anti-Semitism is anti-Jewism. That’s
1:54:44 all it is. I’m not sure whether there has ever existed a person who hated Jews, Arabs, and Maltese
1:54:50 equally. That’s kind of hard to imagine. I don’t know. But that’s technically what that would mean
1:54:57 because, let’s face it, most Semites are Arabs. So if you’re an anti-Semite, then you don’t seem
1:55:05 to distinguish Jews from Arabs. It makes no sense. The origin of the term is invented by,
1:55:13 I guess what, an anti-Semite. A guy in the 1870s, a German journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr,
1:55:22 who is, wouldn’t you know it, part Jewish himself and who decides that you really needed a better
1:55:30 term than Judenhaas, “Jew-hate,” which was the term because that just sounds so inelegant, doesn’t it?
1:55:38 Okay, what do you want to call yourself? A Jew-hater or an anti-Semite? See, anti-Semitism,
1:55:43 it’s got that “ism” part of the end of it, which means it’s a system of belief. Anything that has
1:55:49 an “ism” must somehow be scientific and important. It’s all part of the 19th century obsession with
1:55:55 trying to bring science into something on one or the other. So we’re going to get rid of Jew-hate
1:55:59 and we’re going to turn it into anti-Semitism. And we’re only going to be talking about Jews,
1:56:07 but we’ll never actually say that. And somehow, the invention of a Jew-hater to disguise the
1:56:12 fact that he’s a Jew-hater, even though he’s partly Jewish, by inventing the term anti-Semitism
1:56:20 worked because everybody has bought it and repeated it ever since. So I don’t know, maybe just because
1:56:28 anti-Jewism would just be, is it too direct in some way? Do we have difficulty confronting
1:56:31 actually what it is that we’re talking about? I do wish terms were a little bit more
1:56:37 direct and self-explanatory. Yeah, Jew-hate is a better term. Well, the question then comes,
1:56:46 what exactly do you hate about Jews? And a lot of this has to do with, if you go back
1:56:51 prior to the 19th century, if Jews were hated, they were hated for religious reasons. In Christian
1:56:57 Europe, they’re hated because they weren’t Christians. And they existed as the only kind of
1:57:03 significant religious minority, but other than that, they tended to live separately.
1:57:11 They had little economic influence. Jews tended to live in stettles in the east,
1:57:17 ghettos elsewhere. Some were involved in banking and business, but they sort of remained
1:57:26 segregated from much of society. That changes when you get to the 19th century and with what’s called
1:57:33 Jewish emancipation. And that means that between about 1800 and 1850, most European countries
1:57:38 dropped the various legal or social restrictions against Jews. They are assimilated into the
1:57:45 general society. So ideally, you stop being a German Jew and you become a Jewish German.
1:57:54 Those are two very different important concepts. And what that does, of course, is that it opens up
1:58:04 the professions business world elsewhere. So Jews move, who had been largely within those realms to
1:58:09 begin with, they already had a good deal of experience in banking and business, and they
1:58:17 move into those areas and professions and become quite visible. And that’s what then creates
1:58:29 antisemitism. Because in some way, that is seen as part of the changes that have taken place.
1:58:35 And there are a lot of things going on here. Part of it has to do with the kind of wrenching
1:58:41 social and economic changes that took place with industrialization. So one of the things
1:58:47 to keep in mind is that in the process of industrialization, just like today, whole classes
1:58:55 of people were made extinct economically, craftsmen, for instance. So when factories came along and
1:59:00 began to produce things with machines, all the crafts people who had made those things previously
1:59:10 are now unemployed or go to work as wage labor in factories. So there are winners and losers
1:59:18 in industrialization. And what people saw in Germany and elsewhere is that among this new
1:59:24 sort of rising capitalist elite, among these new professions, among the bureaucrats that are
1:59:33 coming out of these burgeoning states, there were visibly a fair number of Jews. So in some way,
1:59:39 the rise of Jews in the minds of many people were connected to all of the other bad things that were
1:59:45 going on. Now, the world was changing in a way we don’t like. And seemingly the Jews are prospering
1:59:54 while I am not. And that was true in Germany and elsewhere. Jews became highly visible
1:59:59 in the professions. They became very visible in banking. They became visible in legal profession.
2:00:04 They became visible in the medical profession. And those are people that a lot of people would
2:00:10 come in contact with, bankers, lawyers, and doctors. They were not the majority of there, but
2:00:21 vastly overrepresented in terms of the general population, and especially within the cities.
2:00:28 So in that sense, the roots of anti-Semitism to me is that Jews in Germany and elsewhere,
2:00:33 and not just in Germany by enemies, France, Britain, everywhere else, became identified
2:00:43 with the bad changes that were taking place. But you also found that Jews were not only
2:00:49 prominent among capitalists, they were also prominent in the socialist movement as well.
2:00:55 So one of the things you could look around, if we return to Germany in 1919 in the aftermath of
2:01:01 World War I, and you look around in Bavaria or elsewhere, you tend to find that there are a lot
2:01:10 of Jews in visible positions on the German left. Rosa Luxembourg is but one example of that.
2:01:17 Eugen Levine, some of them came in from Russia. When the Soviets send a representative to Germany
2:01:26 in this period, it’s Karl Radek, a Jew. So it wasn’t difficult to exploit that, to argue that
2:01:37 just as the ranks of capitalism was full of Jews, the ranks of Bolshevism or of the revolutionary
2:01:43 left were full of Jews, because you could easily go around and distinguish a great many of them.
2:01:51 They don’t have to be the majority, they just have to be numerous, prominent, invisible, which they were.
2:01:59 So this provided you a, in the case of the propaganda of the German army, the type of stuff
2:02:03 that Hitler was spewed out, they could put all the anti-capitalist rhetoric in there,
2:02:07 wanted to. The army was never going to overthrow capitalism, and the capitalists knew they weren’t
2:02:13 going to do it. So go ahead, talk shit about us, we don’t really care, that’s not going to, because
2:02:21 we know that the army would prevent that from happening. The way to then undermine the real
2:02:28 enemy, it was a scene, the revolutionary left, was to point out the Jewish influence there.
2:02:34 I mean, look at Russia, well Lenislav Trotsky, there he is, look, there’s a Jew, there’s one,
2:02:37 Radek is a Jew, it wasn’t hard to find him in that regard.
2:02:46 You gave a lecture on the protocols of the elders of Zion. It’s widely considered to be the most
2:02:51 influential work of anti-Semitism ever, perhaps. Can you describe this text?
2:02:57 Well, the protocols of the learned elders of Zion
2:03:05 is probably one of the most troublesome and destructive works of literature that has ever
2:03:17 emerged, and yet its origins remain obscure. So you get a whole variety of stories about
2:03:23 where it came from. So the one story that is often, yes, that it was the work of the Ocarana,
2:03:30 the Russian secret police, and in particular, it was all crafted in 1904 and 1905.
2:03:43 In Paris, there’s a whole description of Piotr Raczkowski, who was supposedly the chief
2:03:48 of the Ocarana at the time, was the man behind it, another fellow by the name of Matve Golovinsky,
2:03:58 was the drafter of it, and that they had this document written by a French political writer
2:04:05 from some decades back called Dialogue and Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu,
2:04:13 which they were then adapting. Usually, it’s argued that they plagiarized it into the protocols,
2:04:20 and none of that is really true. I mean, the first part about it is that at the time this
2:04:24 supposedly took place in Raczkowski, he wasn’t working for the Ocarana, he’d been fired, and he
2:04:30 wasn’t in Paris, and the whole situation which is described couldn’t have taken place because the
2:04:38 people who did it weren’t there. It’s a story, but it provides a kind of explanation for it.
2:04:43 So the protocols emerge. So they always have to go back. This is one of the things that
2:04:56 I have found always useful in research is go back to the beginning. Find the first place this is
2:05:02 mentioned, or the first version, or the first iteration. Where does it start?
2:05:12 So you go back to St. Petersburg, Russia, run 1903. There is a small right-wing anti-Semitic
2:05:21 newspaper published there called Znamja, Banner. And it publishes in a kind of serial form
2:05:30 a work that doesn’t credit with any original author. And this is the first version of the
2:05:35 protocols of the limited elders of Zion. But what it’s actually describing
2:05:44 is a Judeo-Masonic plot to rule the world. Those two terms are always combined together.
2:05:50 And in the earlier version, there’s far more mentions of Freemasons than there are Jews.
2:06:02 The publisher of Znamja is closely connected to a thing called the Union of Russian People,
2:06:09 the Union of Russian Men, which was ostensibly existed to defend the empire against subversion,
2:06:15 and particularly against what it thought was Jewish subversion, when they also argued that the
2:06:20 prominence of Jews in revolutionary movements somehow proved that this was in some way a Jewish
2:06:24 revolution. But again, this is not a mainstream newspaper. It’s not appealing to a mainstream
2:06:29 population. Very few people saw it. But this is where it appears. Now, keep in mind,
2:06:36 that’s two or three years before it’s usually said to have been written. Or the other version
2:06:40 is that there’s this crazy priest by the name of Sergei Nielis, and he wrote it,
2:06:47 or actually appended it as an appendix to his work in 1905. Now, it was around before that.
2:06:56 So Nielis didn’t create it. It wasn’t drafted in Paris in 1904 or 1905. It was serialized in an
2:07:07 obscure right-wing Russian newspaper in 1903. And by the way, we should say that these are 24
2:07:16 protocols. Well, it varies. It varies. That are, I guess, supposed to be like meeting notes about
2:07:24 the supposed cabal where the Jews and Freemasons are planning together a world domination. But
2:07:30 it’s like meeting notes, right? Protocol, which are Russian term basically for notes of a meeting.
2:07:35 Well, as notes of a meeting, these are the goofiest things I’ve ever seen,
2:07:41 because what you’ve got here, it’s not notes. No one takes notes from a meeting that way.
