Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies | Lex Fridman Podcast #451
- Most people, most of the time, are polite, cooperative, and kind, until they're not. - The following is a
conversation with Rick Spence, a historian specializing in the history of intelligence agencies,
espionage, secret societies, conspiracies, the occult,
and military history. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please
check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Rick Spence. You have written and lectured
about serial killers, secret societies, cults,
and intelligence agencies. So we can basically begin at any of these fascinating topics. But let's begin with
intelligence agencies. Which has been the most powerful intelligence
agency in history? - The most powerful
intelligence agency in history? I mean, it's an interesting question. I'd say probably in terms
of historical longevity and consistency of performance, that the Russian intelligence services, notice I didn't say the KGB specifically, but the Russian intelligence services, going back to the Tsarist period, are consistently pretty good. Not infallible. None of them are. Of course, there's a common
Western way of looking at anything Russian. Very often, I think it's still the case, Russians are viewed in one of two ways. Either they are bumbling idiots, or they are diabolically clever. No sort of middle ground. And you can find both of
those examples in this. So what I mean by that
is that if you're looking at the modern SVR, or FSB, which are just two different
organizations that used to be part of the one big KGB, or the KGB or its predecessors, the CheKa, you're really going back
to the late 19th century and the Imperial Russian
Intelligence Security Service, generally known as the
Okhrana or Okhranka. It's really the Department of Police, the Special Corps of Gendarmes. Their primary job was
protecting the Imperial regime and protecting it against Imperial, or
rather, interior enemies. Revolutionaries, for the most part. And they got very, very good at that. By co-opting people
within those movements, infiltrating and recruiting informers, agent provocateurs, in fact, they excelled at the agent provocateur. Person you place inside an organization to cause trouble, usually
maneuver them into a position of leadership, and they provoke actions that can then allow you
to crack down on them. That is, to sort of lure or
bring the target organization into any legal or open status that it can be more
effectively suppressed. They were very good at that. So good that by the early 20th century, in the years preceding the
Russian Revolution, in 1917, they had effectively
infiltrated every radical party Bolsheviks, Mensheviks,
Srs, great and small, and placed people in positions
of influence and leadership. To the point that arguably, that is, you can debate this, and I think in the whole,
they could largely dictate what those parties did. Nothing was discussed at any
central committee meeting of any revolutionary group that the Okhrana wasn't
immediately aware of, and they often had people
in positions to influence what those decisions were. Of course, that raises
an interesting question, is that if they were that
good and they had infiltrated and effectively controlled
most of the opposition, then how did the regime get
overthrown by revolutionaries? The answer to that is that it wasn't overthrown
by revolutionaries. It was overthrown by politicians. That would then take us into a detour into Russian history, but
I'll just leave it with this. If you look at 1917 and you look closely, this is one of the things I would always tell my students, is that there are two
Russian revolutions in 1917. There's the first one
in March or February, depending on your calendar,
that overthrows Nicholas II. Revolutionaries are really
not involved with that. Bolsheviks are nowhere to be seen. Trotsky and Lenin are nowhere to be seen. They have nothing to do with that. That has to do effectively with a political conspiracy within the Russian parliament, the Duma, to unseat an emperor they
thought was bungling the war and was essentially a loser to begin with. And it was a coup d'état, a
parliamentary coup d'état. The temporary or provisional government that that revolution put in
power was the one overthrown by Lenin eight months later. And that government was
essentially one dominated by moderate socialists. It was a government that
very quickly sort of turned to the left. The guy we associate with
that is Alexander Kerensky. Alexander Kerensky was a
Russian socialist, a politician. He was the quasi-dictator of that regime. He's the person, not the czar,
who's overthrown by Lenin. So the revolutionaries,
they did not prove to be the fatal threat to the czarist regime. It was the czarist political
system itself that did that. What then transpired was that
the Okhrana and its method and many of its agents
then immediately segued over into the new Soviet security service. So one of the first things
that Lenin did in December of 1917, within a month of seizing power, since the hold on power
was tenuous at best, was that, well, you're
going to need some kind of organization to infiltrate and suppress those pesky
counter-revolutionaries and foreign imperialists
and all of the other enemies that we have. And so the extraordinary commission to combat counter-revolution and sabotage, the CheKa was formed. You put a veteran Bolshevik,
Felix Dzerzhinsky, at the head of that, someone you could politically rely upon. But Dzerzhinsky built his
organization essentially out of the Okhrana. I mean, there were all of these informers sitting
around with nothing to do. And they were employed. In the early '20s, the kind of rank and file of
the CheKa might have been 80% to 90% former imperial officials. Those were gradually decreased over time. So why would they do that?
Well, they were professionals. They also needed to eat, and things were somewhat precarious. So if your job is to be
an agent provocateur, if your job is to infiltrate
targeted organizations and lead them astray, you do
that for whoever pays you. That's part of the
professionalism which goes in. And under the Soviets, the Soviet intelligence services
are also very good at that. They are very good at infiltrating people into opposing organizations. And I guess the one example
I would give to demonstrate that are the Cambridge
Five, the British traitors, from a Soviet standpoint,
heroes, who were recruited, most notably Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald
Maclean, Anthony Blunt. And there may have been
well more than five, but that wasn't bad out of just Cambridge. And then placing those
people in high positions, the ultimate goal, of course, is to get your people into
positions of leadership and influence in the opposing
intelligence service. And so they did. Of
course, it all fell apart. And they ended up in, you know, Philby ended up living the
last part of his life in exile in Moscow, but they got their
money's worth out of him. And you can also find
this in KGB infiltration of the CIA, the FBI, the Aldrich
Ames, Robert Hanssen cases. Of course, we were infiltrating, by we I mean the Americans
and the West managed to infiltrate our moles as well. But if it came down, you know,
someone could dispute this, but I would think if you
were going to come down to a kind of like a who had the most moles Super Bowl, probably the Soviets would
come somewhat ahead of that. - So the scale of the
infiltration, the number of people, and the skill of it. Is there a case to be
made that the Okhrana and the CheKa orchestrated
both the components of the Russian revolution
as you describe them? - Well, there's an
interesting question for me. I mean, there are all kinds
of questions about this. I mean, one of the questions
is whether or not Lenin was an Okhrana agent. Okay, I've just said heresy. I will do that quite often
because I am a heretic and proud of it.
- Great. (laughs) - Why would you possibly say
that Lenin could have been an Okhrana agent? Well, let's look what he managed to do. So you had, coming into the 20th century, a single, well, nominally,
a single Marxist movement, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the majority-ites and
minority-ites are merely factions of that party. And they always agreed
that they were all Marxists and we all believe in
dialectical materialism and the rise of, we're
all socialist, comrade. The difference was the tactical means by which one would attain this. And what Lenin wanted was a militant,
small-scale, vanguard party. He wanted a revolution. He wanted to seize power,
seize control of the state, and once you have the state, then you induce socialism from above. Whereas the majority of the people, the so-called Mensheviks,
the minority-ites, who are, oddly enough, the vast
majority of the party, that's one of the first things, how do you lose that argument? Okay, how does the minority get to grab the name majority-ites? But Lenin did that. So what Lenin wanted was
a conspiratorial party of committed revolutionaries
that would plot and scheme and undermine and eventually
seize control of the state and induce socialism from above. There were other Russian
Marxists who thought that that sounded vaguely totalitarian and not really democratic,
not even terribly socialist. And they opposed that, ineffectively from the beginning, outmaneuvered
every step of the way. The Mensheviks are a case study in failure of a political organization. That too will be heresy to some
people, but look, they lost. Now, so what Lenin managed to do, starting around
1903, continuing under this, is he managed to divide, to take what had been
a single Marxist party and split it into angry,
contending factions. Because he and his
Bolsheviks were on one side, advocating a much more
militant, conspiratorial policy, the discombobulated Mensheviks
were over on the other, and in between were a lot of people who really didn't know
where they stood on this. I mean, sometimes they
kind of agree he seems to be making sense today. No, no, I don't think he's
making sense on that day. But he managed to completely
disunify this organization. Now, who could possibly
have seen benefit in that? The Okhrana. Now, whether or not they put him up to it, whether or not in some
way they helped move him into a position of
leadership or encouraged it, or encouraged it through
people around him, whether he was a witting
or unwitting agent of the Tsar's secret police, he certainly accomplished exactly what it was that they had wanted. And I find that suspicious
is one of those things that it's so convenient in a way is that I'm not necessarily
sure that was an accident. There's also this whole question to me as to what was going on
within the Okhrana itself. Now, this is one of these
questions we may come to later about how
intelligence agencies interact or serve the governments to which they are theoretically subordinate. They do tend to acquire a great
deal of influence and power. After all, their main job
is to collect information. And that information
could be about all kinds of things, including people within the government structure itself. And they also know how to
leverage that information in a way to get people to
do what you want them to do. So an argument can be made,
again, an argument, not a fact, merely an opinion, which is mostly what history
is made out of, opinions, is that at some point
between about 1900 and 1917, people within the Okhrana
were playing their own game. And that game took them
in a direction which meant that continued loyalty to the emperor, specifically to Nicholas II,
was no longer part of that. To me, in a way, it seems almost during the
events of 1917 that one, you had an organization
that was very effective for what it did that suddenly
just becomes ineffective. It doesn't really disappear. These things don't go away
because it will reappear as the VeCheKa basically fairly quickly. But it raises the question to me is to what degree there were people within the organization
who allowed events to take the course they wished? - I always wonder how much
deliberate planning there is within an organization like Okhrana, or if there's kind of a distributed
intelligence that happens? - Well, one of the key
elements in any kind of intelligence organization or operation is compartmentalization, need to know. So rarely do you have an
occasion where everybody, everybody in an executive
position are all brought into a big corporate
meeting and we discuss all of the secret operations
that are going on. No, no, you never do that. Only a very limited number of
people should know about that. If you have a person who is a case officer who's controlling
agents, he's the only one who should know who those people are, possibly his immediate superiors, but in no way do you want
that to be common knowledge. So information within the organization itself
is compartmentalized. So you don't need
everybody to be in on it. You don't even need necessarily the people who are nominally at the top. First is the Okhrana, the real boss of the Okhrana was the Imperial Ministry of the Interior, the Minister of the Interior, in fact, but the Minister of the Interior had no real effective
control over this at all. I mean, to the point was
that at one point early on, they actually organized the
assassination of their own boss. They have their agents among
the revolutionaries kill the Minister of the Interior, because he'll just be
replaced by another one. He is an Imperial bureaucrat. He's not really part
of their organization. You know, it's like a director of an intelligence agency
appointed by the president. Maybe he's part of the organization. Maybe he isn't, maybe he is not one of us. So you've got different levels, different compartments within it. And who's actually running the show? If anyone is, I don't know. That's never supposed to be apparent. - Well, that's a fascinating question. I mean, you could see this with NKVD. It's obviously an extremely
powerful organization that starts to eat itself, where everybody's pointing
fingers internally also, as a way to gain more power. So the question is, in
organizations like that, that are so compartmentalized,
where's the power? Where's the center of power? Because you would think,
given that much power, some individual or a group of individuals will start
accumulating that power. But it seems like that's
not always a trivial thing, because if you get too powerful,
the snake eats that person. - Well, if we go back again to the founder of Soviet secret police,
Felix Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky dies in 1926. Keels over after giving a heated
speech to a party meeting. Now, the common view,
what you usually read, which was key for the
time, is that, you know, clearly Stalin had him whacked, because anytime someone died,
it was almost always that. And I think a lot of times he did. But in some cases, Stalin's probably
getting blamed for things that he didn't actually do. Dzerzhinsky wasn't even opposed to Stalin, so it's not clear why he would. But this was the, you know, someone died, obviously, he was poisoned,
something happened. It was an unnatural death. Somebody goes in for an operation, gets a little too much
anesthesia, Stalin killed them. Somebody tips over in a
canoe in upstate New York, Stalin killed them. There's
actually a case about that. So that itself can be kind of useful, where every time someone dies,
they think you killed them. That's kind of an interesting
method of intimidation in that regard. But the suspicion is nonetheless there. Dzerzhinsky had been, he
was the Grand Inquisitor. He was seemingly firmly in
control of the organization. Of course, maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was, my guess would be is that Dzerzhinsky's death
was not natural causes, but he was probably eliminated by someone within his own organization. And then you look at the
people who take over. His immediate successor
is Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, who's really not really
a secret policeman, more a kind of intellectual dilettante. But if you look behind him, you'll notice the fellow
is Genrikh Yagoda. And Yagoda will really sort
of manage things from behind the scenes until Menzhinsky dies in 1934. And then Yagoda will hold
on till he's a victim of the purges, I think in '37 or '38. Yagoda is ambitious, murderous, and if I was going to
point the finger to anybody who possibly had Dzerzhinsky
whacked, it would be him, and for the purposes
simply of advancement. That's the, you know, the person to look out at any kind of corporate organization is
your immediate subordinate, the person who could move into your job, because more than likely that's exactly what they're planning to do. - Yeah, just one step
away from the very top. Somebody there will probably
accumulate the most power. You mentioned that the various
Russian intelligence agencies were good at creating agent
provocateurs infiltrating the halls of power. What does it take to do that? - Well, there's an interesting
little acronym called MICE, M-I-C-E, and it's generally used, and it's just the way in
which you would acquire. How do you get people to work for you? Well, M stands for money. You pay them. People are greedy. They want money. You know, if you look at
Aldrich Ames, he had a very, very expensive wife with expensive tastes, so he wanted money. I is for ideology. So during particularly in
the 1920s and the 1930s, the Soviets were very effective in exploiting communists, you know, people who wanted to
serve the great cause, even though that's initially
not really what they wanted to do, because the idea was
that if you recruit agents from among, let's say,
American communists, you compromise the party, because exactly what your
enemies are going to say is that all communists are Soviet spies, they're all traitors in some way, so you would really want to keep those two things separate, but ideology was just so convenient, and those people would
just work for you so well. You could get them to do anything,
betray their grandmother. They would go ahead and do
that for the greater good. So ideology can be a motivation, and that can be someone who is a devoted Marxist Leninist. It can also be someone who's a disgruntled
communist because, you know, there's no anti-communist
like an ex-communist. Those who lose the faith can
become very, very useful. For instance, if you look in the case of American intelligence, the people who essentially temporarily destroyed much of the KGB organization in the US post-World War II were people like Whittaker Chambers, Louis
Budenz, Elizabeth Bentley. All of those people have
been Communist Party members. They had all been part
of the red faithful. They all, for one reason or another, became
disillusioned, and turned rat or patriot, whichever
case you may want to put in that regard. - What does the C and the E stand for? - The C is for coercion. That's where you have to
persuade someone to work for you. You have to pressure them. So
usually you blackmail them. You know, that could be
they have a gambling habit. You know, in the old
days it was very often because they were gay. Okay, gets them in a decision where they can be compromised
and you can get them to do your bidding. Those people usually have a
certain amount of control. Here's an interesting example
of how the Okhrana tended to handle this. I think it's still largely used. You'd round up a bunch of
revolutionaries on some charge or another, distributing
revolutionary literature, running an illegal printing press. You bring a guy into the
room and you say, okay, you're going to work for us. He of course refuses to do so. They go, well, if you refuse, we'll keep the rest of
your comrades in jail for a while, you know, maybe beat them with a
rubber truncheon or so. And then we're just going to let you go. We're just going to put
you back out on the street. And if you don't work for us, we will spread the rumor
through our agents already in your organization that you are. And then what will your comrades do? How long are you going to live? So you see, you have no choice. You're ours and you're
going to cooperate with us. And the way that that
effectiveness would be ensured is that you have multiple agents within the same
organization who don't know who each other are. That's very important. And
they'll all be filing reports. So let's say you have three agents inside the central committee of the SR party, and there's a committee meeting
and you're going to look at the reports that file. They all better agree
with each other, right? If one person doesn't report
what the other two do, then perhaps they're not
entirely doing their job and they can be liquidated at any time. All you do is drop the dime on them. And this was done periodically. In fact, in some cases, you would betray your own agents just to completely discombobulate
to the organization. This happened in one
particular case around 1908. The fellow who was the head of the chief revolutionary
terrorist organization, which wasn't Bolshevik, but the so-called
Socialist Revolutionaries, actually the biggest
revolutionary party, the SRs, who aren't even actually
Marxists, more anarchists. But they went all in for
the propaganda of the deed. They really like blowing people up, and carrying out quite
a campaign of terrorism. The fellow who was the head
of that terrorist organization was a fellow by the name of Yevno Azef. And Yevno Azef was, guess
what? An Okhrana agent. Everything he did, every
assassination that he planned, he did in consultation with his control. So he'd kind of run out his string. There was increasing suspicion of him. He was also asking for a lot more money. So the Okhrana itself arranged
to have him write it out. And what did that do? Well, what do you do in
your party when you find out the chief of your terrorist brigade was a secret police agent? It's consternation and mistrust. Nobody in the party would ever trust and you couldn't tell who
you were sitting around. I know that a fellow I wrote a biography on, Boris Savinkov, who was a Russian
revolutionary and the second in command within the
terrorist organization. By the way, the guy that
wanted Azef's job so bad he could taste it. Well, on the one level, he expressed absolute horror that his boss was a police agent. And well, he should, because Savinkov was a police agent too. See, they already had the
number two waiting in the wings to take over. But he was legitimately shocked. He didn't really suspect that. So it's a way of manipulating this. And then finally, we come to the E. That, I think, is the most important, ego. Sometimes people spy or betray because of the egotistical
satisfaction that they receive. The sheer kind of
Machiavellian joy in deceit. An example of that would be Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Five. Now, Philby was a communist
and he would argue that he always saw himself as
serving the communist cause. But he also made this statement, I think it's in the preface
to his autobiography. And he says, one never
looks twice at the offer of service in elite force. He's talking about his recruitment
by the NKVD in the 1930s. And he was absolutely chuffed by that. The mere fact that they would want him, what he considered to be a first-rate organization would
want him, satisfied his ego. And if I was to take a
guess as to whether it was ideological motivation,
whether it was the romance of communism, or there
was the appeal of ego that was the most important
in his career of treason, I'd go with ego. And I think that figures into a... Someone doesn't get the
promotions that they wanted. Again, if you look at something
like Aldrich Ames' career in particular, you've got these kind of... His career in the CIA was hit or miss. He didn't get the postings or promotions that he wanted, his evaluation... He never felt that he got
credit for doing that. And that's the type of
thing that tends to stick in someone's craw, and can lead for egotistical reasons, an
added incentive to betray. - Yeah, that there's a boost to the ego when you can deceive, sort of not play by the rules of the world and just play with powerful
people like they're your pawns. - You're the only one that knows this. You're the only one that
knows that the person who is sitting across from you, to which you have sworn your loyalty, you are simultaneously betraying. What a rush that must be for some people. - I wonder how many people
are susceptible to this. I would like to believe that people have, a lot of people have the
integrity to at least withstand the M-I, the money and the ideology, the pull of that, and the ego. - It can also be a combination of the two. I mean, you can create a
recipe of these things, certain amount of money, ego, and the little push of coercion but if you don't, well, we'll rat you out, you'll be exposed. - What are some differences
to you as we look at the history of the 20th century between the Russian intelligence and the American intelligence in the CIA? - If you look at both
the Okhrana and the KGB, one of the things that you find consistent is that a single organization
handled foreign intelligence, that is spying upon enemy
or hostile governments, and also internal security. So that's all part of it. Whereas if you look at the
US models that evolves, you eventually have the FBI, who under Hoover quite
insists that he's going to be the counterintelligence force. Okay, if they're commie
spies running around America, it's the FBI who's supposed
to ferret them out. The CIA is not supposed
to be involved in that. The charter, the basic agreement in 1947, did not give the CIA any... It's often said they
were barred from spying on Americans, which isn't quite true. You can always find a way to do that. What they don't have is
they don't have any police or judicial powers. They can't run around in the country carrying
guns to use on people. They can't arrest you.
