The Explosion of Antisemitism with Mike Rothschild

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:48Rothschild is a name we all know. My guest today, Mike Rothschild of No Relation, has written a new book titled Jewish Space Lasers, The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories. It's a hard look at the dangerous explosion of anti-Semitism in America today and how the baseless lies of conspiracy theories shape our culture, society, and political systems. Let's go to the conversation.

1:23Joining us now on Open Book, Mike Rothschild. He's a journalist and conspiracy theory expert. and we're going to go right to it, Mike. This is a phenomenal cover. It's a phenomenal title. Jewish Space Lasers. Okay. And you know, that tickles me really well because I am a huge fan of Mel Brooks and everything about Mel Brooks. And it's the Rothschilds and the 200 years of conspiracy theories. And of course you're writing no relation to the Rothschilds. Okay. Just to let us know that you're not a Rothschild like in the Rothschild dynasty. But I got to tell you, Michael, I really enjoyed this book because the world is inflamed.

2:05There's inflammation in the world today about conspiracy theory. I have a theory about that. I want to test it on you and then talk to you about the various things that are in the book. I sort of feel like people feel left out of the system. I feel that social media has also caused a lot of jealousy and envy. Everyone's comparing each other's. Every butt wants to look like a Kardashian butt. Every bank account wants to look like Elon Musk's. And everyone's all uptight with each other. And so there has to be a reason why they haven't made it or they haven't gotten to where they need to be. And of course, the world's got to be against them.

2:37There's got to be a conspiracy. And so it feeds into this cabal. And then, of course, if you feed it, you can get people to subscribe to your social media account and you add followers. If you tell people the World Trade Center was brought down by the U.S. government, and if you tell people that the Rothschilds are really controlling the world. And I mean, I could list you conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory. I know you know them all. You wrote something about QAnon a while back. But what is driving all the conspiracy theory nonsense today, sir, in social media and in our lives? Well, I think you nailed it exactly.

3:11So much of the belief in conspiracy theories now and going back hundreds and even thousands of years is people feeling like they are left out, like they didn't get what they wanted, and somebody took it from them, and somebody has to be blamed for it. And you find that irrational anger and that irrational paranoia drives so much of the material that I write about, whether it is something like QAnon, which is clearly based on the need for enemies to be punished, or whether it's Rothschild conspiracy theories, which hold that a vast secretive cabal is conspiring, certainly to control world events and wars and economic calamities, but also conspiring against you personally.

3:48There is a great evil force and you are so important and so dangerous to their plan that they have to single you out for punishment. So much of conspiracy belief comes from feeling small and wanting to feel bigger and wanting to feel like you're doing battle with the great forces of evil. And so often those forces are funded by wealthy, powerful Jews. Okay. And so let me give you some, I want to throw some fodder at you and I want you to play pickleball with me with some conspiracy theories. OK, the world is controlled by this cabal. There's like 500 families that tightly control the world and they they own everything.

4:26They own all the politicians from Vladimir Putin to the Bush family to Joe Biden and Barack Obama. The vaccines were put in place on the world to depopulate the world because this cabal believes that the world is overpopulated. and they'll turn a large group of people in the world into their slaves once they can eliminate six or seven billion people in the world using these vaccines and so forth. You have a conspiracy around 9-11. The US government fomented 9-11 and brought those buildings down. Of course, seven world trade. How could that have possibly fallen? It looked like a controlled demolition.

5:05And so that had to be the government making a mistake. And so therefore, it was going to get demolished. They thought they were going to get a plane into that one as well. What do you say to these people? How do you convince these people that what they're talking about is a bunch of nonsense? Well, it's a great question. And it's something I've been dealing with in all of my work. And even on the book tour I've been on, I've had people who have said, oh, well, the fires in Maui, that was a laser, right? And I'm going, well, no, I mean, that's not really how fire works. It's not really how lasers work.

