From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies.

History is riddled with unexplained events.

You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.

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Hello, welcome back to the show.

My name is Matt, my name is Noah.

They call me Ben.

We're joined as always with our super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan.

Most importantly, you are you.

You are here.

That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.

Guys, you remember that it's an observation that only grows more relevant over time.

People say, no one wants to be living through the times of which history is made, right.

Yeah, kind of impossible though, because I guess history is sort of always being made in it we're working live well now.

I think it means people want to not have the stress and maybe fear and all of the things that come with a big historical event.

Right too bad suckers, where you find yourself.

We want smooth sailing, I think I think generally that's what human beings want.

But we've also got this thing where in our media and things, most of the stuff really interested in is the exciting, crazy.

Stuff from the past.

But also from the present as long as it's not touching us.

Yeah, and the future as long as it's not over the horizon quite yet.

And history proves time and time again.

We've seen this on every show we have touched, as EPs, as voice actors, as writers, as hosts.

History proves that in chaotic times, the public will look for alternatives to the status quo, whatever that status quo may be.

Sometimes this leads to things that history calls good revolutions, the French and American Revolution right when the rejection of monarchy, and then sometimes you know, it gets a little sith lordie.

Chaos can lead to a search for alternatives like fascism or dictatorships or coups.

Chaos reigns, Chaos reigns, and chaos is a ladder for better or worse.

I watched a Mister Robot episode where one of the characters use that term and used it in that way.

It was robot fun twist on a child's board game would be coups and ladders.

I love it.

Yeah, I think it's brilliant.

What we also see here is that, just like our discussion with governments and AI, the modern information age hasn't really changed this tendency.

Instead, it's ushered in a new toolbox, a new way to escalate this pattern.

That's why there are so many world governments accused of interfering with elections and sovereign domestic politics.

And tonight's story.

First off, yes, this is a story about political conspiracies, but also it's a story about patterns.

This is about a country that might be facing something similar as we record the rise of the far right in Japan and the growing allegations that there may be a conspiracy powering it.

Absolutely, But first we're gonna hear a quick word from our sponsor.

Here are the facts, all right, We've talked about this a lot.

I don't want to sound like a wiyaboo, and we're going to keep any personal anecdotes to a bare minimum.

Not me, I'm putting it all out there.

Can I just say I think your experience, Ben, in particular, would be extremely helpful for this episode.

I feel a bit in the dark as we're going into this, but just really.

In terms of on the ground experience of this kind of thing, because you know, a lot of these things don't even make the news over here.

A lot of the things that we're going to be talking about today, let alone being available for us to you know, set our very eyes on and see the way of functions.

I just think your input and or any anecdote you've gotten could be extremely helpful for me personally to understand this a little better.

Ah.

I think we'll I hear you and appreciate it.

I think will also be darkly surprised by how many parallels are going to be in this story.

Across the Ocean's blue, Across the Ocean's blue.

I'm of a maritime sort of mind.

What are we talking about?

We're talking about the crime cruise, right, so that's called but it's sort of like that.

We're doing a Virgin Mega Cruz True Crime.

Theend are going to be on the high seas coming up pretty soon.

I think you could still buy your tickets, y'all.

I believe so.

Yeah, this is our organic mention, and we're being so smooth with it.

October tenth through the fifteenth.

Join us for smooth seas, you know, that's the hope.

And look, if you come on this thing, you might go snorkeling with us.

Weird, there might be sharks involved.

Trivia, you know.

Yeah, you might see a shipwreck.

You'll definitely go through the Bermuda Triangle with us, where we have hatched up the bride idea of recording our Bermuda Triangle episode live from the location.

No tempting fade there.

It's gonna be fine.

Join us.

You can hold hands, guys.

I've got the first version of the video and I'm working on the sound design and music.

Right now.

That's gonna play.

I guess people are coming in.

We're gonna make people feel so freaking uncomfortable and scary people.

We're gonna bring people together.

This is not sanctioned by the Version Corporation.

Matthew and like the decembers said, you know, if worst comes the worst, we'll both go down together.

Also said, I'm a jolly little chimbley boy.

Is that a veiled if we're both going down together?

Is that a I think that one's about jumping off of a building.

It's metaphor.

Laden's okay.

There's a lot of possibility there, and this will be This will be great because it will get all of us together in this one place and we'll be focused on one thing and we'll probably agree what the revelations we discover.

And that's cool because it doesn't usually happen anywhere else in human society.

Right outside of a focused show or exploration.

You're just outside of our particular friend group.

Never does occur.

We'll fight all the time.

In the end, we're going to explore mysteries and you'll take away whatever you take from it.

Right, But in the end, possibly you're a souvenir.

Yeah, but you'll be in the Bermuda triangle.

It's gonna be sick.

I'm excited.

I haven't been on a cruise before, and I'm really really looking forward to hanging out with you guys on the high seas and talk about some some spooky stuff.

And with that, the reason we're emphasizing this idea of agreeing being on the same page, and why that is so important is because pretty much any other place you go, or any other human endeavor you counter, you will see that everyone disagrees.

And Japan is no different.

Japan is full of competing ideologies and political parties.

This is not unique, it is not unusual.

Well, and it's funny.

I was just gonna ask, maybe this is a dumb question, but like we're talking about the right and the lefts like obviously, when when I ask to the right or left of what the answer is center?

But who determines, like culturally, which ideology is represented by which side of zero?

You know, that's an interesting question.

That's when we'll get to because every center party, you know, as a your mileage may vary situation, and historically we'll get into this a little bit.

Historically you call Japan more or less culturally conservative, and a lot of a lot of East Asia, to be fair, is that way.

But in Japan, you know, just like anywhere else, anywhere you go, you're going to find a spectrum of groups with priorities and values that sometimes combine and converge and then sometimes contradict and people get at loggerheads.

Here in the United States, for example, speaking of centrism, there are two big political parties.

You got the Democrats, you got the Republicans.

But each of those terms, as we've discussed before in some pretty cool stuff, each of those terms is like a it's an umbrella phrase because within under the umbrella of democracy you'll find, you know, the little umbrellas of Democrats, little umbrella Republicans, and under that a monopoly of tinier umbrellas, tighier movements.

And ultimately it all represents campaign finance donations, right, and which which primary corporations and entities donate to which of those two parties, and then how is that divided up amongst individual candidates?

And not to mention that I mean you're talking about campaign I mean we're talking about a collection of campaign promises and sort of treatises that are put out there exclusively in the form of rhetoric, you know, and let's just call it what it is, propaganda that doesn't always add up to the way things actually end up, you know, when folks are elected from either side.