They can't interrogate you. They can't jail you. They have
no police or judicial powers. Now, that means they have to
get that from someone else. That doesn't mean that other
agencies can't be brought in or local police officials, or whatever you need, you
can eventually acquire. But they can't do that directly. So you've got this division
between foreign intelligence and domestic
counterintelligence, often split between hostile organizations. The relationship between
the FBI and the CIA, I think it's fair to say, is
not chummy. Never has been. There's always been a
certain amount of rivalry and contention between the two. And it's not to say that something like that didn't exist between the domestic counterintelligence and foreign intelligence
components of the KGB, but there would be less
of that to a degree because there was a single organization. They're all answerable to the same people. So that gives you a certain,
greater amount, I think, of leeway and power because
you're controlling both of those ends. I remember somebody telling me once that, and he was a retired KGB officer. There you go, retired. One of the things that he found amusing was that in his role, one of the things that he could be is that he could be anywhere, at any time, in any dress, which meant
that he could be in or out of uniform and any place at any time. He was authorized to do that. - So more freedom, more power. - I think one of the
things that you would often have the view is that the Russians are simply naturally meaner. There's less respect for human rights. There's a greater tendency to abuse power that one might have. I mean, frankly, they're
all pretty good at that. And probably it is fair to say that there's probably some degree of cultural differences, not necessarily for institutional reasons, but cultural reasons
there could well be things that Americans might balk at doing more than you would find on
the Russian or Soviet side of the equations. The other aspect of that is
that Russian history is long and contentious and bloody. One of the things it certainly teaches, you never trust foreigners. Every foreign government, anywhere, any country on your border
is a real or potential enemy. They will all, at some point,
given the chance, invade you. Therefore, they must always be
treated with great suspicion. That goes back to something that I think the British observed was that
countries don't have friends. They have interests. And those interests can change over time. - Well, the CIA is
probably equally suspicious of all other nations. - That's your job. You're supposed to be suspicious. Your job is not to be trusting. Yeah, the basic job of
an intelligence agency is to safeguard your secrets
and steal the other guys' and then hide those away. - Are there laws, either
intelligence agencies, that they're not willing to break? Is it basically a lawless operation to where you can break any law as long as it accomplishes the task? - Well, I think, John le
Carré, give his pen name. He was talking about his early recruitment into British intelligence. And one of the things he
remembered being told up front was if you do this, you
have to be willing to lie, and you have to be willing to kill. Now, those are things that in ordinary human
interactions are bad things. Generally, we don't like
it when people lie to us. We expect that people will
act honestly towards us, you know, whether that's
being a businessman you're involved with, your employers... We're often disappointed in that because people do lie
all the time for a variety of reasons, but honesty is
generally considered to be good. But in a realm where deception is a rule, dishonesty is a virtue. To be good at that, to be able to lie convincingly is good. It's one of the things you need to do. And killing also is
generally frowned upon. You know, put people in prison for that. They're otherwise executed. But in certain circumstances, killing is one of those things that you
need to be able to do. So what he felt he was being
told in that case is that, you know, once you enter this realm, the same sort of moral rules that apply in general British society do not apply. And if you're squeamish
about it, you won't fit in. You have to be able to do those things. - I wonder how often those
intelligence agencies in the 20th century, and of course, the natural question extending
it to the 21st century, how often they go to the assassination? How often they go to the kill part of that
versus just the espionage? - Let's take an example
from American intelligence, from the CIA, 1950s, 1960s
into the 1970s, MKUltra. That is a secret program
which was involved with what is generally
categorized as mind control, which really means messing
with people's heads. And what was the goal of that? Well, there seemed to
have been lots of goals, but there was an FBI memo that was, I recently acquired,
quite legally, by the way, it's declassified, but it's from 1949. So this is only two years after
the CIA came into existence. And it's an FBI memo,
because the FBI, of course, is very curious what the CIA is up to. And the FBI are not part of this meeting, but they have someone in. They're sort of spying on what's going on. So there was a meeting which was held in a private apartment in New York. So it's not held in any kind of, it essentially never really happened because it's in somebody's house. And there are a couple of
guys there from the CIA. One of them is Cleve Backster. Cleve Backster is the great
godfather of the lie detector. Pretty much everything that
we know or think we know about lie detectors today,
you owe to Cleve Backster. He's also the same guy that thought that plants could feel, which somehow was a derivative of his work on lie detectors. So these guys are there
and they're giving a talk to some military and other personnel. And there are certain
parts of the document, which are of course redacted, but you could figure out what it is that they're talking about. And they're talking about
hypnotic suggestion and all the wonderful things that
you can potentially do with hypnotic suggestion. And two of the things they
note is that one of the things we could potentially do is erase memories from people's minds and
implant false memories. That would be really keen to do that, just imagine how that would be done. So here to me is the interesting point. They're talking about this in 1949. MKUltra does not come
along until really 1953, although there are all sorts of, you know, Artichoke and others. Everything is sort of leading up to that. It's simply an elaboration of programs that are already there. I don't think that it ultimately matters whether you can implant
memories or erase memories. To me, the important
part is they thought they could and they were going to try to do it. And that eventually is what you find out in the efforts made
during the 1950s and '60s through MKUltra, MKSearch, MKNaomi, and all the others that came out. That's one of the things
they're working for. And among the few MKUltra era documents that survived, there's that whole question is that you get someone to
put a gun to someone's head and pull the trigger and
then not remember it later. Yeah. You could, interestingly enough. - So non-direct violence,
controlling people's minds, controlling people's minds
at scale and experimenting with different kinds
of ways of doing that. - One person put it that
the basic argument there or the basic thing you're
after was to understand the architecture of the
human mind, how it worked, how it put together, and then how you could
take those pieces apart and assemble them in different ways. So this is where hypnosis comes in, which was then still is,
a fairly spooky thing. Nobody's ever explained
to me exactly what it is. The idea was that could you, you think of the whole
possibilities in this case, could you create an alternate personality, and use that alternate
personality in an agent role, but then be able to turn it on and off. So subsequently, the person, which that personality inhabited, was captured and interrogated, tortured, had their fingernails torn out. They would have no memory of it. They couldn't give any kind
of secret away because it was embedded in some part
of their brain where there is a completely different person. I mean, you can just
imagine the possibilities that you can dream up. And again, it's not, I think, the question as to
whether that is possible or whether it was done. Although I suspect that
both of those are true, but that you would try to do it. Then imagine the mischief
that comes out of that. And one of the big complaints
from a legal standpoint about MKUltra and the
rest is that you were having medical experiments, essentially, being carried out on people
without their knowledge and against their will,
which is, you know, a no-no. - Yeah, the fact that you're willing to do medical experiments says something about what you're willing to do. And I'm sure that same
spirit, innovative spirit, persists to this day. And maybe less so, I hope,
less so in the United States, but probably in other intelligence
agencies in the world. - Well, one thing that
was learned and the reason why most MKUltra and similar
records were destroyed on order in the early '70s, around the time the CIA
became under a certain amount of scrutiny, you know, the mid-70s were not a
good time for the agency because you had the Church Committee
breathing down their neck. You had all of these assassins. People were asking lots of questions. And so you need to dump this stuff because there's all kinds of it because you were committing crimes against American citizens. So let's eradicate it. And the important lesson to
be learned is that never do this type of thing again, where at least in any way in which the agency's direct
fingerprints are placed on it. You can pay people. You
can subsidize research. You can set up venture capital firms. You got plenty of money. And you can funnel that money
into the hands of people who will carry out this
research privately. So if something goes wrong,
you have perfect deniability. - On the topic of MICE, on the topic of money, ideology, coercion, and ego, let me ask you about a conspiracy theory. So there is a conspiracy
theory that the CIA is behind Jeffrey Epstein. At a high level, if we
can just talk about that, is that something that's
at all even possible? That you have, basically
this would be for coercion. You get a bunch of powerful people to be sexually mischievous
and then you collect evidence on them so that you can
then have leverage on them. - Well, let's look at
what Epstein was doing. He was a businessman
who then also developed a very lucrative sideline and being a high level procurer, basically
in supplying young girls. And he also filmed much of that activity. I think his partner in this, Ghislaine, and I hope I'm pronouncing
her name correctly. - I think it's Ghislaine.
- Ghislaine. Well, I've heard it both ways. Ghislaine or Ghislaine,
whichever it may be? I think her argument at
one point was that, well, we did this to protect ourselves. But this type of thing
has been done before. There's nothing new about this. Getting influential people
in compromising situations and filming them. I could give you another
historical example of that. In late 1920, actually early
1930s, just pre-Nazi Berlin, there was a very prominent
sort of would-be psychic and occultist by the name
of Erik Jan Hanussen. He had a private yacht, I think it was called the Seven
Sins, and he hosted parties. He also had a whole club called the Palace of the Occult, which hosted parties where things went on and there were cameras everywhere. He filmed important people, you know, guys like the Brownshirt Chief of Berlin in various states of
undress and sexual congress. And he did that for the
purposes of blackmail. So in Epstein's case, he is a procurer of young
girls to wealthy men, largely. And many of those events were recorded. Now, even if it wasn't
his intention to use them for blackmail, think of
what someone else could do because people know about this. So you can raise a question,
is this not, you know, Epstein is just kind of a greedy pervert. But through his greedy perversion, he's now collecting information
that could be useful. Who could that be useful to? Who would like dirt on Prince Andrew? Think of all the people who were there. There were important people
who went to Lolita Island. So if it isn't Epstein
directly, he might have been, I'm not trying to let him off the hook because I have anything for him. He was either running his
own blackmail business or someone was using
him as a front for that. I mean, I think we're
kidding ourselves if we try to pretend that's not what was going on. - So you think even American
intelligence agencies would be willing to swoop in and take advantage of a situation like that? - Well, you know, American politicians
could ultimately end up in a position to oversee things
like intelligence budgets. One of them might even become
director. You never know. You can never tell what some
crazy president might do. One of the guys who understood the part was, was J. Edgar Hoover. J. Edgar Hoover spent a long time collecting
dossiers on politicians. How do you think he'd remain
director of the FBI as long as he did? Because he systematically
collected dirt on people. So, there is a history
of this type of thing. And again, he could argue that's partly for his protection, to keep his job, to protect the sanctity
and security of the Bureau. You can find a million
different ways to justify that. - It's really dark. - Well, there is that
side to human nature. Let's put it that way. - Whether it's the CIA or the Okhrana, maybe that's what the President of the United States sees
when they show up to office is all this stuff they have on him or her. And say, that there's a
internal mechanism of power that you don't want to mess with, and so you will listen, whether that internal mechanism of power is the military industrial
complex or whatever, the bureaucracy of government. - Kind of actually the deep state. - The deep state. - The entrenched bureaucrats. Well, it's been said, and I
think it's generally true, that bureaucratic creatures
are like any other creatures, it basically exists to
perpetuate itself and to grow. I mean, nobody wants
to go out of business. And of course, you get all of these things like Pizzagate and accusations
of one form or another. But here's an interesting
thing to consider. Okay? And I want to argue that I'm
not saying that Pizzagate in any way was real or QAnon
exists, but where do they get these ideas from? So let's ask ourselves,
do pedophiles exist? Yeah. Do organized pedophile
organizations exist? Yeah, they share information, pictures. They're out there on the
dark web. They cooperate. So does child trafficking
exist? Yeah, it does. So in other words, whether or not specific
conspiracy theories about this or that group of
organized pedophile cultists is real, all the ingredients
for that to be real are there. Pedophiles exist, organized
pedophilia exists, child and human trafficking exists. At some point, at some time, someone will put all of those together. In fact, certainly, they already have. - We'll jump around a little bit, but your work is so
fascinating and it covers so many topics. So let's see if we jump into the present with the Bohemian Grove
and the Bilderberg Group. - Bilderbergers... - So the elites, as I think
you've referred to them. So this gathering of the elites. Can you just talk about
them? What is this? - Well, first thing I have to point out is that Bohemian Grove is a
place, not an organization. It's where the Bohemian Club meets. It's that 2,700-acre old
growth redwoods near, you know, north of San Francisco. The Bohemian Club began, I
think, back in the 1870s. Its initial members
were mostly journalists. In fact, supposedly the
name itself was a term for an itinerant journalist
who moved from paper to paper who was called the Bohemian. And although I think
there may be other reasons why that particular
term was chosen as well, but I think the original five members, there were like three journalists, there was a merchant and there
was a vintner guy who owned a vineyards in California, how surprising. None of them terribly wealthy, but they formed an exclusive men's club, was and still is, nothing terribly unusual
about that at the time, but it became fashionable. And as it became fashionable, more wealthy people wanted
to become part of it. And the thing about getting
rich guys to join your club is what do rich guys have? Money. And of course it's one of those rich guys that bought Bohemian Grove where now you build your
old boys summer camp, which is what it is. They got cabins with goofy names. They go there, they perform skits, they dress up in costumes. True, some of those skits look
like pagan human sacrifices, but it's just a skit. What's really going on there? So on the one hand, you can argue, look, it's a rich guys club. They like to get out there. The whole motto of the place is Weaving Spiders Come Not Here. So we're never gonna talk about business. We just want to get out into
the woods, put on some robes, burn a couple of effigies in front of the owl, have a good time,
probably get drunk a lot. - What's with the robes? Why do they do weird creepy shit? Why do they put on a mask
and the robe and do the plays and the owl and the sacrificing? I don't know. - Why do you have a giant owl? I mean, why do you do that? - Well, what is that in human nature? Because I don't think
rich people are different than not rich people. What is it about wealth and power that brings that out of people? - Well, part of it is
the ritual aspect of it. And that clearly is a ritual.
