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An international anti-fascist show run by a Scandinavian nerd, a Slavic alcoholic and an American unc that takes you to the darkest corners of the internet to help you understand the footsoldiers of online right-wing mobilization - content creators.
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Episode 14 - "Professor" Jiang
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A veritable philosopher king, an intellectual titan. Our subject today made his mark by claiming to be able to analyze history perfectly through the application of game theory, and from that methodology, we also predict the future. His most striking, most prescient prediction, which nobody could have seen coming, and which propelled him to the status of genius philosopher, was this.
SPEAKER_00You know, for people who aren't familiar with your work, I wanted to show folks that back in uh 2024, you made three big predictions. One, that Trump would win. Two, that he would start a war with Iran, and three, that the US would lose that war. Let's take a listen to that.
SPEAKER_08In this class this semester, I'm making three big predictions, right? The first is that Trump will win in November. Second is that the United States will go to war against Iran. And the third big big prediction is that the United States will lose this war, which will forever change the global order.
SPEAKER_07The clip starts with Professor Jiang saying, quote, in this class, this semester, as he's looking out into the room behind the camera, towards the students in his class. The problem with this clip is that that class, that semester, and those students, may not exist. Professor Jiang is not a professor. He's a high school teacher portraying himself as a professor. An act that's punishable by law in multiple countries, including Germany, Austria, and Norway. Professor Jang is a con artist, but is raking in millions of views, and all sorts of dumbasses on the right treat him like a geopolitics guru. The question is, how did he get here and why do people listen to him? Welcome to the Reaction Podcast. This is Professor Jang.
SPEAKER_04What did you tell us, Mike? How do you feel about this particular gentleman?
SPEAKER_05It's gosh, I I hesitate to even give this guy the level of clout by saying that he's a demagogue, but he is pure slopulism. It is designed to appeal to people by taking advantage of kind of our reptilian brain. He calls himself Professor Jang. He goes up in front of the of the school board and he loops into or he hooks into our relationship with being a student and a teacher. Right? Like he takes on that form of a history professor or history teacher that you got in high school, because almost every single one of us experience that in our lives, where you would be, as a child, forced to go into a room to an adult, and they had an implicit authority, and they would teach you things, and you would kind of accept them as true because they had that position. And he's hooking into that in order to just ramble.
SPEAKER_04And it's all rambling, it is literally rambling. That's why it's a slot machine. It's it's it's a it's a repeated loop of words. Yeah, it's just all surface level. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Here's the thing like it's surface level, and then there'll be, you know, you'll be nodding along, going like, okay, you know, the when on his one of his lectures on Iran, he'll talk about how the US overthrew Muhammad Mossadegh and then implemented the you know, you know, put the Shah into power who is a brutal dictator, and you'll be nodding along, and then all of a sudden, before you know it, he's saying, and that's why the Illuminati fake the Holocaust. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08Speaking of which, to reveal the secret history of the world. That is a project we are undertaking this semester to discover for ourselves the secret history of humanity. Because you may not know this, but all the history that you learn in school, all that history that you think you know, it is false.
unknownOkay?
SPEAKER_08The history that you know, you the history that you believe, it is a system implanted into your brains by powerful people.
SPEAKER_07This is how Mr. Jiang starts his so-called secret history lecture series, and this is how he ends his series.
SPEAKER_08So we come to the end of the course, and all roads lead to Lucilla.
SPEAKER_07What Mr. Jang generally does is introduce various topics or ideas, mentioning them only in brief and at a complete surface level, and then constructs or finds links between them. Sometimes these disparate things have no real connection, and Jang even admits to it. At one point in his secret history series, he scribbles down the head of the Frankist Jewish sect, Meyer Rothschild and Adam Weisaupt, and says, quote, There's no evidence that these people actually met. That's why it's just a theory. This is all stuff from Augustine Barrell and John Robeson, arguably the founding fathers of the modern conspiracy tradition. Both authors saw the French Revolution as the work of a bunch of secret organizations, including the Freemasons and the Illuminati. Their conspiracy theory was a novel conception, a timeless, long and evil plan for the destruction of Christianity and the social order. Quoting from the book Conspiracy Theories by lecturer in psychology Joven Biford, quote Conspiracy theorists are generally not interested in the multitude of conflicting conspiracies, but in a smaller number of them, which are often reduced to a single overarching plot, which supposedly explains everything. Jang's whole deal is that his method of analysis can explain everything. He refers to it as speculative analysis in an interview with Mehdi Housan, in which he also says the following.
SPEAKER_08Look, I I think that the problem with education is that it focuses too much on facts, too much on rigor, and not enough too much.
SPEAKER_06Do you hear yourself? It sounds you sound mean what do you mean too much on facts?
SPEAKER_08Look, look, I I know this sounds strange, but there is a difference between facts and truth, right? Facts are what can be independently verified by other sources. Truth is a deep understanding of the world that allows you to understand why things are the way they are, as well as as well as make certain predictions. We used to be a people, a human species that was very focused on truth seeking. Uh, and and that's why religion was so such an important part of our lives. Because God, um prayer was was very important to help us understand um our place in the world, uh, where we came from, what we're doing here, and where we're going.
SPEAKER_05There is a long tradition in this kind of like pseudo-intellectual tradition that I kind of associate this with a Christian, like a fundamentalist Southern Christian eschatology, where they basically embrace theories that are not factual and that they try to like logic themselves into positions. And the closer you know, you see it, whether it's like, you know, Austrian economics to I guess this speculative analysis, it's just, you know, does it feel like it makes sense from the seat of my pants? You know what I mean? And then try to make some sort of like connection or some sort of string of you know, ever more speculative pronouncements, and then present it in a confident way, and then before you know it, the Arkansas state government is funding the Creation Science Museum with hundreds of millions of dollars in grants. So I'm kind of surprised. Like, I wonder, you know, I want to learn more about Professor Jang's background, like why he has seemingly the same politics as a southern racist.
SPEAKER_07Well, there's a um fascinating aspect to many of Jang's theories. I don't think he actually like proclaims to belong to any sort of religion, not that I could find at least, but he very often uses religion to analyze everything, and he uses the Bible. Yeah, God and the Bible quite a lot. But I think all this is more tied to his uh fascination with secret societies and, let's be blunt, his idea that basically kind of Jews run the world. Something that perfectly illustrates Mr. Jang's methodology is how he approaches perhaps the most sensitive aspect of modern Western history, the Holocaust. This is a clip from number fifty-four of his civilization lectures on his YouTube channel Predictive History. This video is from May 22nd, 2025.
SPEAKER_08So we don't actually have any concrete evidence for the Holocaust, okay?
SPEAKER_07Now on its face, this is pretty outright Holocaust denial, but there's layers to this. Here's another clip from April 1st, 2026, in an interview with Jay Shapiro of the Dilemma podcast.
SPEAKER_08Um, so my issue is this. My issue is I believe the Holocaust happened. So, in my opinion, Hitler made a speech every single day demanding the extermination of the Jews. And the Nazi bureaucracy spent uh years and years planning this out meticulously, right? Um I spent a lot of time looking for his speeches, going for his speeches, which was not that many. And I tried to do a lot of research on the internet, and I couldn't find anything. That's what confused me. It was kind of dissonance, where if it is a systematic extermination ordered by Hitler, you would think there'd be a speech justifying or explaining why he's doing what he's doing in order to rally the German people to his cause. Or at the very least, there'd be a blueprint, a bureaucratic blueprint for how you would actually implement this, because I mean it's logistics, right? You need to bring in the gas from somewhere, you need to pay for it, you need to right, right? I mean, like, like it like it has to be like a military operation. And I couldn't find any documentation, I couldn't find any um real direct evidence. And that's why in my lecture, um, I said, listen, um, I'm not saying the Holocaust didn't happen, it must have happened, but there's no direct evidence for it that I could find, which I found really frustrating. Okay, so so that's a background to what happened.