2:07:48 What you’ve got is like the exposition of a bond villain. It’s all of this, boy, all of them are
2:07:53 going to do this. And then the last thing you want to do is lay out your, if you get a plan for world
2:08:03 domination, my suggestion would be don’t write it down. So it’s not notes of a meeting. It’s again,
2:08:10 it’s another sort of narrative or story that’s being told. It bears no resemblance to the
2:08:17 dialogue in hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. But what it is, the best thing, it’s not
2:08:23 particularly readable in some ways. There was an Italian writer named Cesare Michalis,
2:08:30 who wrote a book translated in English called The Non-Existant Manuscript.
2:08:38 And what it is, is that he takes the different versions, starting with the 1902-1903 versions
2:08:43 and looks through the other ones. And he tries to, in the process, to reconstruct what he thinks
2:08:49 the original might have been. But the other thing he does, which was fascinating to me,
2:08:58 is that he takes this whole sort of initial text. And in bold type, he indicates the paragraphs,
2:09:04 but more often sentences or phrases that appear to be identical from the Jolie work.
2:09:12 And they’re just scattered throughout it. There’s no particular grime or reason to it.
2:09:19 You don’t plagiarize that way. I mean, who does that? It’s in here, it’s in there,
2:09:26 which has led to a peculiar theory of mine, which of course I will have to expound upon,
2:09:32 which is that I think that the original author of the protocols was the same Maurice Jolie.
2:09:41 I think what someone stumbled across was a work which he wrote and never published
2:09:47 and which he just drew. It’s exactly what someone would do working from your own
2:09:54 kind of material. Because I’ve written things and then taken what I’ve written and then
2:09:58 repackaged that into something else.
2:09:59 Sudden seer, sudden seer.
2:10:03 Yeah. And the same sort of thing comes out. Only bits and pieces of it remain.
2:10:10 So why would Jolie have done that? Jolie was, we’re talking about a man whose career basically
2:10:20 span the 1850s to 1870s. He’s an obscure figure. I’m not even totally sure he existed.
2:10:25 I mean, but it’s one of those things you go looking for him.
2:10:29 I love that you’re a scholar of people that just kind of emerge out of like the darkness.
2:10:31 They just come from nowhere.
2:10:35 And there’s the Ocarina there also. And we should also say this was,
2:10:38 I guess, the original would be written. I mean, what’s the language of the original?
2:10:39 Russian?
2:10:44 Russian. But my hunch is that that’s adopted from a French version.
2:10:47 First of all, they’re constantly harping on freemasons, which wasn’t nearly as a big idea as
2:10:53 there. If you go back to France in the 1890s, there’s some big scandals. Well, there’s the
2:10:58 Dreyfus scandal. We got that. All right. Well, you’ve got a Jewish officer on trial for being a
2:11:03 traitor. All right. So that was probably, so you bring in the whole Jewish element,
2:11:11 Jews, disloyal, Dreyfus case, 1894. Earlier, you had the Panama scandal, which was a huge
2:11:16 investment scandal when the Panama Canal Company in Paris collapsed. And again,
2:11:23 many of the major players in that work, Jewish financiers. And then you’ve got the Taxel hoax.
2:11:30 So the Taxel hoax was the work of this guy. His real name was, I think,
2:11:37 Joghan Paje. He was kind of a French journalist. He started out writing porn.
2:11:44 So when he wrote things like Sex Lives of the Popes and the Erotic Bible and various things
2:11:48 of that kind, he was a Catholic, broke with the Catholic Church, wrote bad stuff about the Popes.
2:11:57 And apparently became a freemason for a while and then supposedly recanted his evil ways,
2:12:02 went back to the church. And then under the name Leo Taxel began writing these whole series of
2:12:11 articles, basically arguing that there was a Masonic satanic conspiracy run by the way by an
2:12:20 American, Albert Pike. And this also included child sacrifice. It’s got pizza gate as well
2:12:29 by a high priestess, Diana Vaughn. And so there’s child sacrifice, weird Roby Bohemian grove stuff.
2:12:34 And the Freemasons are devil worshipers going back to the Knights Templars. And so there’s
2:12:40 a thing called the Devil in the 19th Century and the Secrets of Freemasonry. And this became
2:12:46 a bestseller in France. So France is just obsessed with all these kinds of conspiracies.
2:12:55 So evil satanic freemasons, evil Jewish financiers, Dreyfus. This, this is the brew where all of this
2:13:00 comes. I want to figure out how Freemasons and Jews get connected together. France is the place
2:13:08 where this happens. Now, Taxel or Jogon Paget eventually pulls another interesting thing in this.
2:13:16 Around 1897, critics argue that he’s making this stuff up and demand that he present Diana Vaughn.
2:13:21 Suppose satanic high priestess, toddler killer. And he says, “Oh, we’re going to have a press
2:13:26 conference. She’ll appear and say all of this stuff as she returns to the church and, you know,
2:13:32 possibly becomes a nun.” And so people show up, you know, high figures in the Catholic Church
2:13:37 shows up and he does. No Diana Vaughn. And Dogon Paget goes, “It’s all a hoax. I made it up. You’re
2:13:43 all a bunch of idiots for believing it.” Okay, you, you members of the church especially, just
2:13:49 just about gullible, you know, morons you are. And that’s it. He confesses to this day, however,
2:13:53 you will find people who will insist that it’s actually true because they desperately want it
2:14:03 to be true. But this is, I think, the milieu that, I like that word apparently, that this comes out
2:14:12 of. And this is, this is this whole kind of unhealthy mix. So France to me is the only place
2:14:18 then in a decade preceding it that something like this would be concocted. So it was either
2:14:24 created by some sort of unknown person there. But I still think that even though he dies in
2:14:36 like 1879 that in, in, in Maurice Jolie’s troubled career, he went from being an opponent of French
2:14:42 emperor Napoleon III, which is what his, which is what the whole dialogues was written against.
2:14:55 And then he was, for a time, a close political ally of a French politician by the name of Adolf
2:15:01 Cremieux. So Adolf Cremieux, well, what’s he got going for him? Well, he was kind of a radical
2:15:09 politician. He was an opponent of Napoleon III. He was a Freemason. Oh, and he was Jewish. In fact,
2:15:14 at one point, I think he was actually the head both of the Scottish right
2:15:26 in France and I have an important figure in the alliance Israeli, the Jewish organization in France.
2:15:32 So he was publicly very prominently Jewish and Masonic. So someone else who would have linked
2:15:38 them together. Jolie, as he did with virtually everyone, this is a guy whose life largely consisted
2:15:52 of dual threats and fistfights. So he gets, he gets angry at Cremieux. And it’s exactly the type
2:16:00 of thing that he might write to vent his spleen about it. But he died. Probably a suicide. That’s
2:16:11 kind of difficult to tell. In obscurity, his son seems to have inherited most of his literary works.
2:16:20 And his son then worked for new became a journalist work for newspapers in France
2:16:26 in the 1890s, but was also associated with some people on the fringes of the Ocarina
2:16:35 or the Russian press in France. So one of the little things that had happened by this time
2:16:41 is that France and Russia had become allies, even though their political systems are completely
2:16:50 incompatible. And so the Russians were using money to subsidize French newspapers that were
2:16:57 championing the alliance between the two, Russian meddling. They’re just paying to have the right
2:17:02 kind of newspapers come out. So there’s this whole connection between the kind of Russian
2:17:10 journalistic world and the French journalistic world and all of these scandals which are going on
2:17:18 in Jolie’s son. And then 10 years down the road, this thing pops up in a newspaper in St. Petersburg.
2:17:29 That’s where I think the origins lay. Why do you think it took off? Why do you think it grabbed
2:17:37 a large number of people’s imaginations? And even after it was shown to be not actually what it’s
2:17:43 supposed to be, people still believe it’s real? Well, it doesn’t take off immediately. Okay,
2:17:47 it never receives any kind of wide. I mean, nobody much reads the first edition of it.
2:17:55 When it’s reedited, it keeps getting, there’s something like 18 or 19 different versions
2:18:00 as it goes through. I mean, it gets, you know, people leave this protocol out or leave another
2:18:05 one. As time goes on, there’s more and more emphasis on Jews and less and less on Freemasons.
2:18:13 So it’s sort of, and the whole thing could have begun as an anti-Masonic tract. I mean,
2:18:17 you could leave Jews out of it entirely and just turn it into a Masonic plot to rule the world.
2:18:22 But let’s just throw them in as well, since the two things are already being combined elsewhere.
2:18:31 It doesn’t become a big deal until really after the First World War, because the initial versions
2:18:36 of it are all in Russian. And, you know, let’s face it, well, that’s widely read in Russia.
2:18:41 It’s not much read anywhere else. It’s a different alphabet. Nobody can even see what it means.
2:18:47 So it has no particular influence outside of Russia. But then you get the 1919,
2:18:53 and you get all these different versions of it. So suddenly you get two English versions
2:18:58 in the US, another English version in Britain, a German edition, a French edition, a Dutch
2:19:05 edition. Everybody is coming up with these things. So it’s not until the immediate aftermath of the
2:19:12 First World War that this metastasizes, and it begins to show up in all of these different foreign
2:19:19 editions. And I think that it just has to do with the changes that have taken place
2:19:26 during the war. One of the things that people began looking for was that, why was there a war?
2:19:30 And we’ve just had this whole disastrous war, and the world has been turned upside down.
2:19:36 So there has to be some kind of explanation for that. I don’t know. And one of the things
2:19:41 this offered is, see, there’s this evil plan. There’s this evil plan that has been put into motion.
2:19:48 And this could possibly explain what’s taking place. The reason why the protocols
2:19:56 were, I think, widely bought then, and why they still are in many ways, is the same reason that
2:20:02 the taxal hoax I was talking about was because it told a story that people wanted to believe.
2:20:09 So in France in the 1890s, there was widespread suspicion of Freemasons.
2:20:18 It was seen as a somewhat sinister, secretive organization, certainly secretive. And there
2:20:30 was also the same sort of generalized prejudices about Jews, clannish, distinct, too much influence,
2:20:36 all of the things that went on. So it was sort of easy to combine those two things together.