Rituals are pretty simple. Rituals are just a series
of actions performed in a precise sequence
to produce an effect. That describes a lot of things. It describes plays, symphonies, every movie you've ever seen. A movie is a ritual. It is a series of actions carried out in a precise sequence
to produce an effect, but then added soundtrack
to cue you to what emotions you're supposed to be feeling. - It's a great idea. So the rich people
should just go to a movie or maybe just go to a
Taylor Swift concert. Why do you have to put on
a mask? Why the owl thing? - Part of it is to create
this kind of sense, I suppose, of group solidarity. You're all going to appear in... Also a way of sort of
transcending yourself in a way. When you put on the robe, it's
like putting on a uniform. You are in some way a different
or a more important person. It's a ritual. The key ritual at Bohemian
Grove is a thing called the Cremation of Care. And that's what it's supposed to be. We're going to put all of
our rich, important people, we have to make all of
these critical decisions. Life is so hard. So we're going to go out here in the woods and we're going to kick
back and we're all going to gather around the lake. And then we're going to carry... It's wicker, it's not a real
person. And how would you know? And this is the Cremation of our Care. But it's a ritual which is
meant to produce a sense of solidarity and relief among
those people who are there. The question comes down with the rituals is how seriously do you take them? How important is this to the
people who carry them out? And the interesting answer to that is that for some people it's, for some people it's just boring. I mean, there are probably
people standing around the owl who think this is
ridiculous and can't wait for it to get over with. There are the people that
are kind of excited about it and get caught up into it. But other people can
take it very seriously. It's all a matter of
the intention that you have about what the ritual means. And I don't mean to suggest by that that there's
anything necessarily sinister about what's going on, but it is clearly a ritual
carried out for some kind of group-reinforcing purpose. And you're absolutely right. You don't have to do it that way. I've gone to summer camps and we never carried out mock
sacrifices in front of an owl. All right? Yeah, we did
all those other things. We didn't even have any robes either. So it goes beyond merely
a rich guy summer camp, although that's an aspect of it. But it also, I think, often obscures that
focusing on Bohemian Grove at the getaway of the
club ignores that the club is around all the time. That's what's at the center of this. It is the club and its members. So despite all the talk about no weaving spiders
coming around here, one of the other features
of the summer meeting are things called lakeside talks. Often people are invited to go there. And one of the people who was invited, I think around 1968, was Richard Nixon, who was making his political comeback. And he was invited to give a talk, where very important people are listening. And Nixon, in his memoirs,
realized what was going on. He was being auditioned
as to whether or not he was going to be... He recognized that that
was really the beginning of his second presidential campaign. He was being vetted. So one of the main theories, call it a conspiracy theory or not, about the Bohemian Club and
the gatherings is that people of wealth and influence gather together. And whether or not it's part of the agenda or not, inevitably you're going to talk
about things of interest. But to me, the mere fact that you invite people
in, political leaders, to give lakeside talks means that there are weaving spiders which are going on. And it is a perfect
private venue to vet people for political office. - I mean, yeah. Where else are you going to do it if you're interested in vetting? If you're interesting in
powerful people selecting? - Well, see, here's the question. Are these guys actually picking
who's going to be president? Is that the decision which is being made? Or are they just deciding what
horses they're going to back? I think the latter is the
simpler version of it, but it doesn't mean it's
the other way around. But these are the kinds of... I mean, Nixon was... There was the whole 1960 thing. So he's the new Nixon. And this is where the
new Nixon apparently made a good impression on the right people, because he did indeed get
the Republican nomination, and he did indeed become president. Well, there could also be a much more innocent
explanation of, really, it's powerful people getting together and having conversations, and through that conversation
influencing each other's view of the world, and just having
a legitimate discussion of policies, foreign policies. - Why wouldn't they? I mean, why would you assume
that people are not going to do that? - It's the owl thing with the robes. - Why the owl and why the robes? - Which is why it
becomes really compelling when guys like Alex Jones, forgive me, but I've not watched his documentary, I probably should at some point, about the Bohemian Grove, where he claims that there
is a Satanist human sacrifice of, I think, children. And I think that's quite a
popular conspiracy theory. Or it has lost popularity, it kind of transformed
itself into the QAnon set of conspiracy theories. But I mean, can you
speak to that conspiracy? - Let's put it this way, to the general public rich
people are inherently suspicious. Let's put it that way. First of all, they've got
all that money and exactly how did one obtain it? And I do not, of necessity, adhere to the view that behind
every great fortune there is a great crime, but there often are. There are ways in which it's
acquired. But I think it's... One of the things I
think that can happen is, particularly when people
acquire a huge amount of money, and I won't name any names, but let's say there are people who perhaps in the tech sphere, who coming from no particular
background of wealth, suddenly find themselves
with $600 billion. Well, what? This is the question you would
have to ask yourself, why me? Because you're one of the rare, tiny group of human beings
who will ever have that kind of wealth in your hands. Even if you are a convinced atheist, I think at some point you
have to begin to suspect that the cosmic muffin,
providence, whatever it is, put this money in your hands to do what? Achieve great things. Just
think of all the stuff is... So you're gonna start a foundation and you're gonna start backing
all the things that you like. I think there's an element of ego that comes in with it as well. And again, it may not be so
much what the rich person with a huge amount of
money at their disposal, and a lot of fuzzy ideas about what to do with it can be influenced by others. It's always that question as to who's actually
manipulating these events? What's going on in that regard? In some way, they can
be a very useful sucker. Find somebody with a lot
of money and get them to finance the things
that you want them to do. The Bohemian Club is, I don't think, in and of itself,
inherently evil or sinister, but it means that there are
lots of different people in it who have different agendas. It goes back to what I said
about how somebody feels about the Cremation of Care ritual. This is either just a waste of time, it's just some sort of silly
thing that we're doing, or it is something of great importance, perhaps even mystical
or religious importance, because that's ostensibly
what it's pretending to be. It's always this question
as to what degree you begin to play and the play becomes serious. That tends to happen a lot. - You've studied a lot
of cults and occultism. What do you think is the power
of that mystical experience? - Well, what is broadly referred to, well, we're getting to, what's occultism? What's the occult? Occult is the hidden, that's all it really means,
specifically hidden from sight. And the basis of it is the
idea that what is hidden? Well, what is hidden from
us is most of the world, most of reality. So the basic concept within occultism, the basic concept within most religions, which are approved forms of occultism, is that the world, the physical world that we are aware of, is only a very small part
of a much larger reality. And that what the methods and practices of occultism arguably
do is to allow someone to either enter into this
larger reality or to access that larger reality for
purposes to be exploited here. The most interesting statement about, and a key element of this
becomes the thing called magic. Now, we all know magic, we know it's a guy standing
on stage performing a trick. But the interesting thing
about a stage magician is that a stage magician is... We know when we're watching
this that it's a trick. Yet we can't really figure
out, if he does it well, how that trick is being
accomplished because it seems to defy physical laws. And that's what's fascinating about it. So even though you know it's a trick, if you can't figure it out, it has this kind of power of fascination, but it's mimicking something. Stage magic is mimicking real magic. So it's real magic. Well, let's go back to Aleister Crowley because, you know, he always has to come. I knew he was gonna come
up at some point in this, earlier than that, because he always does. - All roads lead to Aleister Crowley. - All roads lead to Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley, and
I've said this enough so I should be able to get it right, but I'm paraphrasing
here, he goes, magick, which of course he spelled with a K or CK, is the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with will. So in a way that's sort
of mind over matter, but it's the idea that
one can through will, through intention, bend reality, to make something happen. Somebody wants to put it this way, it's tipping the luck plane. So you got some kind of a level plane. What we're trying to do is
just tip it just a little bit so the marble rolls over
one side or another. Now that presupposes a lot
of things that is there a luck plane? I don't know, but it's a good
sort of idea to have. But... And here again, don't become
overly bothered trying to figure out whether you
actually can bend reality. Become bothered by the
fact that there are people who believe that they can
and will go to great efforts to do so, and will often
believe they have succeeded. So it's this effort to make things occur in a particular way, maybe just to sort of nudge reality in one
little way or another. And that's where things
like rituals come in. Rituals are a way of
focusing will and attention. We're all there, we're all
thinking about the same thing. And you have to imagine just how, the pervasiveness of what
could be called that kind of magical thinking every
day happens everywhere. So let me give you an example. You ever attended a high
school football pep rally? Think of what's going on there. Your team is going to
battle the other team. You've now assembled
everyone in the gymnasium. You've got people who are dancing around in animal totem costumes. And what are you chanting? Everyone is supposed to chant
that the other team dies, that you will be horribly defeated and that our team will be victorious. That is a magic ritual. The idea is, it becomes into this idea that's very popular about visualizing things,
visualizing, manifesting, I love this term. You need to manifest your success. Well, that's just magic. That is trying to cause change
in conformity with will. So these things can happen without you being even consciously
aware of what's going on. And you don't need to be, because if you're all a part of the mob, which is there in the
gymnasium and you get into this and you get worked up, and a cultist would
argue what you're doing is you're creating a
huge amount of energy. All of these people are
putting energy into something and that energy goes somewhere. And maybe you can, maybe, just maybe you actually can
slightly increase the chances of your team's victory. Of course, your opponents
are having their own ritual at the same time. So whoever has the bigger
mojo will apparently win on the team. - So that's a, I would say,
trivial example of that, but a clear one. But I do believe that there's
incredible power in groups of humans getting together
and morphing reality. I think that's probably one of the things that made human civilization what it is. Groups of people being
able to believe a thing and bring that belief into reality. - Yes, that's, you're exactly right. Trying to conceive of something and then through intention, will, to
manifest that into this realm. - And of course, that power of the collective
mind can be leveraged by charismatic leaders
to do all kinds of stuff, whether you get cults that do
horrible things, or anything. - There might be a cult
that does good things. I don't know. It depends. We don't call those cults. - Exactly. 100%. - Without endorsing this entirely. An interesting, one of the questions, what's the difference between
a cult and a religion? And it has been said, that
in the case of a cult, there's always someone
at the top who knows what's going on, generally,
who knows it's a scam. In a religion, that person is dead. So, see, I've just managed to
insult every single religion. But it's an interesting
way of thinking about it because I think there is
some degree of accuracy in that statement. - Do you think actually the interesting psychological
question is, in cults, do you think the person
at the top always knows that it's a scam? Do you think there's
something about the human mind where you gradually- - Begin to believe your own bullshit? Yes, that again is part of magic, I think, is believing your own bullshit. It doesn't necessarily mean that the head of the cult realized, but
there's someone, maybe the second, you know, I always sort of look in the lieutenants, someone probably has an
idea about what's going on. The other thing that seems
to be a kind of dead giveaway for what we would call a cult is what's called excessive
reverence for the leader. People just believe
everything these people say. I give you an example of the first time I ever encountered anything
like that was in... Was in Santa Barbara,
California in the 1970s. I was going to grad school and there was a particular cult locally, which I think was Brotherhood of the Sun. And I noticed the same, so
there was some guy who was, you know, among the other things, followers were convinced to
hand over all their money and personal belongings to him. I believe he used part of that
money to buy a yacht with. Anyway, a lot of it went to him. And then of course, working for free upon
different cult-owned business enterprises of which there were several. And there was a person I knew who became a devoted follower of this, and it was, all I could think of at
one point was ask them, what the hell is the matter with you? I mean, have you lost your
mind? Why would you... What is it that this person
can possibly be providing that you essentially are
going to become a slave to them, which is what they were doing? And I actually give that
credit in a way of sort of sparking my whole interest in things like secret societies. And here again, as a disclaimer, I am not now nor have I ever been a member of any fraternal organization, secret society or cult that I know of. And that's what interests me about them, because I'm just always
trying to figure out why people do these things. Like I said, why the
robes and the owl? Why? Why do you do that? And it's
trying to figure it out. I mean, I couldn't even
hack the boy scouts. Okay, that was too much of that. Because to me, you join an organization and the first thing that comes along is there's somebody, there
are rules and someone is telling you what to do. Okay. I don't like people
telling me what to do. Spent much of my life trying to avoid that as much as possible. And join a cult, there's gonna be someone
telling you what to do. Join the Bohemian Club and there's gonna be someone
telling you what to do. And obviously, a lot of people really get
something out of that. It becomes, in some ways, it's sort of necessary
for them to function. But I do not understand
it and my study of it is a personal effort to try to understand why people do that. - And there's so many reasons. Primary of which I would say is the desire in the human heart to belong. - Yes. - And the dark forms that it takes throughout human history,
recent human history, is something I'd love to
talk to you a bit about. If we can go back to the
beginning of the 20th century, on the German side, you've described how secret
societies like The Thule Society laid the foundation for Nazi ideology. Can you, through that lens,
from that perspective, describe the rise of the Nazi party? - Well, I guess we could start with, what on earth is The Thule Society? So The Thule Society was a
small German occult society. That is, they studied metaphysics, their fancy word for occultism. That appeared in Munich around 1917, 1918. The key figure behind it
was a German esotericist by the name of Rudolf von Sebottendorff. Okay, not his real name. His real name was Adam Rudolf Glauer. He was adopted by a
German nobleman and got the name von Sebottendorff. And I like to say that name. So I have this real thing about vague, mysterious characters who
show up and do things. And trying to figure out
who these people are. So we're working with
the years sort of prior to the First World War. So the decade or so prior to World War I, he spends a lot of time
in the Ottoman Empire. Turkey, there was in the Ottoman Empire, which was a fairly tumultuous place because in 1908 and 1909, there was the Young Turk Revolution. And you had a kind of military coup, which effectively overthrew
the Ottoman Sultan and installed a military junta, which would go on during
the First World War to make its greatest achievement
in the Armenian genocide. Eventually, it created a
genocidal military regime, which would lead the country into disastrous First World War, which would destroy the Ottoman Empire, out of which modern Turkey emerges. Yada, yada, yada. - And by the way, we should
take a tiny tangent here, which is that you refer to
the intelligence agencies as being exceptionally successful. And here in the case of the Young Turks being
also very successful in doing the genocide, meaning they've achieved the greatest impact, even
though the impact on the scale of good to evil tends towards evil. It's one of those things
that often comes out of revolutionary situations. Revolutions always seek to
make things better, don't they? We're going to take a bad old regime. You know, the Sultan is, you
know, and the Sultan was bad. I think it's fairly stated. Abdul Hamid II wasn't called a Red Sultan because of his favorite
color type of thing. And the idea is that they
were going to improve, they were now going to, the Ottoman Empire was a
multinational empire... They were going to try
to equalize and bring in the different groups. And none of that
happened. It became worse. Okay? In the same way that you
could argue that the goal of Russian revolutionaries was to get rid of the bad old incompetent
medieval czarist regime and to bring in a new
great shining future, and it became even more authoritarian. And the crimes of the
Imperial Russian regime pale the significance of what
would follow in the same way that the crimes of Abdul
Hamid pale when you get to the Young Turks. But that wasn't necessarily the intention. But von Sebottendorff
was a German businessman who's working in this period. And the whole point here
is that the Ottoman Empire in this period is a hotbed
of political intrigue. And all kinds of
interesting things about it. The Young Turk revolution is essentially a military coup, but it is
plotted in Masonic lodges. Okay, I know, technically Masonic lodges are never supposed to be involved
in politics, but they are. Or, the lodge meeting breaks up and then you plot the revolution. So, same group of people,
but it's not technically. But yes, and there's the
Macedonia Risorta Lodge in Thessaloniki was
ground zero for plotting this military coup that was
supposed to improve the empire. Sebottendorff is in one way
or another mixed up in all of this, or at least he's an
observer, plus he's initiated, he's initiated into the Masonic lodges. And interestingly enough,
the fellow who initiates him into one of these Eastern
lodges is a Jewish merchant by the name of Termudi. And who's also a Kabbalist. And also... So, Sebottendorff is very,
very interested in the occult. He's initiated into Eastern
Masonic lodges in a period when those same lodges
are being used as a center for political intrigue. He also apparently is
involved in gun running, which in revolutionary periods is, there's a lot of money
to be made off of that. So, he's connected to
various dark businesses in a tumultuous time, with connections to politicized
Freemasonry and the occult. Now, in the course of the First World War, he returns to Germany. He just shows up. And It would be my operative
suspicion or theory that Sebottendorff was
working for someone. I don't think he just pops up
in Munich on his own accord. Why does he leave the
Ottoman Empire and return to that place? Who's behind him? Maybe no one, but maybe someone, because he does seem to
have money at his disposal. And he comes into Munich
and he basically takes over this small sort
of occult study group. Now the interesting thing
is that The Thule Society is really just a branch of
another existing what's called an Ariosophist order, a
thing called the German order or the Germanenorden, which
is centered in Berlin. But for some reason, he doesn't want his group
to be connected by name with the Germanenorden. So Thule Society, Thule in
this case is a reference to supposedly a mythical Arctic
homeland of the Aryan race. Apparently, they're all
snow people who wander out of the snow at some point. It's kind of like a frozen Atlantis. So I mentioned these
people, the Ariosophists, who, you have to practice
saying that, so what are they? Well, they're a kind of racist, Germanic offshoot of theosophy. And I know I'm explaining one thing to explain something, but
there's no other way to do this. So theosophy was 19th century, very popular and widely
modeled occult belief that was founded by a
Russian woman by the name of Helena Blavatsky. She was a medium psychic. She supposedly got channelings
from the ascended masters. The basic story there, they're all of the ascended masters, which are mystical beings
that may or may not have once been human. They live inside the Himalayas
or they float among them on a cloud and they guide the spiritual
evolution of humanity. What Blavatsky did was to
take Western esotericism and blend it with Hindu
and Buddhist esotericism, which became very, very sexy in the West. Still is. Buddhism attracts a lot of people because, well, it's Buddhism. It's different, see? So the Mahatmas, the ascended masters were
sending her messages, despite the fact that she
was later proven pretty much to be a fraud and writing
the letters herself. Nevertheless, people still went along with this doctrine, and
it's been widely modified and copied since then. So an idea in theosophy was that human spiritual
evolution was tied to physical evolution. So in the case of Blavatsky, Blavatsky never said that
Aryans, white people, anything out this were superior. She talked about the different root races, but it's just, her version of it, it's just total gobbledygook
that seems to include everyone. I defy you to make much sense out of it. But in the early 20th century,
there were different sort of, one of the things that became fashionable, not terribly popular,
these are small movements with the idea that, well, Germany
is a new upcoming country. And part of this, I think, was really trying to define who the Germans were, because, remember, the German empire, Germany as a political state doesn't
come into existence until 1871. Prior to that, Germany was
a geographic expression, a vague one which described a large area in Central
Europe where a lot of people who wore leather shorts and, or something like that and
spoke similar German dialects, were nominally Germans, but they might be
Prussians or Bavarians... They came in all sorts of
varieties and relations. There was no German identity. Something very similar happened
in Italy in the same period. There weren't Italians. There were Sardinians
and there were Romans and there were Sicilians,
Umbrians, spoke, again, dialects of a similar
language, but it never lived, not since the Roman Empire
under a single state and really didn't think
of themselves as the same. So you have to create
this artificial thing. You have to create Germans. There's now a Germany with an emperor, and so we're all going to be Germans. Well, exactly what is that? Much of it is an artificial creation. You have to decide upon some
sort of standard dialect. Okay, we'll decide what that is. Often a dialect that only a
few people actually speak, and then they will be
drilled into children's heads through state schooling programs. So I think this is the kind of
milieu that it comes out of. People were trying to figure out what on Earth Germans actually were. And the need for some
sort of common identity. And, you know, that leads to everything like Wagnerian opera. Richard Wagner wanted to
create a German mythical music. So he went back and strip
mined old German myths and cobbled them together
into a lot of people standing on stage singing. And that was his purpose.