5:36You struggle to talk to these people because they want to believe it's true. They want to believe that 9-11 happened not just because of inaction or incompetence, but there was a plot. And the plot was so complicated that it involved putting explosives in buildings and somehow nobody figuring it out for decades and then all of it being unleashed. And then somebody on the internet figuring it out immediately. They want to believe that COVID-19, which upended everything about our lives, which put us inside, which cost so many people their jobs, their businesses. It wasn't just the lack of action by Chinese authorities or Trump administration authorities.

6:12It was a plot. It was a bioweapon. It was done to us. It brings people a measure of order and comfort to feel like there is some invisible hand. A lot of these theories revolve around organizations that are literally called the hidden hand, that there's an invisible hidden hand controlling everything. Someone knows what's going on. And even if they're evil, Someone knows what's happening and therefore something can be done about it as opposed to it's just random chance or bad luck or mismanagement or people being bad at their jobs. Those are complicated things. But an evil cabal is controlling it.

6:46That's a simple thing. OK. And so how do you prove it? You know, I'm sorry, Michael. You know, I read on the Internet that the Seven World Trade Center was a controlled demolition. And so I believe that with all my heart that the U.S. government did that to instigate a war in the Middle East. You know, the Rothschild family wanted them to do that because they own a lot of defense contractors and they they wanted there to. I don't know. It's always tied to, you know, you bring this up in the book. It's always tied to anti-Semitism. We're going to get the anti-Semitism in a second. But how do you rebut a person that's locked in like that?

7:20Well, a lot of times you don't. You know, I deal with this all the time. people demanding I prove that some conspiracy theory is not true. And of course, the way evidence works is it's not the skeptic's job to prove it's not true. It's the believer's job to prove that it is true. They just don't want to do that. That's actually one of the biggest reasons why the Rothschilds don't address the theories about them. I talked to people who work for the family. They're archivists in London. I asked her, why don't they ever talk about this? Why don't they refute it? She said they can't. They can't put themselves in the position of having to prove a negative.

7:51Yeah, no, exactly. Unanswerable question. Prove you don't have$500 trillion. Well, I don't. And I could show you my bank statements. Oh, well, prove those aren't fake. And it never ends. So once you start acquiescing to those demands to prove a negative, it never stops. Right. You can't prove it now. I think it's well said. But let's go to the Rothschild family for a second because I had Professor Neil Ferguson on my show and I asked him about the Rothschilds. Of course, you wrote a award-winning book about the family. Huge source for my book. Yeah. And I said, so, and you referenced them. And I said, so what is it about the Rothschilds?

8:26And he said, well, people have to find something. Okay. And there is, if you're okay with me talking about this, because everyone's so sensitive now, there's antisemitism. It's rife with antisemitism. It's, you know, I read Jay Winick's book recently, 1944, about the Holocaust and about Hitler's view of the Jews and the Wansi Conference and the Final Solution and all of these different things. It goes back thousands of years. It's not the 200 years of the Rothschilds, Mike. It goes back thousands of years and it's landed on this Jewish family. But go ahead, tell me what this is about in your mind.

9:04Sure. And it's absolutely about the visible wealth and success of the Rothschilds. And of course, Jewish communities have been scapegoated for their visible wealth and their visible success long before the Rothschilds. You know, 2 ,000 years of conspiracy theories would be a slightly longer book. I'm not quite sure. I'd probably still be working on it. I'd never finish. But the Jewish communities of the Middle Ages had access to wealth that they were able to lend to nobility, to kings, to princes, because of course, canon law prohibited the lending of money in interest. So you had these rulers and these leaders who needed money to build their palaces and their churches and raise their armies, but they had to get it from a group that was considered to be sinful, untrustworthy, rootless.

9:48So Jews since then have been caught in that paradox of, we are successful, we are visible, and the community outside of us needs access to our money, to our success, but they also hate us for it. And in that kind of paradoxical existence, Jewish communities have really existed ever since then. And it's led to unspeakable horrors. Yeah, really. I mean, it looked super bothersome for me. And I get these weird ass, and I never block the guys anyway, because I want to read what they're saying. I get these weird emails. This one particular guy is, you know, this is this, and that is that. And this is how the war started, World War I, and this is how World War II started.