2:20:45 And even though taxal admits it was a hoax, there were those who argued that it’s too accurate.
2:20:52 It describes things too completely to be a hoax. And then you get the same arguments. In fact,
2:20:58 I’ve heard the same arguments with the protocol. I don’t even buy this as an example of plagiarism,
2:21:02 because you can’t actually prove what’s being plagiarized in any sense. To me,
2:21:09 the protocols are a prime example of what I call a turd on a plate.
2:21:17 These things crop up. I have to explain that now. What is a turd on a plate? Well,
2:21:22 a turd on a plate is a turd on a plate. Suppose you come in and there’s a plate setting on the
2:21:27 table and there’s a turd on it. Now, the first thing you’re going to want is, is that a turd?
2:21:34 Is it a human turd? Where did it come from? Why would someone poop on a plate? There are all these
2:21:40 questions that come to mind. It makes no sense. But that’s what you come up with. It’s just there.
2:21:47 Right? I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know why, but there’s a turd
2:21:51 on a plate. And that’s what the protocol is that they’re just there.
2:21:55 But the reality is, just like with a turd on a plate, you take a picture of that in modern day
2:22:00 and it becomes a meme, becomes viral and becomes a joke on all social media. And that was viewed
2:22:05 by tens of millions of people or whatever. It becomes popular. So wherever the turd came from,
2:22:11 it did captivate the imagination. Yeah.
2:22:14 It did speak to something. But does it seem to provide an explanation?
2:22:23 Can you just speak to Jew hatred? Is it just an accident of history?
2:22:33 Why was it the Jews versus the Freemasons? Is it the collective mind searching for small group
2:22:39 to blame for the pains of civilization? And then Jews just happened to be the thing that
2:22:46 was selected at that moment in history. It goes all the way back to the Greeks.
2:22:59 Let’s blame them. So one of the first occasions you find the idea that Jews are a distinct,
2:23:11 mean-spirited, nasty people, goes back to a Greco-Egyptian historian named Manito.
2:23:21 This is around, I think, 300 BC, early. Can’t even rope the Romans into this one.
2:23:29 So Manito is trying to write a history of the dynasties of Egypt. I think his history of dynasties
2:23:33 of Egypt still is one of the basic works in this. But he tells this whole story,
2:23:40 which essentially describes the first blood libels that the Jews, to celebrate their
2:23:46 various religious holidays, would capture Greeks and fatten them up in the basement and then slaughter
2:23:51 them and eat them or drain their blood or do something. Yeah, it’s just the earlier version
2:23:58 of that kind. Also, I think it repeats the Egyptian version of the Exodus out of
2:24:06 Egypt, which is quite different than the biblical version. In this case, the Egyptian,
2:24:12 they stole all the stuff out of the Egyptians’ houses and ran off into the desert.
2:24:16 The Jews stole all the stuff and ran off. Yeah, Hebrews. Hebrews robbed the Egyptians.
2:24:24 They were taken in. We took them in and sheltered them, gave them jobs, and then they stole all
2:24:31 the jewelry and ran away. We didn’t even chase them. We were glad to see them gone. So it’s a
2:24:40 different narrative on that story. But it essentially portrays the Jews as being hostile,
2:24:48 that they don’t like other people. They’re contemptuous of other people’s religions,
2:24:54 the rest of it. And see, the Greeks tended to think of themselves as being extremely cosmopolitan.
2:24:57 Now, the Greeks ran across people worshipping other gods. They go, “Oh,
2:25:03 this is just our gods under different names.” Everything was adjusted into their landscape.
2:25:10 So you end up with that kind of hostility, which was there at the time.
2:25:16 And that was probably influenced also by some of these earlier rebellions
2:25:23 that had taken place in Egypt. During the Roman period, you not only have the Judean
2:25:30 rebellion in 70 AD, but you have a couple of other uprisings in North Africa. And
2:25:38 they’re very bloody affairs. And in some cases, Jews begin massacring other people around them
2:25:42 to start killing the Greeks. The Greeks start killing them. So there was a fair amount of,
2:25:48 from that period on, a certain amount of bad blood of mutual contempt between Greeks or between
2:25:54 Hellenes, between the people who became Hellenized, as the Romans would be, and the Jews.
2:26:02 And the Romans also seemed to have developed much of that idea. They considered Judea as to
2:26:09 being a horrible place to have to govern, inhabited by a stubborn, obnoxious people,
2:26:22 not well liked. So that’s really where you see the earliest version of that.
2:26:25 And the reasons for it would be
2:26:33 complicated. What you could say is that going back to Manito and to the Roman period,
2:26:43 Jews, Judeans, frequently experienced difficulties, conflicts with other people living around them.
2:26:50 And part of that probably had to do with the diaspora, which was the movement. Well,
2:26:53 you get the idea, the Romans came and he kicked everybody out, which they didn’t. Jews had been
2:26:58 leaving Judea since it was a poor, limited area, and moving to areas like North Africa,
2:27:03 Egypt, Sireneca, all the way into southern France. They move widely around the Roman Empire.
2:27:12 So that sense of both distinctness and hostility existed since ancient times.
2:27:23 So it wasn’t just–the attitude of the Church towards Jews was mixed by–well, one of the ideas,
2:27:30 of course, is that at the end of time, just before the Second Coming, one of the signs,
2:27:34 how are we going to know that Jesus is going to return and the world is going to end?
2:27:40 Well, the Jews will all convert. There will be a mass conversion. They’ll sort of see the light.
2:27:46 Now, so there have to be Jews around to do that, or we won’t–it’s like a canary in a coal mine.
2:27:50 You would have to have them there to tip it off. So that was one of the arguments as to why,
2:27:56 within the Church, as to why Jews would not be forcibly converted, beyond the fact that it’s
2:28:03 just kind of bad policy to forcibly convert people because you don’t know whether it’s sincere.
2:28:14 But they need to be preserved as a kind of artifact which will then redeem itself
2:28:22 at the end of time. It’s not something which is encouraged–it predates Christianity.
2:28:33 And then Christianity, of course, in its own way, just sort of plagiarizes the whole Jewish thing,
2:28:39 doesn’t it? I mean, I hesitate to use that term, but that’s what you do. It’s just like, well,
2:28:44 we’re the Jews now. You used to have a unique relationship with God, but now it’s been passed
2:28:55 over to us. Thanks for the Bible. I can remember that. And my mom’s side, I was periodically exposed
2:29:01 to Sunday school. And pretty much, the Old Testament was always presented as if somehow
2:29:10 it was the history of like a better term–Europeans in some way. It was sort of a Christian history.
2:29:16 It was all the prequel to that. And there’d be some sort of–first, the term Hebrew was always
2:29:22 used, never Jews. So the ancient Hebrews, and somehow the Hebrews just sort of became the
2:29:26 Christians. And I don’t know, the Jews just got–they didn’t get a memo or something.
2:29:31 So it’s basically like Christianity, the prequel is the Old Testament.
2:29:36 But they just sort of took takeover. We have the special dispensation now. Thank you very much.
2:29:42 You’re an artifact. So it’s interesting. So this whole narrative
2:29:52 that I would say is kind of like a viral meme started, as you described in 300 BC.
2:30:00 It just carried on in various forms and morphed itself and arrived after the industrial revolution
2:30:07 into a new form to the 19th and 20th century. And then somehow captivated everybody’s imagination.
2:30:15 I think that modern anti-Semitism is very much a creation of the modern world and the industrial
2:30:23 revolution. It’s largely a creation of Jewish emancipation. It’s the nasty flip side of that.
2:30:31 All of the restrictions are thrown off, but now also you become the focus of
2:30:42 much more attention than what you had before. Prior to that, you had the kind of ghettoization
2:30:50 which worked both ways. I mean, there were rabbis who praised the ghetto as a protection
2:30:57 of Jews against the outside world because inside we can live our life as we wish and we’re
2:31:07 unmolested. Whereas if we were, the great fear is that if we were sort of absorbed into this
2:31:13 larger world, we’ll lose our identity. That sort of question comes up in the 18th century and things
2:31:19 like the Haskala movement in Germany because the German Jews were always at the sort of cutting
2:31:25 edge of assimilation and modernity. Moses Mendelssohn was an example of that. You’re arguing that,
2:31:33 you know, we just need to become Germans. So as much as possible, synagogue should look like
2:31:42 Lutheran churches, everything things should be given in good German, and that’s the way we need
2:31:48 to become Jewish Germans. We don’t want to become a kind of group of people who are a part in that
2:31:57 way. And that has created great tensions ever since. You know, one of the essential points that
2:32:03 seems to me in anti-Semitism, anti-Jewism, is that all the Jews are in this together. Isn’t that
2:32:08 one of the things? Okay, they’re always talking about as if they’re collective Jews this, Jews that,
2:32:14 as if it’s a single undifferentiated mass of people who all move and speak in the same way.
2:32:27 From my personal experience, not being Jewish. I’ve incredibly diverse. In many ways, really,
2:32:34 one of the things that anti-Semitism proposes is a continuity or a singularity of Jewish identity
2:32:41 that never existed. Just like you said, in one hand, there’s a good story. In the other hand,
2:32:47 is the truth. And oftentimes, the good story wins out. And there’s something about the idea that
2:32:51 there’s a cabal of people, whatever they are, in this case, our discussion is Jews,
2:32:59 seeking world domination, controlling everybody, is somehow a compelling story. It gives us a
2:33:06 direction of a people’s to fight, of a people’s to hate, on which we project our pain. Because life
2:33:13 is difficult. Life, for many, for most, is full of suffering. And so we channel that suffering into
2:33:19 hatred towards the other. Maybe if you can just zoom out, what do you, from this particular
2:33:26 discussion, learn about human nature that we pick the other in this kind of way?
2:33:36 And we divide each other up in groups and then construct stories. And like constructing those
2:33:43 stories, and they become really viral and sexy to us. And then we channel the hatred. We use
2:33:50 those stories to channel hatred towards the other. Well, yeah, Jews aren’t the only recipient of that.