SPEAKER_04I don't know. Maybe the tens of millions of corpses is a pretty decent amount of evidence, maybe people disappearing.
SPEAKER_05Well, I mean, it's just ahistorical. There is a lot of evidence, actually. It's very well documented. Like he's just saying shit because he's dumb as fuck. What do you want me to say? Like the WANC conference, and we have the physical documents, we have the coordination documents, the logistics, we have the trade schedules, we have testimony at Nuremberg, you know.
SPEAKER_04That's not the conversation I'm trying to start here. Obviously, there's an insane amount of evidence. Yeah, but why would you tackle a subject that has so much evidence pointing towards it happening? Why would you tackle that subject specifically by saying there's no evidence for it? Like you could have so many different approaches to choose this one. It's just sounds incredibly irrational.
SPEAKER_07It's it's weird, yeah. And he's like he's muddying the waters for no reason, but also says, like, obviously, yeah, the Holocaust happened. I just, you know, I just can't find any evidence for it. Like, what's the motivation? And honestly, it gets fucking weirder because hit some of these conspiracy theories have just no motivation for them. Like I I think there's a motivation.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, not to know but you, but like I think what what he's doing here is he's moving the Holocaust from a historical fact to a matter of opinion. Yes. So when he says, like, oh, I think the Holocaust happened, that's my opinion. What he's doing is he's giving acceptability to the contrary opinion. Yes. And it didn't happen.
SPEAKER_07Yes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_05But at the same time, he's protecting himself from the accusation of being a Holocaust denier because wait, I believe it happened. What do you mean I'm a Holocaust denier? So he's doing the Nazis work for them, which is he's giving himself plausible deniability by saying that he believes it while at the same time lowering the historicity of the Holocaust to a lower level, to one of opinion where people could differ. And then when you say Jews control the world, well, now you, you know, Holocaust didn't happen, or it's opinionslash Jews control the world equals, well, now we've got to do something. And that is the natural kind of logical flow of what he's doing.
SPEAKER_07I think that that's obviously the actual product of this sort of like rhetoric, but I think that he doesn't actually kind of think of it in that way. I think he just has a very conspiratorial mind because he will bring up conspiracy theories for the dumbest fucking shit. Like he will just keep bringing up conspiracy theories, and I think either either he just has a completely conspiratorial mind, or he's doing this to farm engagement.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, probably. I mean, yeah, you know, I've talked about this before, but there is a certain attractiveness to the arcane. What I mean by that is like details or or or procedures or knowledge that regular people don't have access to. Yeah. I mean, what is becoming a doctor or a lawyer or anyone else with a professional degree? It is the authority saying that you have knowledge that regular people don't have access to. So your judgment can be trusted on these very specific areas. And people are attracted to that kind of thing. So when you tell them that you have, you know, you have these models of the world that, you know, they don't have access to, they're naturally attracted. And if you're a lefty, hypothetically, you know, this is obviously a centrist podcast. Um, if you're a lefty, that's part of the attraction of left-wing thought as well, is, you know, the way of at, you know, I analyzing the world in a material way, it gives you insight into what's unsaid or what the propaganda is trying to cover up, like the bare venal motivations for whatever's going on around you. So I understand this. Like I understand the attractiveness of these kind of explanations, but fundamentally, it is not verifiable, it's not empirical, it's not based on a historical method, it's just like a lot of, you know, schizo uh uh imaginings or, you know, not firmly rooted or firmly connected theory.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Imagine though that we take Zhang at his word. I think it would then reveal quite a bit of it, you know, about his methodology. Oh, yeah. He approached the topic with preconceived notions of what sort of evidence he was supposed to see, and the absence of that particular evidence was frustrating to him and led him to state that we lack concrete evidence of the Holocaust. Not to interrupt you again, but this evidence exists.
SPEAKER_05Yes, yeah, yeah, no, no, no. He's just lazy. He's just lazy. He did a Google search and he didn't find it on the first response or whatever, and then then he said I guess it doesn't exist.
SPEAKER_07What happened here is something I've seen time and time again when confronting pseudo-historians on YouTube. Put simply, their lack of understanding of the iterative nature of the field and the inflated sense of their own importance and capabilities leads them to carry out their own independent investigations, much in the same way a flat earther or climate change denier might do. This investigation stands completely independently from the established literature, the whole field of history, which could easily point him to the evidence that he's looking for. But he decided to approach the topic by going straight to the primary sources. This is a tried and true tactic for those who want to spin alternative narratives about history to an audience unfamiliar with a topic. The method is very simple. You cherry pick a specific primary source whose existence is an established fact, and then present that primary source as evidence for your claim. What makes this method very convincing is that it's one half of what actual historians do. And it's the sexiest part, and the one most connected to the past. The part that the pseudo-historian leaves out is everything else. Virtually every important primary source has already been analyzed at least once, if not dozens or hundreds of times before, contributing to a whole host of literature. But the layperson is woefully unaware of the breadth of this literature, not even a professional historian would be unless they're working in that specific field. People like Mr. Jang exploit this. He points to evidence, or sometimes non-existence of evidence, in order to support his claim, but ignores the preponderance of evidence, that is, all the rest of it, which would be stacked against it. It may be a conscious tactic, but for the most part, when I've encountered this, it's purely a product of the creator's inflated confidence in their own ability. That is to say, they're just being a dumbass. He's actually so stupid it's borderline upsetting. Virtually every intelligent person that I've seen tackle this guy expresses immense frustration at his genuinely confounding stupidity. So, Mr. Jang does a little bit of Holocaust revisionism because he's stupid. When he's now walking back his previous annihilation about how he found it frustrating that he couldn't find any bureaucratic evidence, he could have brought up Sonderaktun 1000 Funf, or Special Action Thousand Five, a secret operation to erase evidence of the Holocaust in Central and Eastern Europe, which was largely, though not entirely, successful, as the Soviet Red Army's advance prevented some of the destruction of evidence. Quoting Richard J. Evans in Third Weich had war By late July 1943, after four months, the task of digging up and incinerating some 700,000 corpses that had been crudely buried in mass pits was almost complete. There very much is bureaucratic evidence of the mass murder, which this special action was to cover up. Quoting further, according to a report sent to Eichmann on the eleventh of January 1943 and intercepted by British monitoring services, the number of Jews killed in the Reinhard Action camps by the end of the previous year had totaled nearly one and a quarter million. A shorter version of the report, updated to 31st of March 1943 and prepared in the large type used for documents intended to be read by the short-sighted Hitler, was presented to the German leader on the eve of his fifty-fourth birthday, on 19th of April, nineteen forty-three. The reason Jang didn't bring up this evidence is because that's not how he works. That's not how his so-called speculative analysis operates. He said it himself. Facts are secondary to rationalization. For example, much like with the Holocaust, he has also managed to rationalize himself into probably the weirdest and most niche conspiracy theory I've ever heard. Which is that the Battle of Canae, and in fact the whole Second Punic War, never happened. Okay, what the hell is the Punic War and does it have anything to do with pubes? The Romans made up a battle they lost and got owned? First of all, I guess I'll explain what the Battle of Cannae is. It's one of the most famous battles of history.
SPEAKER_04Okay, call me Domon Main, but game fucking hilarious.
SPEAKER_07Sorry, but it is kind of famous. The Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca bested a numerically far superior Roman force after having made a treacherous march across the Alps with elephants, mind you.