Absolutely, I just want to make that point that it's it ends up those cliques that we're talking about inside like the bigger umbrella groups, often those are divided up amongst groups of people, groups of what appear to be independent let's say representatives or people from certain states or a scattering of states.

You can use money and like CARDI B make money moves to create like clicks and movements of belief of you know what a group is all about within this umbrella.

And all you got, all you have to do is inject enough money to get enough candidates to believe the same thing.

Then you can push that and push it and push it and grow it and make it larger until it potentially can take over one of these umbrellas.

Mm hmm and becomes the establishment.

And it's so cynical, I know, but I mean, I can't help but think that the only true belief is in the money, that a lot of the other ones are just sort of weaponized.

Beliefs that are used.

To sort of manipulate the populace.

Like I just have a real hard time believing in true believers in governments, you know.

Yeah, I hear you.

The one thing we would add as an asterisk to this is that money is a representation of resource, right, it's labor over time.

So there are historically massive upheavals in social dynamics where people are starving and someone comes along and says, I'll feed you, right, and you can worry about the other stuff.

We can talk about that later.

But wouldn't you like to eat something when you like some rootabagas, some squash, et cetera, and please.

That's a good way to get loyalty, right.

Right exactly.

And so money then is an escalation of that age old concept and these.

Yeah, I love your point about the Overton window.

Right.

So here in the US, sure, the big boys, the Democrats and the Republicans actively work together like Pepsi and coke to repress competitors, to kill them in the womb, really, or to buy them or buy them, neuter them somehow, right, sanitize, sterilize them.

And that's why far right movements and far left movements and independent movements are all over the US.

But the FEC won't let them be uh.

And that's fine.

That is Federal Election Commission.

That is Yeah, check out our episode on that speaking.

Yeah, good luck getting on a debate that it means anything whatsoever one of those parties.

It's sort of like Oscar campaigns.

Like everyone thinks magically that the best things win the Oscar, But the things that win the Oscar are the ones that had the big money behind them to make their Oscar campaigns.

You know, it's I mean, it's just it's it's an illusion of quality or this illusion of like democracy, I guess, or you know, what's the word I'm looking for.

Meritocracy.

Yes, meritocracy.

I love that word and I wish it was practiced more often.

Also.

You know, one thing that's totally different from that, of course, is the podcast awards.

Everybody tune in for the MP's and the Webbies coming to a town near you.

Yeah, definitely the fixes and in on those.

So we see that these smaller groups, right may team up with the big dogs on certain issues, right like the the LDP, which is a weirdly misleading name, is the big party in Japan.

We'll get to them, but they have under their umbrella they have a lot of other smaller parties that agree with them on certain issues, and we'll team up with them to vote for certain things and policies.

But at the same time, these smaller crews, these smaller clicks, are still pushing other parts of their respective agendas.

That happens constantly.

In Japan is a quote unquote proper democracy, right, Well, yes, okay, okay, I'm just just asking the question.

Yeah, I don't know, it's not on it like, it's just not something that I am completely immersed in, you know, And I think I get it in general, but I want to know when a lot of these shifts took place, and I have to imagine that some of them took place after the war.

It's a democracy on a diet.

It's a democracy on a diet.

Diet, let's get a drug, let's get Dylan.

Thank you for anybody who notices that is an amazing joke.

That's very well written, and thank you for that.

Matt.

Yeah, maybe the way to say it is Japan is a diet is the funniest way.

But Japan is a democracy that loves its royal family well.

And one could maybe argue that that makes it easier to control, and that there's probably it's a little more consistent than things over here might be right.

Yes, it's similar to what we see in European style democracies that still have a royal family that might have largely symbolic power, but a great deal of economic heft because they own a lot of stuff from back in the day.

But they have these weird agreements that say something like, yes, you are required as the you know, the king of this place or the queen of this place, to show up for these events.

You make these speeches, you know what I mean, where that funny outfit, where this specific outfit, and then you go back home and we're going we the elected representatives are going to handle the day to day business of government and the wheel of power, and that's that's a thing that sounds silly, but it is an important distinction.

And the United States, not once, but at multiple times got so very close to having acknowledged monarchs, and it's a bullet we keep trying to matrix dodge.

It was absolutely a post war situation when they had a constitution drafted and became a democracy after being you know, having their asses handed to them.

Yeah, at the end of World War two.

Oh, we we'll get to that, but we have to point out too and is answering my own question that genuine I just was guessing that that was probably tasty, have.

Omami to it.

Yeah, we're gonna have to get in the weeds when it comes to like what the what the democracy actually looks like, how it functions, the different ways it's split up.

And then the emperor has some sneaky stuff in there that's way more powerful than you'd expect, and we'll get let's get into that, but first of all, let's let's jump back to the US really quickly, because we're talking about some of the ways in which these sub parties, right, not the big players can actually play a role in let's say election right.

In pushing the Overton window of conversation.

You know, the Green We're probably never going to have a Green Party president in most of our listener's lifetimes.

And you might hear this and be in the US and you might say, look, the Green Party, what a bunch of cuckoos.

Anarchy is dumb, Or you might not vibe with libertarians, or you might be embarrassed by a local politician that you personally don't support your neck of the woods.

But the thing is that's not inherently bad.

When democracy works, it gives everyone the opportunity to make their opinions known.

The original donors to any campaign were always supposed to be the voters.

Has changed post Citizens United, and that's never been true in practice.

But that's the idea on the paper.

It really is great in theory.

It's so much stuff is cool in theory.

Like I told you guys about trying to invent the farido, it's a burrito that also utilizes the amazing technology of FA and the world's just not ready quite yet.

There's called tortillas.

We'll see.

Now we've just formed two different parties and we can work together.

Okay, So we know that these times of instability, this is just the quick abstract structuralis above it.

The times of instability create opportunities for beliefs and movements that would have been dismissed as fringe.

Right, everything's going to pot everything's going sideways and pear shaped, and this leads us to the public to say, there's got to be a better way, just like on a made for TV commercial.

That's why the threat of war and economic collapse in particular historically often lead to nationalism, to do countries saying hey us first.

Yeah, yeah, we've been spending a lot of resources in time out there in the others, in the other worlds.

What about this place?

Man?

What about my pension?

And I get that makes total sense.

I mean when the planes going down, they say put the mask on yourself first, So you know, it does to a certain degree.

But then it becomes a rhetoric in and of itself where it supplants like everything else and sometimes even you know, things way outside of the realms of like logic.

Yeah.