He was a nationalist. He was in many ways a kind
of racialist nationalist. And this was his idea of
trying to create out of bits and pieces of the past a
newfangled form of German identity. So, on the more mystical end of this, you had the ideas that, well, Germany must have been created for some special purpose because the Germans must
be very special people. And we must have some sort
of particular destiny. And then out of this, you know, the direction this is heading, well, we're all part of some sort
of master race with some sort of ties to some sort of great
civilization in the past, call it Thule, call it
whatever you want to be. They basically just invent things. And try to attach those to the past. And so Ariosophy was the
Aryanized version of theosophy. And what this did was to take the idea that spiritual and
physical evolution had led to the most advanced form of human beings, which were the Aryans and
the most advanced group of them were, of course, the Germans. And this attracted appeal. Keep in mind again, this
was not a mass movement. This is very much a fringe movement. Most people weren't aware of it and weren't particularly interested in it, but it had appeal for those
who already had a kind of esoteric bent in some form or another. And this is where things
like the Germanenorden, the German order and
there are other groups, it was only one of many,
sort of grew out of. And what it was that The
Thule Society as a branch, The Thule Gesellschaft was
supposed to do was to study this. It was an esoteric study group. And so people would get
together and they'd talk about things, probably make
more stuff up and all sort of work around this idea of German Aryans is the most advanced type
of human beings and all the wonderful things that
the future would hold. And the fact that this
was in the midst of a war in which Germany was, again,
fighting, as they saw it, for its existence, heightened those kinds of tensions as well. So my suspicion, again, is that Sebottendorff in
terms of who was behind him, that he was essentially
called back to Germany to work either for the
Prussian political police or for some aspect of German
intelligence or security to try to mobilize
occultism or esotericism for the war effort. Because again, this is 1918, the war has gone on way too long. Within a few months,
Germany will collapse, and it will collapse simply from the psychological
exhaustion of the population. So this is almost like to help
the war effort with a kind of propaganda, a narrative
that can strengthen the will of the German people. - It would strengthen
the will of some people. You have to try to appeal to
different aspects of this. But the mystical aspect
is one of those things that can be, can have a
very powerful influence. And the idea is that we
can come up with some kind of mystical nationalism. Maybe that's one to put it, a kind of mystical nationalism that can be exploited for the... At this point, you're kind
of grasping at straws. And this is a whole
period when the Germans are marshaling the last
of their forces to launch a series of offensives
on the Western Front, the Peace Offensive, which
will initially be successful but will ultimately fail and
lead to a collapse in morale. But among the leadership of
Germany, it was a recognition, it was that national morale was flagging. And one of the other things that was kind of raising its head was
what had happened nearby a year, well, the Russian Revolution, which had now brought the idea
of another solution to all of this, the idea of
revolutionary Marxism. Here we need to remind ourselves as to where Marxism comes
from, not Russia, Germany. Where was the largest
Marxist party? In Germany. - And Marx probably expected the revolution to begin in Germany. - Where else? - I mean, the Soviet Union
is not very industrialized. Germany is, and so that's
where it would probably be. - Russia, 5% of the population
is industrial workers. In Germany, 40% of the population is... So if any place was made
for Marxism, it was Germany. I think that's why it
caught on in East Germany so well, because it did kind of come home. It was a local belief. It wasn't something
imported by the Russians. It was a German invention. So... The Thule Society, one
of the things you can see in this is The Thule Society
was particularly involved in sort of anti-Marxist or
anti-Bolshevik agitation. They saw themselves, saw
them as this whole movement. It was a counter to this. It was a kind of counter-Marxist movement. - Can we sort of try to break
that apart in a nuanced way? So it was a nationalist movement. The occult was part of the
picture, occult racial theories. So there's a racial component,
like the Aryan race. So it's not just the nation of Germany. And you take that and
contrast it with Marxism. Did they also formulate
that in racial terms? Did they formulate that in
national versus global terms? Like how do they see this? - Marxism formulates everything by class. People are categorized by class. You're either part of the
proletariat or you're part of the bourgeoisie or just, you know, you're either part of the proletariat or
just some sort of scum. Really, needs to be swept
into the dustbin of history. Only workers count. And that was what would take someone who was a nationalist, would sort of drive them
crazy because their idea is we're trying to create a German people. We're trying to create a
common German identity. But what the Marxists are doing is they're dividing Germans
against each other by class. German workers hate
the German bourgeoisie. German proletariat is opposed
to German capitalists. We're all trying to
fight this war together. So that was why Marxism, particularly in the form of Bolsheism, was seen as unpatriotic. And of course, it was opposed
to the war as a whole. The idea that parroting
Lenin was that the war was an imperialist war. And the only thing that
was good that was going to come out of it is that the
imperialist war through all of the crises it was creating
would eventually lead to a class war. And that would be good because
that would reconcile all of these things. But think of this, the two
very different versions of this, the Bolshevist
version or let's just call it the Marxist version of Germany, it was going to be a class
society in which we're going to have to have some
kind of civil upheaval, which will have Germans fighting Germans. Whereas the kind of mystical nationalism, the almost kind of religious nationalism that Sebottendorff and The Thule Society had hitched its wagon to held
that Germans are all part of a single racial family
and that's what must be the most important thing. And that these can be
different ways of trying to influence people. It comes down to a matter
of political influence. So in a sense, I think that what Sebottendorff
and The Thule Society was trying to do, at least within Munich, was to use this idea
of mystical nationalism as a potential rallying
point for some part of the population to
oppose these other forces, to keep people fighting. The war is lost though,
by the, in November, the Kaiser abdicates and essentially the socialists do take over in Germany. Things come very, very close
to following the Russian model. And you even get the
Russian version or take on the Bolsheviks, which
are the Spartacists who try and fail to seize power early on. But you do essentially end
up with a socialist Germany. And that then leaves in
the aftermath of the war, The Thule Society is
sort of the odd man out, although they're still very
closely connected to the army. Now here's one of the things
that I find interesting. When you get into 1919, who is it that's paying
Sebottendorff's bills? It's the army. The one thing the German
army is absolutely determined to do is to preserve its
social position and power. And they're perfectly willing
to dump the Kaiser to do that. That's sort of this deal which is made. In November of 1918, Kaiser's abdication, the proclamation of a German Republic, which you just had this guy declare it, it wasn't really planned. There's the Ebert-Groener pact. Groener is the chief of staff,
general staff at this point. Friedrich Ebert is the
chief socialist politician, basically, and they make an agreement. And the agreement basically is that the army will
support Ebert's government, if Ebert supports the army. And particularly that
means the continuation of the officer corps and the general staff
in one form or another. So a deal is made. And that of course is what
will eventually help defeat the Spartacist uprising. - Now was the army doing
the similar kinds of things that we've talked about with
the intelligence agencies, this kind of same kind of trying to control
the direction of power? - Well, the German intelligence landscape in the First World War
is obscure in many ways. There are lots of things that
are going on. You've got... Germany has a military intelligence
service called Abteilung or Section III b. That's just plain military intelligence. They're constantly trying to collect military
information before the war about the weaponry and plans
of the enemies and then about what the operational
plans were during the war. It doesn't really go
much beyond that though. The German foreign office runs a kind of political intelligence service. And that's the one which
is much more involved in things like subsidizing
subversion in Russia, which is one of the things
that the Germans sign on to fairly early. Little diversion here, in 1915 there is a Russian revolutionary
who's lived much of his life in Germany who goes by
the code name of Parvus. And he essentially comes to the Germans in Constantinople,
interesting enough, in Turkey. He's hanging around there the
same time as Sebottendorff is there, which I find curious. So Parvus or Alexander Helphand, to give his actual
name, comes and he goes, look, there's a lot of
revolutionaries in Russia and there's a lot of
mistrust with the regime. We think that the war will
increase the contradictions in Russian society. And if you give me a lot of marks, I can finance this revolutionary activity, and through subversion, I can
take Russia out of the war. Well, the Germans are
facing a two front war. That sounds great. We'll
use money in order to... But notice what they're doing. The German general staff, a very conservative organization, not a bunch of revolutionaries, are going to finance revolution
in an opposing country. They are going to finance
revolutionary subversion to take Russia out of the
war, which basically works. So that gives you another idea as to what the German
military is willing to do. They're not revolutionaries, but they'll pay revolutionaries
to subvert another regime. Now you've got the problem is that the revolutionary regime that your money helped bring
to power is now threatening to extend into your country. So the whole question for
the army and for others in Germany in 1919 is how to keep Germany from going Bolshevik, from, in a sense, being hoist by your own petard. So The Thule Society, I don't think is a huge
part of this program, but it is a part of it. And it's all an effort
to try to keep control. And that's why the army is financing them. That's even why the army at some point then supplies
them with its own propagandists. So The Thule Society begins to create under Sebottendorff's
leadership, what he called the rings of Thule. And these are satellite organizations
that aren't the society as though, but they're kind of controlled and inspired by it. And one of those is a thing called the German Workers' Party. And the German Workers'
Party, again, is local. It's not large. It's not
terribly influential. But what does it aspire to be? It aspires to be a party that will bring German workers away from the seductive
influence of the Bolsheviks and into a more patriotic
position, a patriot... And the way that I describe
this is that it's not an anti-communist organization, it's a counter-communist organization. So you don't create something which completely opposes it, you create something which mimics it, which is ultimately what the German Workers' Party will become is the National Socialist
German Workers' Party. Notice that term, socialist. And that is, in my view, what Nazism is from the beginning. It is a counter-communist movement. - And by the way, for
people who don't know, the National Socialist
German Workers' Party is also known as the Nazi Party. So how did this evolution
happen from those, that complicated little interplay? We should also say that
a guy named Adolf Hitler is in the army at this time. - Yes. - Well... - He's going to come into this. Because remember, the army was going to supply its own propagandists to help the German Workers' Party and The Thule Society do their work. And the propagandist they
supply them with is a man who the army trains, sends to classes to learn the art of public
speaking and propaganda. And that fellow is Corporal Adolf Hitler. - So how does Adolf Hitler connect with the German Workers' Party? - Well, he'd been in
the army during the war, the only regular job that he'd ever had. Kind of liked it. So you often get the view is that, well, at the end of the war, he joined millions of other German soldiers
who didn't have jobs. No, no, he stays in the army. He stays in the army until 1921. He's on the army payroll at the very time in which he is able to
help them to set this up. What appears to have happened is this. Sebottendorff had organized
The Thule Society. That didn't have, you know,
that it had tried to oppose... There's actually a brief period of time in which the communists
actually take over Munich, the Bavarian Soviet Republic,
which doesn't last very long. And eventually the army and
volunteers put this down. While that's going on, by the way, Hitler is actually sitting in the barracks in Munich wearing a red armband because he is technically
part of the soldiers who have gone over to the
Bavarian Soviet Republic. He seems to have had flexible
interests in this case. So once order is restored, so to speak, the army comes in and decide that, well, one of the things we need, we need to have people
who can lecture soldiers on patriotic topics. So there is a particular
captain by the name of Karl Mayr who sort of spots Hitler. He later describes him as
like a stray dog looking for a master. Hitler has a knack for public speaking. Other soldiers will listen to
him. Some people can do that. Some people can't. Mayr decides that he's a good candidate for further training. So yes, they bring him in. They turn him into a
what's called a Wehmann, a kind of liaison man. He's an army propagandist. And then you've got this
little outfit called the German Workers' Party. And essentially what happens
is that Hitler is sent in to take over leadership of
that, which is what happens. He shows up, he attends a meeting. There are like 50 people there. By the way, the topic of
the first meeting he's at is how and why capitalism
should be abolished, which is not what you might well expect. Because remember, the German
Workers' Party is trying to cast itself as a counter-Bolshevism. So it's not saying that
capitalism is great, which is important. No, capitalism is evil,
we agree upon that. We just agree it has to be destroyed from a nationalist
point of view as opposed from some sort of strange
internationalist point of view. So Hitler is essentially, as I see it, sent in by the army as their trained man to assume leadership
within this small party and to use it for the army's
patriotic propaganda campaign. And it's a season doing so. Even to the name change to the National Socialist
or German Workers' Party? I mean, really, what
sounds more red than that? - So the interesting thing here is from where did anti-Semitism
seep into this whole thing? It seems like the way they try to formulate counter-Marxism
is by saying the problem with capitalism and the
problem with Marxism is that it's really
Judeo-capitalism and, quote, Judeo-Bolshevism. From where did that ideology seep in? - Well, that's a huge topic. Where does anti-Semitism come from? Let's start with that term itself, a term which I have
really grown increasingly to dislike, because it doesn't
actually say what it means. Anti-Semitism is anti-Jewism.