SPEAKER_04Oh, I know that one. I know the elephant one. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05By the way, for people like you, Gopnik, who have never heard this battle, I believe this battle was uh the inspiration for Battle of the Bastards and Game of Thrones.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. It's it's one of the most like, I guess, analyzed and pop history-wise famous battles, I guess, in like ancient uh warfare.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, exactly. That's it. I only like the more niche battles, you know. Exactly. Yeah, he's a scholar.
SPEAKER_07Like you know, the fucking like 300 bullshit. Like, he doesn't care about that stuff. That's all Hollywood.
SPEAKER_04I don't do this pop history, man. What the fuck? I don't do it just to get all the uh the history-loving ladies, you know. I only talk about niche manly wars.
SPEAKER_07Like which ones you go?
SPEAKER_04Like uh like uh like uh Crimea. Yep. Battles of Crimea and relate yeah.
SPEAKER_07Those are those are not at all obscure. So just like a brief, I guess, on what the fuck the Punic Wars are. They're the wars between Carthage and Rome during the Roman Republic's like sort of expansion out of Italy. Uh the first Punic War was over control of Sicily. Carthage was this major naval power that kind of controlled most of the Mediterranean before Rome's rise. And you can kind of view it as like a sort of Cold War, kind of like, you know, we have our spheres of interest, you have your spheres of interest kind of situation up until the first Punic War and then the Second Punic War and then the Third Punic War. Now I don't know whether he focuses on the Second Punic War and just says that one is fake. And I don't know why, as Mike said, he would say that the Battle of Canae is faked, because that's something that the Romans lost, like quite embarrassingly so. Yeah, I think they like outnumbered them significantly. Yeah, like almost two to one. And it was like the flower of the Roman Republic, you know, was destroyed. But of course, the uh Carthaginians were in fact beaten back eventually. But you know, what followed, of course, was like the Romans sacking Carthage eventually in the Third Punic War and basically ending what could be compared to like a superpower. And Jan kind of like claims that the whole war was made up to justify that, which is crazy because we have first hand accounts of people who Went through it. I believe uh Polybius or someone like like that wrote from it. But anyways.
SPEAKER_05I don't think the Romans would care to justify subjugating other you know what I mean? Like it's not like they're doing propaganda. Oh no, absolutely. Why the fuck would they're the fucking Romans? Yeah, like they enslaved people all the time and were like, because we're better. That was their justification. They didn't need to do this propagandistic view for the destruction of Carthage, right? Like they would have just done it.
SPEAKER_07Also, everybody in Rome fucking loved war. Like, not that I seemed like you know, everyone was enthusiastic in that regard, but like before we started recording this episode, because I was a little like I was playing Total War last night, Rome to Total War, and I was getting some fucking like abstinence shakes and shit. So I was I was reading from one of my uh like uh Roman history books and everything. And yeah, the Romans they they loved this shit. They loved war, they loved like everyone wanted to contribute to the state's ability to continue waging war because war was such a big part of who they were. It was how a lot of people made wages. It was like how a lot of people, like middle class people, kind of supported themselves was through wages and salaries and and pillage. Anyways, Jang's argument essentially boils down to the character Hannibal Barca and his motivations make no sense to him. Hannibal Barca didn't make the decisions that Jang believes a person like him would have made at the time, and that Hannibal Barca fits into a larger, almost religious narrative of a struggle between Rome and Carthage.
SPEAKER_04Oh, he's um actually a historical figure. That is.
SPEAKER_07He's like, why didn't he just, you know, what don't Siege Leningrad just take it, you know, that kind of shit. Fuck yeah, bro. And because of that, he's like, he's not real. I I need you to understand how fucking goofy this is. There are 9-11 truthers, there are Sandy Hook deniers, and then you've got Jang with the second Punic War denialism. Not the first, not the third, just the second. I never fucking would imagine this to be a thing to ever exist, but it is.
SPEAKER_04I mean, it's it will be a great conversation starter at the bar.
SPEAKER_05Does he believe the Middle Ages exist? Because like he strikes me as a Middle Ages denier. Do you know about that? I've heard of this, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_07That like we kind of just like made it up. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, the Middle Ages didn't happen. Yeah. So but I guess, I mean, all in all, I think this is part of the part of the allure. Yes, right, is he's making like actual arguments. And ironically, it's the one thing that made me interested in him. I guess and before this it was boring, but yeah. Well, if you're not familiar with the historical method, right? Yeah. If you're not if you're not familiar with history really, other than as a recounting of uh effects or events from an authority, which is not what it is, by the way. Yeah, no, yeah. But a lot of our experience with history as children is that, right? Which is an authority figure stands in front of us at a classroom, much similar to his lectures, and tells us the American independence was, you know, announced on July 4th, 1776, and that led to blah, blah, blah. And you were just sitting there kind of passively as a child. That's not what history is. That's why many people find history boring because it is like rote almost. Yeah. And they experienced it as a very young child who's not really intellectually or academically prepared for the practice of history. Yes. And may not be emotionally mature enough to deal with contingency or or uncertainty or you know, competing theories where maybe our side isn't the good side. It takes a little bit of adulthood, a little bit of maturity in order to be able to appreciate the true historical method. And I don't think, you know, that's why Professor Jang has been so successful, is because he's saying things that are to our ear, you know, challenging the authority of history, big H, and he seemingly is getting away with it.
SPEAKER_07So there must be something to it. It's not just that, it also makes him an active participant in the writing of the history, because as you said, like the way people often experience history is someone just telling it to them, and that's it. With this, he's saying, like, we can figure this out and we can do something with it. It becomes like a thing you actually take part in, which is what history actually is. But uh, he's kind of introducing this sort of concept by basic basically just saying this shit isn't real.
SPEAKER_05Well, that's why pseudo-historian is the best way to understand it, right? Like he is warping the process for his own gain in a totally immature and irresponsible way, yeah. Which is why he's dangerous.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, but that's what gives him the anti-hero allure, right? Because in most of his lectures, specifically when he talks about education and school and going to college, etc. etc., he dismisses it as, you know, the future poor man's decision, etc. So while a lot of people do relate to him because again, the the the chimp brain associates him with uh an old professor we might have had in school, it also associates with kind of this counterculture figure who at the same time has the weight of an academic, but also not one of those like boring academics that we used to have in school that uh that made us do homework, etc. etc. This guy, Professor Zhang, is someone who stands up uh not only to the academic status quo, but stands up to school that doesn't really get you ready for life, he will tell you all the real truths that will help you become truly successful. Well, academia, academia is just created, was just designed to create more and more and more mindless lobotomized drones. So by combining all of these things, the kind of rock and roll counterculture aspect, which uh when applied to being a hist basically a geopolitics guy, you know, being rock and roll in the nerdiest fucking sphere on the planet, is basically having hot takes about the second penis war or whatever the fuck, right? It's yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. It's uh that that is applying counterculture mentality, uh at least fake counterculture mentality, to the particular field that he finds himself in. And it and the the package is somewhat complex. What I mean by package, the package of who he is when he represents himself, especially to a curious but naive uh larger audience. It takes all the boxes. It the more you put like he is very difficult to understand, respectfully, like to people that maybe no, actually very disrespectfully to people that listen to him regularly. He is difficult to understand the appeal to for smart people. Like I'm sorry if that sounds elitist, but it genuinely is like mind-numbing. You are very problematic if you made it through 10 minutes of any of his videos and you didn't start going like what this is stupid.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, like where the fuck is he going with this, that kind of stuff, right? Yeah. I just had a rant on my stream like today about about stupid people. So I as much as I want to indulge, I'm going to have to take the view of this makes sense to me because of the fall of all of the apparatuses of authority that we are experiencing. And it doesn't surprise me that this is happening while one of the major predictions that he got popular with is really referencing Israel, right? And we could all see the kind of sinews of uh of authority that are moving the muscles of America, if that not to belabor a metaphor too much, right? Like we could see the connective tissue of the Israel lobby, of seemingly the fact that American politics is ignoring the fact that everybody disagrees with the Iran war or disagrees with what Israel's doing throughout the West. And instead of like our democratic institutions responding to the will of the people like we've been in propagandized to believe, it's not happening. In fact, the opposite is occurring, where the more you are a vicious propagandist for Israel, the more you're willing to sell out for this for this genocidal state, the more you're being propped up. And the more prominent you are when you speak out, the more oppression is literally being visited on people. Whether it is losing jobs, whether it is being fired from positions of academic authority, uh being removed from the government, from you know, being deported. Yep. Right? Being like Hassan Piker and Jank Uger were just recently banned from traveling to the United Kingdom. Yeah. You know, because they criticized Israel. You could see that there is clearly some control that is outside of our hands that's being used to prop up what Israel is doing against the will, the democratic will and clearly expressed will of regular people. And so as these, you know, authorities are losing their justification, their legitimacy to exercise the authority they have, you can't be surprised when other like authorities that are more well-founded are also losing their legitimacy in the eyes of regular people. So there is a desire for a new authority, a new legitimacy, a new way of approaching the world. And Professor Jang is offering it. And his conspiratorial blathering is closer to reality than the official state communiques. You know what I mean? Like you can see the slaughtering of Joder.
