Category: conspiracy theory

The Rothschilds and the Scofield Bible

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

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Sometimes a conspiracy theory emerges that you immediately know is absolutely designed with just the right combination of stupidity and malice that you have to drop everything to debunk it.

On July 17th, I got a tip from Ben Lorber, co-author of the new book on antisemitism Safety Through Solidarity (which is great and you should read it) of a clip from Tucker Carlson’s Twitter show of him and country singer John Rich discussing how “the Rothschilds were connected” to the printing and distribution of what’s known as the Scofield Bible, an End Times-focused edition of the Bible published in 1909 that contained extensive notes and references written by American theologian CI Scofield.

One particular clip of the interview features Rich, who is not an expert on the Rothschilds, telling Carlson, who is not an expert on anything, that another preacher named John Darby, who popularized a concept called “The Secret Rapture” was connected to “the Rothschilds.”

“Interesting” Carlson intones, with the two discussing how this philosophy lead to the warping of US foreign policy and the deaths of “a lot of people.”

I am the farthest possible thing from an expert on Christian eschatology, the history of American charismatic movements, the growth of Christian Zionism and its relation to its Jewish counterpart, or the influence of the Scofield Bible on anything. But I am something of an expert on the Rothschilds, as my book Jewish Space Lasers is about the Rothschild myth and its role in antisemitism. And I am definitely an expert on how conspiracy theorists like John Rich and Tucker Carlson say stuff that doesn’t mean anything, put it behind a wall of creepy music and quick edits, and spread it around to their followers as gospel truth.

So why are we talking about the links between a wealthy Jewish family and an End Times Bible? Did the Rothschilds fund the Scofield Bible? Did they control John Darby?

With numerous references to the Book of Revelation and other End Times concepts, the Scofield Reference Bible was the perfect scripture for the upheaval and bloodshed of the Great War and later of World War II. It sold millions of copies and laid the groundwork for the “tribulation industry” of End Times preachers and evangelical personalities like the authors of Left Behind, Late Great Planet Earth author Hal Lindsey, and many others. These apocalyptic concepts continue to be a driving force in American evangelical Christianity, and numerous believers in the idea of a Rapture or dispensationalism (the idea that history is divided into “Eras” in which God has different plans for humanity) have risen to prominent positions in the US government. In this version of Zionism, Israel must belong to the Jewish people – so it can serve as the place where the Tribulation begins, presumably causing the deaths of countless Jewish people.

All of this is hopelessly complex, and could fill entire bookshelves with tomes I’m not educated enough to understand. But the Rothschild link is simple, so I’ll focus on that.

Scofield was an American preacher and author who lived from 1843 to 1921. Darby was a British author who first popularized the ideas of pre-tribulation rapture and dispensationalism that Scofield referred to, and lived from 1800 to 1882. In the research and writing of Jewish Space Lasers, I never saw any reference to Darby or Scofield having worked for or ever come across the Rothschilds. The family had no real presence in America in 1909, and its power in Europe had drastically waned. There’s no reason why the family would have invested in the funding or distribution of a New Testament that, as Jews, they wouldn’t have had any interest in. No edition of the Reference Bible I found had a reference to the Rothschilds, though I confess that I haven’t looked through every edition ever printed. And I can’t find any primary source that connects the Scofield Bible, Scofield himself, or Darby to the family.

Carlson and Rich’s claim that the Rothschilds helped create or fund “Christian Zionism” also don’t carry any kind of evidentiary weight. Many Rothschilds were Zionists, of course. Many also were not. The family is extremely large and varied in its beliefs and priorities, and so simply ascribing “the Rothschilds” as having done something is a meaningless statement that only serves to fuel antisemitic conspiracy theories. And again, we’re talking about Tucker Carlson, here. Similarly, trying to link the Balfour Declaration to Christian Zionism because it’s a letter written by Lord Balfour to Lionel Walter Rothschild is nonsensical.

The sources connecting all of this together are impossibly thin, mostly consisting of blogs and a few podcasts that throw the accusation out without evidence. The closest thing to a primary source connecting Darby to the Rothschilds and Christian Zionism is a reference to the family in a 2002 issue of Executive Intelligence Review claiming that 19th Century British aristocrat and pre-millennial Zionist Lord Shaftesbury “was instrumental in the founding of the Palestine Exploration Fund, which brought the Darbyites and other evangelicals, wealthy Jews like the Rothschilds and Montefiores, together with the highest levels of English aristocracy, to officially claim Palestine for the Empire.”

