Are you aware of how much of your life is puppet-mastered by George Soros, the humanity-hating supervillain? If not, you’re entranced by the lies of the globalist/RINO/Deep State.
Do you know the FBI and CIA are engaging in Psyops to make the right-wing “disaffected liberal” podcaster Tim Pool look bad after news reports showed a white nationalist mass shooter was a big fan of Pool? No? You must be a blue-pilled NPC.
Have you heard the Good News? The end is nigh. Well, not from climate change or the increasing fragility of global democracy or anything like that—but from the “woke mind virus,” which was created in the labs of postmodern academia to finally exact Mao’s godless communist revolution. Don’t believe that? That’s because you’re too cowardly to believe anything but “the Cathedral’s” narrative.
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These are the questions on the mind of the very important person, Elon Musk, who since taking over Twitter last year has elevated the prominence of apocalyptic conspiracy theories—including the very same ones explored in the previous paragraphs—all while posturing as a politically independent, free-thinking, non-partisan centrist who’s just into “the facts” and “civil discourse.”
After he recently compared Soros—the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire who has openly contributed heavily to left-wing political causes and candidates around the world—to the X-Men villain Magneto, it was quickly pointed out to him that the Magneto character, like Soros the real person, is a Holocaust survivor.
Musk replied, “He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” Now, if that’s the fact-forward rational centrist civil discourse, imagine the panic-mongering, rage-stoking fascist discourse. (Actually, you don’t have to imagine, you can find that stuff in Musk’s replies courtesy of the blue checkmark-purchasing Twitter Blue subscribers, Musk’s anti-elite free-the-people squad of freethinking political independents, a great many of whom adhere to far-right MAGA orthodoxy.)
The grandiosity of the conspiracy theories pushed by Musk and his cohort—which include hugely popular and influential Intellectual Dark Web commentators like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson—are what make them exceptional. These aren’t goofy UFO conspiracy theories. This is serious shit, the kind of stuff that would make you crazy enough to sack the Capitol, threaten the life of the vice president and speaker of the House—and think you’re the good guy.
Soros and his political spending have long been cited as the source of all that is evil in the world, in the fever brains of antisemites and far-right ideologues. But when an incredibly rich, successful, and influential self-avowed centrist is tarring him as evil, a whole new audience is opened up to the threat of the Soros-purchased apocalypse.
PICK A THEORY, ANY THEORY
A cocktail of insomnia and an HBO Max subscription recently inspired me to rewatch Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK—a huge box office hit that was nominated for eight Oscars, winning two. It’s got an 84 percent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And more than three decades later, I can attest that dammit, the acclaim is earned.
It’s an outstanding piece of celluloid drama, fast-paced, intelligent, brilliantly staged. There are scenes that consist of nothing but eight lawyers in a room, sweating through their clothes in the New Orleans heat, shouting various threads of information to each other for more than 10 minutes. This should be absolute torture for a viewer, and yet, these are some of the most compelling scenes in the film!
A three-hour dramatization of a forgotten criminal investigation and trial (the only case ever brought against someone for the assassination of President Kennedy) led by District Attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner, fresh off of his Oscar-dominating Dances With Wolves and at the peak of his fame) should not work. But it does. It’s a fantastic success as a piece of entertainment.
It’s also batshit crazy, comically irresponsible with the facts, and lionizes a prosecutor who by many accounts was both unethical and deranged by a fixation with conspiracy theories—some of which plainly contradicted each other. But no matter, the D.A. and his team were “through the looking glass,” justice had to be done “though the heavens fall.”
At numerous times in the film, the Garrison character even says things like “I don’t have much of a case,” implying he would have one if only a vast conspiracy including the CIA, the mafia, right-wing Cubans, and a conclave of New Orleans gay men with fascist leanings hadn’t pulled the wool over America’s eyes.
Garrison’s case was weak, but he wasn’t shy about using homophobia—during a time when being gay was literally considered a national security threat—to make it stronger. Indeed, as James Kirchick (a past The Daily Beast contributor) wrote in 2022, Garrison described Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as “a switch-hitter who couldn’t satisfy his wife” and said Jack Ruby (the nightclub owner who murdered Oswald on live television) was a homosexual nicknamed, “Pinkie.”
Most people also don’t know that The New York Times referred to Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw as “one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of American jurisprudence.” They just know the legend, which is that an unwieldy conspiracy theory is the actual truth, and those who believe “the government” are just dead sheep walking.
Garrison’s obsessions found an audience through books, radio shows, and especially, through JFK. And to this day, the majority of the American public has been sufficiently convinced that Oswald didn’t act alone.
Good entertainment has that kind of power.
ENJOY THE SHOW
There’s an apocalyptic feel to JFK, as if the walls of reality are closing in just as “the truth” could come to light. It makes you want to believe, even if you know better (there wasn’t a viable internet for the layperson to do some basic fact-checking after watching JFK in the early ’90s.)
And it’s not dissimilar to tuning into hours and hours of The Joe Rogan Experience or participating in various Twitter arguments. The entertainment value makes you receptive, the repetitiveness entrances you, and the feeling of being “brave” enough to question the supposedly unquestionable solidifies in your mind the veracity of hysterical conspiracy theories. And having a community of the like-minded provides a reinforcement bubble—a safe space—for the freethinkers who all think the same thing.
When Musk jokes that his Soros comparison was “really unfair to Magneto,” he’s playing the fake nuance game. “See, I don’t take things too seriously, I like to joke around. Also, George Soros is going to kill you all,” is the implied message.
When Joe Rogan says Soros “funds corrosion… It’s like he wants these cities to fall apart. He wants crime to flourish” and then compares him to “an evil person in a Batman movie,” like Musk, Rogan deploys a comic book reference to make the apocalyptic warnings more entertaining, more palatable to the masses. And also, “nuanced”!
By hiding behind “just asking questions” on issues where the questions have already been asked and answered—like the 2020 election, which Musk concedes Biden won but also says it’s a “nuanced” question to ask if the election was stolen—the conspiracy theorist postulates as brave and reasonable. In contrast, someone believing the “official narrative” is a coward and intellectually inferior.
Dropping these “nuance” breadcrumbs helps convince people to believe untrue things that are so important they’re suppressed by forces that are beyond even the reach of the world’s richest man!
Given Musk’s penchant for erratic behavior and incoherent politics, who knows if he even believes what he’s saying or whether he just needs some sleep. Similarly, whenever Joe Rogan is cornered after spreading bullshit to his vast, rapt audience, he retreats to his “I’m just an idiot comic” armor of excuses, so he may or may not truly believe Soros is actively trying to destroy American cities.
What we do know is these two have massive followings and hold a demigod status among many of their devotees. And they take them—and their apocalyptic conspiracy theories—very seriously.