The thing about binary in out group reasoning is that it feels very convenient at the beginning, but you have to realize those that ideology only gains power as long as the inn group gets smaller and smaller.

So let's say you have a dozen friends, right, and then eleven of you decide, Hey, we're going to ice this one guy out and we're just not going to talk to him.

We'll have a separate group thread for that guy, and then we the eleven real people are real friends, will have our own thing and then from there to continue that system.

It's a Ponzi scheme of exclusion that sounds way smarter than it is, but it's very accurate.

It seems a bit like what's happening with Putin and Modi and China over there.

You know, just so, just so, and it happens to a lot of microcosmics, like on the ground, individual friend groups.

So we know that an example of nationalism threatening democracy, we can see it in the story of Marine General Smedley Butler real pos back in the day.

He probably stopped a coup, a fascistic coup to overthrow democracy.

In the US brad podcast about it that you had to hand in Ben called Let's start a coup?

If I'm not mistaken.

If you want more on that, do check it out.

Appreciate it.

It's the most unhinged Sesame Street kind of thing I've ever written, but it's a lot of fun.

Check out the phenomenal actors and our friends at the School of Humans.

And this is where we get to the questions we're raising.

Now we've talked about the US Japanese parallels, We're going to see a lot of that's in these conspiracies.

Japan has a deep, deep history with nationalism before the horrors of World War Two.

You don't have to look too far back in your history book to see the evidence of that.

These ultra nationalistic forces committed heinous atrocities.

They rationalized each and every one as noble ACKs for a greater good Japan first.

Oh yeah, it's an interesting thing that occurs when nationalism becomes like the main ideology, because when things are all about you and us and what we're doing and how to better us, it often leads that country or that group or that empire into other places to then make that stuff them, to make that stuff us right, And we're talking about resources, we're talking about peoples, We're talking about a lot of accumulation essentially through let's continue calling them heinous acts and atrocities.

Yeah, and this leads us to post World War two Japan.

Post World War two Japan, ever since the close of the war, has always been a politically conservative democracy, and you don't have to agree with the policies of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party, which by the way, is again just a farcical name.

They're not particularly liberal, they're kind of democratic.

They do party though, so one out of three, one out of three for their name, but the public also so who votes for them.

That's how democracy works.

So you don't have to like that party's policies, but you do have to recognize that since World War Two, in modern Japan, these have been, you know, the big dogs.

The most people agree on this party, and they're not you know, they're not World War two cats.

They're not yelling from the rooftops to invade Banchuria.

They're not saying, hey, let's do hey, you guys, remember war crimes, let's do some of those.

They like global trade, they're not opposed to tourism.

And if you put aside the usual culture wars that happened there and here in the US, the mainstream LDP is a lot more like to your question.

Note what we would call center right, the way that the Democratic Party is a neoliberal center right organization here in the US.

Interesting, should we talk a little bit just quickly about the Constitution of Japan?

I'm interested.

I mean, yeah, how did it come around?

How did it come about?

What?

You know, who was involved?

I imagine there was no small involvement from perhaps the Allies themselves or no.

A mandate.

There you go, Val Shalt of all intel, there you go.

Yes for a constitution.

Yeah, there was a constitution in eighteen ninety and it was the one that the Empire of Japan essentially functioned upon until the end of World War Two.

And you get this thing called what it's called the Constitution of Japan, but it's known as a bunch of other things, like the Peace Constitution or even the MacArthur Constitution, as in US General MacArthur Constitution.

That's probably the best name for it, because he is the guy who ended up dictating a lot of what went into.

It and when he came in post World War two.

I love that you're mentioning that previous document.

The eighteen nineties one is from the Meiji era, and that's when Japan was undergoing this rapid modernization industrialization.

The nation loved the possibility of new technology, new systems, new processes, new resources, but they also feared the erosion of traditional values and institutions.

So that first modernization, if we want to play the reindeer games, that first modernization launched arguably part of or informed the ultra nationalistic movements that arose and became such a moving force in the Japanese activities and atrocities during World War Two, because ever since the Meji era, there's been this consistent concern about preserving traditional Japanese culture, protecting it from the from falling prey to the collaborating foreign hordes of the world outside, which is barbaric because it's not Japanese.

Do you guys see any parallel between other island nations that have empires from Britain what became the United Kingdom and in Japan here that is an island nation that is separated pretty fully from anyone else.

You've got to take a ship to get any goods across, to get culture across one way or the other.

Yess, it is easier to be isolationists in those situations, that's for sure.

Yeah, And those powerful archipelago nations historically are going to beef up with the nearest mainland while they are culturally interconnected.

Yes, which is precisely right what happened with Britain over scores and scores of years there.

You think about Spain and France and the other powers that are right around that area, and then you think about China and Japan in particular and other nations that were there that ended up warring with So it is, I don't know, it's very interesting because at least in these two instances, you see tremendous power being built specifically for war for expansionism.

Right, yeah, hebens thrown.

This is a very real historical precedent.

And you know, even in the modern day, let's jump around in time.

Even in the modern day with Japan's LDP, we see there's a lot of internal dissent and they argue about a lot of things.

And one of the things that is always up for vigorous debate or what Corporate America calls healthy conversation, is that MacArthur imposed constitution.

So Uncle Sam kills so many people with world ending technology and then says, good game.

You do this rightly?

You would be pissed as well, right, And that's why people always argue about revision to the Constitution of Japan, specifically Article nine.

Article nine is the US imposed.

Well, the whole thing's US imposed, but this is the big tent item for the US and for the allies.

It said, hey, Japan, you can never again wage war to solve a conflict.

You cannot have, you know, a blue water navy or maritime power.

You cannot impose your will upon other entities in the region through conflict and violence and kinetic war.

Bluewater navy, that's one that would be able to go out and impose force further than a certain distance essentially from the mainland.

That's the concept, right.

Yeah, yeah, brownwater Navy, you can kind of run your coast.

Greenwater Navy, you can futs around in the region, get up to some Saturday night Shenanigans, right of piracy and crime or force projection.

Bluewater Navy, you can go anywhere in the world.

You're the US and someone in two Valu is talking mess you can send the boys out, got it.

But also it's very expensive and it's one of those why would you do it?

Things?

You know?

Anyway, that's maybe a different story, but the but.

What you can do is protect yourself, right, you can have a defense force.

That's cool.

We're cool with.

That self defense force.

We're joking about this off air as a treat right, because then you know, rightly, you have to give a country the ability to at least defend itself.

And this sort of gives lie to the idea of a Department of Defense in the United States now Department of now department back to Department of War, which it was for a long time.

