Rick Spence: evaluation

Transcript context

…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 there. If you go back to France in the 1890s, there’s some big scandals. Well, there’s the Dreyfus scandal. We got that. All right. Where you’ve got a Jewish officer on trial for being a traitor. All right. So that was [inaudible 02:02:34]. So you bring in the whole Jewish element. Jews is 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 were 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-Pages. He was kind of a French journalist. I don’t know. He started out writing porn. So I mean, 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 and it is as well by a high priestess Diana Vaughan. And so there’s like child sacrifice, weird Robie, Bohemian Grove stuff, and the Freemasons or devil worshipers going back to the Knights Templars. And so there’s a thing called the Devil in the 19th Century and the Secrets of Freemasonry, and this became a bestseller in France. So France is just obsessed with all these kinds of conspiracies. So evil, Satanic, Freemasons, evil, Jewish financiers, Dreyfus. This, this is the brew where all of this come. So want to figure out how Freemasons and Jews get connected together? France is the place where this happens. Now, Taxil or Jogand-Pages 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, high figures in the Catholic Church shows up, and he does. No Diana Vaughan and Jogand-Pages 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 what gullible morons you are, and that’s it. He confesses. ges 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 what 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 apparently 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, well, 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 right 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’ve linked them together. Joly, as he did with virtually everyone, this was a guy whose life largely consisted of dual 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 became a journalist, worked 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 were 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 10 years down the road, this thing pops up in a newspaper in Saint 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?…

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