That's all it is. I'm not sure whether there
has ever existed a person who hated Jews, Arabs,
and Maltese equally. Okay, that's kind of hard to imagine. But that's technically
what that would mean because let's face it,
most Semites are Arabs. So if you're an anti-Semite, then you don't seem to
distinguish Jews from Arabs. It makes no sense. The origin of the term is invented by,
guess what, an anti-Semite. A guy in the 1870s, a German journalist by
the name of Wilhelm Marr, who is, wouldn't you know
it, part Jewish himself, and who decides that you
really need a better term than Judenhass, Jew hate, which was the term
because that just sounds so inelegant, doesn't it? Okay. What do you want to call yourself? A Jew hater or an anti-Semite? See, anti-Semitism, it's got
that -ism part at the end of it, which means it's
a system of belief. Anything that has an -ism must somehow be
scientific and important. It's all part of the 19th
century obsession with trying to bring science into
something on one or the other. So we're going to get rid
of Jew hate and we're going to turn it into anti-Semitism. And we're only going to
be talking about Jews, but we'll never actually say that. Somehow, the invention of
a Jew hater to disguise the fact that he's a Jew hater, even though he's partly Jewish, by inventing the term anti-Semitism worked because everybody has bought
it and repeated it ever since. So... I don't know. Maybe just because
anti-Jewism would just be, is it too direct in some way? Do we have difficulty
confronting actually what it is that we're talking about? - I do wish terms were a little bit more direct
and self-explanatory. Yeah. Jew hate is a better term. - Well, the question then comes, what exactly do you hate about Jews? And a lot of this has to do with, if you go back prior to the 19th century, if Jews were hated, they were
hated for religious reasons. In Christian Europe, they're hated because they weren't Christians. And they existed as the only kind of significant religious minority. But other than that, they
tended to live separately. They had little economic influence. Jews tended to live in shtetls in the east, ghettos elsewhere. They were, some were involved in banking and business, but they
sort of remained segregated from much of society. That changes when you
get to the 19th century and with what's called
Jewish emancipation. And that means that between
about 1800 and 1850, most European countries
drop the various legal or social restrictions against Jews. They are assimilated
into the general society. So ideally you stop being
a German Jew and you become a Jewish German. Those are two very different
important concepts. And what that does of
course is that it opens up the professions, business
world, elsewhere. So Jews move, who had been
largely within those realms to begin with, they already
had a good deal of experience in banking and business, and they move into those
areas and professions and become quite visible. And that's what then creates antisemitism. Because in some way that is seen as part of the changes that have taken place. And there are a lot of
things going on here. Part of it has to do with
the kind of wrenching social and economic changes that took
place with industrialization. So one of the things to keep in mind is that in the process
of industrialization, just like today, whole classes of people were made extinct economically. Craftsmen, for instance. So when factories came along and began to produce things with machines, all the craftspeople who had made those things
previously are now unemployed or go to work as wage labor in factories. So there are winners and
losers in industrialization. And what people saw in
Germany and elsewhere is that among this new sort
of rising capitalist elite, among these new professions, among the bureaucrats that are coming out of these burgeoning states, there were visibly a fair number of Jews. So in some way, the rise of Jews in the minds of many people were connected to all of the other bad things
that were going on. The world was changing
in a way we don't like. And seemingly, the Jews are
prospering while I am not. And that was true in
Germany and elsewhere. Jews became highly visible
in the professions. They became very visible in banking. They became visible in legal profession. They became visible in
the medical profession. And those are people that
a lot of people would come in contact with, bankers,
lawyers, and doctors. They were not the majority there, but vastly over-represented in terms of the general population, and
especially within the cities. So in that sense, the roots of anti-Semitism
to me is that Jews in Germany and elsewhere, and not just in Germany by any means, France,
Britain, everywhere else, became identified with the bad changes that were taking place. But you also found that Jews were not only prominent among capitalists, they were also prominent among, in the socialist movement as well. So one of the things
you could look around, we return to Germany in
1919 in the aftermath of World War I, and you
look around in Bavaria or elsewhere, you tend to
find that there are a lot of Jews in visible positions
on the German left. Rosa Luxemburg is but one example of that. Eugen Levine, some of
them came in from Russia. When the Soviets send a
representative to Germany in this period, it's Karl Radek, a Jew. So it wasn't difficult to
exploit that to argue that just as the ranks of capitalism
was full of Jews, the ranks of Bolshevism or of the revolutionary
left were full of Jews because you could easily
go around and distinguish a great many of them. Again, they don't have to be the majority, they just have to be numerous,
prominent, and visible, which they were. So this provided you a, you know, in case of the propaganda
of the German army, the type of stuff that Hitler spewed out, they could put all the
anti-capitalist rhetoric in there wanted to. The army was never going
to overthrow capitalism, and the capitalists knew
they weren't going to do it. So go ahead, you know, talk shit about us. We don't really care. That's not going to, because we know that
the army would prevent that from happening. The way to then undermine
the real enemy, it was seen, the revolutionary left was to point out the Jewish influence there. I mean, look at Russia. Well,
Lenin's not, but Trotsky. There he is. Look, there's a Jew. There's one. Radek is a Jew. It wasn't hard to find
them in that regard. - You gave a lecture on "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." It's widely considered to
be the most influential work of anti-Semitism ever, perhaps. Can you describe this text? - Well, "The Protocols of
the Learned Elders of Zion" is probably one of the most troublesome and destructive works of
literature that has ever emerged. And yet its origins remain obscure. So you get a whole variety of stories about where it came from. So the one story that is
often is that it was the work of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, and in particular, it was
all crafted in 1904 and 1905. In Paris, there's a whole description of Pyotr Rachkovsky, who
was supposedly the chief of the Okhrana at the time,
was the man behind it. Another fellow by the
name of Matvei Golovinsky was the drafter of it. And that they had this document written by a French political writer from some decades back
called "Dialogue on Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu," which they were then adapting... Usually it's argued
that they plagiarized it into the protocols. And none of that is really true. I mean, the first part
about it is that at the time this supposedly took place, Rachkovsky wasn't working for the Okhrana. He'd been fired and he wasn't in Paris. And the whole situation
which is described couldn't have taken place because the people who did it weren't there. It's a story. But it provides
a kind of explanation for it. So "The Protocols" emerge. So
you always have to go back. This is one of the things that
I have found always useful in research is go back to the beginning. Find the first place this is mentioned or the first version
or the first iteration. Where does it start? So you go back to St.
Petersburg, Russia, around 1903. There is a small right-wing
anti-Semitic newspaper published there called Znamya, Banner. And it publishes in a kind of serial form a work doesn't credit
with any original author. And this is the first version of "The Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Zion." But what it's actually describing
is a Judeo-Masonic plot to rule the world. Those two terms are
always combined together. And I think in the earlier version, there's far more mentions of
Freemasons than there are Jews. The publisher of Znamya
is closely connected to a thing called the Union
of the Russian People, the Union of Russian Men, which ostensibly existed
to defend the empire against subversion, and particularly against what it thought
was Jewish subversion, when they also argued that
the prominence of Jews in revolutionary movements somehow proved that this was in some
way a Jewish revolution. But again, this is not
a mainstream newspaper, it's not appealing to a
mainstream population, very few people saw it, but
this is where it appears. Now keep in mind, that's two or three years
before it's usually said to have been written. Or the other version is that
there's this crazy priest by the name of Sergei
Nilus, and he wrote it, or actually appended it as an
appendix to his work in 1905. Now, it was around before that. So Nilus didn't create it, it wasn't drafted in
Paris in 1904 and 1905. It was serialized in an obscure right-wing
Russian newspaper, 1903. - And by the way, we should say
that these are 24 protocols. - Well, it varies. - It varies. That are, I guess, supposed to be like meeting notes about the supposed cabal
where the Jews and Freemasons are planning together a world domination. But it's like meeting notes, right? - Protocol, which are Russian
terms basically for notes of a meeting.
- Yeah. - Well, as notes of a meeting, these are the goofiest
things I've ever seen. Because what you've got
here, it's not notes. No one takes notes from
a meeting that way. What you've got is like the exposition of a Bond villain, right? It's all of this, "Boy, all
of them are gonna do this!" And then, the last thing you
want to do is lay out your, if you've got a plan for world domination, my suggestion would be,
don't write it down. So it's not notes of a meeting. Again, it's another sort
of narrative or story that's being told. It bears no resemblance
to the "Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu." But what it is, the best thing, it's not particularly
readable in some ways. There was an Italian writer, and they know Cesare Michelis, who wrote a book translated in English called "The Non-Existent Manuscript." And what it is is that he takes the different versions
starting with the 1902, 1903 versions and looks
through the other ones. And he tries to in the
process to reconstruct what he thinks the
original might have been. But the other thing he does,
which was fascinating to me, is that he takes this
whole sort of initial text. And in bold type, he
indicates the paragraphs, but more often sentences
or phrases that appear to be identical from the Joly work. And they're just scattered throughout it. There's no particular
rhyme or reason to it. You don't plagiarize that
way. I mean, who does that? It's a sentence here, a sentence there... Which has led to a
peculiar theory of mine, which of course I will
have to expound upon, which is that I think
that the original author of "The Protocols" was
the same Maurice Joly. I think what someone
stumbled across was a work which he wrote and never
published and which he just drew. It's exactly what someone would do working from your own kind of material. Because I've written things and then taken what I've written and
then sort of repackaged that into something else. - A sentence here, a sentence there... - And the same sort of thing comes out. Only sort of bits and pieces of it remain. So why would Joly have done that? Joly was, we're talking about a man whose career basically spanned the 1850s to 1870s. He's an obscure figure. I'm not even totally sure he existed. I mean, it's one of those
things you go looking for him. - I love that you're a scholar
of people that just kind of emerge out of the darkness. - They just come from nowhere. - And there's the Okhrana of there also. And we should also say this was, I guess the original would be written... I mean, what's the language
of the original? Russian? - Russian. But my hunch is that that's
adopted from a French version. First of all, they're constantly harping on Freemasons, which wasn't nearly as a big idea as it is there. If you go back to France in the 1890s, there's some big scandals. Well, there's the Dreyfus
scandal. Well, we got that. All right. Where you've got a Jewish officer on trial
for being a traitor. All right? So that was, so you're bringing
the whole Jewish element, Jews as disloyal, Dreyfus case, 1894. Earlier, you had the Panama scandal, which was this huge investment scandal when the Panama Canal
Company in Paris collapsed. And again, many of the
major players in that work, Jewish financiers. And then you've got the Taxil hoax. So the Taxil hoax was
the work of this guy. His real name was I think, Jogand-Pagès. He was kind of a French journalist. He started out writing porn. So when he wrote things like
"Sex Lives of the Popes" and "The Erotic Bible" and
various things of that kind, he was a Catholic, broke
with the Catholic Church, wrote bad stuff about the Popes, and apparently became a
Freemason for a while... And then supposedly
recanted his evil ways, went back to the church. And then under the name Leo
Taxil began writing these whole series of articles,
basically arguing that there was a Masonic satanic
conspiracy, run by the way, by an American, Albert Pike. And this also included child sacrifice, it's got Pizzagate as well, by a high
priestess, Diana Vaughan. And so there's like
child sacrifice, weird, robe-y Bohemian Grove stuff. And the Freemasons are
devil worshipers going back to the Knights Templars. And so there's a thing called "The Devil in the Nineteenth Century" and "The Secrets of Freemasonry." And this became a bestseller in France. So France is just obsessed with all these kinds of conspiracy. So evil satanic Freemasons,
evil Jewish financiers, Dreyfus... Yes, this is the brew
where all of this comes. I want to figure out how Freemasons and Jews get connected together? France is the place where this happens. Now, Taxil or Jogand-Pagès
eventually pulls another interesting thing in this, around 1897, critics argue that he's making
this stuff up and demand that he present Diana Vaughan, suppose satanic high
priestess toddler killer. And he says, oh, we're going
to have a press conference. She'll appear and say all
of this stuff as she returns to the church and possibly becomes a nun. And so people show up, you know, high figures in the
Catholic church shows up and he does know Diana
Vaughan and Jogand-Pagès goes, it's all a hoax. I made it up. You're all a bunch
of idiots for believing it. Okay? You, you members of the church, especially just the gullible morons you are. And that's it. He confesses. To this day however, you will find people who will insist that it's actually true because
they desperately want it to be true. But this is I think
the milieu that, I like that word, that this
comes out of, and this is this whole kind of unhealthy mix. So France to me is the only place that in the decade preceding it, that something like
this would be concocted. So it was either created by some sort of unknown person there, but I still think that even though he dies in like 1879, that in Maurice
Joly's troubled career, he went from being an opponent of French Emperor Napoleon III, which is what the whole
Dialogues was written against. And then he was, for a time, a close political ally of a
French politician by the name of Adolphe Cremieux. So Adolphe Cremieux, what's
he got going for him? Well, he was kind of a radical politician. He was an opponent of Napoleon
III. He was a Freemason. Oh, and he was Jewish. In fact, at one point, I think he was actually the head both of the Scottish Rite in
France and an important figure in the Alliance Israélite, the Jewish organization in France. So he was publicly very
prominently Jewish and Masonic. So someone else who would
have linked them together. Joly, as he did with virtually everyone, this was a guy whose
life largely consisted of duel threats and fistfights. So he gets angry at Cremieux. And it's exactly the type
of thing that he might write to vent his spleen about it. But he died, probably a suicide. That's kind of difficult to tell. In obscurity, his son seems
to have inherited most of his literary works. And his son then became a journalist to work
for newspapers in France in the 1890s, but was also
associated with some people on the fringes of the Okhrana or the
Russian press in France. So one of the little
things that had happened by this time is that France and Russia had become allies, even
though their political systems are completely incompatible. And so the Russians were using money to subsidize French newspapers
that were championing the alliance between the
two, Russian meddling. Okay? Now they're just paying
to have the right kind of newspapers come out. So there's this whole
connection between the kind of Russian journalistic world and the French journalistic world and all of these scandals, which are
going on and Joly's son... And then, you know, 10
years down the road, this thing pops up in a
newspaper in St. Petersburg. That's where I think the origins lay. - Why do you think it took off? Why do you think it grabbed a large number of people's imaginations? And even after it was
shown to be not actually what it's supposed to be,
people still believe it's real. - Well, it doesn't take off immediately. Okay? It never receives
any kind of wide... I mean, nobody much reads
the first edition of it. There are something like
18 or 19 different versions it goes through. I mean, people leave this
protocol out or leave another one. As time goes on, there's more and more emphasis on Jews and less and less on Freemasons. And the whole thing could have begun as an anti-Masonic tract. I mean, you could leave
Jews out of it entirely and just turn it into a
Masonic plot to rule the world. But let's just throw them in as well, since the two things are already
being combined elsewhere. It doesn't become a big
deal until really after the First World War because
the initial versions of it are all in Russian. And, you know, let's face it, while that's widely read in Russia, it's not much read anywhere else. It's a different alphabet. Nobody can even see what it means. So it has no particular
influence outside of Russia, but then you get to 1919, and you get all these
different versions of it. So suddenly you get two
English versions in the US, another English version in
Britain, a German edition, a French edition, a Dutch edition. Everybody is coming up with these things. So it's not until in
the immediate aftermath of the First World War
that this metastasizes and it begins to show up in all of these different foreign editions. And I think that it just
has to do with the changes that have taken place during the war. One of the things that
people began looking for was that, why was there a war? We've just had this whole
disastrous war and the world has been turned upside down. So there has to be some kind
of explanation for that. I don't know. And one of the things this offered to see, there's this evil plan, there's this evil plan that
has been put into motion and this could possibly
explain what's taking place. The reason why "The Protocols" were I think widely bought
then and why they still are in many ways is the same
reason that the Taxil hoax I was talking about was
because it told a story that people wanted to believe. So in France in the 1890s, there was widespread
suspicion of Freemasons. It was seen as a somewhat sinister secretive organization,
certainly secretive. And there was also, again, the same sort of generalized prejudices about Jews, clannish,
distinct, too much influence, all of the things that went on. So it was sort of easy to combine
those two things together. And even though Taxil
admits it was a hoax, there were those who argued
that it's just too accurate. It describes things too
completely to be a hoax. And then you get the same arguments. In fact, I've heard the same
arguments with "The Protocol." I don't even buy this as
an example of plagiarism because you can't actually
prove what's being plagiarized in any sense. To me, "The Protocols" are a
prime example of what I call a turd on a plate. These things crop up. I
have to explain that now. - Yeah, please.