But you know, the argument is, look, we get it says Japan.

We're not going to send out bombers over Vietnam or something, right, or we're not going to take the Philippines.

But if someone comes and attacks Tokyo, we need to have some resources to respond.

And that seems very reasonable, right, sure.

As a treat now, and you can have that, and that's okay, said the US pat But also, but really, the way this is set up Article N is serious, and that is one of the reasons, as you said, Ben, that's like a sticking point.

But the rest of it, in its entirety was made up and created in the moment following World War Two, after Japan's defeat, and it was really really was imposed by there was this whole thing that we can get into where the concept was, we can have a bunch of smart people who know the government in Japan get together and make the new constitution.

And they started doing that, but then the US came in kind of at the last minute and said, well, actually we're gonna use this one.

And it was over It was overseen by General MacArthur.

So just the entirety of the constitution ends up being this thing that's kind of held over you if you're you know, a Japanese citizen, as like, this is how we have to function.

Why does it have to still be like this?

And it was not written by the people of that country?

Is the important thing the US did.

For another analogy, the US did something executive producers do.

Came in and saw what people are working on and said, great job, guys, good hustle.

I've got some notes.

Can you do this?

But completely different and it's my thing, but now it's yours and you have to do it.

Great meeting, all.

Right, But also it's my thing and my name is gonna be on it.

Why don't we just call it the MacArthur Constitution.

Anyway, the other thing they fight about in the LDP is going to be how foreign policy should work with communist countries in the region caugh cough, China right, not great friends of Japan either on either side, So they also talk about whether this will be important later.

A lot of other folks don't like this.

There's a lot of internal argument over the nature of ties with the United States, which makes total historical sense, like how cool do you want to be with these guys?

Well, barely really cool because you know stuff's booming over here economically, train all these cars and video game systems and tech and woo.

Yeah, but also, oh wait, what did those guys do to us?

Yeah?

Also, everything you learn about diplomacy, no matter what your genre of it is, can boil down to this sweet till it isn't right.

So we also see more radical beliefs popping up.

Anti immigration, like Benja turtles radical.

Those are like like wild off base radical.

Sorry, yeah, this is not bodacious, anti immigration, anti LGBT proposals, the continual denial of historic war crimes.

We've talked about the idea of preserving culture in Japan or cultural identity which may be another familiar thing you see a lot of parallels to in other parts of the world.

In recent years, some very extreme versions of this conservative ideology have become super powered in Japan, someone somewhat through some high octane gas on the bonfire.

This leads us to the current far right, a new kid on the block called Santo Pardner pronunciation.

I think you did fine, a super conservative ultra nationalist right wing party that was founded in twenty twenty, very recently.

Yeah.

If the more conservative members of the LDP party in the Upper House, if they are, if they are caffeine, then Sanseto is cocaine in terms of the extremity of their belief And the name is weird.

It translates to the Political Participation Party, but they also use the name the Party of do it Yourself or the party love it Amazing.

Do you get a political participation award for hanging out?

Yeah?

But you have to make it yourself?

Okay.

It's really a lot craft.

It gives you the feeling the sense of, oh, we could we could actually decide what happens.

You could decide what happens, right like that.

That's a pretty powerful concept and it feels like something that you could buy into before you even really understand what the party represents, or you know what deep waters you're actually waiting into.

Why can't we be the masters of our fate, the captains of our souls?

Right?

Quoting in Victis, they're paraphrasing.

So this party, Sansito, has people worried, diy party whatever in their worried because there's this crazy political rise to fame and success from a once fringe party.

In some ways, you could compare it to hanging out in the Midwest with a friend of a friend or a friend of your friend's cousin who just smokes weed and tells you that Jewish space lasers are the world's most dangerous technology.

And now all of a sudden, that guy and his buddies are in office.

That's how people are reacting to some of this.

And the question is a logical question.

Yes, thinking about that one person from Georgia who has said those things.

Yeah, that one person.

There's this question, right, how did this It's a logical one.

How did this small group has often dismissed as fringe and weing nuts and what have you.

How do they gain so much power so much influence, so much attention over such a short span of time, which we'll get into.

And despite their xenophobic stances against all foreign powersliar right right parallels, as we said, critics alleged this might all be a front that indeed certain foreign powers are funding this party as helping this They're helping this party to succeed, not because they want Japan to succeed overall, but because it's part of a long term conspiratorial scheme to weaken Japan from within.

Oh God, the home parallels.

That's our ad break.

Here's where it gets crazy.

All right, right parallels.

As we're getting I think we're going to find a lot of these as we continue.

Can we kick a little bit of the origin story of Sanseto?

Absolutely so.

For three years since Sayto existed as a little tiny opposition party, holding just a single seat in Japan's two hundred and forty eight seat upper house, also called the House of Councilors.

This changed in the recent election of July twentieth, when Sanseeto walked away with a whopping fourteen new seats in the House.

And this is not a this goes back to our European comparison, you can have coalition parties, right, so you can have a group of some people get you know, X amount of seats, some other group gets wide amount of seats and they team up and agree to largely vote together.

That doesn't really happen in US democracy because we're a young country and we're still trying to figure stuff out.

Yeah, quickly, let's talk about that diet thing because it'll help us understand that upper house, because there's an upper house in a lower house.

Upper house, the House of Councilors feels a lot like the Senate to me, although it's not the same thing.

It's not the same thing, but the diet is Congress house of Councilors.

Yeah, let's think of it as the Senate exactly.

And then you've got you have another house of representatives, which is the lower House, which is it's very interesting.

There are four and eighty members in that house.

But I was looking through I think it's the official website of the Prime Minister of Japan, and the way it's described here, I'm just going to say this out loud just so we hear it and then maybe we can break it down.

Sure, so there are foreign eighty members of the House of Representatives.

Three hundred are elected from the single seat constituencies, and one hundred and eighty by their proportional representation system, in which the nation is divided into eleven electoral blocks, which.

According to Sary, dissimilar to the way we do things, right, is it?

Is it kind of that way?

I don't Maybe I just don't understand voting blocks.

And there's districts and redistricting and you know, all that stuff, and proportional representation over here.

I mean, it seems like it has some things in common, but I might be oversimplifying.

So yeah, that would go into some of the redistricting stuff that we're seeing in the news, where a certain representative, you know, represents X people within these lines.

That kind of thing.

Okay, that makes sense.

So then the House of Councilors, the total membership, at least according to this website of the House of Councilors says two hundred and forty two, says, ninety six of those are elected the proportional representation system, and then one hundred and forty six from forty seven different prefectural constituencies.