10:29And it's all controlled by the Rothschilds and all of these people are stooges of the Rothschilds and all of this sort of stuff. But what happens if one or two, this is the other problem. I have people who have been injured by the vaccine. Unfortunately, that does happen. If you're looking at the statistics of it, you can get a Guillain-Barre syndrome or you get an autoimmune flare from the vaccine. Okay. And, you know, the vaccine, the mental, the, the, the national health service or the health policy people, the policy walks will tell you that it's in the very low decimals of a percent, but there are people that are injured.

11:09And so, you know, all of a sudden now they're like, okay, well, I'm anti-vaccine. I've experienced this injury. And so therefore vaccines cause autism and vaccines are bad for you and so forth and so on. So what do you say to somebody where there is some truth. Okay. Now, talk about the Kennedy assassination for a second. We have a new person. He's 90 years old. He's written a book. I'm not saying that he's correct or not, but we also have the 1977 assassination house investigatory study where people do believe that there was some connectivity that it perhaps may not have been a lone killer. And so I guess my point is the worst thing that can happen is what Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda for the Nazi party said, right?

12:02What's the best propaganda? You wrap a kernel of truth into the web of lies and people say, oh, that's true. So therefore this other stuff is true. Right. What do you say to all that? And the most durable conspiracy theories and the most impactful ones and the ones that have been with us century after century are the ones that have some element of truth to them. And so the believers say things like, well, are you saying it's all untrue? I said, well, no, part of it is true, but that doesn't mean all of it is true. When you talk about the Rothschilds, they were absolutely one of the most powerful families in Europe.

12:35Their wealth was instrumental in preventing wars, in building the railroads of Europe. That's all true. And it is also true they had a number of associations that we would consider problematic these days. The Rothschilds were wrapped up in, with Cecil Rhodes and the De Beers Mining Company, the horrible abuses of colonialism in what is now South Africa. That doesn't mean that they fund both sides of every war and own all the central banks. And in fact, by saying things like they own every central bank and fund both sides of every war, we are actually not talking about some of these real issues.

13:07We're not talking about the Rothschilds in the legacy of colonialism. We're not talking about whether it was okay for all of that wealth to be concentrated with one family. We don't talk about the real issues because we are so busy chasing the fake issues. Okay. A hundred percent. I mean, we totally agree with that as well. Give me some of the more absurd things that people have said, whether it's about the Rothschilds, the Jews, the conspiracy theories. You're a student of this stuff. So give me a sampling of some of these weird things. Well, I mean, first, just the idea that the Rothschilds own$500 trillion.

13:41This is something you will see on memes on Twitter right now. That's twice as much money as there is in the world. I mean, it's like, come on. They own all but three or five or seven central banks spread by people who do not understand how central banks work. Some of these theories about Jews in general, that all Jews are wealthy, all Jews are powerful. I will post things about the Jewish diaspora, people fleeing the poverty of Eastern Europe, and people go, Jews couldn't be impoverished. I'm like, have you seen Fiddler on the Roof? I mean, this is real stuff. And what it actually does is it creates a false narrative around Jews, that all Jews are rich, all Jews look out for each other, all Jews are cheap and greedy, and ultimately, it is Jewish wealth and power who exert outside influence on world events.

14:32That was true to a certain extent with the Rothschilds. It is not true anymore. Well, but it fed into and it made it easy for people, the politics of envy, demonization and scapegoating. You know, we find ourselves in trouble and a demonic political leader can say, well, it's not your fault. It's the fault of this group over here. And, you know, what was very sad for me is that when I visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, which is, of course, the Holocaust Museum there, the Holocaust Memorial, there was writing on the wall as you go through the museum where the Germans, the Jews lived in Germany for 500 years.

