Mike RothschildBesprekingen

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Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories by Mike Rothschild debunks the conspiracy theories surrounding specifically the Rothschild family specifically, and the Jewish people generally. Mr. Rothschild is a season journalist, conspiracy theory expert, and investigative reporter.

As a political junky, and a technologist I got very interested in misinformation and disinformation the last several years. Some of the books were very enlightening, and I’m always happy to learn more.

The book looks at one of the most prominent Jewish families in the world. The word “Rothschild”, to many, is synonymous with the obscenely rich Jews wielding hidden power, instead of a family name. The fact that the Rothschild family itself has a policy not to address these

Over centuries, and probably millenniums, people loved to blame the rich for their own miserable lives, and not much has changed. Add to that rabid antisemitism and you get a fertile ground for conspiracy theories which have festered in our society, and crossed oceans, to this day.

Jewish Space Lasers by Mike Rothschild (no relation) researches and debunks many of these conspiracy theories. The notion that the Rothschilds own the Federal Reserve, made money from both sides of every war, were hidden puppet-masters, and more. The author goes back centuries to find out where these started, and if there is any truth behind them. Unfortunately, many of these falsehoods have been so prominent that they’ve became “fact” by historians including them in their books.

This is why I don’t begrudge many who believe these conspiracy theories. Who has the time to go research things where are “facts” for all intents and purposes. Going back centuries just to figure out that a serious historian included a conspiracy theory without checking. This reminds me of Stacy Schiff’s excellent book about Cleopatra, where she discovered that many other biographers used Shakespeare’s plays about her as a primary source.

The books is very interesting, well-written, and provides useful information for those who wish to counter-argue people who spout these falsehoods.
But beware – you’re not going to make any friends, be appreciated, and most likely not change any minds since believing in such nonsense usually have an underlying resentment to begin with.

This book was, overall, as neat and concise a description of the “Qanon” conspiracy theory / movement as one could hope to find on such a sprawling, contradictory, and dense subject. In its best moments the author manages to write empathetically about people caught up in Qanon while also highlighting how Q is destructive and harmful to its adherents and everyone else. Unfortunately, some stilted writing and repetitive elements and phrases, hold this book back. However, as an introduction to this most complex and impactful of conspiracy theories it’s a great resource. This book would be particularly useful to a reader with a loved one who’s fallen down the Qanon rabbit hole.

Pretty much everything you need to know about Q and the certain climate that it got started.

Pretty much everything you need to know about Q and the certain climate that it got started.

Bailed out after 80 pages. The topic, QAnon, is awful, but I was hoping to read a good and perhaps interesting explanation. The book didn’t seem very good to me. So a book I don’t like very much about a putrid topic? Nope, life’s too sort.

Free from the library.
Very interesting.
Learned alot about this phenomena.
Well written with a good flow to it.

An incredibly informative and readable primer on the QAnon conspiracy theory. The book is divided into three parts: Origins (from when Q started posting to 2019), Escalation (the boom of QAnon due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election), and Fallout (analysis of the group). Rothschild connects QAnon to several other conspiracy theories and really brings out the human aspects of this movement both the believers and those affected by them.

This book provides readers with a good primer of background knowledge about the QAnon movement/cult/conspiracy theory - however you want to define it.

Rothschild doesn't just treat QAnon as a distant object of analysis like other authors (especially academics) might, nor is it treated as an object of ridicule. This, I think contributes, to the book's strengths. As clearly as he can, he breaks down what QAnon is and how it came about. Importantly, he draws out the human aspects of QAnon, both in the people involved and the people whom it impacts.

It's quite a readable book, though I think you need at least some prior broad knowledge about what QAnon is to get a good handle on the book - or at least, the political environment in the United States immediately prior to, during, and immediately after the Trump administration.

At times, the structure does feel quite disjointed (eg. here's a crime that a QAnon follower committed, and then here's another, and another) which breaks up the flow of the reading, but it wasn't a big deal for me.

What was more concerning to me was the quality of some of the arguments Rothschild touches, like an implication that the French Yellow Vest Movement (gilets jaunes) is associated with QAnon and a comparison between QAnon, al-Qaeda, and radicalization.

To be fair, these claims are brief and maybe tangential to the content of the book itself. And, maybe I'm just not as well-versed on either topic as I'd like to believe. Still, since they were included, I wish Rothschild elaborated on some of these claims more to back them up because both were a bit tough to believe. With the gilets jaunes for example, while some individuals may be inspired by Q, to say that the entire movement directly took inspiration from Q is a stretch. And I'm still not sure how QAnon and al-Qaeda can be directly compared to one another given their numerous basic differences.

Still, if you're interested in reading about politics (specifically American politics) from a popular non-fiction angle, this is an excellent choice.

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Comprehensive and informative. And contains actual primary source material, unlike some books on this topic.

I have a sick fascination with the phenomenon, though one level removed: I don't engage with the toxic source material but I do enjoy its trainspotters in the Q Anon Anonymous and the Conspiratuality podcasts.

This is one of the few attempts at a history of Q-Anon that acknowledges the origins of Q-Anon properly and puts the phenomenon into the context of other right wing conspiracy theories, including Nesara pyramid schemes and thousand year-old blood libel antisemitism. It also does a great job of tracking its evolution from NEET internet nazis to hardened conspiracy weirdos to facebook boomers and then instagram wellness gurus.

The gripe I have, and it is major, is the author's repeated use of "anarchy" or "anarchic" to describe 4Chan, 8Chan, its frequenters, etc. It's just incredibly sloppy use of language. Where these folks politically self-identify, they self-describe as fascists, "libertarian" capitalists, national socialists, patriots, nationalists. They crave and preen for order at all cost of human life and dignity, not anarchy. Aside from self-descriptions, these are people who share child pornography which only exists because of a society based on ageist heteropatriarchy, trade in vigorously white supremacist memes, and engage in hero worship about heads of state. They explicitly call for military dictatorships, for the police to gun down people in the streets, for the military to take control of civilian life. This is not a state of anarchy, this is a very specific and highly curated order of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy: the disgusting underbelly of our current society, as far from anarchic as you could imagine. To call this anarchy or anarchic is a complete misnomer.

You'll feel like a Q expert by the time you are done with this book. Great book and definitely not a waste of your time.