And again, like I don't understand all of that stuff.

But it is important to know that term office for someone in the House of Councilors is six years.

Yeah, and again, proportional representation is going to be familiar to anybody thinking of the House of Reps here in the United States, where in the number of Congress folks you get is based on the population.

Yeah, people alway talking about, oh, we picked up a new seats, you know, because the population changed or whatever.

And then there's of course even obviously not super hard to detect ways of trying to manipulate that, you know.

And yeah, mister mander Jerry has entered the chat.

So how do we explain this meteoric rise from one seat for three years to all of a sudden in a recent just an election a few months ago, now we got fourteen seats, and this can make a big difference, especially when you have coalition systems.

We can't ignore the COVID nineteen pandemic.

It shook up a lot of stuff in a lot of places.

And it put a lot of people in a situation where they were much more vulnerable to the mechanisms of online disinformation.

And this is where we see Sanseto really rolling up with.

Some big dice and again how familiar.

Parallels.

Everything is precedent and a lot of these things are sadly similar.

The Japanese public, like the rest of the world, is locked away, and this political movement blows up on the Internet partially as a result, they're just more eyes on more screens.

Their members get known for trumpeting conspiracy theories about vaccinations, anti Semitism, revisionist history, and more, and they find an audience.

Huge percentage of their voting demographic is going to be young eighteen to thirty year old male searching for alternatives to the status quo because the economy is rough right.

Earlier generations, you could get a job for life at a large corporation, but younger folks are having a much more difficult time finding long term substantive employment.

Well, we talked about how serious school is taken in Japan culturally, and just how much pressure is on each individual student to like truly fully succeed to get to go to secondary school or higher degree, to continue on to get that good job.

Right well, and with that almost a guarantee within that system of getting that career that you were promised of carrying forth that legacy.

Which is why suicide rates tend to spike after people receive their final exam grades and their college acceptance letters.

Yes, but you also see this thing happening in Japan and the United States and across the world where the older generation of folks is staying around for much longer now, right to run corporations, to you know, be in that job that would be the next jump up, so that you could get new people in to hire.

Within government, the old guard is sticking around.

Right, well, yeah, yeah, what by saying stick around, we mean that they're retiring later, Yes.

But people are retired later.

But you've also got folks, you know, we're talking about how often you have to get re elected to a term, right, either six years if you're in the upper House, four years if you're in the lower House.

And they're seeing people stick around there and get re elected over and over and over again, and you can imagine the view of it's time to switch these people out.

Yeah, no, you know, And that's a base belief without any of the other stuff on top of it, just that feeling.

Right, and it's a universal feeling too.

Right.

Your time's up, old man, Let me take the stick.

That kind of thing again, they'll say no, very few of them saying yes, even if they're talking directly to their own scion.

But in addition, because of these economic factors, we see that marriage is difficult, right, Raising children is a hefty financial proposition, buying a home, these are all much more difficult to accomplish.

And there's still, of course, this conservative milieu that says, hey, you as a woman can't You can't have a kid and have a job, right, Or you as a dude, right when you get your forever job, when you become one of those vaunted aspirational salarymen.

Well, your family kind of exist on the weekends, okay, and everybody be cool.

And a lot of people are saying, oh wait, hang on, I'm a human being that's actually not super cool.

And these are understandable problems.

That's the response.

Right.

Well, we even talked about, like within that culture, how some very interesting entrepreneurial situations pop up, like companies that will quit your job for you so that you don't have to face your boss or even Ben, I think you and I were talking offline about this, companies that will like disappear you if you've shamed your family or whatever, like so you can live off the grid and not have to you know, be ridiculed and may be seen as a failure.

Yeah, they'll obscure your trail.

And it's it's not illegal to disappear folks.

As we talked in the past, the concept of pseudo side is dicey, but just leaving, just sort of laying down away from society.

There's nothing illegal about that, as long as you aren't ditching out on debts and as long as you're not trying to get money by faking your death.

So we can't blame a lot of people in very competitive environments for just getting tired and burned out.

And you vote with your actions, ever since the beginning of tribes, that's the number one way people vote.

And when we see that perspective, we see that a lot of Japanese nationals are voting with their actions by saying, well, why would I bother get married?

Why would I sign up for this hellish Sisyphian life of working till I die, right and then barely seeing a kid and then yelling at the kid when I do see them.

So as a result, birth rates are plummeting.

Even the popular media accuses other countries of trying to besmirch Japan's culture and reputation.

You click on you know, you're hanging out somewhere, right and isekaya or a hotel room or something.

You see the news, the local news, and there's this heavy implication that the world is telling you it is wrong for you to be Japanese.

Yeah.

We also see in parallel to that a massive rise and popularity of Japanese cultural things.

Yes, yes, in other places, which is just a very interesting notion to have those two movements occurring together.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Every country is a land of contradictions, right, and this is I love this point because it brings us to more parallels.

Here Amid COVID nineteen right, Sanseto hits the zeitgeist.

They urge potential voters to be proud of your ethnicity and culture.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, except when it leads to racism and things like white supremacy and so on.

They also pivot and they say, you know how your life is tough and you're kind of unhappy and unsatisfied.

Well, it's not due to the economics of Japan itself.

Really, Instead, it's due to these foreigners, these immigrant hordes.

The phrase they use over and over again is silent invasion.

It's due to these globalists who are messing with something that would have been fine if we never said yes to the Portuguese in the first place.

Basically, so they say, is the motto Japan First.

Huh Sorry, It's almost like they got the idea from somebody who also got the idea from somebody.

This is just a pattern, I mean, this rise of nationalism and then words like patriot or nationalists almost beginning to have a dog whistle feel to them, you know, for xenophobic or a racist.

Yeah.

And to your point there, the reason sounds familiar is because this party, the DIY Party, explicitly notes the phrase Japan First was inspired by the current US President Donald Trump.

Okay, so they're there a secret.

They're saying, we think this is a pretty cool idea.

Yeah wow.

And then they continue with international racism, not really targeting, not really targeting like Canadians and US folks and other folks from the anglosphere.

Although they hate Australian tourists.

Sorry, guys, there's a reputation that was someone earned.

But they how do they feel about American tours seriously, like, what what have you experienced?

Ben?

I mean, just what have you experienced traveling through Japan?

It does has it been?

Doesn't seem like he's been negative at all?

Uh No, No, usually there for specific reasons.

Always it depends on where you go, right, So you go to Tokyo, it's like you're going to New York or London.

