There may be some literary justice to the fact that, in these hopelessly confusing and terminally dangerous times, an obscure screed written more than 200 years ago by an opium-addicted mechanical engineer might serve as a clarification. The author was one of the first tech bros, a polymath born in the 18th century — when steam engines, modern chemistry, and mind-numbing military expenditures were born. His name was John Robison, and without him there would be no Alex Jones, Peter Thiel, Joe Rogan, or “Big Balls” Edward Coristine, the 21-year-old engineering student and computer programmer Elon Musk brought to Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.
A brilliant Scotsman born in 1739, John Robison’s only lasting literary achievement is a little-known work that has endured as one of the most influential, yet least examined, political documents of modern times, and it possesses one of those interminable 18th-century titles: Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. More than a dozen editions remain in print.
John Robison was the first of a kind that has become a cliché throughout the manosphere and blogosophere: the nerdy computer programmer turned political pundit turned hate-riddled defender of the plutocracy — men like David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, Vivek Ramaswamy, and various and sundry other members of the “PayPal Mafia”. Not to mention the spittle-mouthed prince of them all, Mr Musk himself. From the start, such bros were guilty of intellectual overreach, supremely confident in their belief that, since they were the smartest men in the room, they possessed every right and privilege to scribble whatever they liked on topics about which they knew nothing. Such as politics.
A beach read, it isn’t. But here was the first full-throated articulation of what has become an integral part of the overheated agenda of the modern Republican Party. It enumerates now familiar anti-democratic obsessions — from the menace of “universal citizenship” and deep-state spies to the influence and power of liberal journalists (“scribbling vermin”) and judges hell-bent on lawfare (“they insinuated themselves into all public offices, and particularly into courts of justice”); from the fear of wealth re-distribution to worship of the trad wife (as opposed to the “female ornaments” who had been infected by “the whole system of female dress in France”) and threats against the family (a “community of wives” to “take children from their parents, and educate them for the nation”). Robison even accuses the wealthy French atheist Baron D’Holbach of dissecting the brains of living children, purchased from poor parents, in order to discover the “principle of vitality”. That is to say, even in the age of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Jefferson, there was a precursor to Pizzagate.
Much like other private equity-obsessed male-power nerds who blithely endorse technofascism, Robison was an expert in everything but human connection. “This requires a talent to which I have no pretensions,” he confessed. Many years later, his students would complain that Professor Robison lectured in a rapid-fire monotone, spewing streams of fact with such rapidity no one could keep up.
Robison crossed the Atlantic twice: first, to fight for the British in the Battle of Quebec (1775), and second, to Jamaica as a technical expert on chronometers and as a secret agent for the Royal Navy. Afterwards, he settled in St Petersburg and became a military adviser to Catherine the Great. Thus he played an integral part in Russia’s efforts to gain a warm water port. He was one of many young naval engineers who illegally transferred English tech secrets to Russia, enabling her annexation of the Crimean peninsula.
Which is to say, the current geopolitics concerning Russia in the Ukraine have been with us for centuries.
It was easy for Catherine the Great to recruit Robison as a Russian asset. When he returned to Scotland, he brought with him two Russian students, and soon thereafter began his epic literary attempt to describe the descent of his fellow academics into evil. It would be the first version of a political philosophy that would endure through the centuries, a theory of invisible international powers consisting of intellectuals, socialists, and others who stood “against patriotism”. In short, Robison believed that a crew of atheists and globalists sought riches, power, and influence… To do so, he wrote, “they would abolish Christianity”, after which “dissolute manners and universal profligacy” would allow them to usurp the governments of Europe — a typical example of Robison’s over-heated prose, which aside from the polysyllables, would be right at home on Ben Shapiro.
The book was an instant bestseller. Within days, the first edition sold out in Scotland. Soon, four editions followed, as well as bootlegs in Ireland and America, a slew of abridgements, sermons, tracts, pamphlets, reference works, and scores of lurid novels depicting the wicked machinations of dastardly schemers intent upon modelling the world anew. In America, Proofs would inspire the rise of the Anti-Masonic Party, the Populists, the Know-Nothings and Nativists, McCarthyism, and the John Birch Society, whose founder Robert Welch was directly inspired by the book, which he kept in his library. (Not only was Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s ex-chief of staff, a card-carrying member of the John Birch society, but so too was Fred Trump, Donald’s father, who donated to the organisation).
