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Recently my YouTube algorithm has been taken over by videos featuring Professor Jiang Xueqin. His own channel is called Predictive History but I’ve also watched him talk on other channels. I find his work and theories very interesting, he is a creative person with very heterodox views on the present and world history. He reminds me a lot of Rudyard Lynch (the Whatifhalthist guy) in that they both have creative approaches to history and the present day. I suspect Xueqin is familiar with Lynch’s channel as they are so similar and both reference Peter Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction, the rat/mouse utopia experiments of John B. Calhoun, and have similar views of modernity and modern society.
Xueqin recently ended a 28 part series on his youtube channel titled “Secret History” which is a class he taught (I believe to students in Beijing) which culminates in his theory which he calls Pax Judaica. He uses this term to basically refer to the Zionist project, directed by Zionist Jews inside and outside of Israel, along with Zionist Christians, and secret societies, which are all advocating for war to bring about the Judeo-Christian end times (or something like that.) It’s a complicated theory (that series alone is over 30 hours) but he paints a pretty compelling picture by the end. I am not personally very interested in Jews or Christians but the thought that millennia old religions can sway geopolitics to this degree today irritates me as someone who is basically philosophically an atheist and doesn’t want to be involved in wars of religion in the 2020s or the rest of my life for that matter.
He is not entirely antisemitic, as he also claims that much of the zionist project will face opposition from the Jewish people as well.
He predicts the imminent collapse of the American empire followed by the rise of Pax Judiaca, reinforced by Israeli invented general AI which will be backed by a global surveillance system based in Israel.
I can’t quite place him on the right-left spectrum. My instincts tell me that he is very aware of right wing thinking. There is a video I saw of him where he claims to be “a pretty liberal guy” though I don’t know if he means he’s a “classical liberal” or is making this claim to appeal to left leaning people or if he earnestly believes he is a leftist. I listen to so few people on the left at this point that I suspect he is not really a leftist but it’s possible that the sort of center left has so quickly found itself incorrect in so many ways that it’s sliding into the space of theoretical uncertainty that as recently as a few years ago only the right was willing to explore. Regardless of his own view of his work I think it is unique enough to stand on its own and be examined and taken seriously from either perspective.
At the same time his ideas and views tick every single “conspiracy theorist” trope that we’re trained to identify, to the degree that I’m surprised he’s being pushed by an algorithm as mainstream as YouTube to me. I don’t think his work is so esoteric that he is just eliding censorship, as he has taught high schoolers and I think the language and theories he presents are digestible enough that high schoolers could understand it. It makes me question the narrative that algorithms have a left wing bias and that dissident voices are difficult to find.
If I had to criticize his work I’d say his dismissal of various things is a bit short sighted. He outright dismisses Darwinism and the theory of evolution, something that I find extremely illuminating and one of the few broad scientific theories that reveal and explain rather than obfuscate human nature as well as the broader natural world. That he dismisses it so casually is very revealing to me and points to some discomfort within him with the implications rather than a scientifically reasoned rejection of the theory. He dismisses other things similarly and seemingly randomly, like Freud’s Oedipal complex, while embracing any vague illuminati theory seemingly without evidence, specifics, or rigor.
Anyway, I’m curious to know if anyone else here has engaged with his videos or work, if they have any response to his Pax Judaica concept, or had any other broader response to creative/unorthodox theorists breaking through to normie spaces via algorithm or an apparent lack of censorship that is often framed as ubiquitous.
I've seen him mentioned a few times (including here iirc) but his work seemed to disjointed and slop-y, so I stopped quickly.
They've been boosting dissident voices for a decade bar the topic of covid, in my experience.
How do you figure? There's been leaks of the Google algorithm where it came out they explicitly derank small independant websites. There was also an analysis of YouTube's recommendations that shows they're trying to pull people to the mainstream. I wouldn't be surprised if Elon was boosting his favorite causes, but it's definitely not what I'd call "boosting diasident voices".
For the past decade, everyone I know (e.g. my grandma) only gets recommended videos of guys in trucks talking about race realism etc. even though they're generic liberals and just try to watch craft videos. I was annoyed by it until I "converted". Overall quality's pretty low, but it's often fairly solid. Lately my grandpa was directed to this gem.
I used to see the "You like politics? Here have some John Oliver" algo in all it's glory, nowadays I mostly get slop that's neither here nor there. Then again I mostly watch it through FreeTube (effectively watching everything via an anonymous tab). What you're getting sounds looks more like profiling than outright boosting, though you probably were on the edges of the cluster they put you in originally.
Man... what do I have to do to get this recommended to me?
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"They" have a very naive and shitty "anti-radicalism" algo going on, certain channels are marked with a wrongthink boolean somewhere in the code, basically any time you watch a video from say The Jimmy Dore show/The grayzone or some of the alt-lite ish channels, they always recommend for the next auto play video an "approved" video from a channel like Fox news or NBC or another "mainstream" "tv" channel. It's comical how persistent the algo has been warped. For years if you searched for Tucker Carlson on youtube the first three videos you got were attempted takedowns by the time telling british dork or "Colbert".
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