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The Dead Popes' Society
26 Plays6 years ago
In this episode Josh and M talk about the various conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Pope John Paul I, one of the Roman Catholic Church's shortest lived pontiffs. They also talk a lot about dog-whistle racism in recent U.S. politics, and reference both the works of Julian Sands and William Shatner. It's just a perfectly normal episode of The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy.
Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJEp7xTcFU3hc2W0kfdSvAQ
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Transcript
Introduction & Humorous Conspiracies
00:00:00
Speaker
This week, on the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, we return to Catholicism. It's Catholic conspiracy theories too! Pope harder! Pope-inator too! Judgment day. Or Pope-Pope too, Pope in the city? Pope too! When he comes, he'll tear your world apart. That's the tagline to Warlock too, isn't it? Yep! The film with a poster of Julian Sand's hand outstretched with glowing white goo in the centre? Yep. If we were crass, we'd comment on that.
00:00:29
Speaker
We certainly would. We'd really hammer the joke home. We would pound it out. But I'm fairly sure we've mentioned that poster and tagline on the podcast before. So rather than slap you with it like a meat sausage. Because after all, we are genteel folk. We're just going to move right along. So with that, Pope. The Revenge. Pope 2. The Wrath of Khan. Khan?
00:00:58
Speaker
the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy.
Host Introductions & Polyamory Jokes
00:01:03
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. It's a sunny afternoon here in Auckland, and you were joined as usual by Josh Addison and Dr. N. Dinta. That is correct, you are joined by us. Psychically, Physically, Geographically. In the bonds of Holy Matrimony.
00:01:20
Speaker
Not just yet, but that is coming. So there will be marriage vows. And we'll all just have a lovely polyamorous relationship together. Polyamory with conspiracy. What more does a person need? Can't think of anything.
Catholic Church Conspiracy Series Overview
00:01:33
Speaker
So this week, we're going popey again. We had a bit of popiness last week, but a popitude. We're kind of doing series. We did two episodes on China. Now we've got two episodes on the Catholic Church. Where will we go next in our two episode extravaganza? Who knows?
00:01:50
Speaker
as you do know we're doing a book review next week it's going to be exciting so I guess it means we have to do a book review the week after that as well basically oh actually the thing is I've got another book so actually we do have another book we can do after next week this is just
00:02:07
Speaker
a plot of yours to make me read isn't it it is see the thing is josh doesn't like reading josh likes to look at still images and frames on a page you call them kumik books something like that kumik books he's very fond of kumik books and kumik book writers and i like to give him to read the occasional word that isn't a script or notes for this podcast not all still in the blood that's a well-known fact
00:02:32
Speaker
That is true, but thin blood is good blood. Thick blood clogs
Was Pope John Paul I's Death a Conspiracy?
00:02:37
Speaker
up the arteries. That's why people have heart attacks, because they don't read enough to thin the blood out. Also, take three leeches every day. Up the anus. I do well.
00:02:48
Speaker
I'm doing it right now. Of course you are because we always put our anal leeches in before we record the pumpkin. This is going to be a very weird direction. Maybe we should return to the Pope? Yes, let's return. From anal leeches to the Pope. It's a natural progression experience by human beings since time immemorial. Can we move on? Yes, I think we'd better do that right now.
00:03:15
Speaker
Right, so we have moved on. Last week we talked about conspiracy theories in general in the Catholic Church, and at the end of it we had to mention the fact that when old Pope John Paul I died 33 days into his papacy, that itself spawned too many conspiracy theories to go through in one section of one part of an episode, and so we said we'd probably do it next week, and next week is this week!
00:03:38
Speaker
this now we are a few days late due to complicated difficulties not due to the catholic church trying to stop us from making this episode they just don't care to me all the assassins of poke john the first whoops stopping us from yeah so but we we've managed to
00:03:55
Speaker
fend off papal assassins and anti-papal assassins to bring you this exciting story about the death of Pope John Paul I, the prequel to Pope John Paul II, who was a rather lengthy pope, rather lengthy pope. He had some good staying power, that pope. And then it was Benedict, and then it was the latest one, or was there someone in between?
00:04:23
Speaker
Yeah, so we get Beers, then we've got cahubabuch, and I'm fed you we get Pope John E. Lee Miller next. Right, okay. Now actually, what's interesting about this, and this is something which Beers pointing out, the reason why we had such a long papacy with Pope John Paul II, he was a young pope. He was a relatively young man elected to the throne of St Peter to become the pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. Traditionally, not always, but traditionally, popes have been older men. Yes.
00:04:52
Speaker
And it's kind of thought to be a feature that one way to make sure the papacy and the church continues to modernize and become vibrant and alive in its community is you elect old men to the throne of St Peter because they're more likely to die and thus you're more likely to get generational change quite quickly.
00:05:13
Speaker
And that was what was interesting about Pope John Paul II, who was taken to be a rather interesting pick at the time, but of course ended up becoming quite a conservative pope long term because we were stuck with one person the entire time.