15:13And so 60 % of them left, 40 % of them stayed. Of course, the 40 % that stayed were massacred, but they stayed because they saw themselves as Germans hopefully the same way you and I see ourselves as Americans, you know, and there was safety in Germany and there was a pride to be German. And yet the people that took power in that nation and, you know, listen, I mean, you know, this is one of the reasons why I broke from Trump. And this is one of the reasons why I'm so concerned about what's going on. Now we have this QAnon conspiracy that you're writing about that people want to believe. You've got people believing that people are killing young babies and drinking something called adrenochrome.

15:53I mean, how do you, I mean, you know, I mean, I don't even know. One of the reasons I wanted to invite you on is that I'm listening to this nonsense all day and I'm like, okay, how do you respond to it? I mean, I guess you're telling me you sort of can't, right? Because you can't prove it negative, but your book does respond to it. Your book explains that all of this stuff is nonsense. So give us some color on that. Yeah. It's not even so much about trying to do anything about it. I've gotten criticism of the book of like, oh, it's not exactly a happy ending. I'm like, yeah, 2 ,000 years of this stuff.

16:24If you've got a happy ending in mine, I'd love to hear it. But I think what we can do is we can understand. We can understand what the code words mean. We can understand what it means when someone is blaming globalists or London financiers or Soros-backed DAs. And I think we can also understand that the demonization and eventually the attempted extermination of the Jews in the 1930s and 40s, it didn't happen all at once. Adolf Hitler did not start the Nazi party on a platform of we're going to kill all the Jews. That would have been absolutely repulsive to most Germans. With his rise, it was apathy.

17:00It was, we can't trust them. They did this to us. They prevented us from victory in 1918. They stabbed our fighting men in the back. They're not like us. They control the banks. They control finance. this economic situation we're in, it's because of them. And you slowly work the population toward it being okay, and then it being something they want to participate in to commit genocide. It doesn't happen all at once. It doesn't happen with one speech or one meme. It is very gradual. And I think people don't quite understand that about the Holocaust. And I really wanted to talk about that progression in the book, and of course, how the Rothschilds were used in that progression.

17:37Well, yeah. And of course, you know, there's a very famous book written almost 30 years ago now, Now, it's hard to believe it's that long ago by Daniel Goldhagen called Hitler's willing executioners. It got a lot of press and consternation from people, particularly in Germany at the time. But Goldhagen's point was you can't kill six million people or 11 million if you count all the ethnic people and gypsies that were killed. You can't kill 11 million people without having willing co-conspirators and people that are actually believing that these people are subhuman. You know, Jay Winnick writes in his book that the human hair that was taken from the cadavers of the people that were murdered were stuffed into luxury mattresses and sent back to Berlin.

18:19I mean, I cannot find or believe anything more revolting than that. Right. And the people living next to camps who said, oh, I didn't smell anything. I didn't know what was going on. Of course they knew. They all knew. And it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of effort to move a population from distrust to loathing to mass killing. That is a process. Well, the American soldiers that liberated some of these camps or bore witness to it did say that they were revolted by the German citizens. You could smell the camp for 30 miles and people knew what was going on. Okay. And how could they do that?

18:57So I want to switch topics for a second, okay, because we have this orange maniac who gets this. He gets this as well as anybody. He gets the Duraflame law. He's a Duraflame log for conspiracists. He loves lighting that flame, okay? You know, we have four decentralized justice areas of different governments, state and local, federal government, different prosecutors. Our system's very decentralized, but only for Mr. Trump. All of them have now coordinated in this cabal to go after him. He's done absolutely nothing wrong. It's just a witch hunt because they're coming after me and I'm here to protect you from them coming after you.

19:44You've heard this line before. Oh yeah. I've seen the memes. So what do we do, sir? I mean, I get a lot of questions about what Trump believes. Is he really anti-Semitic? And I, you know, I don't know. I, I, you know, I don't know the man. I don't think he's anti-Semitic. Well, I mean, you can probably say that because you know him. He's anti-Semitic and he's nasty. Yes. But he's also tolerant of Jews. You know, he worked with the Jews and, uh, and his, uh, his, his son-in-law's a Jew. He can get nasty and say nasty things about Jews, even in front of his son-in-law. I've seen it. Sure. Well, he's anti-Semitic, but he's not, he's not anti-Semitic the way Hitler was.