It should be noted that Executive Intelligence Review is a publication of the crank conspiracy theorist and activist Lyndon LaRouche, and often published incomprehensible and antisemitic nonsense – including a 1996 article that was likely the first to connect the Rothschilds to future conspiracy theory magnet George Soros. So as primary sources go, EIR is firmly in the category of ones that can be ignored.

In digging around for something that connects Darby/Scofield to the Rothschilds, the only real link that makes any kind of sense is that the Scofield Reference Bible was published in 1909 by Oxford University Press, the prestigious academic house that’s been in business since 1586 and has become the largest university press in the world. A number of conspiracy theorists have claimed that the Rothschilds “own” or “control” Oxford University Press, and therefore were critical in the printing and distribution of the Scofield Bible.

But again, none of this is actually true. The Rothschilds don’t “own” Oxford University Press – the University of Oxford does. And Oxford has existed since around 1096, roughly 700 years before Mayer Amschel Rothschild rose to prominence as a banker and court Jew in the Free City of Frankfurt.

Simply put, if there’s a link between the Rothschilds and Darby, Scofield, the Scofield Bible, Christian Zionism, or its influence on American politics; nobody has bothered writing about it, documenting it, or exploring it in any way. But the trick about conspiracy theories claiming “the Rothschilds control ______” is that they don’t require evidence. The people spreading them have no interest in backing up their claims (tellingly, John Rich offers no evidence and Tucker Carlson asks for none), only in spreading them. And in going viral, which the claims did.

This unevidenced nonsense spreads because of generations of the similar spread of past antisemitic nonsense about the Rothschilds controlling banking, finance, politics, media, entertainment, global events, and medicine. Strip away all of the names and concepts unique to this one theory and you’re left with another version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document making grandiose claims of Jewish control while offering no evidence to support them. Over and over, influencers make these claims, spread them around without evidence, and reap the rewards. And Jews suffer the consequences of this hate and mythmaking.

Like The Protocols, the idea that “The Rothschilds” funded an End Times Bible to exert control over American Christianity is just as pernicious – and just as false.

All the World’s a Staged False Flag

Mike Rothschild5 Comments

In the seconds and minutes after a traumatic event, all we know is what we already knew before the event. As information starts to come in – what exactly happened, how it happened, who did it – that starts to change. Questions get answered, new questions arise, an overall narrative starts to emerge. But the moment we learn of something truly enormous and unexpected, such as an airliner flying into the World Trade Center or a mass shooting at a school, we don’t know anything other than the fact that something happened. And we want to know more.

Our minds demand more information, more details, more facts. We need to know what’s going on, even if nobody even knows what’s going on. And we want to talk about it, even if we don’t know what we’re even talking about yet. Social media and the speed that information travels now have exacerbated this need to concoct a story when one isn’t available, but it’s always been part of us.

With all this in mind, nobody should be surprised that the seconds and minutes after a 20-year-old loser with a rifle tried to assassinate Donald Trump, conspiracy theories exploded on social media. It was inevitable, given the intensity of the situation, the infrequent nature of such assassination attempts, and of course, the fact that involved Donald Trump.

Each block of conspiracy theories fell neatly down partisan lines.

Pro-Trump influencers have spent months obsessing over the “deep state” trying to assassinate Trump because he’s going to beat Joe Biden (again!) and they only way they can stop this is by taking Trump off the board. And anti-Trump influencers believe that Trump is so craven that he’d stage his own assassination attempt, complete with a pre-made photo-op, to change the conversation from Biden’s refusal to step aside.

The information you allow yourself to take in depends entirely on the information you’ve already taken in.

None of this should be surprising if one has followed Western politics and media for the last few decades. Within hours of the World Trade Center collapsing, major conspiracy figures like Alex Jones and Bill Cooper claimed the hijackings were staged as an excuse to detonate charges on the main girders of the buildings and bring them down in order to take control of the American people. It now takes minutes for “citizen journalists” to declare that “something is wrong” with the story when news breaks of a school shooting. Most of these conspiracy theories are repackaged versions of ones that have come before, and quickly fade out.