00:05:29
Speaker
But when it comes to popes, the term conservative and liberal, it's sort of on a sliding scale, isn't it? I mean, the latest pope is quite a liberal pope. But still actually very conservative. He's just a liberal conservative, which is one of those things which sometimes the mind just has to do hopes to try and work what's going on. But he is. He's a liberal conservative. But still very conservative. Yes. But actually, when I was in Bucharest, my Italian flatmate was going, oh,
00:05:58
Speaker
Oh, Papa Francis, everybody thinks he's so great because he's liberal compared to Pope John Paul II, but he's still actually a really, really reactionary, regressive person. Yes, as I say, a sliding scale, I suppose. Amorphous. But John Paul I,
00:06:17
Speaker
never really got to see much about him at all because he died awfully quick. I think people had said he wasn't as educated as some of the popes before him. He didn't sort of have the intellectualism of a lot of them that apparently was just a jolt, a belly nice fellow. Yes, I suppose in some respects there's some analogy here to Pope Francis.
00:06:38
Speaker
who is taken to be a jolly nice fellow, except that Francis is actually quite well educated. Yes, but anyway, John Paul I. So he was found dead on the morning of the 29th of September in 1978, when I was two years old. Coincidence?
00:06:55
Speaker
I was only one. Now that's a coincidence. Just this conspiracy, it's turtles all the way down. Popes all the way down. It's just papacy after papacy after papacy. Funny how that works. So the official finding was that he'd probably died. He died of a heart attack, which probably had happened
00:07:14
Speaker
the evening beforehand. He was found lying in bed with his reading light still on with a book by his side, so it seemed he'd just sort of died suddenly while reading in bed before going to sleep that night. But there... Do we know what the book was? Well, well, that's one of the things. We'll get to that in a minute. But conspiracy theories started popping up fairly quickly, partly simply because he'd died so quickly that people thought that seems a little bit weird.
00:07:43
Speaker
Not withstanding the fact that popes are old men and old men do die. The older you get, the more likely you are to die.
Theories on Pope John Paul I's Death
00:07:53
Speaker
Older men are very likely to die compared to young men. Not that young men don't die, it's that older men die more often.
00:08:01
Speaker
So there was the shock, basically, the suddenness. I've heard stories of people from the time who showed up somewhere, the prior Pope Paul VI, who we might mention briefly, and we did talk about last time, Paul VI had died, and then just a month later
00:08:19
Speaker
John Paul I dies, and so there are stories of people, this is the 70s, obviously no internet news, travelled a bit slower, showing up to a place and being told, the Pope is dead, and they're like, yeah, yeah, we know, it was a month ago, no, no, no, this one's dead as well, and being quite shocked. But then there are also our good old friend discrepancies in official reports. How many times have we seen this in other things?
00:08:43
Speaker
It is indeed a feature of many a conspiracy theory, especially initial reports, which are taken to be discrepant with reports after the fact. And there's a quite interesting psychology going on here. And that for some reason, people think initial reports should be trusted more than subsequent reports.
00:09:01
Speaker
And yet, as we know from media reporting, initial reports are more likely to be filled with error for the sheer fact that initial reports are often rushed to the desk, and so people aren't verifying things. It's only later on that people go, I know that they said there were three suspects, but all the other witnesses say two. So we have to assume that first report is erroneous in some sense.
00:09:26
Speaker
But of course, that then becomes a discrepancy. Why were they reporting three suspects and now they're only saying two? Well, they're only saying two because, in retrospect, one of those initial reports looks like it was an error.
00:09:42
Speaker
And so that's what we see here. There are discrepancies in the various accounts of his death that came out over time. So there are things like who was it, who found him. In some reports, he was found by his secretaries who came to check on him in the morning. The Papal Nuncio. The Papal Nuncio. Isn't it a Shakespearean character?
00:09:59
Speaker
I suspect, well, there'll be, there'll be nuncios in Shakespeare. That's the context, I know that. It's a role, it's people's secretary basically. Popes. So it was either some secretaries or possibly some nuns in the Vatican. Nuns in the Vatican? Supposedly, I think I believe the official story now is that it was
00:10:23
Speaker
a nun who usually left a cup of coffee out for him in the morning, knowing he usually rose around that time. He was an early riser, a quarter past five in the morning or something. And when she looked in and saw that he hadn't picked up his coffee, she checked on him, found him dead, called another nun and they raised the alarm.
00:10:40
Speaker
So there was the question of who found him. Then your question about the book he was found holding. Apparently the title of that book changed from retelling to retelling. I didn't bother actually writing it down now. It was something religious-y. I can't remember what exactly. Holy blood, holy grail? Probably. Oh my god, my entire career is based on a lie. Oh well, better die.