2:33:55 I mean, anytime you hear people talking about Jews, this or that, white people, this or that,
2:34:00 black people, this or that, Asians, this or that, where they’re in undifferentiated mass,
2:34:07 who apparently all share something in common. Well, then nobody’s really thinking.
2:34:12 And the other thing you’ll find is that people who will express those views when press will argue
2:34:16 that, oh, well, this, you know, if they actually know anybody from those groups, those are okay.
2:34:22 You know, it’s like Nazis, though, they go, this isn’t okay, Jew. They’re all right. They were
2:34:28 always constantly making exceptions. And one for, you know, what they actually met an actual human
2:34:33 being, and they seem to be fairly normal. Well, they were okay. So what it was that they hated
2:34:41 weren’t actual people for the most part, it was just this kind of gollywag vision that they had
2:34:48 with them. You’re not even talking about real people. I don’t know. What does that tell you
2:34:55 about human nature? Well, okay, in 70 odd years, what have I learned about my fellow creatures?
2:35:03 One, I don’t actually understand them any better than I ever did. In fact, less so.
2:35:09 Okay, I would say this. When I was 17, I thought that I had the world much more figured out than
2:35:14 I do now. Completely deluded. But, you know, it seemed to make much more sense and I could
2:35:24 categorize things. Basic take upon human beings, most people most of the time are polite, cooperative,
2:35:38 and kind until they’re not. And the exact tipping point and moment in which they go from one to
2:35:45 the other is unpredictable. God, that’s brilliantly put. Speaking of the tipping point,
2:35:52 you gave a series of lectures on murderers, crimes in the 20th century. One of the crimes
2:35:58 that you described is the Manson family murders. And that combines a lot of the elements of what
2:36:03 we’ve been talking about and a lot of the elements of the human nature that you just described.
2:36:07 So, can you just tell the story at a high level as you understand it?
2:36:11 The Manson family. Well, you begin with Charles Manson, who’s the key element in this. And Charles
2:36:19 Manson, for most of his life, up until the time that he’s around 33, is an unexceptional petty
2:36:27 criminal. In and out of prison, reform school from an early age, not really associated with
2:36:35 violent crimes. He did stuff like steal cars, write bad checks, became an unsuccessful pimp
2:36:42 and drug dealer. So around 1967, he gets out of his latest stint in federal lockup and terminal
2:36:48 island in Los Angeles, California. By that time, he’s learned how to play the guitar,
2:36:56 has ambitions to become a musician, and also has proclaimed himself a Scientologist.
2:37:00 Not that he ever seems to have practiced, but that’s when he reclaimed that he was.
2:37:08 Kind of self-educated himself in prison to a certain degree. And so when he gets out of prison
2:37:18 in ’67, he was a model prisoner. He behaved himself and seemed, you can sort of imagine his life is
2:37:24 going in a completely different direction. And here again, I’m going to say something kind of good
2:37:30 about Charles Manson, which is that he actually was a decent singer. If you really sort of listen
2:37:37 to some of the stuff he did, he’s not a great singer, but he could have, you know, other people
2:37:41 got recording contracts with less talent than he had, and he could play a guitar.
2:37:47 The Beach Boys actually do record one of his songs without him.
2:37:51 How would you evaluate Hitler’s painting compared to Charles Manson’s?
2:37:55 Well, you’re supposed to say it’s terrible. Okay. Okay. It looks average to me.
2:37:56 Yeah, landscape.
2:38:03 I mean, if you didn’t know it was Hitler, would it, would you, I don’t know what
2:38:09 people say about it. Sorry for the distraction. It’s just, you know, it’s just an average
2:38:14 painter. That’s what it was. Something like crazy genocidal maniac paintings that you don’t have
2:38:19 really have those. So Manson, he could have done that. He probably could have, you know,
2:38:24 he made certain inroads into the music industry. And if he hadn’t been such a weirdo, he might have
2:38:29 gotten further with it. But his life could have taken a different turn. So this is one of the
2:38:34 questions I have. Where did a guy who becomes, who’s an unexceptional career petty criminal
2:38:41 suddenly emerge into some sort of criminal mastermind, a Sven Galle, who can bend all of
2:38:47 these people to his will and get them to go out and commit murder? That’s a, that’s a real shift
2:38:54 that you have. So the first thing it kind of could tell you that something odd is going on is he
2:39:03 gets out of prison in LA County. And he’s supposed, you know, he’s on parole. You know,
2:39:08 parolees are supposed to have a job, not supposed to leave the jurisdiction of their parole. He
2:39:15 heads straight for the Bay Area violates parole right off the bat. Two weeks later, he drifts
2:39:20 into the parole office in the Bay Area, where upon he should have been arrested and sent back
2:39:24 to Terminal Island. But instead, they just assign him a parole, I don’t know, maybe things were
2:39:30 easier than in some way. So he gets assigned a parole officer, Michael Smith. Michael Smith
2:39:35 is initially handling a number of parolees. But after a while, once he takes on Manson,
2:39:41 he only has one parolee he’s supervising, Charlie Manson, which is odd.
2:39:46 And you also find out that Michael Smith, in addition to being a parole officer,
2:39:53 is a graduate student at the University of California studying group dynamics, especially
2:40:00 the influence of drugs on gangs and groups. And he’s also connected to the Hayat Ashbury Free
2:40:06 Clinic, which is a place where the influence of because Hayat Ashbury had lots of drugs and lots
2:40:16 of groups. So, you know, Charlie Manson never gets a regular job, hangs around with a young
2:40:25 girl’s ex cons, engages in criminal activity, is repeatedly arrested, but nothing ever sticks for
2:40:35 the next couple of years. So who gets that type of thing? Who gets a get out of jail free card
2:40:49 informants? So here is what, again, this is speculation. But Manson, at some point,
2:40:54 after he got out of prison, is getting this treatment because he is recruited as a confidential
2:41:04 informant. For who? For who? That’s the interesting question. So probably not for any local police
2:41:12 departments. My best suspicion is probably the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, precursor to the DEA.
2:41:21 You know, Federal Parolee, Federal Parole Officer, a graduate student in drugs and group
2:41:27 dynamics. And eventually, with permission, he goes back down to LA. And what is he part of
2:41:32 when he’s there? Well, he’s on the fringes of the music industry. Not so much, you know, these
2:41:38 those the Wilson’s and elsewhere, which also brings him to the fringes of the film industry. So
2:41:44 one of the things, if you’re sort of looking in terms of Hollywood music industry elites in the
2:41:53 flow of, oh, and he’s also dealing in drugs and girls. So an early version of Jeffrey Epstein.
2:42:04 Yeah, Manson distracted lots of underage runaways and trained them, used them also
2:42:10 associating with biker gangs who produced drugs, etc. So that’s part of what he’s
2:42:15 he’s an informant in the movement of drugs, basically within the film music industries.
2:42:19 And he’s given pretty much a kind of free rein at that point.
2:42:27 What then happens in August of 1969 is that there are these murders, you know, first Sharon Tate
2:42:34 and her friends in Cielo Drive. I think everybody has probably pretty much heard that story before.
2:42:40 And of course, the question is, why Cielo Drive, why Sharon Tate, Frikowski and the rest of them,
2:42:45 that he have some Manson was familiar with the place he had been there before members of the
2:42:51 family had been there before. So he knew where it was. It wasn’t an easy place to find. I mean,
2:42:56 the way that that house, the house, the original house is no longer there, but the same sort of
2:43:02 property in a house is built there. And if you didn’t know where it was, it’s not some place.
2:43:06 Let’s just go for a drive in the Hollywood Hills and murder people in a house. Well,
2:43:11 that isn’t the one that you would come across. There are lots of connections there.
2:43:16 Vojtek Frikowski, who was one of the people killed at the Cielo Drive house, was involved in drug
2:43:22 dealing. That’s a possible connection between the two, probably a fairly likely one. Probably not
2:43:30 unfortunate Sharon Tate at all. She was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her husband
2:43:37 might have been, you never know. And then the next night after the slaughter there,
2:43:41 which by the way, Manson is not at. So this is one of the interesting things about it.
2:43:45 Charles Manson doesn’t kill any of these people. His crime is supposedly
2:43:55 ordering the killings to be done. He supposedly thought that the killings at the Tate House were
2:44:01 sloppy. And he was going to give everybody a crash course in how you apparently commit
2:44:05 seemingly random murders. So the next night he takes a group of people over to the La Bianca’s
2:44:13 house in a different section of LA. And you got Lena Rosemary, La Bianca. The guy is a grocer.
2:44:21 His wife runs a dress shop, upper middle class. And they’re bound to gagged and hacked to death.
2:44:28 And as at the Tate residence, various things like piggy are written, various messages in blood,
2:44:33 things that are supposed to look like cats paws, because one of the groups trying to be
2:44:39 framed for this was the idea was the Black Panthers. So the general story that comes out
2:44:44 in the subsequent trial is that this was all a part of something called Helter Skelter,
2:44:49 which Manson supposedly was an idea that that sounds like a Beatles song. That’s where he got
2:44:53 it from. He thought the Beatles were talking to him through their music and that there was going
2:45:02 to be an apocalyptic race war. And this was all part of a plan to set this off. So this is why
2:45:10 the Black Panthers were trying to be implicated in this, although how it was supposed to do that
2:45:18 is never really explained. Here is what I think was really happening, what really happened,
2:45:25 and how I think it fits together. Before Sharon Tate and her friends or the La Biancas were killed,
2:45:31 there was a murder by members of the family of some of the same people involved in the
2:45:36 later killings of a musician drug manufacturer by the name of Gary Hinman.
2:45:46 So Manson, again, was involved in the drug trade, and Hinman made them. He was a cook, basically,
2:45:53 and he brewed them up in his basement, sold the drugs to Manson, who sold them to biker gangs,
2:45:57 like the straight satans, which was one of the groups that he used, and they distributed them
2:46:04 elsewhere. Well, one day, the straight satans show up and complained that the last batch of
2:46:12 meth or whatever it was that they got from Manson had made some of their brothers very,
2:46:17 very ill, and they were quite unhappy about that. And they wanted their $2,000 back.