SPEAKER_07Or rather, both are completely because he does he actually like criticize Israel properly? Because all I see him say about Israel is like they're you know attacking Iran in order to create Pax Judaica.
SPEAKER_05Right, which is the domination of the world by Jews, basically. Like, you know, Pax means peace, right? But it means an imperial peace, right? Like this calling of all resistance.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, exactly. Enemies have been neutralized and there is no need for further uh war, basically, is like the rationale.
SPEAKER_04Literally not how it works. That's not, yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_05Well, yeah, but it's the Roman Empire. Yeah, exactly. Pax Romana, yeah. There's Pax America, yeah. You know, which is like what we live in now, where you have the global hegemon, and there isn't major wars between competing powers, large powers, because America dominates so thoroughly that it's not viable as a strategy, right? So we live in that. And what I'm trying to get at here is like I think I understand why it's happening. And what concerns me is like the elites should fall. Like, that's the kind of rub is like we are in a populist period because the elites are actually not serving the interests of the people that they're supposed to be ruling over, or the authorities are not using their authority to advance the interests of those that they have been entrusted to supervise.
SPEAKER_07And it's also a little funny and ironic that uh you say that because a lot of the conspiracy theories that he brings up continuously, or continually rather, are from these two authors who wrote uh conspiracy theories about how the French Revolution, which occurred in a similar situation, was actually like secretly ordained by you know Masonic societies and Jews. Which is reactionary. Yes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Which is a way of saying the French Revolution and the reordering of society that remove the feudal, the remnant and the aristocrats or you know, the bourgeois liberal, you know, new world order. He's saying, oh, actually, that's bad. Yeah. That's an imposition from some, you know, uh evil authority that we need to get rid of so we can go back to what, having the king?
SPEAKER_07Well, so he doesn't actually say that. He's actually so what's happened because that stuff was obviously very anti-Semitic. That stuff has become recontextualized. Such a good point. Such a good point, Fredda.
SPEAKER_05Like, I'm I'm sorry, I'm just like, I'm like scoffing because like this is something that I think all of us feel, which is you know what Yugo was saying, which is like if you're an intelligent person, you can't go 10 minutes. Because it is dumb as fuck. I I really I'm sorry to say, but like if you are unlettered, then you know you could probably listen to this stuff and and nod along. But if you've ever done the homework, you're just like your skin is crawling that people are liking this because it doesn't make sense, man. It's not true. Both in form and in content. And you want to scream, you're like, what the fuck? How are people believing this shit?
SPEAKER_04We had a conversation on our on our Discord server before making this this particular episode, and we were comparing him to other reactionaries that we touched on, analyzed, and that we're gonna talk about a lot more in the future, of course. We were like comparing him and and and saying shit like, okay, is this guy more annoying than the other guy? Is this is this like the the shit that the bottom feeders that they drink out of? And in my modest opinion, he really is. Like there is the reason that I never used words like idiots or stupid when talking about the audiences of any of the reactionaries that we covered before, but I do with him specifically is because it is the lowest, uh lowest hanging fruit here. Like the delivery is absolutely horrendous. The transparency towards uh the levels of just pure charlatan is through the roof. His inability to carry through like uh these conspiratorial and reactionary points on the basis of ris or charisma that a lot of other reactionaries that we covered do, the lack of of direct and honest like ideological dedication to a particular cause, even once, that entire package in the reactionary funnel still, of course, makes him a very successful uh reactionary, but one out of all the the bouquet of everybody that we've that we've covered, one that I truly, truly, truly, truly cannot relate to even for a minute. So so that's that's the I'm explaining why I I specifically just said you have to kind of be very stupid because there are also levels of let's say your base of knowledge and your wealth of experience throughout life that will either stop you or encourage you to pursue certain reactionary ideals, right? Particular events that happened, particular like bigoted things that you've been taught by your family, your environment, uh particular like systems of oppression and propaganda that might exist in the particular nation or culture that you live in, etc. etc. And that forms certain either passive or very active reactionary attitudes that you sometimes don't even admit to anybody that you hold in yourself, right? And then that gets potentially picked up by a propagandist or by an organization, and that's when they make you into into quote unquote and fellow active agitator or or member or you know, a fellow storm soldaten or whatever the fuck. But with him, with him particularly, you have to have had such a lackluster life, I'm sorry, so that you you can eat the slop up. Either that or you're just very, very young and naive, which I think is like as both Mike and Freda said, uh, probably most of the people, uh most of the kids listening to this rock and roll professor who's really gonna tell them the truth about the pussy wars. See what I did there? It was the penis wars, now it's the pussy wars.
SPEAKER_07Now the pussy wars. Yeah. Yeah, that's where you're the expert. The fact that Jang actually just rationalizes and completely sidesteps actual evidence for the most part, serves a very important purpose. Especially if we view him as a conspiracy theorist. This sort of system of thinking is what lecturer in psychology, Joe Van Bryford, calls a quote, monological belief system. One that, while looking outwards and seeking to convert the outside world, is in fact engaged in dialogue only with itself. This closed, self-isolating quality plays a key role in sustaining the ideological tradition of the conspiracy theory and ensures its continuity through time. There's an incredible monologue that Jang does when he was interviewed by Sneeko, the Manosphere influencer who pretends to be Muslim. This is not the same interview where Sneeko was talking simultaneously with Jang and Alexander Dugin, the Russian fascist thinker, who we'll cover one day. This was a one-on-one affair, and I just want you to listen to it.
SPEAKER_08I think the greatest secret out there is that the history that we've been taught about evolution, about development of humanity, it's all fake. Okay? So um we have about 10,000 years of human history. That's it. But we know that we Homo sapiens have been around for about 200,000 years, 200,000 years, okay? That's that that's the best estimate. So what are we what are we doing for the rest of this time? Okay, that's that's a question that science has never really answered for us, okay. That's point number one.
SPEAKER_09What number two is that we have some architectural sites that are close to us, okay? So go play Tempe in Turkey, okay? Go play Tempe in Turkey, uh Tempe in Turkey. We've only uncovered 5% of all of it. And we we have so when we haven't uncovered the rest of it. It's not about money issue, it's it's because the truth will destroy the traditional narrative.
SPEAKER_10Then you have uh the Amazon in Brazil, and how we're discovering how the ancient existed in Amazon before. And also, it's just a civilization, but once actually created Amazon. It is a many creation. So so you if you do one first principle, what you recognize is that it's important to destroy it.