What’s new with the Trump shooting is that the volume of right wing conspiracy theories is being overwhelmed by the volume of conspiracy theories from the left. While many Republicans have fallen back on the usual narrative of a surprisingly incompetent deep state hit job, many Democrats have embraced the false and deranged notion that Trump staged his own attempted murder, based on “proof” that doesn’t stand up to logic or scrutiny, and sticking to the idea even once it became clear that multiple people, including the shooter, were killed in those furious few seconds.

“What, you think Trump wouldn’t do it? You think he cares about anyone but himself dying?” is that believers will ask, though these are rhetorical questions designed to reinforce belief. “Why would you put anything past him?”

Left wing conspiracy theories aren’t new, of course. But they’ve never quite caught on the way right-wing myths and disinformation have. They aren’t as compelling, they aren’t as profitable, they don’t offer the same heady stakes and cartoonish villains. And they aren’t equivalent. Left-leaning nonsense doesn’t have the same rotten core of antisemitism and racism and hate and fear. It wasn’t left-wing conspiracy theories that fueled January 6th or Charlottesville. Even health freedom and antivax conspiracy theories, once more the domain of progressives, have been usurped by the far right – Steve Bannon is just as likely to shill for “vaccine detox” as he is for “white genocide” these days.

But that’s changed as Donald Trump’s grip on American politics and discourse has tightened. Trump is an accelerant for left wing conspiracism in the same way Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were for the right. They are all-powerful, pure evil, devious and cunning in ways that defy description, and yet never quite pulls off their dark plans for world domination and mass slavery. They kill anyone they want, but manage to get caught on the internet. They create vast networks of underground bases and camps and terror cells that, for some reason, mostly remain dormant. And when they do activate – a mass shooter “brainwashed by MKUltra” or something like that – the internet figures it out easily.

These are cartoon villains. They’re Cobra Commander in the 80’s GI Joe Cartoon, building a vast army of soldiers and tanks and lasers, hatching plan after plan, and never winning. And like all “world domination” theories, they give a free pass to the real villains. They absolve the food conglomerates, the mass polluters, the actual dictators, the holders of medical debt and the inventors of “lunch debt.” These people get off – while the phony Saturday morning TV villains of the “deep state” keep pumping out their ham-fisted plots in public.

The idea that Trump staged his own assassination, built around one lousy marksman shooting him just close enough to his head to get a once-in-a-century photo, then having that marksman killed, is just as goofy and unserious a plan as much of the far right’s supposed chicanery. Sure, it’s fun to tweet about your belief that WWE-trained showman Trump could duck down just long enough to smear blood on his ear and pop up for a first pump, but once you find out people are dead, that’s not going to stick as a story.

Once you find out the shooting was real, it can’t be staged anymore, right? The problem with conspiracy theories is that they don’t function in the realm of logic. It can be real AND staged. Why not? The details don’t matter and are entirely fungible. You claim no kids died at Sandy Hook, then when overwhelming evidence emerges that they definitely did, you just claim they died but not the way THEY are telling us. The theory changes, but it doesn’t really change.

Likewise, Trump’s “shooting” clearly was real, but it can also be fake. Arguing over the details is pointless, because they’re meaningless. The idea that anyone would let some clown with no training shoot at their head on the off chance that they’d hit their ear is comical – but Trump is evil and Project 2025 will turn us all into breeding slaves in a Christofacist hellscape, so can we really say he wouldn’t do it?

I caught twelve kinds of hell from liberal influencers when I pushed back at the conspiracy theory that Trump had his ex-wife Ivana murdered by throwing her down the stairs, then used her fake burial to hide classified documents in her empty casket. I didn’t push back at it because I love Trump – far from it. I pushed back because it was insane and totally devoid of evidence, while sidestepping actual evidence, like Ivana being in so much pain from degenerating hips that she could barely walk. But people who have turned Trump in dime store villain capable of doing anything to anyone didn’t want to hear it.

The biggest problem with conspiracy theories how they transform their believers into conspiratorial people. They invert trust and faith. They wrap certainty in a blanket of nonsense. And they make people paranoid and joyless, distrustful and cynical. They show us a real and traumatic event and make it cartoonish and bizarre in ways that don’t actually help us process and react to them.