2:46:27 Manson had gotten those drugs from Gary Hinman. So he is unhappy, and he sends
2:46:31 Bobby Bosaway and a couple of the girls over to Hinman’s place to get the money from him.
2:46:39 As the story is later related, I think, by Susan Atkins, Hinman denied that there was anything
2:46:46 wrong with his drugs and refused to pay up, which led to an interrogation torture session in which
2:46:52 he was killed. And the idea was here, what are we going to do with that? Well, one of the other
2:46:57 groups that Hinman had sold drugs to were, guess what, people associated with the Black Panthers.
2:47:07 So we’ll leave these things up, and they will do it. So it’s Bobby Bosaway, who then takes Hinman’s
2:47:15 car and decides to drive it up the coast. By the way, with a bloody knife with Hinman’s blood and
2:47:21 hair on it and blood on the seats in the car, and then he pulls it off the road and decides to sleep
2:47:30 it off, and he gets busted. So find Hinman’s body, find Bosaway and Hinman’s car with a bloody knife
2:47:38 with him. Yeah, he gets arrested. So Bosaway was very popular with some of the girls. There’s
2:47:45 consternation in the family that Bobby has been arrested. So how can we possibly get Bobby out
2:47:52 of jail? Copycat killings. So if we go kill more people and we make it look the same, then see,
2:47:58 Bobby couldn’t possibly have done it. Now, see, he just borrowed the car. Okay, he stole the car,
2:48:04 but the knife was already in it. He didn’t have anything to do with this. So that, to me, makes
2:48:09 the most sense out of what followed. How often do people talk about that theory? That’s an interesting
2:48:14 theory. Well, it’s there. It’s just not the one that, that, luckily, obviously, I wanted to go with
2:48:19 healthy scouter because it was, again, it was a story that people could understand. Yeah. And
2:48:27 it was sensational and it would catch on. Also another probable issue in that was that his star
2:48:34 witness was Linda Kassabian. Linda Kassabian, she was present at both the Tate and the LaBianca
2:48:40 murders. She didn’t participate in the killings according to her. She sort of drives the car,
2:48:46 but everybody else talked about what had happened. Well, okay, she turns states evidence
2:48:54 and gets total immunity. And it’s largely in her testimony that all the rest of the case is based.
2:49:02 Now, if you start throwing into the equation that she proclaimed her love for Bobby Beausoleil,
2:49:07 and this could, and that she, according to others, was the chief proponent of the copycat killings,
2:49:15 well, then that would get messy. Now, there’s one guy that’s at the center of this. It’s Charles
2:49:24 Manson. He ordered all of this done to ignite a race war, even though how would any of that do it?
2:49:29 Okay. So that doesn’t make sense. But he is nevertheless at the center of this
2:49:34 because he’s the glue of the family, right? He exerts a tremendous amount of psychological control
2:49:39 over them. How was he able to do that? Sorry to interrupt. Because he said he was a petty criminal.
2:49:45 It does seem he was pretty prolific in his petty crimes. He did a lot of them. He had a lot of
2:49:57 access to LSD, which he started getting at the free clinic in San Francisco. So lots of it
2:50:02 floating around. Some descriptions of the family at Spawn Ranch is that people were basically
2:50:08 taking acid on a daily basis, which, by the way, was also a potential problem with Linda
2:50:13 Cassabian’s testimony, since she also admitted to being high most of the time and also thinking
2:50:18 she was a witch. All right. So you want to put her, okay. Where do you want to go with that?
2:50:24 See, if Manson wasn’t Manson, if he hadn’t acted like such a complete, if he hadn’t actually
2:50:32 acted like the crazed hippy psycho goofball that Boogliosi painted him as being, then
2:50:37 Cassabian’s testimony wouldn’t have been as strong because you could. I mean,
2:50:43 the first thing against her is you’ve gotten immunity for telling the story the prosecution
2:50:49 wants. That’s a little iffy. And we won’t even bring in the witch and the drugs and being in
2:50:54 love with Bobby Poseley. All right. So if Manson had been dressed like you, sitting there in a
2:51:02 suit and you know, and it behaved himself and spoken normally, this isn’t to say that he wasn’t
2:51:10 guilty as hell. So what he supposedly did was to inspire all of these killings.
2:51:19 And I think that’s probably sort of beginning with the Hinman killing.
2:51:25 He told them to go over there and get the money one way or the other. I don’t know whether it’s
2:51:31 clear whether he told them if you don’t get the money, kill him, but Hinman’s dead. And then
2:51:39 you might also have seen the value in terms of having copycat killings as a way of throwing
2:51:44 off any other kind of blame. The other story you get is that one of the people who had lived at
2:51:50 the Cielo house for Sharon Tate was before was a record producer by the name of Terry Melcher.
2:52:00 Melcher supposedly, as the general story goes, had welched on a deal with Manson in terms of
2:52:05 a record contract. He screwed over Manson in some sort of a record deal and Manson wanted to get
2:52:12 revenge and sent them to kill everybody in the house, which again doesn’t make much of sense.
2:52:18 One, Manson knew that Melcher wasn’t living there anymore. He probably knew where Melcher
2:52:22 was living. If he wanted to get Melcher, he could have found him. It wasn’t that difficult to do.
2:52:38 So it’s not revenge on Terry Melcher that drew him there. He was familiar with the house,
2:52:45 so if the idea was to simply commit random killings that would muddy the whole waters
2:52:50 with the Hinman killing, then you might pick some place you knew of. You knew the place
2:52:54 where to run it out. There would be someone there. You really didn’t care. In the same way that the
2:53:01 lobbyonkas seemed to have been, Manson was familiar with that because it supposedly had been the scene
2:53:09 of creepy crawling. This is little interesting things that the family would be taught to do. Creepy
2:53:16 crawling is when you sneak into somebody’s house at night. While they’re there asleep or when they’re
2:53:22 not there and you move things around. So when they get up in the morning or they come home,
2:53:27 they’ll suddenly notice that someone has been in their house, which will freak them out,
2:53:32 which is the whole point of that. But it doesn’t seem like the murder or the creepy crawling was
2:53:38 the… well, creepy crawling may be. But it doesn’t seem like the murder, like some of the other
2:53:44 people you’ve covered, like the Zodiac killer, the murder is the goal. Maybe there’s some
2:53:51 psychopathic kind of artistry to the murder that the Zodiac killer had and the messaging behind
2:53:57 that. But it seems like with at least the way you’re describing it with Charles Manson family,
2:54:02 the murder was just the… they just had a basic disregard for human life and the murder was a
2:54:09 consequence of just operating in the drug underworld. So Manson set up a kind of base,
2:54:15 a thing called the Spawn Movie Ranch, which was an old movie ranch out on the northwest edge of LA.
2:54:24 And they just kind of camped out there. He used the girls in particular, Squeaky From, to get the
2:54:34 owner or operator, George Spawn, to let them hang out there. And basically, she slept with him and
2:54:38 he was perfectly happy to let them hang out. They also had a place out in the desert that they had.
2:54:45 They dealt in credit card fraud, stolen cars. It was kind of a chop shop that they ran out of the
2:54:55 place. So he had a fairly good little criminal gig going, which with the protection he had,
2:54:57 probably would… the one thing they couldn’t cover him on was murder.
2:55:02 So you think there was… if he was an informer, you think there was still a connection between
2:55:07 DEA, FBI, CIA, whatever with him throughout this until you come into murder?
2:55:12 Well, the real question is there is a book written on this by Tom O’Neill called Chaos.
2:55:16 And that sort of thing is the easiest thing to get through. There’s a lot of material there.
2:55:20 I don’t think O’Neill necessarily knows what to make of some of the stuff he came up with.
2:55:26 But he does a very good job of sort of demolishing the whole Boogliosi narrative.
2:55:32 And one of the people he mentions is a name that I had run into elsewhere.
2:55:37 And so I really paid attention to it when I saw it again. And the name is Reeve Whitson.
2:55:48 Reeve Whitson shows up on the fringes even though he has no judicial function. He sort of hangs
2:55:52 around Boogliosi in the prosecution. He’s some sort of advice. He’s just kind of there.
2:55:59 In the same way that he was one of these guys, he grew his hair kind of long, wore bell bottoms,
2:56:05 hung around the music community and elsewhere in Hollywood, but no one could tell you exactly what
2:56:13 he did. I know what he did later, but a decade later, he shows up as a CIA officer in Central
2:56:30 America. So Reeve Whitson, later in his career at least, is CIA. What was he in 1969? What is he
2:56:37 doing in this? The other thing about it is he appears to have been the person who called…
2:56:43 There’s a whole question of when the bodies at C.L.O. Drive are discovered. So the general story is
2:56:49 that Sharon Tate’s housekeeper shows up around 8.30 in the morning, finds the bloody scene and goes
2:56:56 screaming next door. But there was another fellow who knew, I think the owner of the house is a
2:57:00 photographer, the last name may be Hatami. He gets a call earlier in the morning saying that
2:57:13 there have been murders. There. And the person he recalls calling him is Reeve Whitson. So someone
2:57:20 had been at the house before the bodies were discovered and they had not called the police.
2:57:31 So I don’t know what’s going on there, but it’s a curious kind of situation.
2:57:42 And Manson in a lot of ways just self-immolates himself. His behavior at the trial is bizarre,
2:57:49 it’s threatening, it’s disruptive. He’s got his girls out on the street carving Xs in their forehead,
2:57:56 carrying knives. One of the attorneys, initially his attorney, Ron Hughes,
2:58:03 becomes Van Houten’s attorney. And he figures out that the three girls supposedly on Charlie’s
2:58:09 insistence are going to confess. And they’re confessed that it was all their idea and Charlie
2:58:17 had nothing to do with it. Hughes doesn’t like this because his defense for her is that she was
2:58:25 under his influence and therefore not responsible for her own actions. He was having psychic control,
2:58:30 so he refuses to go along. Whether there’s a break in the trial, he goes camping up in the
2:58:37 mountains with some friends, disappears during a rainstorm, and then some months later his decomposed
2:58:45 remains are found. Now rumors, always the rumors. Okay. What would history be without rumors?