00:11:07
Speaker
But simply the fact that at one point people were saying he'd been reading one book and then at a later time people said he was reading another book was again jumped on as a ha ha. And apparently there was some question I haven't in my limited reading preparing for this I didn't actually see an official
00:11:22
Speaker
wording on it but there was apparently some question about the autopsy or whether or not one had been conducted and when and where and how and so on. So that's one and then there are also conspiracy theories founded on the fact that this pope had some views which as we say were you know were liberal for a pope. He was
00:11:43
Speaker
uh apparently he was he was sympathetic to contraception in in that sort of head i believe he'd spoken about uh in in famine-stricken countries where there weren't enough you know too many mouths to feed and so on he was sort of sympathetic to the idea that people might actually turn to contraception to make sure they weren't having more children than they could feed um he was questioned on it was around this time when artificial insemination was becoming a thing
00:12:10
Speaker
And he was questioned on that and he basically said, yeah, I don't have a problem with it. Sort of, you know, God made us. We're doing it. You know, it's it's not like, you know, we're not we're not creating artificial life forms or something. We're just taking a natural process and doing it slightly differently with robots and needles and all sorts of stuff. So these conspiracy theories started to come around. So do we do we start with the detailed ones or just the general catch all wackiness?
00:12:38
Speaker
I say we'll do the catch all and then move on to the details. Yeah, because there's I mean there were there are some common threads that come through some of them. Freemasonry and we saw that last time and we were talking about old, old Cardinal Ciri getting shafted out of the papacy on more than one occasion was all because of those Freemasons. So apparently there are numerous conspiracy theories saying oh yeah it was the masons that did it. Now of course the masons did it thing
00:13:04
Speaker
gained a certain amount of credibility after the P2 scandal, the banking scandal, where we had Calvino being associated, particularly with British Masons. And so the Masons were kind of involved in the Papal Hierarchy, or at least being used by members of the Papal Hierarchy, made people go, ooh,
00:13:26
Speaker
This whole Freemasons in the church thing, which have always kind of laughed off as being ridiculous, there is something to it. But it's one thing to go, there was a banking scandal, and that was a conspiracy to Freemasons in our response over every bad thing that happens to a post.
00:13:42
Speaker
Yes, so this banking scandal we'll come back to shortly because that did feature in some of the more thought out conspiracy theories. But we had Masons, we had references to the Fatima prophecies. Oh, yes, which of course Benedict was also involved in. Was he? So there's a conspiracy theory about the previous Pope, the living previous Pope Benedict. When was the last time a Pope actually retired prior to Benedict?
00:14:08
Speaker
It doesn't normally happen, does it? Yes, a few hundred years ago. It's not particularly common. So people be aware there were these three prophecies delivered apparently by the Virgin Mary at Fatima to a set of children.
00:14:24
Speaker
Two of the prophecies were made public, the third prophecy was kept under seal, there were rumours going around the prophecy referred to either the destiny or fate of the church, the number of popes that were left in the papal reign, things like that.
00:14:44
Speaker
Basically, Pope Benedict, before he became a poet back when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, was responsible, along with Pope John Paul II, for the revelation of the Third Fatima Prophecy. So Pope John Paul II made public what the Prophecy said.
00:15:01
Speaker
said, but there's a conspiracy theory going on there that when Ratzinger saw what the prophecy said, he and Pope John Paul II had to create an alternate version of the Third Prophecy of Fatima so that the information wouldn't get out. Now the suspicion is by people who hold to the conspiracy theory about what's in this still sealed Third Prophecy is that the prophecy refers to how many popes are left
00:15:30
Speaker
which has either led to the claim that we're up to our very last Pope now with Pope Francis, the final Pope, or we've already had our final Pope and we have anti-Popes in charge now, that the official lineage of Peter is over and done with, and the Church is now basically alive, being controlled by Satan or Freemasons.
00:15:50
Speaker
So yeah, there was some suggestion that this mysterious third Fatima prophecy referred to John Paul I in some way, and he was killed either to thwart the prophecy or possibly to fulfill it. We don't know exactly what it said in accordance to the prophecy.
00:16:06
Speaker
There's talk of the tridentine mass. I don't know what that is. That's the Latin mass. Right. So I think Paul VI had moved away from that. And there was a talk that John Paul I was going to bring it back. And some people didn't like that for some reason, although I understand Benedict brought it back eventually himself.
00:16:27
Speaker
Well, Benedict allowed the Latin Mass to be celebrated, so basically one of the big things that happened in the second half of the 20th century in Roman Catholicism was moving away from the Mass in Latin to the Mass in the Vulgate, so basically performing the Mass in the language of your country.
00:16:46
Speaker
And there were certain conservatives who felt that the new Mass was illegitimate and didn't have the right stamp of approval, despite the fact that actually the Latin Mass, as was practiced in the early part of the 20th century, the Tridentine Mass, was a modification of even earlier other Latin Masses. The Masses changed a lot over time, but people are very conservative in the Catholic Church when it comes to change.
00:17:13
Speaker
Yes, so there was some, and indeed, to the extent that people thought it could have actually been a legitimate motive for murder, the idea that this Tridentine Mass being re-established might be enough to kill someone over. But those are all, they're sort of variations. They really are. It's a Catholic First World issue. Oh my god, they're changing the mass. This pope must die. Have you seen John Mulaney's stand-up routine? No, I have not. I think he won awards for it, I believe.