Political assassinations are pretty common in the US. Four presidents have been shot dead, many others have had guns pulled on them or shots fired at them while in office or around then. Gerald Ford had guns pulled on him twice in three weeks. Reagan was nearly killed by a shooter, while Harry Truman survived an assassination attempt as VP. Likewise, the atmosphere at Trump events and around Trump in general is one of chaos and violence and a sickening kind of “anything can happen” energy. It’s not surprising that this happened, it’s more surprising that it took this long.

So the attempt to kill Donald Trump doesn’t require a conspiracy theory. Like so many other hinge points in history, it just requires a dope with a gun who maybe shifts the tides of a generation depending on if they can hit a target or not.

But we process information through conspiracy theories. We fill gaps in our understanding with garbage rather than simply sit in that lack of understanding. We make up better stories than the ones the officials give us because we like stories. And we cast our villains as being so evil they must be stopped while also being so incompetent that they never quite start.

We know who and what Donald Trump is. We don’t need conspiracy theories to make him worse or more devious. We only need look at his history and his plans for the future. It’s all there and obvious. Him “smearing blood on his ear” or conspiring with the Secret Service to be photographed on his good side only obscures his danger in a haze of nonsense.

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The American Roots of QAnon, Part Two

Mike Rothschild

The following is the second half of the speech I gave at Purdue University in early April on the uniquely American properties of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Because it wasn’t recorded, I decided to post it online, broken up into two parts because it’s really long. Part one can be found here. My books The Storm is Upon Us and the forthcoming Jewish Space Lasers are also available. Enjoy!

Another one of Q’s foundational theories had been floating around since the early 90’s – and it wasn’t the Clinton Body Count. It was the three-decade old prophesy scam built around a great financial awakening, known as NESARA.

First emerging out of the wreckage of another scam called Omega Trust, NESARA was like a lot other conspiracy theories in that it had its roots in something real, only to become completely engulfed in fraud and false hope. In this case, it was an economic proposal called the “National Economic Security and Recovery Act,” proposed by an amateur economist as a massive overhaul to the US financial system that would do away with the Federal Reserve, loan interest, consumer debt, and the current income tax. Its originator printed a thousand copies of his proposal and sent them to Congress, where he assumed it would be put to a vote at once. It was not, and it eventually found its way online.

That’s where it caught the eye of a victim of the Omega Trust scam, Yelm, Washington resident Shaini Goodwin. She saw it as a way to merge some of the conspiracy she’d fallen for with the more New Age-y aspects of NESARA, and went to work building a cult around herself.

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QAnon is Dead, Long Live QAnon: Thoughts on the Q Twitter Ban

Mike Rothschild

Late on July 21st, news broke that Twitter was finally taking action against accounts linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory, rolling out a multi-pronged approach to stop harassment and Q-related hashtags from trending. They’re also planning to ban QAnon accounts that engage in targeted attacks on other accounts, gaming hashtags, or trying to evade bans.

Despite having written extensively about Q over the last two years, I would like nothing more than this toxic prophecy cult to disappear for good and release the hold it has on its believers. In that respect, what Twitter has done here is a good thing: it will reduce Q’s visibility, make it harder for disinformation and conspiracy theories to go viral, and hopefully reduce harassment against celebrities and journalists who run afoul of Q.

https://twitter.com/MajorPatriot/status/1285742727553060866?s=20

But is it the end of Q for good? Will whoever has been making the mysterious posts on 8chan over the last two-plus years give up the ghost and reveal themselves? Will people walk away from the movement – or dig themselves in even deeper?

Here are some thoughts I have as a long-time conspiracy theory watcher:

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Waif Error: Why the Wayfair Conspiracy Theory Took Off

Mike Rothschild4 Comments

Last week, America’s weekly conspiracy obsession shifted from “who’s giving away all those fireworks” to “wait, is Wayfair actually trafficking children through their website?”

Thanks to a few price anomalies that either made stuff look way more expensive than it actually was or just didn’t seem right, and some office cabinets anthropomorphized with human names; the Peaceful Researchers and Trafficking Experts of the internet determined that the furniture and decor clearinghouse was actually selling kids that had gone missing – disguising them in broad daylight as office cabinets and other furniture with the names of missing kids, and posting their prices for everyone to see.

And the internet went crazy.

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