SPEAKER_07While he's going on this insane rant, Sneeko is sitting there fighting for his life to keep up and just nodding along. At this point, it might be prudent to at least mention the high school that he used to teach at. It's called Moonshot Academy. It's an international private school in Beijing. And the tuition fee is thirty-five thousand dollars a year. Which I don't know if that's a lot, but it sounds like a lot. Because I it's a crazy amount. Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah, it's it's all free. Especially for China. Yeah, isn't it like mostly free in China too?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it is, yeah. And there's now very specific laws against private tutoring because it creates a crazy imbalance between uh kids that cannot afford private tutoring and kids that can afford private tutoring. So this probably exists in a very this institution exists in a very, very strange limbo. And if it's even a real institution, because who the fuck would hire this motherfucker?
SPEAKER_05I mean the name sounds on its own to be like some sort of like a marabou, yeah, kind of like suspicious name to me. Like, you know what I mean? I'm sorry, Moonshot Academy, that's cringe, that's Elon Musk coded.
SPEAKER_07Oh, the website is also really fucking cringe. The website is horrendously slow for some reason, probably bloated with all sorts of graphics and style stuff. But it seems like your average really fancy high school to me at least. I don't know if he still works at Moonshot Academy, the website's profile for him as a teacher just shows a 404 page not found error. In any case, I went and looked for reviews and people talking about Moonshot Academy, and I found a thread of former teachers and students discussing it on the International School Reviews subreddit. Among a lot of indicators of horrible management and treatment of their employees, one was striking. Quote Most of the teachers that came from Moonshot's side are not qualified teachers. I even have a Chinese friend from outside school who had an interview with them and they offered her a position teaching Chinese politics. She turned it down because she has zero experience at that subject. With that in mind, and if we take Zhang's statements at face value, that these are recordings made of him teaching actual classes, then it makes sense how Jang covers topics that range from natural science to philosophy and history, despite not really being qualified in any of them. Again, he has a Bachelor's of Arts in English from Yale, and that's it.
SPEAKER_04Very Jordan Peterson coded. Sorry for this one, extremely Jordan Peterson coded.
SPEAKER_05Oh, Pearson is actually a professor, though, who has a P you know what I mean? Like, he's way more qualified.
SPEAKER_07True, true, true. But he talks out of his field, yeah. Exactly, yeah, he goes out of his field, of course. And it's it is astounding how much of a reach all of this has. But we've covered Alex Jones at this point. We've talked about Candace Owens, who pushes similar conspiracy theories, like the Frankist stuff. It's clear there's a market for this stuff. And I think Zhang's particular genius is dressing it up as education, standing in front of a whiteboard, or electronic whiteboard, I guess. Much in the same way that Jordan Peterson once did.
SPEAKER_08Even today, evolution is a dominant paradigm, meaning that you cannot question evolution. If you question evolution, it means you're crazy. Okay, but I'm crazy. So we're gonna question evolution today. So you said this in school, but evolution means we came from monkeys, apes, and then there were different species of humans, and eventually the bats species, homosexuals, one out. Okay. So what evolution says is that we are just a monkey guy, okay? We're just a monkey. And what do monkeys do? Monkeys like to have sex, monkeys like to eat, monkeys like to fart. That's all we are. We're just monkeys.
SPEAKER_05So how do we explain his appeal? Is it his confidence? Is it the algorithm? Is it audience being stupid? Thank you. How do we prevent pseudo intellectuals like this? How does any charlatan gain prominence? He got his start on YouTube. Yep. Where at nearly two million subscribers, he has amassed a rather large following. Professor Jang has exploited something that. We have noted a number of times in our discussions on the podcast thus far is the total collapse of traditional gatekeepers. At the same time, he relies on those signifiers of authority that almost all of us are familiar with. The teacher in front of the classroom jotting down lecture notes in a crooked, frenetic style. But I want to be very clear, he is a total fraud. But can everything and all his success really be attributed to a presentation style? How in the hell did he get so damn popular? Well, ultimately, it's a cliche. A broken clock is right twice a day. Over the past year and a half, his geopolitical forecasts spread across social media, especially as a few were considered successful. What were those earth-shattering predictions? There were three of them that I've like highlighted that I think are the main ones that people use to justify him as like some sort of prescient thinker. They are. One, Donald Trump would win the president. Nobody could have seen that go.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Two, the United States would go to war with Iran. And three, and I think this is the most provocative prediction, the United States would lose that war. If you're a longtime fan of mine or of political commentary in general, none of these predictions are especially earth-shattering. Donald Trump was favored in most polling averages, and it was pretty clear that the divisions within the Democratic coalition were imperiling its ability to coalesce. The sitting president was forced to drop out of the race after a disastrous debate, and Kamala Harris only had 107 days to defy that political gravity. This was the political equivalent of calling heads on a perfect coin and getting it right. Not exactly earth-shattering. And it's something that I did. So I deserve 2 million YouTube subscribers now. Yeah, me too, me too, yeah.
SPEAKER_04And my 80-year-old grandmother, she was literally like, they will attack the Iranians. They are very proud people. They will attack them, and also Donald Trump will win because everybody else is pussy or some shit like that. I remember her saying. So there you go. My grandma, uh, you gotta Mike, you gotta split one million for my grandma. One million each couple I do love how she's just like everyone else pussy.
SPEAKER_05I feel like your grandmother would use those subscribers more responsibly than him, if if I'm being completely honest. 100%.
SPEAKER_04I mean, and more responsibly than you as well, yes.
SPEAKER_05Oh, definitely. Anyway, um, so you know, uh, you know, when he made that prediction that Donald Trump would win at the time, many analysts viewed the election as highly uncertain. Jang presented the prediction as part of a broader theory about American political realignment. After Trump's victory, supporters widely shared that clip as evidence that Jang had uh identified trends that mainstream commentators missed. And several media profiles later cited this prediction as one of the foundations of his viral popularity. And let me just say, like, it blows my mind because, you know, obviously I've said this before, and it I'm not trying to brag here, but I did predict 49 out of 50 states. Not only did I predict that Donald Trump would win, I predicted exactly how almost all the states would fundamentally go. Does that make me Notre Damas?
SPEAKER_07No, it makes you that dude with uh the whiteboard on CNN.
SPEAKER_03Holy Toledo, holy smokes, holy cow.
SPEAKER_05They look it makes I yeah, better than they did, uh, you know, like and here's the thing though, like all my predictions were fundamentally conventional. Like I was predicting a specific range of outcomes because I believed certain things, but I was relying on the like widely available evidence. Exactly. And it wasn't surprising, right? I didn't predict that Texas would go to you know Kamala Harris and then Texas went to Kamala Harris in defiance of the polls. No, I predicted that Donald Trump would win Texas, which was completely consistent with the available data. That prediction, in and of itself, is not a sign of like some sort of amazing prescience.
SPEAKER_04Do you have a website? I got a website. No, shut up. Do you have a website? Because he has a website called JiangPredictions.com. Predictions, Mike from Beijing Predictions. Mike from Beijing Predictions. You need to make a site and you need to make it look uh like one of those gambling prediction websites. And you gotta put like a thousand graphs in there, and it needs to say Welcome to the end of the world, Professor Zhang's predictive history. He called the Iran War Trump's Comeback in the Fall of Khamenei, all on camera before they happened. 335 predictions, 88% accuracy.
SPEAKER_05Don't get me started about JagPredictions.com. I'm gonna I'll I'll riff on that more.