00:17:42
Speaker
There's a section where he talks about how he went home to meet his family, I can't remember what the occasion was, and then sort of not being a very good Catholic, hadn't been going to church much, but had been telling his family, oh yes, of course I'm going to church every Sunday, and then there's a bit where they do the, what does the peace be with you?
00:17:59
Speaker
And also with you, which now they've changed. There's a new response to that. I've been a Latin Catholic for quite some time. That's his point. So they say, you know, peace be with you. Everyone in the church says one thing except for him who says... Who shouts it out. And also with you. And then sort of has a routine about, you know, obviously in the Roman Catholic Church, they've been sitting around saying, that's the thing that needs fixing in the Roman Catholic Church. And also with you, it sounds clunky, we've got to replace it. But anyway.
00:18:26
Speaker
It's actually a good routine, look it up. Four Catholics, even lapsed Catholics, one of the greatest issues in the Star Wars franchise is whenever anyone says, may the force be with you, Catholics can't help but go and also with you. But anyway, that's why the Catholic Church changed it, so that Catholics wouldn't do that anymore. Every time they've watched Star Wars, that's a good idea.
00:18:49
Speaker
But anyway, so on to the more detailed, more possibly thought-out conspiracy theories, I suppose. The ones that people have literally written books on.
David Yollop's Murder Claims
00:19:01
Speaker
So the first major one that I'm aware of came in 1984, so that's what, six years after his death. British crime author by the name of David Yollop wrote a book called In God's Name.
00:19:13
Speaker
And so his theory was that John Paul I had been murdered to stop him from exposing corruption and freemasonry within the Vatican. So this sort of stuff that you mentioned a minute ago. There was this banking corruption, this big, big, what would you call it, a fear,
00:19:33
Speaker
yeah the calvino affair so basically the church runs a bank the Vatican bank well actually what is it the uh institution for religious management or something but my name is a mario
00:19:50
Speaker
Oh, known colloquially as the Vatican Bank, so we'll call it that. And so because the Roman Catholic Church is a gigantic institution which has offices basically in every single country in the world, and every Catholic Church gives some money back to the diocese, the bishopric, but also to Rome,
00:20:13
Speaker
that Vatican has to run a bank, basically, to manage all of those funds. It's one of the longest standing banks in Western history. And it's been racked with corruption scandals for a very long time, because it turns out that the kind of people who handle the vast sums of money the Catholic Church have sometimes aren't doing it in service of their God.
00:20:40
Speaker
Not entirely, no. So this particular scandal involved the head of the Vatican Bank, one bishop, Paul Marcinkis, and Roberto Calvi of the Italian bank, Banco Ambrosiano. So apparently the Vatican Bank had invested heavily in Banco Ambrosiano. That bank collapsed, costing the Vatican Bank around a quarter of a billion dollars, apparently, in 1982. Yeah, which is an 82 money that's gigantically gigantic.
00:21:09
Speaker
So yeah, Marcinkis was indicted, and then things become more murky because it turns out that Calvi was a member of this P2 propaganda duet, which was an illegal Italian Masonic Lodge. Yes, a Catholic Masonic Lodge. Because its Masonic Charter was withdrawn in 1976. I don't know what you have to do to get your Masonic Charter withdrawn, but they did it.
00:21:33
Speaker
And so, to begin with, it was basically kind of a secret society. It was this sort of secret, not really official Masonic Lodge, but a Masonic Lodge. And so the whole affair became very murky. Kelvie committed suicide, allegedly, not long after the corruption came out, so did his secretiary. And in both cases, that was... Now, the way he committed suicide, I'm pretty sure, was Blackfriars Bridge in London. He hung himself with bricks in his pocket.
00:22:03
Speaker
in a way where it didn't look as if he'd actually done it himself. So it was put forward as suicide, but the way that he kind of hung himself upside down by his feet with bricks in his pocket looked
00:22:19
Speaker
quite a lot like murder or at least many people think it was murder and there's a really really good tv movie of this by of all people the comic strip presents called spaghetti hopes i do not know it it's really really good it's black and white and it's basically a look at hot calvi as kind of a blundering idiot who gets into
00:22:45
Speaker
the wrong things at the wrong time but also quite a grim comedy given it ends with him committing suicide or being murdered at Blackfriars Bridge in London. And so then yes his secretary also apparently committed suicide at around the same time and also under somewhat suspicious circumstances because there was also not only Masonic insinuations but there were also suggestions that he was tied to the mafia and so that this was a which because it's
00:23:12
Speaker
Italy is not out of the question. So a banking cartel in the mafia in Italy. So David Yolopin, his book in God's name, he named six men in particular, three in the church and three of the sort of banking slash mafia types as conspirators in the death. So he named as well as Bishop Marsinkis, he named Archbishop John Patrick Cody of Chicago,
00:23:39
Speaker
The claim is that supposedly John Paul I was about to force him into retirement and so he harbored resentment there. Apparently Cardinal Jean-Marie Villeau had some form of theological differences with him and therefore wanted him gone.