20:22Right. Okay, he's just an asshole when it comes to certain things. Right, right. And that's a very old school kind of anti-Semitism. It's an old school kind of racism. Gratuitous racism, gratuitous anti-Semitism, archibunkerism, archibunkerism. Yeah, exactly. So there is that aspect of it. But he also fluently speaks the language of people who absolutely are about anti-Semites. He understands the things he has to say to get those people on his side. And whether that's him knowing that or whether that's the people around him who know that, or it's both of them, he speaks the language of extremism and of paranoia and of conspiracy theories.

20:58It's, you know, it is not a shock to me, looking where we are now, that his rise to political prominence was based on conspiracy theories, was based on Barack Obama not being born in the United States. Once you start there, you immediately get a whole group of people on your side who feel, who have felt marginalized ever since Barry Goldwater. He's now suddenly the guy who is saying what we've been thinking all this time, and he's got the guts to name it. Now, nevermind that he, you know, the vast majority of these people, he wouldn't pee on them if they were on fire. He's saying the right things and he's saying the things that these people have believed.

21:32And now we're giving, we're giving witness to them. We're saying them out loud. And once you break those barriers down, the entirety of political discourse starts to become infected by what is acceptable to say. And very quickly that turns into just out and out anti-Semitism, out and out racism, because there's no barriers anymore. Yeah, there's absolutely no question what you're saying is true. And this is one of the big things that obviously bothers me and why I wanted to bring you on. You know, when I said Jewish space lasers, this of course is a joke. It's coming from space balls. But there's a woman in our Congress, her name is Marjorie Taylor Greene, that literally was telling people that, you know, these fires in California, and of course you're bringing up the fires in Lahaina and Maui, have come from space lasers.

22:18Right, right. I mean, this is absurd stuff, you know? Oh, it's totally, totally absurd. Yeah. And one of the things that I was actually really surprised by when I started the book is she never actually uses that phrase. She never says Jewish space lasers in that demented, unfollowable Facebook post. She never says Jewish, but she says Rothschild Inc. And oh, the vice president of PG &E was also a vice president at Rothschild Inc. Isn't that interesting? And of course, we know what Rothschild Inc. means. It's one of those codes. It means the Jews. And she's able to couch it in this folksy kind of, oh, I just want the answers.

22:53I just want to know what's really happening. I didn't even know the Rothschilds were Jewish. I mean, fine. But it's a language that these people very fluently speak. And because she's just, she's not outright saying the Jews did this and I hate the Jews. We sort of give it a little bit of a pass because we, a lot of people just still don't speak that language. And I, unfortunately am very fluent in that language. All right. Well, I get it. It sucks. Okay. I'm down to five words. I promised you in and out of here in 30 minutes. I'm going to read you five words. Okay. You can give me a one sentence, a one word.

23:26I just want to get your reaction to them. Okay. You ready? QAnon. We should have taken it more seriously from the very beginning. We should not have laughed at these people as being dumb flyover country hicks. This has now infected our politics, and it didn't have to happen. Okay, I agree with you. The word conspiracy. Conspiracies are real. There are real life conspiracies going back to the assassination of Julius Caesar, the tobacco companies keeping the deleterious effects of cigarettes from us, all real conspiracies, not the same as conspiracy theories. And that distinction causes us to waste a lot of time.

24:02George Soros. Not the boogeyman that so many people have been led to believe. Not perfect by any means, but I think generally a figure who has done a lot of good in the world and has been blamed for a lot of things that have nothing to do with him. He's become a political pariah in certain sects, but I can tell you on Wall Street, he was a very popular person. Oh, yeah. If you got money from George Soros, you were a very happy camper. And so it always baffles me. The same thing with the World Economic Forum, I might add. I'm a member of the World Economic Forum. It's a conference. No one's trying to control the world.