2:58:53 Hell, see members of the family, they were pissed off at Ron Hughes because he messed up Charlie’s
2:58:58 idea to get him off and so they killed him. Maybe they did, maybe he drowned. That’s absolutely
2:59:04 impossible to say. You got that kind of story, there’s a guy named Juan Flynn who was an employee
2:59:10 at the Spawn Ranch, didn’t like Manson, held Manson responsible for the murder of his boss.
2:59:15 He would testify that Manson told him that he had ordered all the killings and that Manson
2:59:24 also admitted that he had killed 35 people. Maybe he did, on the other hand, Juan Flynn
2:59:29 didn’t like him and he had no, other than his word, had no real proof of what he was saying.
2:59:35 So please understand me in this case, is that unlike some people who argue that
2:59:43 Charles Manson got a raw deal, I don’t think that’s the case. I think that he influenced
2:59:57 tremendous influence over the people there through drugs, through sex was another frequent component
3:00:03 in it. He had a real whammy over a lot of these people’s minds. I’m not sure how, that still kind
3:00:09 of puzzles me. He was a scrawny guy and he wasn’t physically intimidating. I mean, even a lot of
3:00:14 women wouldn’t be physically intimidated by him, but he nonetheless had this real psychological
3:00:20 power and if you look around him, the male followers he had were fairly big guys.
3:00:30 So he could get people to do what he wanted. And again, to me, the simplest explanation for this
3:00:35 is that it began with the Hinman killing and probably on Manson’s instigation,
3:00:41 the others were copycat killings to throw off what was going on. That would, if I was a cop,
3:00:46 that’s what I would focus on because that seems to make the most sense.
3:00:51 It’s still as fascinating that he’s able to have that much psychological control over those people
3:00:56 without having a very clear ideology. So it’s a cult.
3:01:01 Yes, the great focus on Charlie the leader, the excessive devotion.
3:01:08 But there’s not an ideology behind that. There’s something like Scientology or
3:01:14 some kind of religious or some kind of, I don’t know, Utopian ideology, nothing like this.
3:01:21 No, I think that Manson, again, was essentially a criminal. He had a sociopathic mindset and
3:01:28 he hit upon a pretty good deal. Yeah, but how do people convince anybody of anything? With a cult,
3:01:34 usually you have either an ideology or you have maybe personal religion, like you said, sex and
3:01:38 drugs. But underneath that, can you really keep people with sex and drugs? You have to kind of
3:01:45 convince them that you love them in some deep sense. There’s a commune of love.
3:01:51 You have a lot of people there in the cult. They have some sort of what we like to call dysfunctional
3:01:57 families. Yeah. A lot of the females in particular seem to have come from more or less middle class
3:02:06 families, but those are full of dysfunction. Their parents didn’t love them. There are semi
3:02:14 runaways and now they had this whole family. A lot of the younger women had children,
3:02:20 some of them by Manson, some of them by the others. They sort of bonded together.
3:02:28 And again, we return to that pull towards belonging that gets us humans into trouble.
3:02:39 So it does seem that there were a few crimes around this time. So the Zodiac killer.
3:02:48 Well, California, but I’m from. So I remember this period vividly. Okay. So by the way, the
3:02:54 Tate Lobbianca killings occurred on my birthday the year I graduated from high school. So I remember
3:03:00 this. Happy birthday. A term which has been used for that. There’s a writer by the name of Todd
3:03:07 Wood who’s toying. I wish I’d come up with this killer fornia, which is just sort of a chronicle
3:03:13 of the serial killers and disappearances in the late ’60s and ’70s. So you’ve got the Zodiac,
3:03:18 you’ve got other ones. I mean, I hate to say it. I’m not trying to be flippant about it,
3:03:23 but I mean, young female hitchhikers were disappearing at an alarming rate in Northern
3:03:32 California. There are bodies that have never been attributed. Some think that the Zodiac’s
3:03:41 victims, but it was a dangerous time. Edmund Kemper, the co-ed killer was another one. There
3:03:47 were a lot of creepy psychopaths running around. I don’t know whether it was something in the water
3:03:57 or what was going on, but it was a menacing in some cases. Hitchhiking, especially if you were
3:04:03 alone and female, was not something you wanted to do in much of the Golden State, certainly not
3:04:08 up around the Bay Area. So a lot of these strange sort of killings that were going on,
3:04:13 the Zodiac is one of those things where you have these people who have theories about it,
3:04:20 and if you don’t share their theory, then you’re part of the problem in some form or another.
3:04:24 So I’m not sure, for instance, that the Zodiac killings were all committed by the same person.
3:04:27 I think there might have been multiple people involved.
3:04:35 And the first killings are all of couples. It’s very sort of clear that they– I remember
3:04:41 in my examination of it, one of the things I was looking at specific, what else is there to say
3:04:45 about the Zodiac killing? So what I was going to look at is that there are all of these
3:04:50 accusations that there is an occult aspect to it. There was some sort of ritualistic
3:04:58 aspect. So I looked at different things, locations, victims, phases of the moon,
3:05:02 that’s always worth looking at. I didn’t find much correspondence in any of those.
3:05:10 In one of the killings, I think the one at Lake Berryessa, he does appear in this kind of weird
3:05:17 hooded costume. He’s got his symbol that sort of compass or aiming rectical circle
3:05:23 with a cross through it. It can mean a variety of things. He used guns and he used knives,
3:05:28 but he certainly had a thing for couples, except in the last of the killings, which is of a cab
3:05:36 driver in downtown San Francisco, who he shoots in full view of witnesses, which is completely
3:05:46 atypical. And also when he was stabbing the victims, it doesn’t seem like he was very good at it,
3:05:50 or if the goal was to kill them, he wasn’t very good at it because some of them survived.
3:05:54 Yeah, he doesn’t– he’s not particularly thorough about it. He seems to have had much more–
3:05:58 more of the violence seems to be directed at the females than the males.
3:06:05 So, I mean, there’s a couple questions to ask here. First of all, did people see his face?
3:06:09 There is a composite drawing of his face, which I think is based upon the
3:06:13 the Stein killing, the cab driver killing, where there were people who saw him,
3:06:19 or who claimed that they saw him. The other ones were all when it was fairly dark.
3:06:25 Right. I’m not sure that anyone else got to look at his face. The one that occurred in the daylight
3:06:33 at Barry Esso, he was wearing a mask. So, there’s something in common initially in the targeting
3:06:38 of victims, which doesn’t– in the last case. Then after that, there’s just the different cases of where
3:06:46 there’s a pretty good case to be made of a woman who claims– I think she was– she and her small
3:06:50 child were picked up. Her car broke down, she got a flat tire, and she was picked up by this guy,
3:06:55 who she got a very sort of strange vibe from, who eventually just let her go.
3:07:02 Well, you know, that might have been the zodiac. It might not have been.
3:07:07 You do this kind of rigorous look saying, okay, what is the actual facts that we know?
3:07:16 Like, reduce it to the thing that we know for sure. And in speaking about his motivation,
3:07:22 he said that he was collecting souls. Souls for the afterlife.
3:07:24 For the afterlife. That’s kind of a culty.
3:07:31 Yeah. I mean, that’s what I believe. Is it the Vikings or the Romans? They believe this in battle.
3:07:34 You’re essentially making sacrificial victims, and they will be your
3:07:39 ghostly servants in the afterlife. Do you think he actually believed that?
3:07:45 Who knows? I mean, here’s the question. Was he making that up just to be scary?
3:07:51 Or is that what is actual? That’s what he’s saying his motivation is.
3:07:54 So let’s take him at face value, rather than trying to
3:08:03 wish that into the cornfield, that is to get rid of it. Let’s just take it to face.
3:08:08 So he’s claiming that he’s killing these people in order to acquire slave servants in the afterlife.
3:08:14 He will subsequently go on to claim many more victims. I’m not sure.
3:08:17 44, eventually he will have. Before he just kind of vanishes.
3:08:24 One of the really interesting clues to me when I was looking at that case,
3:08:28 which I didn’t find anybody else that tended to make much of it of, is that
3:08:34 it all has to do with this kind of Halloween card that he sends to the press in San Francisco.
3:08:43 And it’s talking about sort of rope by gun by fire. And there’s this whole sort of wheel.
3:08:47 He knows the zodiacs. But what was this drawn from, where he got this from,
3:08:54 is from a Tim Holt Western comic book published in 1951. And you see the same thing in the cover.
3:08:58 It’s wheel of fortune, but with different forms of grisly death on it.
3:09:02 And all of the things that he mentioned are shown on the cover of this.
3:09:09 So whoever put together that card saw that comic book.
3:09:13 That’s kind of an interesting clue. So does that mean he’s a comic book collector?
3:09:22 And also before he got the idea from these incorporating these things from the–
3:09:29 Then there are, of course, his codes, which people which aren’t all that difficult to decipher,
3:09:34 probably because they weren’t meant to be. The other thing that you find often with
3:09:39 serial or psychopathic killers is they’re toying with the press. I mean, this goes all the way back
3:09:46 to Jack the Ripper. Now, they get attention. And then he just disappears.
3:09:50 Why do you think he was never caught? I think they knew who to look for.
3:09:56 There’s nothing much to go on. I mean, there was a guy who was long a suspect.
3:10:02 And then eventually he tested his DNA and found it didn’t match any of the things
3:10:09 that they’d found. Again, it goes back to– I’m not even sure that it’s one person who is responsible
3:10:13 for all of them. Well, there’s one of the interesting things you kind of bring up here
3:10:22 in our discussion of Manson inspires this. But there does seem to be a connection,
3:10:30 a shared inspiration between several killers here, the Zodiac, the son of Sam later, and the
3:10:38 monster of Florence. So is it possible there’s some kind of underworld that is connecting these
3:10:44 people? Well, you take the Zodiac and you add his claim that he’s collecting souls for the afterlife.