SPEAKER_04And then you open the prediction segment, and you can just scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll. But then uh probably was very difficult to make. You have a timeline segment. So in the timeline segment, the predictions are also put in like which is going to happen after which one, right? He he set them up in parts. So there's there's this very, this very uh, I don't know if you ever read the book or books or watched the show Foundation. It's got yeah, it's got this very like, oh my god, I I'm I'm doing history math. Like this event is gonna cause this event, and it's gonna be like a house of cards, yeah, yeah, yeah, dude. But then you go through it and it does not follow the pattern at all. Like it's obvious he went in here and he looked for some that he can say that he confirmed or partially confirmed that were supposed to happen in like part 285, but it have already somehow fucking happened. He said they're gonna happen in 2030 plus that have that have already happened. Like partially happened, Saudi Arabia is pushing the US towards war with Iran, it cannot survive without US fighting Iran for it. This was supposed to happen 20 years and it's happening now. But what I'm trying to say is you are not presentable enough, Mike. None of us are presentable enough. We have not gamified every single thing that we have ever said, we haven't turned it into a graph with percentages, and that is what we're lacking, okay? We're lacking whiteboards, we're lacking graphs, we're lacking old school websites. My guy is very like web Web 1.0. It's uh rather impressive.
SPEAKER_07I'm I'm putting that shit um where I kind of like clock Nick Shirley in like 2021 before he you know was invited to the White House and shit. I'm gonna put that on my website.
SPEAKER_05I think I almost appreciate the Jang Predictions website because it just shows how much of a dope he is. Like, if you just go on to any of these predictions, it'll be like Trump's greater North America is a direct response to Russia's third Rome plan. It's like not yet. Like, what the fuck are you saying? This is just this is almost like uh it's like geopolitical fan fiction. You know, it's it's you know what Zhang should have been? He should have been a Hoy 4 mod writer. Yes.
SPEAKER_07Get him on one of those like Nazi-made mods. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05That's where he really Parts of Hired Four if is a video game that simulates World War II, and there's a fan community that writes mods, which are like modifications to the game, yeah, where you can create alternative histories, right? Or, you know, and you can move them and maybe make them in the future. He should have been writing an alternate fiction, alternative history or alternative future mod for this shit. Because it's just it's just embarrassing, right? Like the broad contours of a US-China grand bargain will be announced by May 15th, 2026. That didn't happen, bro.
SPEAKER_07Yo, dude, fucking he said Putin is preparing for uh Russia for Total War, but he capitalized total and war. Shout out to Creative Assembly, shout out to the Total War series.
SPEAKER_04What you you like? Why are you why are you doing this to yourself? Like you're the guy who added it to the list.
SPEAKER_07This one is awesome. Dubai is dead as a global financial slash luxury city in the long term. Yeah, obviously.
SPEAKER_05Some of his other predictions, trouble pick Nikki Haley. Wrong. Didn't happen, right? Maria Le Pen will govern France within three months. It didn't happen. Like, just like all sorts of that shit he says, and it just goes falls down the right wayside, right? So Donald Trump wins, that's a coin flip, you know, and he gets that right. That's a sign that he's got some deep insight. It's a prediction that literally hundreds of millions of people made, if not billions. And so for me, the fact that people even cite that as some sort of insight is laughably stupid. And, you know, after Trump's victory, his fans were promoting those clips. Now, okay, so the Donald Trump prediction, that can't be an explanation to why so many people care. I think for me, the one that really sticks was that he firmly predicted, to his credit, that the United States would launch a war against Iran, right? And his channel grew dramatically after viewers began circulating clips showing forecasts that seemed prescient when compared to subsequent events.
SPEAKER_07Yeah.
SPEAKER_05In lectures released during 2024, Zhang argued that a future Trump administration would move forward toward military confrontation with Iran. When tensions escalated and military conflict emerged, clips of those lectures have spread rapidly online. And he was called China's Notre Damas. Which is awesome. I think that's part of it, right? Like that prediction that Trump would attack Iran, that was the larger source of his popularity. I mean, if you were watching the 2024 campaign closely, Donald Trump frequently claimed to be a peace candidate who had started no new wars during his first term and promised to avoid new military conflicts.
SPEAKER_01You know, we had no wars. Four years we had no wars, except we defeated ISIS. I was the first president in decades who started no new wars with our victory in November. The years of war, weakness, and chaos will be over. I don't have wars. I had no wars other than ISIS, which I defeated, but that was a war that was started. We had no wars. I could stop wars with a telephone call.
SPEAKER_05So literally dozens of times Trump claimed that we would avoid new conflicts. It is safe to say that it was a consistent and repeated refrain and a signature campaign message. The idea Trump was the peace candidate, the world was more stable at his first term, and that there would be no more wars. That is safe to say, like that Donald Trump promised that. And it's also safe to say that he's completely violated and broken that promise. In June 2026, after U.S. military action in Iran, Trump said in an NBC interview that he didn't guarantee no more and argued that he never promised there would be no conflicts. But what the hell did he actually predict? His prediction was that the United States of America would invade Iran with 100,000 troops joined by 200,000 troops from Saudi Arabia. Did that ground invasion actually happen? And so for me, like even the two predictions, like the first prediction Donald Trump would win, the second prediction the US would go to war with Iran. Now, obviously, I don't think you can take a ground invasion off the table, but the kind of low-level conflict we have that's focused on economic blockade is very different from the war in Iran that Jang actually predicted, which was a ground invasion that would quickly become mired in, you know, guerrilla warfare.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it was supposed to immediately make the American world order like tumble in seconds. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07But yeah, it would collapse the world order, he said. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Now, like if you go on jang predictions.com, their supporters will say he predicted JD Vance would be a strong alternative for vice president. That's not a strong prediction, man. He was much more in the camp of Nikki Haley as the vice president. So he just throws out like nonstop predictions and then cherry picks the ones that plausibly come true. And even when you look at those, they aren't really matched by reality. You know, his supporters have argued that he said that JD Vance would be a strong presidential choice, and when he got picked, that was a sign of his prescience. And so now that these high-profile predictions like came true, so-called, that's really where his popularity comes from. It is the social media clipping phenomenon from fans, and that has developed a feedback loop. Viewers discovered those clips that appeared accurate, they shared them on social media, and then they watched newer lectures looking for the next prediction. And you just created this kind of uh this ecosystem where uh forecasting is made, and then those people who made those predictions gain fame. And when a prediction doesn't come true, the clip doesn't go viral. So all the clips that you actually see are the ones that are matched by reality. So we've created this incentive of throw a bunch of shit against the wall, and whatever sticks leads to greater and greater popularity. And then this leads into, you know, what I would call the creator ecosystem that all of us here that you're listening to participate in. His reputation for correct predictions led to appearances on major podcasts. He had clout, so people wanted that clout, and in a kind of mutually agreeable exchange, he was brought on shows.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, you know, he uh was talking to Medi Hassan and shit. And he's like one of the only people that called him out. Yeah. I have a list on my other monitor of all the people that he was that he was on.
SPEAKER_05Oh yeah, let me hear it. Uh so he was on Tucker Carlson's show. Or several times, actually, yeah. Pierce Morgan, Stephen Bartlett's Diary of a CEO, Crystal Ball and a Sagar on Breaking Points, fans of the show. I love that show, I'm friends. Medi Hassan, although that one was a little bit more skeptical of him.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, that's the only confrontational one I know of. Which is absolutely wild, like the fucking. Yeah. Yeah, because Mehdi Hassan was like calling him out uh at every turn, calling him like anti-Semitic, calling him like, you know, all these things, like being like, you know, are you just like making stuff up? Do you like not, you know, believe in reality, etc.? Like all these things.
SPEAKER_06Just on your uh predictions, I just want to be clear here. Nikki Haley was key to your prediction about Iran. You said Trump would pick her as his running mate and as vice president, she would pressure Trump into war with Iran. She's a notorious hawk. Uh, but he didn't pick her. And his current vice president, JD Vance, is widely seen as a skeptic of this war. So you admit you got that wrong.