- But I have to. What is a turd on a plate? Well, a turd on a plate
is a turd on a plate. Suppose you come in and
there's a plate sitting on the table and there's a turd on it. Now the first thing you're going
to want is, is that a turd? Is it a human turd?
Where did it come from? Why would someone poop on a plate? There are all these
questions that come to mind. It makes no sense. But
that's what you come up... It's just there. Right? I don't know where it came
from, I don't know why, but there's a turd on a plate and that's what the protocols are. They're just there. - But the reality is, just
like with a turd on a plate, you take a picture of that
in modern day and it becomes a meme, becomes viral and becomes a joke on all social media and now
is viewed by tens of millions of people or whatever. It becomes popular. So wherever the turd came from, it did captivate the imagination. - Yeah. - It did speak to something. - It seemed to provide an explanation. - Can you just speak to Jew hatred? Is it just an accident of history? Why was it the Jews versus the Freemasons? Is it the collective mind
searching for a small group to blame for the pains of civilization? And then Jews just
happened to be the thing that was selected at
that moment in history? - It goes all the way back to the Greeks. Let's blame them. So one of the first
occasions you find the idea that Jews are a distinct, mean-spirited, nasty people goes back to a Greco-Egyptian
historian named Manetho. This is around, I think, 300 BC. Early. Can't even rope the Romans into this one. So Manetho is trying to write a history of
the dynasties of Egypt. I think his history of
dynasties of Egypt still is one of the basic works in this, but he tells this whole story which essentially describes
the first blood libels, that the Jews, to celebrate their various religious holidays, would capture Greeks and
fatten them up in the basement and then slaughter them and
eat them or drain their blood or do something. Yeah, it's just the earlier
version of that kind. Also, I think it repeats
the Egyptian version of the Exodus out of Egypt, which is quite different
than the biblical version. In this case, the Egyptians, they stole all the stuff
out of the Egyptians' houses and ran off into the desert. - The Jews stole all
the stuff and ran off? - Yeah, Hebrews. Hebrews robbed the Egyptians.
They were taken in. We took them in and sheltered
them, gave them jobs, and then they, like, stole
all the jewelry and ran away. We didn't even chase them. We
were glad to see them gone. So it's a different... It's a different narrative on that story. But it essentially portrays
the Jews as being hostile. They don't like other people. They're contemptuous of
other people's religions, the rest of it. And see, the Greeks tended
to think of themselves as being extremely cosmopolitan. Now, the Greeks ran across
people worshiping other gods. They go, oh, this is just our
gods under different names. Everything was sort of
adjusted into their landscape. So you end up with that kind of hostility, which was there at the time. And that was probably
influenced also by some of these earlier rebellions
that had taken place in Egypt. During the Roman period, you not only have the
Judean rebellion in 70 AD, but you have a couple of other uprisings in North Africa, and very bloody affairs. And in some cases, Jews begin massacring
other people around them. They start killing the Greeks. The Greeks start killing them. So there was a fair amount
of, from that period on, a certain amount of bad
blood, of mutual contempt between Greeks, or between Hellenes, between the people who became Hellenized, as the Romans would be, and the Jews. And the Romans also seems
to have developed much of that idea. They consider Judea as
being a horrible place to have to govern, inhabited by a stubborn, obnoxious people. Not well-liked. So that's really where you see
the earliest version of that. And the reasons for it
would be complicated. What you could say is
that going back to Manetho into the Roman period, Jews, Judeans frequently
experienced difficulties, conflicts with other
people living around them. And part of that probably
had to do with the diaspora, which was the movement. Well, you get the idea. The Romans came and kicked
everybody out, which they didn't. Jews had been leaving
Judea since it was a poor, limited area and moving to areas like North
Africa, Egypt, Cyrenaica, all the way into Southern France. They moved widely around the Roman Empire. So that sense of both distinctness and hostility existed since ancient times. So it wasn't just... The attitude of the Church
towards Jews was mixed by... Well, one of the ideas, of course, is that at the end of time, just before the Second Coming, one of the signs, how are we going to know
that Jesus is going to return and the world is going to end? Well, the Jews will all convert. There will be a mass conversion.
They'll see the light. So there have to be
Jews around to do that, or we won't, it's like
a canary in a coal mine. You have to have them there to tip it off. So that was one of the
arguments as to why, within the Church, as to why Jews would not
be forcibly converted, beyond the fact that it's
just kind of bad policy to forcibly convert people
because you don't know whether it's sincere. But they need to be preserved
as a kind of artifact which will then redeem
itself at the end of time. It's not something which is encouraged. It predates Christianity. And in Christianity, of
course, in its own way just sort of plagiarizes the whole Jewish thing, doesn't it? I mean, I hesitate to use that
term, but that's what you do. It's just like, well, we're the Jews now. Okay, you used to have a
unique relationship with God, but now it's been passed over to us and so, you know, thanks. Thanks for the Bible. You
know, I can remember that. My mom's side, I was periodically
exposed to Sunday school. And pretty much the Old
Testament was always presented as if somehow it was the history of like, for lack of a better term,
Europeans in some way. It was sort of a Christian history. It was all the prequel to that. And there'd be some sort of, first the term Hebrew was
always used, never Jews. So, you know, the ancient
Hebrews and somehow the Hebrews just sort of
became the Christians. And I don't know, the Jews just got, they didn't get a memo or something? So it's basically like Christianity, the prequel is the Old Testament. Yeah, but they just
sort of take over. Okay. We have the special dispensation
now. Thank you very much. You're an artifact. - So it's interesting. So this whole narrative that
I would say is kind of like a viral meme started, as
you described, in 300 BC. It just carried on in various
forms and morphed itself and arrived after the
industrial revolution into a new form to the
19th and 20th century, and then somehow captivated
everybody's imagination. I think that modern antisemitism
is very much a creation of the modern world and
the industrial revolution. It's largely a creation
of Jewish emancipation. It's the nasty flip side of that. Okay? All of the restrictions are thrown off, but now also you become the focus of much more attention
than what you had before. You know, prior to that, you had the kind of ghettoization, which worked both ways. I mean, there were rabbis
who praised the ghettos as a protection of Jews
against the outside world, because inside we can
live our life as we wish and we're unmolested. Whereas if we were, the great
fear is that if we were sort of absorbed into this larger
world, we'll lose our identity. That sort of question comes
up in the 18th century in things like the Haskalah
movement in Germany, because the German Jews
were always at the sort of cutting edge of
assimilation and modernity. Moses Mendelssohn was an
example of that, arguing that, you know, we just need to become Germans. So, you know, as much as possible, synagogues should look
like Lutheran churches, things should be given in good German. And that's the way, we need
to become Jewish Germans. We don't want to become
a kind of group of people who are apart in that way. And that has created
great tensions ever since. You know, one of the essential
points that seems to me in anti-Semitism, anti-Jewism,
is that all the Jews are in this together. Isn't that one of the things? Okay. They're always talking about
as if they're collective. Jews this, Jews that, as if it's a single, undifferentiated mass of
people who all move and speak in the same way. From my personal experience,
not being Jewish, incredibly diverse in many ways, really. One of the things that
anti-Semitism proposes is a continuity or a
singularity of Jewish identity that never existed. - Just like you said, in one
hand, there's a good story, in the other hand is the truth. And oftentimes the good story wins out. And there's something about
the idea that there's a cabal of people, whatever
they are, in this case, our discussion is Jews
seeking world domination, controlling everybody, is
somehow a compelling story. It gives us a direction
of a people's to fight, of a peoples to hate on
which we project our pain. Because life is difficult. Life for many, for most
is full of suffering. And so we channel that suffering into
hatred towards the other. Maybe if you can just zoom out, what do you from this
particular discussion learn about human nature that we pick the other
in this kind of way? And we divide each other up in groups and then construct stories. And like constructing those stories and they become really
viral and sexy to us. And then we channel the hatred. We use those stories to channel our hatred towards the other. - Well, yeah, Jews aren't
the only recipient of that. I mean, anytime you hear
people talking about Jews this or that, white people this or that, black people this or
that, Asians this or that, where they're an undifferentiated mass who apparently all share
something in common. Well, nobody's really thinking. And the other thing
you'll find is that people who will express those views when pressed will argue that, oh, well, if they actually know
anybody from those groups, those are okay. It's like Nazis. They'll all think, oh,
this is an okay Jew. They're all right. They were always constantly
making exceptions in one form. When they actually meant
an actual human being and they seem to be fairly
normal, well, they were okay. So what it was that they
hated weren't actual people for the most part. It was just this kind of
golliwog vision that they had of them. You're not even talking about
real people. I don't know. What does that tell
you about human nature? Well, okay, in 70 odd years, what have I learned about
my fellow creatures? One, I don't actually
understand them any better than I ever did. In fact, less so. Okay. I would say this, when I was 17, I thought that I had the
world much more figured out than I do now. Completely deluded, but it seemed to make much more sense and
I could categorize things. Basic take upon human beings, most people, most of the time are polite, cooperative, and kind until they're not. And the exact tipping point
and moment in which they go from one to the other is unpredictable. - God, that's brilliantly put. Speaking of the tipping point, you gave a series of
lectures on murderers, crimes in the 20th century. One of the crimes that you described is the Manson Family murders. And that combines a lot of the elements of what we've been talking about and a lot of the elements of the human
nature that you just described. So can you just tell the
story at a high level as you understand it? - The Manson Family. Well, you begin with Charles Manson, who's the key element in this. And Charles Manson for most of his life up until the time that he's around 33 is an unexceptional petty criminal. In and out of prison, reform
school from an early age, not really associated with violent crimes. He did stuff like steal
cars, write bad checks, became an unsuccessful
pimp and drug dealer. So around 1967, he gets
out of his latest stint in federal lockup in Terminal Island near
Los Angeles, California. By that time, he's learned
how to play the guitar, has ambitions to become a musician, and also has proclaimed
himself a Scientologist. Not that he ever seems to have practiced, but that's what he
would claim that he was. Kind of, you know, self-educated himself in
prison to a certain degree. And so when he gets out of prison in '67, he was a model prisoner. He behaved himself and seemed, you can sort of imagine his life is going in a completely different direction. And here again, I'm going
to say something kind of good about Charles Manson, which is that he actually
was a decent singer. If you really sort of
listen to some of the stuff he did, he's not a great
singer, but he could have, other people got recording
contracts with less talent than he had, and he could play guitar. The Beach Boys actually do record one of his songs without him. - How would you evaluate
Hitler's painting? Compared to Charles Manson? - Well, you're supposed
to say it's terrible. - Okay.
- Okay. - It looks average to me.
- Yeah. It's a landscape. - I mean, if you didn't know
it was Hitler, would you, I don't know what people
will say about it. - Sorry for the distraction. - It's just, he's an average
painter. That's what it was. It's nothing like crazy
genocidal maniac paintings. You don't really have those. So Manson, he could have done that. He probably could have, he made certain inroads
into the music industry. And if he hadn't been such a weirdo, he might've gotten further with it, but his life could have
taken a different turn. So this is one of the questions I have. Where did a guy who is an unexceptional
career petty criminal suddenly emerge into some sort
of criminal mastermind, a Svengali, who can bend all of these people to his
will and get them to go out and commit murder? That's a real shift that you have. So the first thing you
kind of could tell you that something odd is going
on is he gets out of prison in LA County, and he's on parole. Parolees are supposed to have a job, not supposed to leave the
jurisdiction of their parole. He heads straight for the Bay Area, violates parole right off the bat. Two weeks later, he drifts
into the parole office in the Bay Area, whereupon he should have
been arrested and sent back to Terminal Island. But instead, they just assign him a... I don't know, maybe things
were easier then in some way. So he gets assigned a parole
officer, Michael Smith. Michael Smith is initially
handling a number of parolees, but after a
while, once he takes on Manson, he only has one parolee he's
supervising, Charlie Manson, which is odd. And you also find out that Michael Smith, in addition to being a parole officer, is a graduate student at
the University of California studying group dynamics, especially the influence of
drugs on gangs in groups. And he's also connected to the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, which is a place where the influence... Haight Ashbury had lots of
drugs and lots of groups. So Charlie Manson never
gets a regular job, hangs around with young girls, ex-cons, engages in criminal activity,
is repeatedly arrested, but nothing ever sticks for
the next couple of years. So who gets that type of thing? Who gets a get out of jail
free card? Informants. So here is what, again,
this is speculation. But Manson at some point
after he got out of prison is getting this treatment
because he is recruited as a confidential informant. - For who? - For who? That's the interesting question. So, probably not for any
local police departments. My best suspicion is probably the Federal Bureau of
Narcotics, precursor to the DEA. Federal parolee, federal parole officer, come graduate student in drugs in group dynamics, and
eventually with permission, he goes back down to LA. And what is he part of when he's there? Well, he's on the fringes
of the music industry. That's how much, you know, knows Wilsons and elsewhere, which also brings him to the fringes of the film industry. So one of the things if you're
sort of looking in terms of Hollywood music industry
elites and the flow of, oh, and he's also dealing in drugs and girls. So an early version of Jeffrey Epstein. - Yeah. - Manson attracted lots
of underage runaways and trained them, used
them also associating with biker gangs who
produced drugs, et cetera. So that's part of what, he's an informant in the
movement of drugs basically within the film music industries. And he's given pretty
much a kind of free reign at that point. What then happens in August
of 1969 is that there are these murders, you know, first Sharon Tate and her
friends in Cielo Drive. I think everybody has
probably pretty much heard that story before. And of course the question
is why Cielo Drive, why Sharon Tate, Frykowski, and the rest of them that he has... Manson was familiar with the place. He had been there before. Members of the family
had been there before. So he knew where it was. It
wasn't an easy place to find. I mean, the way that
that house, the house, the original house is no longer there, but the same sort of property
and a house is built there. And if you didn't know where it was, it's not someplace,
let's just go for a drive in the Hollywood Hills and
murder people in a house. Well, that isn't the one
that you would come across. There are lots of connections there. Wojciech Frykowski, who was
one of the people killed at the Cielo Drive house was
involved in drug dealing. That's a possible
connection between the two. Probably a fairly likely one. Probably not unfortunate
Sharon Tate at all. She was probably in the wrong
place at the wrong time. Her husband might've been, you never know. And then the next night
after the slaughter there, which by the way Manson is not at, so this is one of the
interesting things about it, Charles Manson doesn't
kill any of these people. His crime is supposedly ordering
the killings to be done. He supposedly thought that the killings at the Tate house were sloppy, and he was going to give
everybody a crash course in how you apparently commit
seemingly random murders. So the next night he
takes a group of people over to the La Bianca's house
in a different section of LA. And you've got Leno and
Rosemary LaBianca, the guy is a grocer, his wife runs a dress shop, upper middle-class, and they're bound gagged
and hacked to death. And as at the Tate residence, various things like piggy are written, various messages in blood, things that are supposed
to look like cat's paws because one of the groups
trying to be framed for the idea was the Black Panthers. So the general story that comes out in the subsequent trial is
that this was all a part of something called Helter Skelter, which Manson supposedly
was an idea that... That sounds like a Beatles song. That's where he got it from. He thought the Beatles were talking to him through their music and
that there was going to be an apocalyptic race war. And this was all part of
a plan to set this off. So this is why the Black
Panthers were trying to be implicated in this. Although how it was supposed to do that is never really explained. Here is what I think was really happening, what really happened and how
I think it fits together. Before Sharon Tate and her
friends, or the LaBiancas, were killed, there was a
murder by members of the family of some of the same people
involved in the later killings of a musician drug manufacturer
by the name of Gary Hinman. So Manson again was
involved in the drug trade, and Hinman made them. He was a cook, basically. And he brewed them up in his basement, sold the drugs to Manson, who sold them to biker gangs
like the Straight Satans, which was one of the groups that he used and they distributed them elsewhere. Well, one day the Straight
Satans show up and complain that the last batch of meth, or whatever it was that
they got from Manson, had made some of their
brothers very, very ill. And they were quite unhappy about that. And they wanted their $2,000 back. Manson had gotten those
drugs from Gary Hinman. So he is unhappy and he
sends Bobby Beausoleil and a couple of the girls
over to Hinman's place to get the money from him. It's a story that's later
related, I think, by Susan Atkins. Hinman denied that
there was anything wrong with his drugs and refused to pay up, which led to a interrogation
torture session in which he was killed. - Ah, yeah... - And the idea was here, what
are we going to do with that? Well, one of the other groups
that Hinman had sold drugs to were, guess what? People associated with the Black Panthers. So we'll leave these things up and they will make it
look like they will do it. So it's Bobby Beausoleil,
who then takes Hinman's car and decides to drive it up the coast. By the way, with a bloody
knife with Hinman's blood and hair on it, and blood
on the seats in the car. And then he pulls it
off the road and decides to sleep it off and he gets busted. So find Hinman's body, find Beausoleil in Hinman's car with a bloody knife with him. Yeah, he gets arrested. So Beausoleil was very popular
with some of the girls. There's consternation
in the family that Bobby has been arrested. So how can we possibly
get Bobby out of jail? Copycat killings! So if we go kill more
people and we make it look the same, and see, Bobby
couldn't possibly have done it. No, see, he just borrowed the car. Okay, he stole the car, but
the knife was already in. He didn't have anything to do with this. So that, to me, makes the most