3:10:52 There are other things that are occultish connected to that. He may have picked some of the killing
3:10:58 sites due to their physical location, to their position in a particular place.
3:11:06 If you look at the son of Sam case, of course, David Berkowitz will on and off claim that he was
3:11:14 part of a satanic cult that was carrying out, again, these killings, mostly of couples and
3:11:21 young women similar to the Zodiac, and that he had only committed some of them and was witnesses
3:11:30 at others. And that has really created the whole idea that, yes, there is this some kind of satanic
3:11:36 cult which engages in ritual murders. Then if you go all the way to Florence, you’ve got murders
3:11:43 who go on and off for a long period of time, again, focusing on couples in isolated areas,
3:11:50 which Italian prosecutors ultimately tried to connect to some kind of satanic cult, although
3:11:54 I’m not sure they ever made a particularly strong case for that, but that element comes up in all
3:12:05 three of them. So you can, with a little imagination, argue that those similarities, that those things
3:12:14 should come up in each of those cases in different places, either suggest that oddly enough,
3:12:18 psychopathic criminals all sort of thinking the same way, or that there is some sort of
3:12:25 higher element involved in this, that there’s some kind of common inspiration.
3:12:32 And here you come back to something similar we were talking before about do pedophiles exist,
3:12:40 do pedophiles, okay, so do satanic cults exist? Well, they do. Okay, there was one in my hometown.
3:12:47 Apparently quite harmless, as far as I know, never did anything to be no, but there are people who,
3:12:53 you know, robes, here we come again, robes, cut the head off a chicken, naked woman is an altar,
3:12:56 you know, you can get off on that, I suppose, if that’s your thing.
3:13:07 So professed satanus exist, satanic cults exist, serial killers exist, ritual murders exist,
3:13:12 are those things necessarily connected? No, could they be connected?
3:13:20 Yes. Okay, there’s nothing. Don’t ever tell me that something is just too crazy for people to
3:13:27 do, because that’s crazy talk, all right. You’ve studied secret societies. You’ve
3:13:33 gave a lot of amazing lectures on secret societies. It’s fascinating to look at human history through
3:13:38 the lens of secret societies, because they’ve permeated all of human history. You’ve talked
3:13:43 about from everything from the night’s Templar to Illuminati to Freemasons, like we brought up,
3:13:50 Freemasons lasted a long time. Illuminati, as you’ve talked about in its sort of main form,
3:13:56 lasted a short time, but it’s legend. Never gone away. Never gone away. So maybe, like,
3:14:02 Illuminati isn’t a really interesting one. Who, what was that? Well, the Illuminati that we know
3:14:11 started in the 1776. In fact, you can pin it down to a day, the 1st of May, May Day, 1776,
3:14:20 in Ingolstadt, Germany, founded by a professor, Adam Weishaupt. It wasn’t initially called the
3:14:25 Illuminati, because that’s not really the name of the organization. It was called the Order Perfectabilists.
3:14:32 Apparently, that changed. Weishaupt would say things like never let our organization be known
3:14:36 under its real name anywhere, which leaves wondering what’s its real name.
3:14:45 So Illuminati is simply the plural of Illuminatus, which means one who is illuminated, one who has
3:14:53 seen the light. So in Roman times, Christian converts were Illuminati, because they had seen
3:14:59 the light. Anyone who thinks, and there have been organizations called Illuminati, the term is
3:15:06 not trademarked, not copyrighted. Anybody who thinks they’ve seen the light about anything
3:15:13 is an Illuminati. So it defines nothing. The symbol of the Order was an owl,
3:15:19 which interestingly enough is almost identical to the owl, which is the emblem of
3:15:27 the Bohemian Club. Oh, boy. Make of that what you will. I don’t make that much out of it,
3:15:34 because one owl looks pretty much like another owl to me. But compare them. You gotta kind of
3:15:41 wonder about this little thing. Maybe there’s some kind of connection there. So what that
3:15:45 supposedly has to do with the connection to the goddess Minerva, and the owl was sacred to her,
3:15:55 and the Order was the Minerval, the person who was brought in. The number of levels changed over
3:15:59 time. There was a higher level for the Order that people at the lower level didn’t know about.
3:16:06 Pretty typical for this. But the thing about Weishaupt was that he was quite, he was a
3:16:14 luminous correspondent with members with his Illuminati, both during the time that it legally
3:16:20 existed in Bavaria and later on. So Weishaupt himself lives, I think, until 1830.
3:16:27 Dies in Gotta, which was ruled by an Illuminati prince, and so on. Nothing ever happens to
3:16:32 these men. No Illuminati has ever put to death or arrested in prison for any period of time.
3:16:39 What happens is that their plan, well, what was his plan? His plan was to essentially
3:16:46 replace all existing religions and governments in the world with a one-world order governed
3:16:54 by the Illuminati. So to do this, you had to subvert and destroy all the existing Order.
3:17:03 The purpose for this is to, we wish to make men happy and free, but first we must make them good.
3:17:11 All right. So that’s what the Order is all about. Of course, he also said things like,
3:17:16 “Oh man, is there nothing that you won’t believe?” Okay, so myth would be used in that.
3:17:21 Also thought women should be brought into it. He had a rather interesting view about that,
3:17:26 was that we should appeal to women, in part because women have a chip on their shoulder,
3:17:30 because they’re left out of things. So we should appeal to their vanity on that point
3:17:37 and offer that in the future, all things will be open and they will be emancipated. So we should
3:17:42 hold out the prospect of female emancipation to attract them, because he argued in the short
3:17:48 term there’s no better way to influence men than through women. Get women on our side by
3:17:53 promising them emancipation, but it made sure we’ll never actually deliver it to them,
3:18:00 because the future world will be a boys club. So he talks about these things fairly openly,
3:18:05 and this is where you get this idea of some sort of a new world order which is to be based upon
3:18:15 the destruction of the existing order. So there are those who argue that there is a trail of descent
3:18:24 that leads from Weishoff’s Illuminati to the Communist Manifesto, and in fact, Communism itself,
3:18:32 that Marxism was simply a further restating of this idea. And you can draw some sort of,
3:18:40 I mean, the idea never entirely goes away. The Bavarian government gets a hold of the
3:18:47 order’s inner texts, so the story is there to deliver to them. I think that Weishoff gave them
3:18:53 to him. I think he engineered the exposure of his order because it gave him publicity.
3:19:00 By being exposed in Bavaria, you gained great renown and they continued to recruit after this,
3:19:04 and the Bavarian government actually bans the Illuminati four different times.
3:19:12 Why? Because apparently the first three times didn’t work, so the fourth one does.
3:19:17 You can notice that it’s like papal bans on Freemasonry, and they just go on and on and on,
3:19:21 because this clearly isn’t working. And you actually highlight the difference between,
3:19:27 speaking of publicity, that there’s a difference between visibility and transparency,
3:19:33 that a secret society could be visible, it could be known about, it could be quite popular,
3:19:36 but you could still have a secrecy within it. You have no idea what’s going on inside.
3:19:41 It’s like a black box. If I set a black box on this table, we can see that there’s a black box.
3:19:46 What’s in the black box? A cat? Who knows? In fact, the secrecy might be the very thing
3:19:50 that makes it even more popular. Adam Weishoff, again, there’s no more
3:19:55 thing convincing than a concealed mystery. Give people a concealed mystery in the fuss,
3:20:00 so we need to make the order mysterious for that exact reason. Always hold out the possibility
3:20:06 that special knowledge that no mere mortals have other than you
3:20:14 will have in that way. Since there’s a lot of things, the use of vanity and ego to recruit people,
3:20:21 to influence both men and women, it’s quite sophisticated.
3:20:28 And as you might expect from a professor of canon law trained by Jesuits,
3:20:40 so I certainly don’t think that it ceased when it was banned in Bavaria,
3:20:43 because everybody just scatters and goes elsewhere, like Paris.
3:20:52 And then you have the French Revolution. So the idea of the Illuminati, to put it crudely,
3:20:57 the branding is a really powerful one. And so it makes sense that it can,
3:21:03 there’s a thread connecting it to this day, that a lot of organizations,
3:21:06 a lot of secret societies can sort of adopt the branding.
3:21:09 Anybody can call it. You can go out and form a club and call it the Illuminati.
3:21:12 And if you’re effective at it, I think it does attract,
3:21:19 how is the chicken or the egg? But powerful people tend to have gigantic egos, and people with
3:21:23 gigantic egos tend to like the exclusivity of secret societies.
3:21:30 And so there’s a gravitational force that pulls powerful people to these societies.
3:21:34 It’s exclusive, only certain. And you also notice something goes back to when we were
3:21:38 talking about much earlier, when we were talking about intelligence. Remember, mice? Ego,
3:21:46 is a recruitment and control. That’s a great Achilles’ heel in human beings, the exploitation
3:21:51 of ego. And of course, if we go back to the conversation of intelligence agencies,
3:21:59 it would be very efficient and beneficial for intelligence agencies to infiltrate
3:22:03 the secret societies, right? Because that’s where the powerful people are.
3:22:06 Or the secret societies to infiltrate the intelligence agencies.
3:22:11 Oh boy. Well, I mean, that’s actually, in all the lectures,
3:22:19 I kind of had a sense that intelligence agencies themselves are kind of secret societies, right?
3:22:24 Well, it comes down, I give you my definition of secret societies that they come down to. One is
3:22:29 that generally their existence isn’t secret. It’s what they do is secret. It’s what’s in the box,
3:22:36 as opposed to the existence of the box. So one of the most important criterias is that they are
3:22:42 self-selecting. You just don’t join. They pick you. They decide whether or not you’re going to,
3:22:45 they admit you. And now oftentimes they will sort of recruit you.
3:22:52 Once you have been recruited, you have to pass tests and initiations.
3:23:02 And you also have to swear oaths of loyalty. Those are always very, very critical.