00:23:54
Speaker
And the big claim, sort of the big central claim in Yalip's book and the claim that he had most wanted people to investigate and find out whether or not was true or not, was that when John Paul I was found, he had found clutched in his hand a piece of paper which named various members of the Roman Curia as either Freemasons, corrupt in some way, or in some way involved with laundering money for the Mafia. Now of course, members of
00:24:23
Speaker
Is it the Roman Catholic Church in general, or just the higher ups and the Vatican aren't allowed to be Masons? It's complicated in that it's commonly believed that Catholics are not allowed to be Masons, and at some points in time there have been Church edicts saying quite deliberately, don't be a Mason. At other points there's been edicts saying, well, we just don't care, which is complicated by the fact that
00:24:50
Speaker
Many English forms of Masonry won't admit Catholics because Masonry you have to believe in a higher power of some kind to be a Mason But you also have to have allegiance to the master Mason and we're getting back to what we discussed last week Catholics apparently can't be trusted to to serve anyone other than the Pope. Yes. Yes the whole chestnut so
00:25:16
Speaker
Yes, I mean, so there was this claim that John Paul I had the dirt on a number of senior figures within the Vatican and was killed because of it. But in the reading, I have not read in God's name because books give you cancer. They thin the blood. Your cancerous blood. They thin out the cancer.
00:25:35
Speaker
No, wait, that makes it sound like a good thing. You should be reading more books. But all the reading that I've done basically just talked about this motive stuff, all the ideas around the reasons why someone might have wanted to kill John Paul I, but very little talk about how they killed him, for instance, how you murder someone in the Vatican. I mean, I suppose if it was one of the higher ups that did it themselves, they would have the ability to sneak around. Well, I mean, given he died of a heart attack,
00:26:04
Speaker
You can always do some sort of poison thing in the or strict nine, both of which will cause heart attack like stuff. Symptoms. That's what I was looking for. Yes. So that is the biggest theory that I'm aware of. So five years later, 1989, John Cornwell, who's another British author, also a journalist, also a diplomat, I think.
John Cornwell's Counter Arguments
00:26:24
Speaker
published his book, A Thief in the Night, which was basically a counter to in God's name. He argued against most of Yollip's points and while he does argue for a conspiracy, his version is a much more benign conspiracy. So he, as we said, he looks at a lot of these discrepancies that Yollip among other people pounced on and basically just said, yes, poor communication, you know, immediately after an event as
00:26:51
Speaker
significant is the death of a pope. There's lots of, you know, lots of gaps in knowledge, lots of competing information going back and forth. Nobody quite knows exactly what's going on. And that's just results in these discrepancies, especially some of the more major ones, like supposedly
00:27:07
Speaker
There was a claim that undertakers were called for to take to remove his body at five o'clock in the morning, and yet supposedly he hadn't or had only just been found at five o'clock in the morning. So that seemed much too early for someone would have had to have known in advance, essentially, to have called the undertakers at that time. But supposedly that in this particular instance, that was a typo and the undertakers were called at five p.m. that night. So that's that's just simple misunderstanding.
00:27:35
Speaker
But Cornwall's own theory, and which does account for some of these discrepancies, is that rather than having a heart attack at around sort of 11 o'clock or something late at night on February the 28th, he believed that the Pope had died somewhat earlier than that, had been found there, and then had been posed in bed to be found the next morning.
00:27:57
Speaker
And so the reasons for that were, in one instance, to sort of make it look like the pope was in better health than he had been, essentially, because, as we'll get into, he had had some sort of health scares, apparently. And so if those had sort of been proven right, that would have been a worse look than if he had just died suddenly in a way that nobody could have predicted.
00:28:24
Speaker
But in particular, yes, he had—that night, apparently, the night that he died, he had supposedly complained of chest pains. A night or two beforehand, he had also complained of chest pains. And at the time, his secretaries had said, oh, should we summon a doctor? And he's like, no, no, no, don't worry, I'll be fine. And so part of this conspiracy theory is that these secretaries were sort of wracked with guilt. Oh, no, if only we had made him see a doctor. If only we had done something, he might have lived.
00:28:47
Speaker
And so they sort of made a point of making it look like he'd died much later at night when no one was around, so there's nothing anyone could have done. It's a, you know, it's a conspiracy theory of a sort, it's kind of a cover-up, but a much less malevolent one than he was killed by Mafia, Freemason, Nazis, I assume. And the thing is, when a Pope dies, there's quite a lot of rigmarole around what happens immediately after the death,
00:29:14
Speaker
as you basically shut down the church and get ready for the election of a new pope, including the body needs to be visited by the senior cardinals who are in the Vatican at the time. There's the breaking of the papal ring, which the pope wears to show that that papacy has ended. So you can imagine a situation where you discover the pope is dead and then go,
00:29:38
Speaker
We need a few more hours to just set a few things up to have the right kind of photo opportunity. So he's not currently dead. I mean, he's cold in his bed, but he's not actually dead yet. I mean, we'll find him in a few hours and then the smooth machinery of Papal Government will come into effect and the papacy will look grand.