People are too busy, right in general, I will say in Tokyo there's a little bit more of an emphasis on helping folks who may clearly seem out of their depth.

So the public transit is awesome, right, It's worlds away, streets ahead, as community would say, but it can be very confusing if you don't know where you're going, right, because it's essentially a circulatory system for a country.

So there's this whole cottage industry of volunteers, often older people, often older dudes.

They don't necessarily work for the transit system, but they pick a day out of the week and then just hang out at the station and they help people figure out where to go.

It's a pretty beautiful thing.

And you know, I'll tell you it probably wouldn't happen in Boston.

Well, and my understanding too is that in general, people there are pretty and to your pointment in the bigger cities, pretty helpful to tourists and not always doing it for money.

You know, they're proud of their city, and I think tourism is obviously big money there, and it does not seem to my eyes anyway that there's a resentment like you might see in places like Barcelona.

And yeah, it's also very much a well, it's not an overt yelling society unless someone's having a bad day and they assume that you don't know any Japanese.

But there's also an intense, relatively skin based hierarchy.

So if you are a lighter skinned person from the US, you are going to be treated differently, and you're probably going to be there's going to be a slightly more friendly attitude towards you than if you were a darker skinned person.

And you know, like in rural areas, I've never had an issue in cities, I've never had an issue because I'm a huge believer in the idea that energy is a two way street.

You know, so if you are respectful with some one right and you are understanding the boundaries that they may have, and you put just a little bit of time in to figuring out how to not look like it.

It's going to go a long, long way, dude.

That's the key to life right there, My friends, don't be in like read the room.

Don't make you know it's good.

But I have seen to your to your question direct, I have seen.

I have seen people who are just tired of all these tourists, especially in very tourists heavy cities like Kyoto at certain times of year.

There's more of an exasperation than like hostility, right, yes, But exasperation is a cousin of hostility, It's true, you know.

And the one of the big complaints, for instance, that you will see in this galvanized Sanseeto as well, is the idea of, hey, these tourists are crowding all of the trains and the buses.

I'm not here for, you know, insert festival.

I live here and I have to get to work on time, and I can't get on the bus because of all these gosh dart And then they'll insert a phrase, and that phrase I mean often often the discrimination the complaints are going to be centered on Singaporean and Chinese nationals.

More America make sauces.

Yeah, it's deep, it goes deep.

But we also see something parallel here with like what's happening in Spain.

I think we've just mentioned that with housing prices rental homes, yes, and crowding people out of their own city, yeah, and pricing people out mm hmm.

Yeah exactly.

And with this we have to realize there is already like this didn't come from a vacuum.

There's already a lot of emphasis placed on who is Japanese, right, And we're speaking as non Japanese people to be clear who is Japanese and who is not and the indefinable but inescapable differences between the two.

I'd like to give a shout out for anybody's interested in learning more about this stuff.

Check out our friend Miles's show on The Daily Zeitgeist.

Miles has Japanese and African American heritage, Miles speaks Japanese.

He is well suited to remark on this and be fascinating to hear his view on Japan's far right.

But you think we could ever get him on like that'd be interesting to do this episode with him on something like this.

It depends on what we want to talk about with him.

Okay, okay, yeah, but yeah we should check in.

Yeah, we'll see.

These are busy guys because their show comes out literally every day, a couple of times, a couple times every day.

Wow.

Yeah, So there's another there's another fact here that we should mention.

If you are not considered Japanese, if you're considered a foreigner by the Japanese government, you can become a foreign resident.

You can even with enough time and effort, become a Japanese passport holder.

But the word for you that people will use for you does not translate to Japanese, translates to foreigner with a Japanese passport.

Well, that makes sense, it does.

It's descriptive.

I don't know, it's a bit of a day.

It's a bit of a day, right, there's no question.

It's just very like you will never be you will never exactly.

And so people are, you know, looking around at all these terrible economic challenges.

You know, I can't get on the bus.

This is I'm not doing anything special.

I'm just trying to go to work.

Very understandable stuff.

These tours are rude to me right out in Golden Gey or whatever.

But then we have to ask, is there an immigration crisis?

Is there a silent invasion of foreigners?

And that doesn't seem to be the case.

We asked that same question over here, and I mean, there are a lot of people that have similarly on paper reasonable complaints about immigration here in the United States.

But is it a crisis?

Not necessarily, but it's certainly a way to rile up a particular base.

And they seem like talking point.

Yeah, exactly again parallels.

But often talking points that will rile people up action enough to take.

Actually, yes, exactly, but not necessarily based in truth.

Right, don't hit the analytical part of the brain, hit the emotive part of the brain, right, get that primal stuff cooking, And that's that's what happens.

We see if you go to the Streets Times, Japan's foreign residency rows ten in twenty twenty four.

Right, that's a big rise.

That means the total population of permanent foreign residents is three point seven six million.

That's a little over three percent of the population.

WHOA, that's not much.

That's not much at all.

No, and keep in mind, a lot of those folks who are foreign residents are highly skilled workers.

For instance, right, a lot of them are there because a big to do company specifically wanted them there.

Right, those kids who are out doing English teaching programs are not going to end up being for permanent residents, you know, They're not gonna end up getting that dubious distinction of foreign or with the Japanese passport.

They're going to eventually skid outle off or maybe marry somebody.

I'll tell you, guys, I really did have dreams of that, yeah, of living in Japan.

Yeah.

And I don't know why that's instilled.

Did you guys ever experience that when you were younger, Like the feeling or the concept or the I don't know.

It felt like a really interesting place.

For me, but I definitely understand the romanticization of a place like that when you're younger.

For sure, it was specifically Tokyo because and it was something about I don't know, pop culture at the time.

I blame Ninja Turtles.

I don't know why, because everything looks like the future radicalized you bro exactly, And a lot of people share that about any other number of places.

Right.

Part of growing up is going somewhere else in some shape, form or fashion, and so everybody has.

I think that that impetus.

And as long as you are realistic about it, when you're there and you're respectful, then people are usually going to be cool with you.

To show that we're not casting this version on Japan in particular or even Americans.

This happens in Paris all the time.

There's actually a word called, or a term called Paris syndrome, which is somewhat common among female identified Japanese nationals who dream of going to Paris because France is a huge deal culturally.

And then they get to Paris, right that they see the needles and the graffiti they used condoms, someone picks their pocket and they break the heck down because this was not what AMAI told them.

What happened, Well, they should call unwanted Parisian tourists parasites.

I love it.

You're on fire today, dude, shout out to parasite for South Korean film to be amazing.

Memen talking about breaking the mold there, breaking out of all that money in Stepwell, I.