3:23:08 So broadly speaking, what interest into an intelligence organization does,
3:23:12 they, they decide whether you get in. You just don’t automatically get the job. You have to pass
3:23:20 tests, one ally detector test, for instance, field training tests, a whole variety of tests.
3:23:29 And then you’re sworn to secrecy. You never talk about what you do. Ever. Or there will be dire
3:23:37 consequences. So the method is very much the same. And also this idea of creating a kind of
3:23:51 insular group. The organization is us. And everyone else is outside of that. We are guardians of
3:23:57 special knowledge. See, this is the type of thing that would generally happen if you question
3:24:01 whatever any kind of intelligence agency did. Well, we know things that you don’t. Why? Because
3:24:07 we’re the organization that knows things. We collect information. We know the secrets. We
3:24:11 guard the secrets. Therefore, if we tell you, you must believe us.
3:24:19 I have this sense that there are very powerful secret societies operating today. And we don’t
3:24:25 really know or understand them. And the conspiracy theories in spirit might have something to them,
3:24:31 but are actually factually not correct. So like, you know, an effective powerful
3:24:38 secret society or intelligence agency is not going to let you know anything that it doesn’t
3:24:42 want you to know, right? They’ll probably mislead you if you can say that close.
3:24:49 So I think, you know, the question is, what’s the most powerful or important secret society?
3:24:54 Probably the one you don’t know about. One that doesn’t advertise its existence. The one which
3:25:04 is never known anywhere under its real name. You’ve got things like the Bohemian Club. You’ve got
3:25:11 the Bilderbergers, which is another sort of, you know, formed in the 1950s. Largely the creation
3:25:18 of a guy by the name of Josef Rettinger. Polish, mysterious, appears in a nowhere, a schemer for
3:25:25 years. A man expelled from Britain, France, and the United States at one point or another.
3:25:33 Long active in the Mexican labor movement. Rettinger is a mysterious figure. In fact,
3:25:38 he has, I think there was even a book written about him called Eminence Grise, Grey Eminence,
3:25:43 the fellow who was the front man for the Bilderbergers was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands,
3:25:49 who was at one point a Nazi, and then a Dutch freedom fighter. All right, take your pick.
3:25:56 But Rettinger is the moving hand behind the whole thing, and I’ll be damned until I can figure out
3:26:04 who Rettinger is. So the idea is that, well, you get like influential people in media, business,
3:26:14 politics, and you bring them together just to talk, to try to find common answers or common
3:26:21 questions. It’s all very much sort of Western European, Anglo-European. It’s all very closely
3:26:30 sort of connected to NATO, the whole concept of a kind of Atlanticist world, which is essentially
3:26:37 the Anglo-American combined with Western Europe. But you’ve got a bunch of these things. I mean,
3:26:46 the Castle and Foreign Relations is very similar to that, and the Bilderbergers, and
3:26:54 there’s an overlap with the Bohemian Club. And then you’ve got the Penae Circle, or Le Circle,
3:27:03 which is more military, but also linked to the so-called secret gladeo. The idea of the
3:27:07 Soviets over around Western Europe, there would be a stay behind organization called gladeo.
3:27:12 There’d be these freedom fighters. So the question I have about that is that how many
3:27:18 secret organizations do you need? I mean, why all these separate groups, which often seem to have
3:27:24 the same people into them? Yeah, the closer I look, the more I wonder the same question,
3:27:28 we asked about the Russian intelligence agencies. Where’s the center of power?
3:27:33 It seems to be very hard to figure out. Does the secrecy scare you?
3:27:39 Well, I guess on one level, I’m comforted that there’s somebody actually making decisions,
3:27:45 as opposed to data. I mean, what do you want? Do you want chaos, or do you want everything kind
3:27:56 of rigidly controlled? And I don’t put much stock in the idea that there actually is some small group
3:28:01 of people running everything, because if they were, it would operate more efficiently.
3:28:10 I do think that there are various disparate groups of people who think that they’re running things,
3:28:17 or try to. And that’s what concerns me more than anything else.
3:28:21 Well, I hate to go back to them again, because if I should bring up, if you go back to the Nazis,
3:28:25 they had their whole idea about a new world order, and they only had 12 years to do it.
3:28:31 And look what a mess they made. I mean, look at the damage, the physical damage that can be done
3:28:38 by an idea inspiring a relatively small group of people controlling a nation.
3:28:48 Based upon some sort of racial or ideological fantasy that has no real basis in reality and yet
3:28:57 guides their actions. It’s this differentiation that I always make, and I would try to get across
3:29:04 the students between always be clear about what you know and what you believe. You don’t know many
3:29:13 things. You know your name. You know when you were born. You probably know who your father is,
3:29:18 but that’s not absolute unless you’ve had a DNA test, and only if you trust DNA tests.
3:29:25 So you know who your mother is. You believe this man is your father. Why? Because your mother told
3:29:31 you who he was. So you believe things generally because someone has told you this is to be true,
3:29:40 but you don’t really know for sure. Well, because we know so little, we tend to go by beliefs.
3:29:48 So we believe in this. We believe in that. You believe that your cult leader is the answer
3:29:55 to everything, and it seems to be very, very easy to get people to believe things. And then what
3:30:02 happens is that whether or not those beliefs have any real basis in reality, they begin to influence
3:30:10 your actions. So here again, regrettably in some ways to bring it back to the Nazis, what were
3:30:15 the Nazis convinced of? They were convinced that Jews were basically evil aliens. That’s what it
3:30:21 comes down to. They weren’t really humans. There’s some sort of evil contamination which we must
3:30:29 eradicate. And they set out to do that. And they were sure that there’s just a few problems that
3:30:34 can be solved. And once you solve them, that you have this beautiful utopia where everything would
3:30:39 be just perfect. It’d be great. And we can just get there. And I think it’s really strong belief
3:30:48 in a global utopia. It just never goes right. It seems like impossible to know the truth in it.
3:30:56 For some reason, not long ago, I was listening on YouTube to old Wobbly songs. The
3:31:03 Workers of the World. I don’t know why. I didn’t know there was a whole album of Wobbly songs.
3:31:10 There was one of them called Common Wealth of Toil. And like most of them, they’re sort of taken
3:31:17 from gospel songs. And it’s talking about in the future how wonderful everything will be
3:31:29 in the common wealth of toil that will be. Now, these are revolutionary leftists, in this case,
3:31:36 Wobblies. But nonetheless, it’s like a prayer for communism, everything. In the future,
3:31:44 everything will be good because the earth will be shared by the toilers. And from each
3:31:50 of his abilities to each according to his knee. And it’s this kind of sweet little song in some way.
3:31:56 But I’m just sort of imagining this. If I was going to stage that, I’d have like this choir
3:32:02 of children singing it with a huge hammer and sickle behind them. Because that’s what it’s
3:32:11 combining. And you can think that the sentiments that are expressed in that song, which are legitimate
3:32:21 in some way, of all the horrors that that thing leads to. It is fascinating about humans,
3:32:29 a beautiful idea on paper, an innocent little idea about a utopian future can lead to so much
3:32:34 suffering and so much destruction and total the unintended consequences that you see described.
3:32:39 All of unintended consequences. And we learn from it. I mean, that’s why history is important.
3:32:47 We learn from it. Hopefully, do we? Slowly, we’re slow learners. I’m unconvinced of that,
3:32:56 but perhaps is speaking of unconvinced. What gives you hope? If human beings are still here,
3:33:03 maybe expanding out into the cosmos, 1000, 5000, 10,000 years from now,
3:33:10 what gives you hope about that future, about even being a possible future about it happening?
3:33:18 Most people are cooperative and kind most of the time. And
3:33:28 that’s one of those things that can usually be depended upon. And usually, you’ll get back to
3:33:37 what you put into it. Another thing that I have like a weird fascination of watching
3:33:46 are people who have meltdowns on airplanes because it’s just bizarre.
3:33:52 It’s fascinating to watch, yeah. There’s some sort of psychotic break that occurs,
3:33:58 and it’s always going to end the same way. The cops are going to come on and drag you off the plane.
3:34:04 Now, true, and you’re going to inconvenience everybody there, and usually at some point,
3:34:08 they don’t care about that. That’s the one little sense of power that they have. So they
3:34:14 have some sort of sense of powerlessness. And if their only way of power is just to piss off
3:34:20 everybody else on that plane, they’re going to go ahead and do it, even though it’s going to lead
3:34:27 nowhere for them. And there’s similar, sometimes, psychological behavior in traffic.
3:34:30 Oh, the road rage thing. The road rage, yeah. It’s fascinating.
3:34:33 And I bet that most agencies, there again, those are all people who up to some point
3:34:42 were cooperative and kind and polite, and then they snap. So those are all part of the human
3:34:49 makeup as well. But also part of the human makeup, difference between humans and chimps,
3:34:56 is the ability to get together, cooperate on a mass scale over an idea, create things
3:35:04 like the Roman Empire did, laws that prevent us and protect us from crazy human behavior,
3:35:07 manifestations of events and type of human beings are just weird animals. It’s not getting
3:35:12 here. It’s just completely peculiar. I’m not sure that we’re all together natural.
3:35:17 But I think we are all together beautiful. There is something magical about humans,
3:35:22 and I hope humans stay here, even as we get advanced robots walking around everywhere,
3:35:29 more and more intelligent robots that claim to have consciousness, that claim they love you,
3:35:37 that increasingly take over our world. I hope this magical things that makes us human still
3:35:42 persists. Well, let us hope so. Right. You’re an incredible person.
3:35:46 Well, thank you. So much fascinating work. And it’s really an awesome-
3:35:50 I’ve never had anybody ask me as many interesting questions as you have.
3:35:53 So thank you so much. Or as many questions.
3:35:56 This was so fun. Thank you so much for talking today.
3:35:56 Well, thank you.
3:36:01 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Rick Spence. To support this podcast,
3:36:06 please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you some words from John F.
3:36:14 Kennedy. The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society. And we are as a people
3:36:21 inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.
3:36:28 We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts
3:36:33 far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.
3:36:51 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
3:36:53 you