sense out of what followed. - How often do people
talk about that theory? That's an interesting theory. - Well, it's there. It's just not the one that... Bugliosi wanted to go with Helter Skelter because it was, again, it was a story that
people could understand. And it was sensational
and it would catch on. Also, another probable
issue in that was that his star witness was Linda Kasabian. Linda Kasabian, she was
present at both the Tate and LaBianca murders. She didn't participate in the
killings, according to her. She sort of drives the car, but everybody else talked
about what had happened. Well, okay, she turns state's evidence and gets total immunity, and it's largely in her testimony that all the rest of the case is based. Now, if you start
throwing into the equation that she proclaimed her
love for Bobby Beausoleil and this could end that
she, according to others, was the chief proponent of
the copycat killings, well, then that would get messy. Now there's one guy that's
at the center of this. It's Charles Manson. He ordered all of this
done to ignite a race war, even though how would any of that do it? - Okay. So that doesn't make sense. But he is nevertheless at the center of this because he's the
glue of the family, right? - He exerts a tremendous amount of psychological control over them. - How was he able to do that? Sorry to interrupt. Because he said he was a petty criminal. It does seem he was pretty
prolific in his petty crimes. He did a lot of them. - He had a lot of access to LSD. - [Lex] Okay. Okay. - Which he started
getting at the Free Clinic in San Francisco. So lots and lots of it floating around. Some descriptions of the
family at Spahn Ranch is that people were basically taking acid on a daily basis, which by the way was
also a potential problem with Linda Kasabian's testimony
since she also admitted to being high most of the
time and also thinking she was a witch. All right? So you want to put her... Okay. Where do you want to go with that? See, if Manson wasn't Manson, if he hadn't actually acted like the crazed hippie psycho goofball that Bugliosi painted him as being, then Kasabian's testimony
wouldn't have been as strong. Because you could... I mean, the first thing against her is you've gotten immunity
for telling the story the prosecution wants. Yeah, that's a little iffy. And we won't even bring
in the witch and the drugs and being in love with Bobby Beausoleil. All right. So if Manson had been dressed like you, sitting there in a suit and
tie and he behaved himself and spoken normally things might have... This isn't to say that
he wasn't guilty as hell. So what he supposedly
did was to inspire all of these killings. And I think that's probably, you know, sort of beginning with the Hinman killing. He told them to go over there
and get the money one way or the other. I don't know whether it's
clear whether he told them if you don't get the money,
kill him, but Hinman's dead. And then you might also
have seen the value in terms of having copycat killings as a way of throwing off any other kind of blame. The other story you get
is that one of the people who had lived at the Cielo
House for Sharon Tate was before, was a record
producer by the name of Terry Melcher. Melcher supposedly, as
the general story goes, had welched on a deal with Manson in terms of a record contract. He screwed over Manson in
some sort of a record deal and Manson wanted to get
revenge and sent them to kill everybody in the house. Which again, doesn't make much sense. One, Manson knew that Melcher
wasn't living there any more. He probably knew where Melcher was living. If he wanted to get Melcher,
he could have found him. It wasn't that difficult to do. And... So that's, it's not
revenge on Terry Melcher that drew him there. He was familiar with the house. So if the idea was to simply
commit random killings that would throw, that
would muddy the whole waters with the Hinman killing, then you might pick
some place you knew of, you knew the place was rented out, there'd be someone there,
you really didn't care. In the same way that the LaBianca seemed to have been, Manson was familiar with that because it
supposedly had been the scene of creepy crawling. This is little interesting things that the family would be taught to do. Creepy crawling is when you
sneak into somebody's house at night, while they're there asleep or when they're not there
and you move things around. So when they get up in the morning or they come home, they'll suddenly notice
that someone has been in their house, which will freak them out, which is the whole point of that. - But it doesn't it
seem like the murderer, the creepy crawling was the, well, creepy crawling may be, but it doesn't it seem like the murder, like some of the other
people you've covered, like the Zodiac Killer,
the murder is the goal. Maybe there's some
psychopathic kind of artistry to the murder that the Zodiac Killer had and the messaging behind that. - Yeah.
- But it seems like with the, at least the way you're describing it, with the Charles Manson
family, the murder was just, they just had a basic
disregard for human life and the murder was a
consequence of operating in the drug underworld. - So Manson set up a kind of base, a thing called the Spahn Movie Ranch, which was an old movie ranch out on the northwest edge of LA. And they just kind of camped out there. He used the girls, in
particular, Squeaky Fromme, to get the owner or operator,
I think George Spahn, to let them hang out there. And basically, she slept with him and he was perfectly happy
to let them hang out. They also had a place out
in the desert that they had. They dealt in credit
card fraud, stolen cars. It was kind of a chop shop
that they ran out of the place. So he had a fairly good
little criminal gig going, which with the protection he
had probably would have... The one thing they couldn't
cover him on was murder. - So you think there was,
if he was an informer, you think there was still a connection between DEA, FBI, CIA, whatever with him throughout this until
he'd come into murder? - The real question is, there is a book written on this by Tom O'Neill called "Chaos". I'm not necessarily saying
it's the easiest thing to get through. There's a lot of material there. I don't think O'Neill
necessarily knows what to make of some of the stuff he came up with, but he does a very good
job of sort of demolishing the whole Bugliosi narrative. And one of the people
he mentions is a name that I had run into elsewhere, and so I really paid attention
to it when I saw it again. And the name is Reeve Whitson. And Reeve Whitson shows up
on the fringes even though he has no judicial function. He sort of hangs around
Bugliosi in the prosecution. He's some sort of, he's
just kind of there. In the same way that he
was one of these guys, he grew his hair kind of
long, wore bell bottoms, hung around the music
community and elsewhere in Hollywood, but no one could
tell you exactly what he did. I know what he did later, but a decade later he
shows up as a CIA officer in Central America. Hmm. So Reeve Whitson, later
in his career at least, is CIA. What was he doing in 1969? What is he doing in this? The other thing about it
is he appears to have been the person who called... There's a whole question
of when the bodies at Cielo Drive are discovered. So the general story is that Sharon Tate's
housekeeper shows up around 8:30 in the morning, finds the bloody scene and goes screaming next door. But there was another fellow who knew, I think the owner of the
house is a photographer, last name would be Hatami. He gets a call earlier in
the morning saying that there have been murders there. And the person he recalls
calling him is Reeve Whitson. So someone had been at the house before the bodies were discovered and they had not called the police. So I don't know what's going
on there, but it's a... It's a curious kind of situation. And Manson in a lot of ways just kind of self-immolates himself. I mean, his behavior at
the trial is bizarre. It's threatening. It's disruptive. He's got his girls out on the street, carving Xs in their
forehead, carrying knives. One of the attorneys, initially
his attorney, Ron Hughes, becomes Van Houten's attorney. And he figures out that the three girls, supposedly on Charlie's
insistence, are gonna confess. And they've confessed
that it was all their idea and Charlie had nothing to do with it. Hughes doesn't like this
because his defense for her is that she was under his influence and therefore not responsible
for her own actions, he was having psychic control, so he refuses to go along with it, there's a break in the trial, he goes camping up in the mountains with some friends, disappears
during a rainstorm, and then some months later his
decomposed remains are found. Now, rumors, always the rumors. Okay? What would history be without rumors? Held that, ah, see, members of the family, they were pissed off at Ron Hughes because he messed up
Charlie's idea to get him off and so they killed him. Oh, maybe they did, maybe he drowned. That's absolutely impossible to say. You got that kind of story. There's a guy named Juan Flynn, who was an employee at the
Spahn Ranch, didn't like Manson. Held Manson responsible
for the murder of his boss. He would testify that Manson told him that he had ordered all the killings and that Manson also admitted
that he had killed 35 people. Maybe he did. On the other hand, Juan
Flynn didn't like him and he had no, other than his word, had no real proof of what he was saying. So please understand me
in this case is that, unlike some people who argue
that Charles Manson got a raw deal, I don't think that's the case. I think that he influenced
tremendous influence over the people there
through drugs, through... Sex was another frequent component in it. He had a real whammy over a
lot of these people's minds. I'm not sure how, that
still kind of puzzles me. He was a scrawny guy and he
wasn't physically intimidating. I mean, even a lot of women wouldn't be
physically intimidated by him, but he nonetheless had this
real psychological power. And there were... If you look around him,
the male followers he had, they were fairly big guys. So he could get people
to do what he wanted. And, again, to me, the simplest explanation
for this is that it began with the Hinman killing and probably on Manson's instigation, the
others were copycat killings to throw off what was going on. If I was a cop, that's what I would focus on
because that seems to make the most sense. - It's fascinating that he's able to have that much psychological control over those people without
having a very clear ideology. So it's a cult. - Yes. The great focus on Charlie, the leader, the excessive devotion. - But there's not like a... Maybe, there's not an
ideology behind that. Like something like Scientology
or some kind of religious or some kind of, I don't
know, utopian ideology, nothing like this? - No, I think that Manson, again, was essentially a criminal, he had a sociopathic
mindset and he hit upon a pretty good deal. - Yeah, but how do people
convince anybody of anything? With a cult, usually you have
either an ideology or you have maybe personal, religion,
like you said, sex and drugs. But underneath that, can
you really keep people with sex and drugs? You have to kind of convince
them that you love them in some deep sense. Like there's a commune of love. - You have a lot of
people there in the cult. They have some sort of, what we like to call,
dysfunctional families. - [Lex] Yeah. - A lot of the females in
particular seem to have come from more or less middle-class families, but those are full of dysfunction. Their parents didn't love them, they are semi-runaways and now
they had this whole family. A lot of the younger women had children, some of them by Manson,
some of them by the others. They sort of bonded together. - And again, we return to
that pull towards belonging that gets us humans into trouble. So it does seem that there was a few
crimes around this time. So the Zodiac killer. - Well, California,
which is where I'm from. I remember this period vividly. - Okay.
- So by the way, the Tate-LaBianca killings
occurred on my birthday, the year I graduated from high school. So, I remember this. - Happy Birthday. - A term which has been used for that... There's a writer by the name of Todd Wood who's coined, I wish
I'd come up with this, Killerfornia, which is just sort of a chronicle of the serial
killers and disappearances in the late '60s and '70s. So you've got the Zodiac,
you've got other ones. I mean, you know, I hate to say it, I'm not trying to be flippant
about it, but I mean, young female hitchhikers were disappearing at an alarming rate in
Northern California. Their bodies that have
never been attributed, some think that the Zodiac's victims, but it was a dangerous time. Edmund Kemper, you know, the
Co-ed Killer was another one. There were a lot of creepy
psychopaths running around. I don't know whether it
was something in the water or what was going on, but it
was a menacing in some cases. Hitchhiking, especially if
you were alone and female was not something you wanted to do in much of the Golden State, certainly
not up around the Bay Area. So a lot of these strange sort of killings that were going on, the Zodiac is, it's one of those things
where you have these people who have theories about it. If you don't share their theory, then you're part of the problem
in some form or another. So I'm not sure, for instance, that the Zodiac killings
were all committed by the same person. I think there might have been
multiple people involved. And the first killings are all of couples. It's very sort of clear that they, I remember in my examination, one of the things I was
looking at specifically, what else is there to say
about the Zodiac killings? So what I was going to look
at is that there are all of these accusations that there
is an occult aspect to it. There was some sort of ritualistic aspect. So I looked at different
things, locations, victims, phases of the Moon! That's always worth looking at. I didn't find much
correspondence in any of those. In one of the killings, I think the one in Lake Berryessa, he
does appear in this kind of weird hooded costume. He's got his symbol, the
sort of compass or aiming, reticle, circle with a cross through it. It can mean a variety of things. He used guns and he used knives, but he certainly had a thing for couples, except in the last of the killings, which is of a cab driver
in downtown San Francisco, who he shoots in full view of witnesses, which is completely atypical. - And also when he was
stabbing the victims, it doesn't seem like
he was very good at it. Or if the goal was to kill them, he wasn't very good at it
because some of them survived. - Yeah, he doesn't, he's not
particularly thorough about it. He seems to have had much more... More of the violence seems to be directed at the females than the males. - So I mean, there's a couple
of questions to ask here. First of all, did people see his face? - There is a composite
drawing of his face, which I think is based
upon the Stine killing, the cab driver killing,
where there were people who saw him, or who
claimed that they saw him. The other ones were all
when it was fairly dark. - Right. - I'm not sure that anyone
else got a look at his face. The one that occurred in
the daylight at Berryessa, he was wearing a mask. So there's something in common
initially in the targeting of victims, which
doesn't, in the last case. Then after that, there's just the different
cases of where... There's a pretty good
case to be made of a woman who claims, I think she and her small child were
picked up, her car broke down, she got a flat tire, she was picked up by this
guy who she got a very sort of strange vibe from, who
eventually just let her go. Well, you know, that might
have been the Zodiac. It might not have been. - You do this kind of rigorous
look saying like, okay, what is the actual facts that we know? Like reduce it to the thing
that we know for sure. And in speaking about his motivation, he said that he was collecting souls. - Souls for the afterlife. - For the afterlife. - That's kind of occulty. - Yeah. I mean, that's what, I believe, is it the Vikings or the Romans? They believed this, in battle... - You're essentially
making sacrificial victims and they will be your ghostly
servants in the afterlife. - Do you think he actually believed that? - Who knows? I mean, here's the question. Was he making that up just to be scary or is that what his actual... That's what he's saying his motivation is. So let's take him at face value. Rather than trying to wish
that into the cornfield, that is to get rid of it. Let's just take it. So he's claiming that he's
killing these people in order to acquire slave servants
in the afterlife. He will subsequently go on
to claim many more victims, I'm not sure if 44 eventually
he will have before he just kind of vanishes. One of the really interesting clues to me, when I was looking at that case, which I didn't find
anybody else that tended to make much of... Is that it all has to do with this kind of Halloween card that
he sends to the press in San Francisco. And it's talking about sort
of rope, by gun, by fire, and there's this whole sort of wheel. That's like the Zodiac's... But what was this drawn from? Where he got this from is from a Tim
Holt western comic book, published in 1951. And you see the same thing on the cover. It's Wheel of Fortune, but with different forms
of grisly death on it. And all of the things that
he mentioned are shown on the cover of this. So whoever put together that
card, saw that comic book. Well, that's kind of an interesting clue. So does that mean he's
a comic book collector? When would he have... I mean, that is one... And also, but where he got the idea from. So he's incorporating
these things from the... Then there are, of course, his
codes, which people have... Which aren't all that
difficult to decipher, probably because they weren't meant to be. The other thing that you
find often with serial or psychopathic killers is
they're toying with the press. I mean, this goes all the
way back to Jack the Ripper. They get attention. And
then he just disappears. - Why do you think he was never caught? - I think they knew who to look for. There's nothing much to go on. I mean, there was a guy
who was long a suspect, and then eventually they
tested his DNA and find that it didn't match any of
the things that they'd found. Again, it goes back to... I'm not even sure that it's
one person who's responsible for all of them. - Well, one of the interesting
things you bring up here, and our discussion of
Manson inspires this, but there does seem to be a connection, a shared inspiration between
several killers here, the Zodiac, the Son of Sam, later, and the Monster of Florence. So is it possible there's
some kind of underworld that is connecting these people? - Well, you take the Zodiac, and you get his claim
that he's collecting souls for the afterlife. There are other things that are
occultish connected to that. He may have picked some
of the killing sites due to their physical location, to their position in a particular place. If you look at the Son
of Sam case, of course, David Berkowitz will on and
off claim that he was part of a satanic cult that
was carrying out, again, these killings, mostly of
couples and young women similar to the Zodiac, and that
he had only committed some of them and was witnesses at others. And that has really created
the whole idea that, yes, there is this, some kind of
satanic cult which engages in ritual murders. Then if you go all the way to Florence, you've got murders who go on and off for a long period of time, again, focusing on couples in isolated areas, which Italian prosecutors
ultimately tried to connect to some kind of satanic cult, although I'm not sure they ever made a particularly strong case for that. But that element comes
up in all three of them. So you can, with a little imagination, argue that those similarities, that those things should come
up in each of those cases in different places, either
suggest that, oddly enough, psychopathic criminals
are all sort of thinking the same way, or that there is some sort
of higher element involved in this, that there's some
kind of common inspiration. You come back to something similar we were talking before
about, do pedophiles exist? Do pedophiles... Okay, so do satanic cults exist? Well, they do. There
was one in my hometown. Apparently quite harmless,
as far as I know. But there are people who... Robes, here we come again, robes, cut the head off a chicken,
naked woman as an alter... You can get off on that, I
suppose, if that's your thing. So professed satanists
exist, satanic cults exist, serial killers exist,
ritual murders exist. Are those things
necessarily connected? No. Could they be connected? Yes. Okay? There's nothing... Don't ever tell me that
something is just too crazy for people to do, because
that's crazy talk. All right? - You've studied secret societies. You've gave a lot of amazing
lectures on secret societies. It's fascinating to look at human history through the lens of secret societies, because they've permeated
all of human history. You've talked about everything
from the Knights Templar to Illuminati to Freemasons,
like we brought up. Freemasons lasted a long time. Illuminati, as you've talked about, in its sort of main form
lasted a short time, but its legend... - Never gone away.