Don't know for sure.

Well, yeah, well there's also you know, I'm glad to bring that up because they're also similar socioeconomic dynamics at play in the Republic of Korea and South Korea anyway, So a little over three percent of the population foreign residents.

Inarguably, this is a growth pattern.

And the leader of Sanseeto again this just started in twenty twenty.

He's a guy named Sohe Kameya, and he uses statistics like this to stoke those public fears of foreign hordes evading the nation.

And then in the same conference he'll say, I mean, obviously we're not going to discriminate against folks.

No, no, no, that's just a problem.

But you know, it's a problem, it's a common problem.

Yeah, we're civilized.

I'm just saying they're barbarians.

Geez, I'm just saying they're terrible.

Everybody calmed down.

Uh yeah, that's what's again parallels and but.

It's it's it's so strange to see that when the rhetoric is kind of like that, we saw it similarly here in the US, and then to see the actions taking place with ice and homeland security and all like all the things that are occurring right now that I don't know about you guys, but to me, as almost an observer, now what's happening, you feel a little bit powerless to now watch it happening because it was posed as this.

It's just that, you know, we're just we're just saying these things.

We're just talking about these things.

We think these things.

Doesn't mean we're gonna do anything about.

This is just an issue we need to collectively acknowledge, right, Yeah, And you see this a lot in Europe as well, in the European theater.

It's happening all over the place, and the leaders of this political party will say, look, we're just saying we need to be aware some we all need to get together on and as a team, as a nation, we can address this somehow.

The reason our platform is actually so popular is because we want to cut taxes, we want to boost public spending, and we want to protect jobs.

Foreigners are taking all our jobs.

This conference is over.

So we see it everywhere.

I mean, far right parties are on the rise in Europe, parts of Africa, definitely South America.

I was surprised, as I'm sure all of us were, when Bolsonaro actually got sentenced to prison.

Yeah, that was wild.

I didn't see that happening.

Yeah.

Well, then France's government collapsed just like a couple of days ago.

We're just seeing all kinds of craziness up.

Yeah, the heaves are up.

And so some people will argue, even and this is observation, some people will argue that the Make America Great Again movement here in the UN is itself a far right movement.

Your perception of that may vary.

But the big question now is could organic popular support from the Japanese people alone could not explain the massive wins of this thing that, just until July was a wing nut, fringe political party.

So why has san Seto succeeded where so many other similar Japanese movements, very similar movements failed.

Right time, right place, right, Hey, we'll tackle it after a word from our sponsors, and we've returned.

So the big question foreign funding and interference.

Around the time of that recent July election, an analyst named Ichiu Yamamoto from a Guy, a smart guy from a think tank called the Japan Institute of Law and Information Systems went viral and he said, I have hard evidence that Russia, a foreign power, is heavily invested in this anti foreign power movement.

Wait, wait a say, are we saying Russia is directly putting money into campaigns or are they doing stuff that they were alleged to have done here in the US previously.

Right.

Yeah, and one blog post he claims to have hard evidence that quote, anti government propaganda by Russian bought accounts was what made this small far right party so popular leading up to the election.

And then he outlines the process, which is going to sound very familiar to a lot of us.

This is what he had to say.

Russian bought accounts, bought accounts on various social media platforms including x TikTok and Instagram, have been spreading false information and criticism about major government officials, including Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Foreign Minister Takashi Iwaya, to manipulate public impressions.

Yeah, so spam the online comms, which hacks the alg rhythm and gets that post or that conversation further up, increasing the chances that will meet a sympathetic stranger, gain a large number of likes, spread to more and more users, despite no whatever fact checking it.

Beautiful, brilliant evil.

He also notes these candidates from this party are appeared on Russian government media, which is true.

Really Yeah, yeah, make Japan great again.

Yeah.

And then there are the allegations to your question mat about dark money from Russia in a way that is very difficult to trace.

It always makes me wonder about the local level when money can sneak in there and then find its way up right, rather than in a high profile way come in to the people who are actually running for the House of Counselors something.

That's exactly what it is.

It has not been conclusively proven any of these allegations for or dark money, but it is much easier to trace national level financial shenanigans than the local stuff.

And again, the reason we keep saying they're parallels is because large scale election influencers like the Koch brothers here in the United States and in other parts of the anglosphere, but to a much lesser degree, they met with a lot of success funding local politicians for decades in the United States because they don't have term limits, they just hire the people who have term limits, They buy them and puppeteer them.

Well, yeah, and the people who end up making rules and regulations within like a small sector of the US where let's say a factory is or where a business is run, which ends up being a huge deal for somebody you like the Cooch brothers.

But then if you're dealing with actual interference from another country, it makes you wonder why would you do that, right.

If you are so anti foreign influence.

If not in Japanese residents are a silent invasion, then isn't dark money in info war from a foreign power also a silent invasion?

Isn't that the influence you were talking about being bad earlier?

Yep, you know, maybe we didn't catch the right press briefing, but we want to be fair.

The leaders of Sunseto have denied any and all allegations.

The leader So High Kama was pressed about this on July fifteenth, and they said, hey, seriously, break it down.

In Moscow man, you mess with you mess with Moscow money.

He said, you know, do you have ties to him?

And he said, we don't, not at all, not with Russia, not with China, not with America.

We do not.

We keep balanced diplomacy with any country.

And just because some of my folks appeared on Russian media doesn't mean we're suddenly pro Russia.

And they said, okay, yeah, we'd like to read some your earlier statements about your support for Russia.

Just like while we're on this topic.

So he got caught in the interview because he was on record supporting Russia's role in the Ukraine invasion or supporting the Russian argument for that.

And we'll give you a quote so you can see how he responded.

Yeah, upon seeing all of that, right being presented with it in the moment, he replied, quote, Russia's military invasion was, of course bad, but there are forces in the US that drove Russia into doing that.

So I said once that it's not fair to say Russia is the only bad guy here.

And then people began saying I'm pro Russia, right.

Just for being so pro Russia.

Yeah, I mean from but yeah.

On the surface, we know from our previous explorations of the situation happening in Ukraine right now between Russia, about the complicated nature and the history right of ownership over that land, of all of that stuff, Like, we know it's more complicated than there's a good guy, there's a bad guy.

But but it is.

It's one of those things when you get involved in that kind of thing, even to make a public statement about it, especially on one of the country's medias, it does seem to show some bias.

Yeah, from his perspective, he's being fair and balanced, right, he said, I am a statesman from Japan, so I don't have necessarily a horse in the race, which makes me more objective.

Right.