00:30:02
Speaker
So, I mean, that's his sort of argument against. And since then, I mean, there have been more recent books. There was one whose title I don't have in front of me right now just talking about the moments, the time immediately after his death. And that was the one, I think, that sort of solidified the claim that it was these two nuns who found him and not the secretaries. I should say, of course, that the secretaries stringently deny Cornwall's theory that they, you know,
00:30:31
Speaker
had fudged the details around the Pope's death in part to make themselves look a bit better. But there's been another book by a name called Lucian Gregore, which came out just last year, I think, yes, The Vatican Murders.
00:30:48
Speaker
Which is basically about the banking scandal again, and I assume these suspicious suicides and so on.
Vatican Banking Scandal & CIA Involvement
00:30:59
Speaker
So he agrees with David Yollop. His book, being a lot more recent, has more detail, but it's basically more detail about the banking scandal. So he goes much further into the corruption and the details of the scandal there.
00:31:12
Speaker
He also brings the CIA into it. What conspiracy theory is complete without the CIA? So he believes that these conspirators brought the CIA into the mix and it was CIA assassins who actually offed John Paul I, the CIA's motivation being that supposedly the Vatican at the time was quite sort of
00:31:32
Speaker
sympathetic to the extent of being subservient to the United States and the CIA were worried that maybe John Paul I might change things and make it slightly less subservient to the United States. Which of course fits into all the conspiracy theories about the CIA meddling in South American countries, which of course it turns out they actually did.
00:31:55
Speaker
So you can kind of go, I mean it sounds ridiculous, but at the same time, also not outside the bounds of probability. Yes. And so that's all I have on the death of John Paul I. There are some interesting issues with this. You say that's all you have, that was quite a lot. Well it was, yes. But there is, as we say, there have been books written, and I've just spoken for what, 20 minutes or something, so I'm sure that there is more that could be said.
00:32:19
Speaker
Now, last week you mentioned the death of Pope Paul VI, his predecessor, being slightly dodgy. I haven't seen... No, I was just talking about John the Tw... Oh, the one who called the first successor. Yeah, the one who set up the Vatican II reforms. And so, when he died, this wasn't a major conspiracy theory, but when he died, people went...
00:32:42
Speaker
You know, if I was thinking of a motivation for engineering a death, liberalising the church was a Vatican II reform. That seems like the kind of thing that maybe conservatives in the church might have wanted to do. So there was just a suspicion at the time he died, in case of...
00:32:59
Speaker
Did he die naturally? Or were there conservative forces going, no, you're going too far? And of course, what's interesting about this particular hypothesis is that with the election of Pope John Paul II, we had a kind of slowing down of the Vatican II reforms. So we had a slightly more
00:33:20
Speaker
conservative cardinal come into power and many of the Vatican II reforms have actually never been enacted. So it kind of fits the theory that, well, maybe they killed the person who started the reforms to try and stop any more reforms from happening.
00:33:36
Speaker
So again, motive, motive, motive. Seems to be what most people talk about. No, I mean, I had a quick look at Pope Paul VI. Apparently he was the first pope in modern times to be accused of being gay, which I suppose in certain circles is reason to kill him to, if you are exceptionally homophobic and there are some exceptional homophobes out there, or if you don't want to scandal.
00:33:58
Speaker
Apparently at one point Pope VI gave a bit of a homily during which he condemned homosexuality and at that point a French writer and diplomat by the name of Roger Perfete said that Paul VI was a closeted gay and so there was some talk about that but that was the only sort of controversies I could find out around him.
00:34:19
Speaker
He felt so gay in a papally way. He might as well be king of the Catholic Church. But anyway, so that's our foray into the dead po-whips society. I think that works. It pretty much works. I am going to slap you to death after this.
00:34:37
Speaker
My favourite joke from 30 Rock is when Pete, the head writer, says, I used to be a teacher. You know, when I taught, I was like Robin Williams and did Poet Society, by which I mean I got fired. Completely irrelevant to this topic, but it's one of my favourite jokes. And actually also relevant to this topic, but just thinking about the rigmarole around the death of Pope John Paul I, I re-watched the Kipper and the Court.
00:35:00
Speaker
the Great Forty Towers second season episode where they discover someone who is dead, or they say discover Basil serves him breakfast. It's only when Polly comes in to deliver milk for his tea that she realises that the guy was dead and Basil was just completely and utterly unaware. So I'm imagining a version of the death of Pope John Paul I.
00:35:24
Speaker
where the Nuncio came in, you know, fiddled around with things, served breakfast, walked out, and it was only someone who walked, came in a few minutes later to deliver the newspaper, okay, so he's dead. My God, that was so sick! It's been cold for hours, how didn't you notice? Let no one, no one should know that I made this mistake. He's died just now. Yep, you heard it, Basil Faulty killed the Pope. Yes. John Clace. I'll catch you, John Clace. And now, the news.