SPEAKER_08Yes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_06But on your YouTube page, as people now start to acquaint themselves with you and familiarize with your work, uh, people have been slightly surprised to see some of your other stuff. You have a series of lectures focused on secret societies where you argue that groups like the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Jesuits are at the center of world control.
SPEAKER_08So I'm trying a new approach to pedagogy and to scholarship, which is speculative, uh, which is speculative analysis.
SPEAKER_06Uh you said uh you were at Yale. Uh just to be clear, your degree was in English literature, was it not at Yale? It wasn't in English. Yes. International relations or national security. You're an English lit graduate, and you're not a professor. I know it's your YouTube moniker, but you're a high school teacher. You're not actually a professor.
SPEAKER_08I'm not a professor, but but I never said I was a professor. It's the internet who called me.
SPEAKER_06Hold on, hold on. You don't call yourself Professor Jiang on your YouTube channel.
SPEAKER_08I do now, but when I first started out, if you go way back to my.
SPEAKER_06It doesn't matter when you first started out, you do call yourself Professor Jiang and you're not a professor.
SPEAKER_05And so, like, you know, that list of relatively prominent podcasters has given him like even more of an air of an authority, right? Like, I've appeared on popular podcasts, you know, for my predictions, it leads to a greater exposure to a larger and larger audiences who are, you know, they're expecting that the podcasters are going to exercise some sort of editorial control and not just bring on cranks, right? So that kind of overall creator influencer feedback loop has led to more and more associations with him, with their audiences and the algorithm, which boosts him further when he posts more. And so now, you know, once you have millions of followers, that gives you an air of authority, even if that authority is based off of nothing but bullshit. So by 2026, he's become a reoccurring subject across political YouTube. Like we're literally making a podcast about him because he has enough prominence to become worthy of a show. Yeah, there's nothing to it's just clout.
SPEAKER_07Like the only thing is clout powering more clout. It is.
SPEAKER_04It's like capital making more capital, but it's social capital that works in the same way. What's crazy though is like who gave him the original clout? Who gave him the original spark? And that I believe we to an extent have explained throughout the episode.
SPEAKER_05I mean, it was it was it was his it was his episode that went viral that was calling for the invasion of Iran. Ultimately, for me, the source of like Professor Jang's popularity is that episode, uh, which is Geostrategy Number Eight, the Iran trap, whose predictions we just discussed. Basically, he said the United States was going to attack Iran prior to Donald Trump being elected, which flew in the face of the normal expectation of Donald Trump's presidency and the way that he was able to tack to the left of the Democrats politically by promising to be a peace president. And he has dined out on that single prediction. Even though, when you look in the details, as we've just done, it doesn't really match what he said. There was no ground invasion, at least knock on wood, not yet. And so fundamentally, I think the best way to understand his growth is a matter of his appearance on larger media platforms. He got virality, he was able to pick up an audience. That large audience gave him access to other large creators so that they could cross-pollinate. And through that cross-pollination, he's gained an aura of authority, and he has continued to stand in front of more and more people, spouting what amounts to an educated conspiratorial claptrap. And so, there you have it. That is how Professor Jag got popular.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, it's like the Dr. Phil phenomenon. Like, like someone goes on Dr. Phil and then like now they have like a social media career.
SPEAKER_05So, Hugo, how would you explain his ideological output?
SPEAKER_04To an extent, we've already pretty much covered like 85% of everything that that I would have mentioned in this particular segment. But still, there is a way to wrap it all together. It's kind of like the gritty realism that he's trying to present himself through or the geopolitical grift, as Mr. Daniel Tutt in an article called it. Uh all of this ends up being a, at least to me, a surprising pipeline towards fascistic perspectives about how the whole world works. You see, they're not only preying on the disenfranchised or the angry here, the way most reactionaries do. This platform preys on the naive and the curious. Once you establish him in your mind as a sort of reputable character, after he dropped wisdom on you a few times, swallowing crazy shit, he throws at you later on, carries far greater weight. Because it's not Alex Jones saying it, it's our friendly neighborhood professor, the counterculture professor that tells you that all the other professors actually fucking suck and that you're really, really cool for thinking they do. He's not Nick Fuentes, he's not like a Fox News style pundit yelling about trans people in bathrooms. His register is different, but the structure of the politics lines up with very familiar reactionary patterns, as you heard from the boys and myself throughout this episode.
SPEAKER_07I want to say, like during the the interview with Mediasan, he says that he's always identified himself as being on the left. He always believed in like wealth redistribution, um, he said even individual autonomy, all these kinds of things. He was like, I believe in free speech. Um but then uh he uh kind of concedes that most people consider the ideas that he pushes to be far right, and he finds that kind of sad.
SPEAKER_06Let me ask you this before we wrap up. What are your own politics? Where do you place yourself on the political spectrum?
SPEAKER_08I believe I've always been on the left. Um Um, so I I believe that wealth re redistribution is very important. I believe in freedom of speech. I I am anti-war, I'm anti-empire, I believe in individual autonomy. Um and so unfortunately I used to be left, but I think that like given my uh preferences and given my politics, I believe most people would consider me on the far right nowadays, and that's unfortunate.
SPEAKER_07He might I I don't know if that's like I think he's just putting that on, like because he's talking to Matty Assin and his audience are on the left, right?
SPEAKER_04I'm pretty sure he does, or his definition of what being left-wing, and I'm not saying this is a per-clutching MLMLMM FLMMP from uh fucking Pennsylvania. Not from fucking uh what's the what's the socialist uh fucking city in the states? Virginia, Vancouver, New York. No, not by leadership, but where the annoying leftists are. New York City?
SPEAKER_07Uh Seattle?
SPEAKER_04Seattle, Seattle, Seattle, Seattle. Exactly. I love how all of us knew that.
SPEAKER_05We all knew. Oh, annoying leftists, Seattle, Seattle, Portland. Yeah, Portland, Oregon as well. Fuck, yeah, you're right.
SPEAKER_04Well, poor Seattle. I high hi to all the Seattle people. You guys are lovely.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, just that area. But those are those are anarchist lib types.
SPEAKER_04That's the bit kind of to an extent that they wanted to do, which is even if you're the most like wide tent leftist, you would always look at Mr. Jang and say, uh, bro, you most definitely are not one that shares even the baseline worldviews with us, at least based on what you espouse in your in your particular program. Your particular program where you basically call leftists slaves of Jews that run around and do chaos, because it's I don't know. We love doing that. We love destroying the world one worker's right at a time. It's so fucking evil, right? It's crazy evil. But uh yeah, he's firmly in this entire like civilizational decline type of camp. The idea that Western liberal democracy is decadent, exhausted, and doomed, and that American imperial overreach will be the trigger for systemic collapse. And now this entire sentence that I said to probably 99% of people in our audience is triggering, like, oh yeah, that actually is true. Well, what about the second category? His specific conspiratorial content that plugs directly into the same myth pool as a whole like globalist cabal genre as well. So we might have lost 70% of our audience with that one, but we, if we were pitching the same thing, would have gained a very sizable number in return. Third, his anti Semitism and anti-communism are literally fused together. By tying being a red to a supposedly heretical Jewish sect and by floating Holocaust skepticism, he reproduces the old fascist pairing where Jews are both the masterminds of finance capitalism and the masterminds of revolutionary communism, simultaneously running Wall Street and Beijing. Though in his case he probably wouldn't mention Beijing, but yes. That double bind is a classic of 20th century fascist ideology that he repeats ad nauseum. So calling himself leftist just from that perspective is incredibly absurd because you're doing the most cliche applied form of reactionary politics, one that was unironically practiced in Germany before and during World War II.