- Never gone away. So maybe Illuminati is a
really interesting one. What was that? - Well, the Illuminati that
we know started in 1776. In fact, you can pin it down
to a day, the 1st of May, May Day, 1776, in Ingolstadt, Germany, founded by a pProfessor Adam Weishaupt. It wasn't initially called the Illuminati, because that's not really
the name of the organization. It was called the Order
of Perfectibilists. Apparently that changed. Weishaupt would say things like, never let our organization be known under its real name anywhere, which leaves wondering
what's its real name. So Illuminati is simply
the plural of Illuminatus, which means one who is illuminated, one who has seen the light. So in Roman times, Christian
converts were Illuminati, because they had seen the light. Anyone who thinks... And there have been organizations
called Illuminati... The term is not trademarked,
not copyrighted. Anybody who thinks they've
seen the light about anything is an Illuminati, so it defines nothing. The symbol of the order was an owl, which interestingly
enough is almost identical to the owl which is the
emblem of the Bohemian Club. - [Lex] Oh boy... - Make of that what you will. I don't make that much out of it, because one owl looks
pretty much like another owl to me, but compare them. You know? You gotta
kinda wonder about this. Just a little thing. Maybe there's some kind
of connection there. So, but that supposedly has
to do with the connection to the goddess Minerva, and
the owl was sacred to her, and the order was the Minerval, the person who was brought in. The number of levels changed over time. There was a higher level
for the order that people at the lower level didn't know about. Pretty typical for this. But the thing about Weishaupt
was that he was quite... He was a luminous
correspondent with members with his Illuminati, both during the time that it legally existed
in Bavaria and later on. So, Weishaupt himself
lives, I think, until 1830. Dies in Goethe, which was ruled by an Illuminati prince, and so... Nothing ever happens to these men. No Illuminati has ever
put to death or arrested in prison for any period of time. What happens is that their plan... Well, what was his plan? His plan was to essentially
replace all existing religions and governments in the world with a one-world order
governed by the Illuminati. So to do this, you had to subvert and destroy
all the existing order. And he argued the
purpose for this is to... We wish to make men happy and free, but first we must make them good. - All right. - So that's what the order is all about. Of course, he also said
things like, oh man, is there nothing that you won't believe? Okay, so the myth would be used in that. Also thought women should
be brought into it. He had a rather interesting
view about that, was that we should appeal to women, in part because women have
a chip on their shoulder, because they're left out of things. So we should appeal to
their vanity on that point, and offer that in the future, all things will be open and
they will be emancipated. So we should hold out the
prospect of female emancipation to attract them. Because he argued in the short term, there's no better way to
influence men than through women. Get women on our side by
promising them emancipation, but he made sure we'll
never actually deliver it to them, because the future
world will be a boys club. So he talks about these
things fairly openly. And this is where you get
this idea of some sort of a new world order, which is to be based upon the destruction of the existing order. So there are those who
argue that there is a trail of dissent that leads from
Weishaupt's Illuminati to the communist manifesto,
and in fact, communism itself. That Marxism was simply a
further restating of this idea. And you can draw some sort of connection. I mean, the idea never entirely goes away. The Bavarian government gets ahold of the order's inner texts. So the story is there, delivered to them. I think that Weishaupt gave them to him. I think he engineered
the exposure of his order because it gave him publicity. By being exposed in Bavaria,
you gained great renown, and they continued to recruit after this. And the Bavarian government actually bans the Illuminati four different times. Why? Because apparently the
first three times didn't work. So the fourth one does. You can notice that it's like
Papal bans on Freemasonry, and they just go on and on and on because
this clearly isn't working. - And you actually highlight the difference between,
speaking of publicity, that there's a difference
between visibility and transparency, that a secret
society could be visible, it could be known about,
it could be quite popular, but you could still have
a secrecy within it. - You have no idea what's going on inside. - Yeah.
- It's like a black box. If I set a black box on this table, we can see that there is a black box. What's in the black box? A cat? Who knows? - In fact, the secrecy
might be the very thing that makes it even more popular. - Adam Weishaupt, again, there's no more thing convincing
than a concealed mystery. Give people a concealed mystery in the... We need to make the order
mysterious for that exact reason. Always hold out the
possibility that knowledge, special knowledge that no
mere mortals have other than you will have in that way. So he senses a lot of things. The use of vanity and
ego to recruit people, to influence both men and
women, it's quite sophisticated. And as you might expect from a professor of canon law trained by Jesuits. I certainly don't think that
it ceased when it was banned in Bavaria, because
everybody just scatters and goes elsewhere, like Paris. And then you have the French Revolution. - So the idea of the
Illuminati, to put it crudely, the branding is a really powerful one. And so it makes sense that it can, there's a thread
connecting it to this day, that a lot of organizations, a lot of secret societies
can sort of adopt the brand. - Anybody can call it, you can go out and form a club
and call it the Illuminati. - And if you're effective at it, I think it does attract,
it's the chicken or the egg, but powerful people tend
to have gigantic egos and people with gigantic egos tend to like the exclusivity of secret societies. And so like there's a, it's a gravitational force
that pulls powerful people to these societies. - It's exclusive. Only certain... And you also notice
something goes back to, and we were talking about much earlier, when we were talking about
intelligence, remember MICE? Ego.
- Ego, yeah. - Ego is recruitment and control. That's a great Achilles
heel in human beings, the exploitation of ego. - And of course, if we go back to the conversation of intelligence agencies,
it would be very efficient and beneficial for intelligence
agencies to infiltrate the secret societies, right? Like, cause that's where
the powerful people are. - Or the secret societies to infiltrate the intelligence agencies.
- Oh boy. Well, I mean, that's
actually, in all the lectures, I kind of had a sense that intelligence agencies
themselves are kind of secret societies, right? - Well, it comes down, I'll give you my definition
of secret societies, what they come down to. One is that generally their
existence isn't secret. It's what they do is secret. It's what's in the box as
opposed to the existence of the box. So one of the most important criterions is that they are self-selecting. You just don't join, they pick you. They decide whether or not
you're going to, they admit you. And oftentimes they will
sort of recruit you. Once you have been recruited, you have to pass tests and initiations. And you also have to
swear oaths of loyalty. Those are always very, very critical. So broadly speaking, what interest into an
intelligence organization does, they decide whether you get in, you just don't automatically get the job. You have to pass tests,
a lie detector test, for instance, field training tests, a whole variety of tests. And then you're sworn to secrecy. You never talk about what you do, ever, or there will be dire consequences. So the method is very much the same. And also this idea of creating
a kind of insular group. Yeah. The organization is us and everyone else is outside of that. We are guardians of special knowledge. So this is the type of thing
that would generally happen if you question whatever any kind of intelligence agency did. Well, we know things that you don't. Why? Because we're the organization
that knows things. We collect information.
We know the secrets. We guard the secrets. Therefore, if we tell
you, you must believe us. - I have this sense that there are very powerful secret
societies operating today, and we don't really
know or understand them. And the conspiracy
theories in spirit might have something to them, but are actually factually not correct. So like, you know, an effective powerful secret society or intelligence agency is not going to let you know anything that
it doesn't want you to know. Right? - They'll probably mislead
you, if it gets any close. So I think, you know, the question is what's the most powerful or important secret society? Probably the one you don't know about. One that doesn't advertise its existence. The one which is never known
anywhere under its real name. You've got things like the Bohemian Club. You've got the Bilderbergers,
which is another sort of, you know, formed in the 1950s, largely the creation of a guy by the name of Jozef Retinger, Polish, mysterious, appears out of nowhere,
a schemer for years, a man expelled from Britain, France, and the United States
at one point or another, long active in the Mexican labor movement. Right? Okay. Retinger is a mysterious figure. In fact, his, I think there
was even a book written about him called "Eminence
Grise", gray eminence. The fellow who was a, the
front man for the Bilderbergers was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who was at one point a Nazi and then a Dutch freedom fighter. All right? Take your pick. But Retinger is the moving
hand behind the whole thing. And I'll be damned if I can
figure out who Retinger is. So the idea is that, well, you get like influential people in media, business, politics, and you bring them together just to talk. To try to find common
answers or common questions. It's all very much sort of Western Europe angle, European, all very closely sort
of connected to NATO, the whole concept of a
kind of Atlanticist world, which is essentially the Anglo American combine
combined with Western Europe. But you got a bunch of these things. I mean, the Council on Foreign
Relations is very similar to that and the Bilderbergers
and there's an overlap with the Bohemian Club. And then you've got the
Pinay Circle or Le Cercle, which is more military, but also linked to the so-called secret... You know, of the idea of the Soviets over around Western Europe, there would be a stay behind organization called Gladio, there'd be these freedom fighters. So the question I have about that is that how many secret
organizations do you need? I mean, why all these separate groups, which often seem to have
the same people into them? - Yeah, there's a, I
mean, the closer I look, the more I wonder the
same question we asked about the Russian intelligence agencies is where is the center of power? It seems to be very hard to figure out. Does the secrecy scare you? - Well, I guess on one level, I'm comforted that there's
somebody actually making decisions, as opposed to... I mean, what do you want? Do you want chaos or do
you want everything kind of rigidly controlled? And I don't put much stock in the idea that there actually is some small group of people running everything
because if they were, it would operate more efficiently. I do think that there are
various disparate groups of people who think that they're
running things or try to. And that's what concerns
me more than anything else. Well, I hate to go back to them again, 'cause we have to bring it
up, you go back to the Nazis, they had their whole idea
about a new world order and they only had 12 years to do it. Look what a mess they made. I mean, look at the damage, the physical damage that can
be done by an idea inspiring a relatively small group
of people controlling a nation, based upon some sort of racial or ideological fantasy that
has no real basis in reality and yet guides their actions. It's this differentiation
that I always make and I would try to get across to students between always be clear
about what you know and what you believe. You don't know many things. You know your name, you
know when you were born, you probably know who your father is, but that's not absolute
unless you've had a DNA test and only if you trust DNA tests. So you know who your mother is, you believe this man is your father. Why? Because your mother told you he was. So you believe things
generally because someone has told you this is to be true, but you don't really know for sure. Well, because we know so little,
we tend to go by beliefs. So we believe in this, we
believe in that, you know, you believe that your cult leader is the answer to everything. And it seems to be very, very easy to get people to believe things. And then what happens is that whether or not those
beliefs have any real basis in reality, they begin to
influence your actions. So here again, regrettably
in some ways to bring it back to the Nazis, what were
the Nazis convinced of? They were convinced that Jews
were basically evil aliens. That's what it comes down to.
They weren't really humans. There's some sort of evil contamination which we must eradicate. And they set out to do that. - And they were sure that
there's just a few problems that can be solved. And once you solve them, that you have this beautiful utopia where everything would be just perfect. It would be great. And
we can just get there. And I think this really strong
belief in a global utopia, it just never goes right. It seems like impossible to know- - For some reason, not long ago, I was listening on YouTube
to old Wobbly songs. - Okay. (laughs) - The Workers of the
World. I don't know why. I didn't know there was a
whole album of Wobbly songs. And there was one of them
called "Commonwealth of Toil." And like most of them,
they're sort of taken from gospel songs. And it's talking about in the future, how wonderful everything
will be in the commonwealth of toil that will be. And now these are revolutionary leftists, in this case, Wobblies. But nonetheless, it's like
a prayer for communism. In the future, everything will be good because the Earth will
be shared by the toilers and from each of his
abilities to each according to his need. And it's this kind of sweet
little song in some way. But I'm just sort of imagining this. If I was going to stage that, I'd have like this choir
of children singing it with a huge hammer and sickle behind them, because that's what it's combining. And you can think that the
sentiments that are expressed in that song, which,
you know, are legitimate in some way, of all the horrors
that that then leads to. - It is fascinating about
humans, a beautiful idea on paper, an innocent little idea about a utopian future can
lead to so much suffering and so much destruction. And the unintended
consequences that you see- - All have unintended consequences. - And we learn from it. I mean, that's why history is important. We learn from it, hopefully. - Do we?
- (laughs) Slowly. We are slow learners. - I'm unconvinced of that, but perhaps is. - Speaking of unconvinced,
what gives you hope? If human beings are still here, maybe expanding out into the cosmos 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 years from now, what gives you hope about that future, about even being a possible
future, about it happening? - Most people are cooperative
and kind most of the time. And that's one of those things that can usually be
depended upon, you know? And usually you'll get back
to what you put into it. Another thing that I have
like a weird fascination of watching are people who have meltdowns on airplanes, because that's just bizarre. - That's fascinating to watch, yeah. - The people who will, you know, there's some sort of
psychotic break that occurs and it's always going to end the same way. The cops are going to come on
and drag you off the plane. And you're going to
inconvenience everybody there. And usually at some point
they don't care about that. That's the one little sense
of power that they have. So they have some sort of
sense of powerlessness. And if their only way of power is just to piss off everybody else on that plane, they're going to go ahead and do it, even though it's going
to lead nowhere for them. - And there's similar, sometimes, psychological behavior in traffic. - Oh, the road rage thing.
- The road rage, yeah. It's fascinating. - And I bet that most, there again, those are all people who up to some point were cooperative
and kind and polite, and then they snap. So those are all part of
the human makeup as well. - But also part of the human makeup, difference between humans
and chimps is the ability to get together, cooperate on a mass scale over an idea, create things
like the Roman Empire did, laws that prevent us and protect us from crazy human behavior, manifestations of a Manson type- - Well, human beings
are just weird animals. Not kidding around. They're
just completely peculiar. I'm not sure that we're
all-together natural. - But I think we are
all-together beautiful. There is something magical about humans, and I hope humans stay here, even as we get advanced robots
walking around everywhere, more and more intelligent
robots that claim to have consciousness,
that claim they love you, that increasingly take over our world, I hope this magical things that makes us human still persists. - Well, let us hope so. - Rick, you're an incredible person. - Well, thank you. - You've done so much fascinating work, and it's really an honor. - I've never had anybody ask me as many interesting questions as you have. So... - Thank you so much.
- Or as many questions. - (laughs) This was so fun. Thank you so much for talking today. - Well, thank you. - Thanks for listening
to this conversation with Rick Spence. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from John F. Kennedy. "The very word, secrecy, is repugnant in a free and open society, and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed
to secret societies, to secret oaths, and
to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that
the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far
outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it." Thank you for listening, and
hope to see you next time.