00:35:53
Speaker
Breaking, breaking, conspiracy theories in the news.
00:35:59
Speaker
It's news time, which means a quick update on what's happening in the various Reddit conspiracy theory forum. Girls who drink pumpkin spice beverages are actually surveillance drones sent by the government. Can the caravan be an inside job? And one which tickles my own fancy is Demolition Man. Excellent film. Showed us what the elite has been doing for the past century and what it means for those of us who are awake. And now...
00:36:23
Speaker
Crypto anti-Semitism. Not that we're engaging in crypto anti-Semitism, if we are so crypto that it's hidden even from us. No, we're talking about instances of crypto anti-Semitism elsewhere. Doubtless you'll be aware that there was a shooting in a US synagogue last week, the Tree of Life Temple. President Trump's response to it was basically to say that if someone had had a gun at the BRIS, things would have turned out differently.
00:36:46
Speaker
As Lord Doth say to Noah, always carry a handgun when worship is necessary. Fairly sure that was Samuel L Jackson and he was playing a character. I'll never forget his turn as a burning bush in 10 things I hate about Commandment. Not a real film, but it is a real trailer.
00:37:01
Speaker
Anyway, in the weeks leading up to the shooting at Tree of Life Temple, Trump, or whoever writes his speeches, and gives him his buzzwords, has been engaging in what really does look like dog whistle racism. Dog whistle racism is where someone says something racists are primed to hear as supporting their racist views, even though what has been said could be explained away as just an innocuous comment.
00:37:25
Speaker
Trump has been talking about how, at heart, he's a nationalist first and a globalist second, that the US will deal with globalists after they fix up national concerns, and how he's not meant to say he's a nationalist, but he's going to anyway. As other commentators have pointed out, this kind of rhetoric is not just dog-whistle racism, as nationalism in the US is a coded phrase for white nationalism, but it's also the kind of rhetoric the Nazis used as they rose to power.
00:37:51
Speaker
Now, some people will be clutching their heads and going, why did you have to bring up Nazis? But it's important to note that the Nazis didn't just march out of Nuremberg fully formed as leather-suited, jack-booted fascists. They developed a political movement which spoke to a certain base in Weimar Republic, Germany using...
00:38:11
Speaker
Ta
Racism and Nationalism in Politics
00:38:27
Speaker
Dog whistles of this type are inherently conspiratorial because it's a form of political speech where the dog whistlers will deny that what they're saying is a dog whistle and that their innocuous statements are being taken out of context. Not just that, but a successful dog whistle can then be used to attack those disturbed by the dog whistle as being too precious or politically correct.
00:38:36
Speaker
-da!
00:38:46
Speaker
And before we go on, I just want to address an elephant in the room, which is the thesis that all conspiracy theories are based crypto-antisemitic. This is a view propounded by people like Michael Barcoon in his book, A Culture of Conspiracy, where he links conspiracy theories to the kind of antisemitism which was rife in the French Revolution, and dates the age of the conspiracy theory as starting there.
00:39:10
Speaker
For people like Barkun, conspiracy theories are inherently anti-Semitic theories, and those which appear not to be are crypto-anti-Semitic. This is obviously false given that there are a host of conspiracy theories which seem to have no anti-Semitic character at all. Like the 1080 Kills Native Birds theories here in Aotearoa. And for the sheer fact that many conspiracy theories have turned out to be true, as endlessly listed on this podcast, wherein the culprits, the conspirators, have turned out to not be Jewish.
00:39:37
Speaker
Now, none of this is to say that crypto-antisemitism isn't rife in certain conspiracy-theorist communities, as we have just seen. It's just that it's a mistake to think all conspiracy theories are at heart anti-Semitic. Indeed. Now, the synagogue shooting and the pipe bombs from last week have all been linked to white nationalists and supremacists, and has shone a light on GAB. M, you're a social media fiend. You on GAB?
00:40:02
Speaker
No. GAB is the alt-right version of Twitter. I thought that was Mastodon. No, Mastodon is the LGBTQI-friendly left-wing version of Twitter that hardly anyone uses. So GAB is the alt-right Nazi-friendly version of Twitter that hardly anyone uses? Correct. Founded in the wake of James Daymore being fired by Google, GAB was set up as an alternative to Twitter, which would not be so damn PC-friendly, and has become the place Nazis had to camp to.
00:40:27
Speaker
Which is funny because Nazis are still pretty rife on actual Twitter, so the fact Gab houses the ones in exile is pretty telling when it comes to their stated extremist views. Now, unlike dog whistle racism, Gab is filled with just racism, and the founders of Gab are defending free speech by not telling people to tone it down. This has led services like PayPal, whose online payment system helped keep Gab afloat, and Microsoft, whose service initially hosted Gab, to pull support for the company.