SPEAKER_07Joven Biford, the author that I cited earlier, calls it putting old wine into a new bottle.
SPEAKER_04Absolutely. In this case, an old bottle, but yes. Yeah, I guess, yeah.
SPEAKER_07I mean the the Germans put it in a new bottle, and that bottle was the one from the French or sorry, the wine was from the French Revolution. And now, yeah, he's just putting it back in I guess he should he just reached into Hitler's wine cellar and got a bottle, I guess.
SPEAKER_04I love the allegory. Absolutely. The the the but his main focus and what makes him special in my opinion. I always try to pinpoint a very special aspect of a particular pitch, because everybody tries to an extent to be be original and they end up being original intentionally or not. His main focus and even ARC is a kind of strange hyper reactionary spin on multipolarity. For those of you who don't know, multipolarity is usually advocated for by leftists and anti-imperialists who believe a world where no one superpower exists, greater levels of checks, balances, and consequences will exist for all the global players, which should on paper at least limit the amount of harm being done by countries like the US to smaller nations around the world, etc. But he takes that, but basically pitches that American decline is due to how soft America is, and that multipolarity will come because of how hard and quote unquote authoritarian its opponents are. It's a total reversal of the multipolar argument because it agitates against some sort of I guess non-existent, soft liberal American utopia that fucking does literally doesn't exist, and towards the very systems of governance certain countries have as a defense mechanism against the states as something they should pursue. It's really fucking stupid. DLDR America is going to be weak because soft and gay, and Iran strong because religion and no gay. Something we mention every single episode at this point, and towards, in this case, some sort of we need to be stronger, tougher, and rougher, which is exactly what makes you a reactionary. That is what a reactionary is for the one millionth time, taking great and important historical moments in which crises can be co-opted into progress and turning them in the literal opposite direction. And our guy is maybe the most embarrassing version of said reactionary agitation. That's that's what he represents, in my opinion, specifically as an ideological kind of package, a person that taught that does the geopolitical grift in which uh his view towards how different civilizational projects work and why they enter moments of crisis usually happen for a hundred different reasons because he always contradicts himself, but the main overarching one is that power will always prevail, and hence why, as Mike said, like theocratic authoritarianism is the future of the world when we wake up from the liberal softness of our degenerate Western lives, which incredibly soft, like American life known for being in insanely, insanely soft.
SPEAKER_07Yes, very very utopian place that we all yeah, the place where you if you you know fucking scrub your knee, you like might have to fucking take down like out of fucking lonely. Exactly, exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04But that's the TLDR. I would call it if I have to term it something, reactionary multipolarism, which I never thought would exist outside of the mind of Alexander Dugin.
SPEAKER_07Dugan, yeah, exactly. Yeah, ah, fucking real recognize real.
SPEAKER_04But apparently it exists here. Just Dugan, like I've read Dugin, I know Dugan, and we'll have episodes of Dugan.
SPEAKER_07Oh, absolutely.
SPEAKER_04Dugan formulates his thoughts. Sometimes he also goes into absurd ramblings about trans aliens and bio, like whatever the fuck.
SPEAKER_07Did you see the shit where he was talking about? Like he watched like a couple episodes of Euphoria for some reason, and it broke his brain. It broke his brain. God, it was so fucking funny.
SPEAKER_04It was so fucking good. And he keeps getting into beefs online on Twitter with white supremacists because he keeps telling him, No, I fucking hate you people. Like I am a supremacist, but not like your type.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, he's like he's like the white race is gone, or like it's over. You know, I am a I'm a true Aryan, like the Indians and the you know, whatever. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's so fucking funny.
SPEAKER_05Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. You know, it's one of those things that we should probably like have a bit on because the way that whiteness gets people's brains, you know, like everybody is trying to like the whole concept of there being like a c race that's better than other races, everybody instead of rejecting that, everyone's trying to like associate themselves with it. And it's like, what? Like, god damn, you give people something to look down on, then they will empty their pockets for you.
SPEAKER_04Absolutely, I agree with Bruding, but now there's unironic, like, call it ideological hot takes. I don't think they're movements yet, where they they leave the whiteness alone, but they keep the idea that there has to be an ubermensch, like there has to be a super race, and so they're like the Eurasians are actually the superior ones. The whites are soft little dogs that deserve to be killed. And we're just now we're just doing the the whole the whole spiel all over again and all over again and all over again because it means nothing, so it can mean everything, depending on who fucking says it.
SPEAKER_07Exactly. Yeah, back to like the early episodes of the podcast. That's why I'm in favor of La Raza Cosmica. The cosmic race.
SPEAKER_04Let's start with uh let's start with Unitas Mundi only on the planet with our beautiful Homo sapiens, and then we'll talk about fucking being friends with probably like uh 17th legged fucking spider demons from uh the the galaxy over. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_07Like Talosetti for whatever, yeah.
SPEAKER_05No, no, no, no. Uh it's it's it's like some very obscure like uh belief that we should all amalgamate into one like race. You know what I mean? Where it's it's like new, it's like the cover of Newsweek circa 1995, where they'll be like, this is what everyone will look like in the future, and they're all just like, you know what I mean? So like what will happen is we all will just race mix ourselves into one race. It's a it's it comes from like oh god, who what was his name? There was some like Spanish philosopher who was you know arguing against the the eugenesis of the day and social Darwinism. It's like 20, it's like in the 20s, and he was saying, no, we should all mix, and then if we mix, then all the best aspects of each race will be in the super race. So it's like it's like early wokeness. It's like woke race science.
SPEAKER_04I'm gonna get the Brazilian attributes and the Nigerian legs and the Yeah, it's woke race science.
SPEAKER_05It's like if we all combine, we'll all be strong and we'll all be. I was I was gonna repeat racial stereotypes, but I decided against it.
SPEAKER_07I decided to repeat every against repeating racial stereotypes, but like imagine, you know, various No I was gonna I I thought you were gonna talk about the fucking Nordic Nordic aliens, like how like every like American who gets abducted and uh probed by aliens talks about them being like these like tall, white, like super pale, blonde, blue-eyed people, like the Nordic aliens. It's fucking weird. You guys have some stuff going on over there, you should like to figure it out. Mr. Jang is a fraud. That mote is clear. But he's a viral fraud that's listened to by all sorts of people. If you read the comment sections where he's discussed, he has a rabid fan base who treat him like a genius philosopher. In so many ways, he's reminiscent of a calmer, more Chinese Alex Jones, wearing the mask of an educator to spread his conspiracy theories and to grow his cult. And it is kind of reminiscent of a cult. But of course, there's also a deeper connection between Mr. Jang and Alex Jones, one that you might already be aware of if you listen to the last episode. Quoting Joan Biford's book Conspiracy Theories. The idologues of the John Burt Society and similar institutions revived the older tradition of secret society mythology, which characterized the works of Baruel and Robison. The real operators were sought among the inner circles of transnational institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations, which were identified as precursors to a future communist world government. In 1967, more than 150 years after the anti-illuminati literature was first published, Robinson's proofs of conspiracy was reissued in the United States by the John Byrd Society. The Illuminati conspiracy theory, which the John Byrd Society recontextualized to rally support against public institutions, public universities, welfare, and internationalism is the very same conspiracy theory that underpins much of Mr. Jang's understanding of the world. In the interview with Medi Hassan, Zhang said, quote, It is possible I am a useful idiot, and I suspect that there are many entities around the world that would like to amplify my message. With this in mind, I think it's time. Join us again next week for a special episode, not on an individual reactionary figure, but the people who laid the groundwork for much of the modern right wing. Next episode will be on the John Burr Society. Thank you for listening.