It's you guys who are brainwashed and influenced.

I'm not being paid or influenced by some conspiracy.

So what does the official Japanese government make of this?

They'll buy it, spoiler, They don't buy what he say.

They think Russia's up to something.

They recently said through the deputy Chief Cabinet secretary.

They said Japan is working on the premise that they're being targeted by foreign luin's operations.

They think something is screwy and the aw yeah and just and in.

The cabinet, by the way, is like the executive branch within the Japanese government.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, they're the c suite.

And on July sixteenth, just four days before the election, he also said the same cabinet secretary said Japan is a target of foreign election interference.

Low and behold, this once cartoonishly obscure political party walks away with the biggest growth of any Japanese political party in recent history.

It makes you wonder, makes you wonder.

Yeah, but surely it's just the grassroots movement of do it yourself attitude, rightey Man booststraps.

Yeah, power to the people, that's what you say in Saint Petersburg.

We also know we're talking about this a little bit off air.

You can go to Japan in many cities, rural areas, you'll see something called the Yoko Dantai.

Uh.

These are far right activists, internaturals, dudes with honestly sick fans.

They converted their vans and they have flames on them.

They got skulls, they got old carbon propaganda.

They've got these amazing loud speaker systems they roll through towns and protests and uses.

They got charter buses.

They've got all these propaganda slogans.

They'll sing patriotic songs.

So they're well funded.

Someone's funded by whom.

Yeah, that's okay, we're on the same page.

It was because things ain't cheap.

But it sounds like they're new.

It's not like a ragtag you know, right, They've.

Been around for decades, but they now appear to have garnered much more funding.

That would make sense.

Yeah, So they implore the public to stand up for Japan.

I actually got a high five from one of these guys because I was just standing around in Hokkaido and I didn't know what they were saying.

I was like, these guys know how to throw a party.

Five me back.

It's not that kind of party, ben, is it.

Yeah?

I hope that doesn't come back to haunt me.

But they're they're talking about ridding the Great Nation of forid invaders, leeches, and parasites.

And they're usually when they're saying that, to be explicit, they're usually talking about people from other Asian countries that they don't like, you know, like Korean descended populations who have lived in Japan for generations, generations, right, and they're talking about often darker skinned people especially.

They're talking about how they don't like Chinese people.

Their cause is galvanized.

They're gaining new followers, more influence, bigger say in government, and they're aligning with one of our favorite secret textbooks, Alexander Dugan's Foundation of Geopolitics Dun Dun Dum.

We did a whole episode on Alexander Dugan.

Yeah, yeah, the alex Jones of his time.

Dugan.

That's different, that's do check that out if you all aren't familiar Longmont potion Castle, it's these absurdist like proto jerky Boy but way more psychedelic prank kind of phone calls.

And there's one where there's a character he's talking about named Dugan Nash.

Sorry, well totally, that's amazing.

The episode we did was called does Russia Have a New Resputant?

And I believe you could find it from twenty nineteen.

Yeah, well it's still up.

We hope it is.

This book, do check out our episode on it, which if you really listen to it, it's kind of frightening.

But this book is made by guy who's kind of often called in a cult wing nut right, who just sat down and made a bunch of opinions and directions for Russia to re emerge as the world's primary superpower and so as a laundry list of stuff that the Russian government should do across the planet, largely to weaken and attack the United States asymmetrically.

And he breaks it up into different spheres what we call regions, right, the East African sphere, you know, the East Asian theater, stuff like that, And his idea for Japan was not that you attack Japan directly you try to sanction them or something which Russia would have a hard time doing, but instead that you manipulate their internal domestic politics and culture.

You maybe give them a deal, You give them the Kurral Islands, which are very north in Japan, and then you use that leverage and that descent you have created to remove Japan from the International Board, other than supporting your causes and saying like, hey, there's not really a good guy or a bad guy in Ukraine.

Oh yeah, it's working.

You know all of this when thinking about the context of what just happened during Victory Day in China and the coalition of forces that are building there and the movements and some of the public statements specifically by Jijinping and some of the leaders there, you can see you can see movements occurring, and it feels like this could be a big part of that.

Yeah, absolutely right.

You can see.

The question is are we recognizing a pattern or are we manufacturing one to fit our own assumptions, And that's always a very difficult question to answer at this point in the game.

But however, they came to prominence, this political party, Japan's far right, and their allies.

They're having a field day, and no one is sure what is going to happen next.

We know, politics always a sensitive issue, especially now here in the States, and that's because voting and civic action and activism it's largely been replaced by the dopamine casino cycle of social media.

You know, it's difficult, it's pickle because we have to ask, is this a case of a nation truly speaking its own voice, not just in Japan but in every country especially now.

If it is true, if this is organic democracy, then we don't have to love it.

We only have to acknowledge it is democracy, and that's how it's supposed to work, for better or worse.

But there are serious, dangerous questions about how much of this is actually organic and how much instead is the stuff they don't want you to know.

I certainly think it is well in our previous episodes and explorations of specifically what the United States would do to weaken another country when they would go into Latin America, South America, in certain countries in Africa, it is the exact thing that we're looking at here and in parallel in the United States, where you weaken the internal systems and the human beings that are supposed to govern those systems, and the culture and politics and all of that stuff.

As you're weakening all of that, it means the governing bodies, the decision makers at the top, are not going to be as strong, and they're not going to have the will of the people behind them to do certain things.

Doesn't it feel exactly like that's what's happening, Whether it's whether it's occurring from within or from some exterior force, it feels like that's the very thing that's happening across the world in places like Japan and the.

And it's happened before, and it's happening again.

It's cyclical.

M M.

Yeah.

We cannot.

We cannot further emphasize that you should check out Foundations of Geopolitics or at least our episode audit.

And it's important to ask these questions because eroding trust in institutions, whether or not those institutions deserve to lose that trust, is the first step too massive upheaval.

And that is not just the stuff they don't want you to know.

It is the stuff that happens continually over centuries, over millennia, and this modern Millennia is indeed no different except for one thing.

We've got a podcast now and we want you to be part of it.

So let us know, help us, help us understand the course of history, the past president in the future by giving us a call on a telephone.

You could, of course always get a random fact from us if you email us any time, and you can find us on the lines.

That's right, you can find us on the lines.

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Please give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if we can use your name and message on the air.

Within the message, if you got more to say, if you've got links, if you've got attachments, anything in the world, just have a thought, then write it down and send it to us.

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We are the entities that read each piece of correspondence we receive.

Be well aware, yet unafraid.

Sometimes the void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.

Stuff they don't want you to know.

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