Thread by @KUHoopes

Matt Walsh has a bunch of questions about Graham Hancock’s #AncientApocalypse. Can we help answer them?

“What in the world makes it racist?” he asks, and says that’s never explained.

In Episode 2, Graham Hancock suggests that Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha were survivors of a lost civilization who taught “simple hunters and gatherers” how to farm and build pyramids. They became gods.

Although Hancock avoids saying these culture heroes were white in #AncientApocalypse, he made that clear in his book “Fingerprints of the Gods” (1995), the title of which refers to these supposed white saviors of inferior brown people. Is that a racist scenario? I think so.

Also in Episode 2, Grahsm Hancock features as an on-camera expert Italian businessman Marco Vigato, whose book “Empire of Atlantis” was published in January by the New Age press Inner Traditions - Bear & Co.
innertraditions.com/books/the-empi…

In it, Marco Vigato argues that Atlantis was an ancient, global civilization of superior white people who got their brain power from having been human-alien hybrids, the humans having been an inferior race until this occurred. This is an illustration of that from Vigato’s book.

For the illustration, the cranium of the huge-brained Homo Atlanticus was derived from a photograph of the skull of a deceased child with hydrocephalus, a congenital deformity. The illustration also includes an example of ancient artificial cranial deformation from Paracas, Peru.

Inner Traditions - Bear & Co. has an unusual catalogue. It publishes translations of books by Italian fascist Julius Evola, who wrote the introduction to the 1938 Italian translation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an antisemitic Russian hoax.
innertraditions.com/author/julius-…

Inner Traditions - Bear & Co. also publishes books by Frank Collin, a.k.a. Frank Joseph, a former neo-Nazi who led marches in Chicago (see National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie) and also a convicted pedophile.
innertraditions.com/author/frank-j…

For anyone who thinks the promotion of “outside the box” theories about the ancient past is harmless, I urge you to learn more about Heinrich Himmler and the Ahnenerbe, a Nazi organization that promoted theories similar to those of Graham Hancock.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahnenerbe

It is also worth considering the case of the World Ice Theory proposed by Hanns Hörbiger and Philipp Fauth in 1912. It became a cudgel for Nazis to bully and oppress scientists, historians, and others who did not accept an ideology based on pseudoscience.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welteisle…

For more on Frank Collin (who writes about Atlantis, Lemuria, and other topics in pseudoarchaeology under the pseudonym Frank Joseph), see this article. Collin was the model for Henry Gibson’s character in the film “Blues Brothers” (1980).
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Col…

Frank Collin and actor Henry Gibson in their Nazi uniforms, Collin in real life and Gibson playing a character based on him in the film “Blues Brothers” (1980).

Some background on antisemitic Italian author Julius Evola, who wrote about Western esoterica and the occult and has become a favorite of fascist movements around the world. Steve Bannon has cited him as an influence.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Ev…

Graham Hancock suggests that pyramidal platforms such as Cahokia in Illinois were built under the direction of “white saviors” similar to Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha as described in Spanish narratives. In so doing, he revives racist 19th century myths.
amazon.com/Mound-Builder-…

The racist intent and effects of the “Mound Builder” myth were explained in detail in this 1968 book by Robert Silverberg. It contributed directly to passage of the 1830 Indian Removal Act and the brutal Trail of Tears forced migrations that followed.
amazon.com/Mound-Builders…

A notoriously racist 19-century author whose anti-Native hyperdiffusionism is echoed in Graham Hancock’s own hyperdiffusionism is Josiah Priest, who also wrote the awful but popular “Bible Defence of Slavery,” which asserted Black people were subhuman.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Pr…

The similarity of Graham Hancock’s theories to those of authors such as Priest, Collin, and Vigato (who he features in his series) at the very least raises a parade of red flags about the appeal of #AncientApocalypse to white supremacists and other far-right extremists.

Walsh questions the harm of a series such as #AncientApocalypse and the expression of ideas like Hancock’s.

History shows that similar ideas led to the 1830 Indian Removal Act and the genocidal Trail of Tears forced migrations. They were used to justify racism and oppression.

History also shows that similar dangerous ideas about “ancient heritage” and the superiority of white people also contributed to the rise of the Nazis, the brutal mass murders of the Holocaust, and the devastation of Europe and other parts of the world during World War II.

For other examples of the pernicious effects of theories like Graham Hancock’s, this excellent book by R. Tripp Evans highlights the racism of individuals such as Désiré Charnay and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and their role in dreams of Manifest Destiny.
amazon.com/Romancing-Maya…

You can find digital editions of Josiah Priest’s books in the Internet Archive. He was also a 3rd great-grandfather of cryptozoology.
archive.org/details/Americ…

This thread would not be complete without mention of Robert Sepehr, who likes to promote himself as “the world’s most dangerous anthropologist.” He is not an anthropologist at all, but repeats stories of the occult, Atlantis, and Aryan superiority.
thejc.com/news/world/ame…

I should clarify that Hancock himself does not use the phrase “white savior,” nor does he refer to the race of these “advanced” (i.e. superior) people in #AncientApocalypse, but this can be intuited from his own earlier writings as well as the history of these kinds of stories.

@JasonColavito addresses the history of the “Mound Builders” in this 2019 essay.
onlinedigeditions.com/article/Whitew…

Graham Hancock is now tweeting Matt Walsh’s video.

https://twitter.com/graham__hancock/status/1597663125721214976

Bringing this thread to the attention of the smart and articulate @KayleighHistory, who is reviewing #AncientApocalypse episode by episode, starting with Episode 1.

Speaking of what’s considered dangerous speech, the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified what’s dangerous about Matt Walsh’s speech.
splcenter.org/hatewatch/2022…

The last pages of the appendix to Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval’s book “Talisman: Gnostics, Freemasons, Revolutionaries, and the 2000-year-old Conspiracy at Work in the World Today” (2004) provides some troubling context given Matt Walsh’s remarks about conspiracy theories.