00:40:54
Speaker
But GAB promises to fight on, and while it does, it's providing quite a lot of information about the people behind the synagogue shootings, as well as those pipe bombs delivered to prominent Democrats. And this leads to the issue of these events being described as the actions of... Lone Wolf. It's true that some of the recent atrocities, we would call them terrorist acts,
00:41:14
Speaker
have been examples of people acting alone, and thus not in some grand orchestrated conspiracy, but, given how many of these people share common ideologies and goals, share their stated intentions on sites like GAB, and look for feedback and advice, it seems a little weird to treat each and every one of these events as a one-off lone wolf scenario. These people are communicating with one another, egging one another on, and then praising the culprits after a successful attack.
00:41:39
Speaker
So maybe there's no master document detailing the overall plot, but there's evidence of collective intentionality. Now talking of collective intentionality, someone who hates the idea we should blame others for our own problems is our old friend Dr. Jordan Peterson, the unthinking man's thinking man. Peterson has shocked the alt-right world recently by coming out against antisemitism.
00:42:03
Speaker
Which was a bit of a surprise given he's engaged in a fair bit of what looked like crypto-antisemitism in the past. Yes, alt-right is on Twitter and gab. We're surprised to find that Dr Peterson wrote the following on Twitter. Are you using three brackets online to oh so cleverly disguise your pathetically fashionable antisemitism? Might reflect today on what responsibility you bear for this. To say the alt-right were shocked at their man coming out against them would be to understate the issue.
00:42:30
Speaker
After all, Peterson has form with respect to crypto-antisemitism, given he goes on and on about the dangers of cultural Marxism, which is basically the modern guise of so-called cultural Bolshevism, the theory the Nazis came up with to blame all of Germany's problems on. But now Peterson seems to have at least realised that at least some crypto-antisemitism is bad, and so we can but hope he'll come to realise that he shouldn't also be fostering it.
00:42:53
Speaker
Sticking with bad messaging about the Tree of Life congregation shooting, and how this messaging comes off as crypto anti-Semitic, how about that Rabbi at a campaign event in Michigan this last month? Yes, the rally, focusing on the campaigns of Republican Senate candidate John James, GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill Shewett, and others, featured a prayer by a Christian rabbi.
00:43:16
Speaker
Yes, you heard right, a Christian rabbi. Lorem Jacobs, a former leader of Jews for Jesus, and now pastor for a Messianic Jew congregation, offered a prayer for the victims of the shooting before promptly referring to Jesus as the Messiah, and then praying by name for the Republican candidates on the ballot.
00:43:34
Speaker
Vice President Pence then claimed that Jacobs was a respected member of the Jewish community, despite the fact that all the branches of Judaism take a very dim view of Jesus Christ being referred to as the Messiah. It's quite a difference in theological opinion between the Jewish faith and Christianity after all.
00:43:53
Speaker
Yes, Pence claims he didn't notice the reference to Jesus as the Messiah, and wasn't personally involved in inviting Jacobs.
Political Intrigue: Smearing Robert Mueller
00:43:59
Speaker
But this kind of thing, where a Jewish tragedy ends up reinforcing notions of Jewish people as not like the rest of us really, isn't helping the perceptions that the current US administration isn't just a little bit white supremacist. Finally, just a brief mention of the fact Robert Mueller has reported to the FBI an attempt to smear him. And by extension, his investigation into Russia's role in the last presidential election.
00:44:23
Speaker
This was by a Republican operative offering to pay money to former aides of hers if only they would say he sexually harassed them. This is one of those stories which is only bound to get bigger and more exciting by next week, but we ought to at least mention it here, because we have our hands on the trigger of the best, biggest and most exciting news. That's why our patrons pay us the big, or at least some, bucks.
00:44:46
Speaker
So, next week we'll likely be bringing you exciting reportage of faux sexual assault allegations and how, ironically, this kind of thing feeds into conservative fears women accuse men of sexual assault for monetary gain.
00:45:06
Speaker
up such allegations. But that is next week's agenda. This week patrons who pay us a few dollar redos a month get to hear us wax lyrical on Julian Assange attempting to sue the very country offering him asylum. Some preliminary thoughts on that Mueller story? Because patrons get to know what our brain meats are processing before anyone else does.
00:45:25
Speaker
And how QAnon claimed to have the scoop on the Moolah story a day in advance, although it turns out it wasn't quite the scoop they were looking for. But until then, Josh says goodnight. And Em says, uh, the script I'm reading says boosterism? Boosterism! Indeed. You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy.
00:45:47
Speaker
It is written, researched, and performed by Josh Addison, aka monkeyfluids, and MRXtenteth, aka Conspiracism on Twitter. This podcast is available where all good podcasts can be found, as well as iTunes, Podbean, and Stitcher. It can also be watched on YouTube.
00:46:11
Speaker
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00:46:31
Speaker
You can also support us via the Podbean patronage system, if that is more your style. You do you. If you want to get in contact with us, why not email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com, or find us on Facebook. And remember, it's just a step to the left.