In “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, the Yale historian Richard Hofstadter characterises the fears of the far Right as being “overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose and apocalyptic”. Hoftsadter, too, traced the origins of this political strain to Robison’s Proofs.
“It would be the first version of a political philosophy that would endure through the centuries, a theory of invisible international powers consisting of intellectuals, socialists, and others who stood ‘against patriotism’.”
Underlying Robison’s political fears were the Freemasons, a secret society who believed that government could be perfected by means of science. Both George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were card-carrying members. The great irony is that Robison, too, had been a Mason. His volte-face over his erstwhile Masonic bros illustrates how conspiratorial thinking inevitably turns upon itself. It explains how a diehard MAGA acolyte such as Daily Wire host Candace Owens could tell the Stephen A. Smith show that “Trump is betraying America.” It also explains how Jesse Watters could call the US intelligence report on the ineffectual results of bombing Iran “enemy propaganda.” It explains the furious infighting that has recently plagued MAGA: the battle between the isolationists (Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon) and the neoliberal nation-building, warmongering MIGAs (“Make Iran Great Again”). Such recent conflicts among the denizens of Fox News are being played out on the same terms Robison defined more than two centuries ago. Each paints the other as controlled by the deep state.
There is no stronger evidence that Proofs is essential to understanding the context of modern politics than a recent news item that may qualify as the strangest clip ever posted by the radical-Right online media outlet InfoWars. In a segment of just over two minutes, independent journalist Dan Dicks confronts Peter Thiel — the über-tech-bro entrepreneur, investor, Right-wing political activist, and billionaire co-founder of the software company Palantir Technologies that has signed several enormous contracts with the United States Department of Defense. The footage begins as Thiel, dressed in a grey suit and dark sunglasses, casually strolls alongside two bodyguards outside Stockholm’s Grand Hotel, on his way to a meeting of the secretive Bilderberg Group’s Steering Committee. In and of itself, this is extraordinary: the Bilderberg Group has long been considered an insidious and invisible cabal of “insiders” by conspiracy theorists. The subsequent video posted on hard-Right podcasts illustrates how conspiratorial tech bros cannot escape their own conspiracies, as they are by nature entranced by hidden truths.
“Mr Thiel,” asks Dicks, “do you have any comments about Palantir’s surveillance of the American people, sir? Or any of your connections to Jeffrey Epstein?” The Republican megadonor — who has garnered immense political power for himself as a mentor to Vice President JD Vance — picks up the pace until, nearing a sprint, he manages to escape behind a police barricade. The grim set of his jaw, the intensity of his stride, and his stubborn silence speak volumes about Right-wing paranoid politics and the fear of the administrative state: there is no end to it. No matter how far to the Right you may go, you will be outflanked.
Robison possessed a penchant for rococo rhetoric and fanatical vituperation worthy of the most incendiary of today’s pundits — from YouTuber Hamza Ahmed to Fox’s Jesse Watters. But what is most relevant about John Robison’s brand of crazy was that he was also late-18th-century England’s premiere expert on acoustics, engineering, and mechanics, a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and scientific editor of the famous third edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He was a favourite of Adam Smith’s, a drinking buddy of David Hume’s, the man who suggested to James Watt that steam might be used for engines of locomotion. He was an intellectual companion of the great mathematician, Leonhard Euler, and an expert on military seamanship, especially when it came to destroying other ships. After he inscribed the mathematical formula of magnetic attraction and repulsion, he was considered by many to be the next Newton.
If he had never written Proofs, John Robison might have been consigned by academics to the footnotes of scholarly articles about the Scottish Enlightenment. Instead, his embittered, resentful, furious, and thoroughly modern attack on the deep state presents an unsavoury counter to the traditional narrative of Enlightenment positivism and liberalism. The case of John Robison proves how inevitable it was that the MAGA tech bros would become the mess they are today, and how our contemporary political crises have collapsed into a flurry of self-destruction.
“I never possessed great talents,” Robison would lament in one of his last, self-loathing letters. But the guns-and-ammo loving drug-addicted techno-nerd from the outskirts of Glasgow did provide mankind with one practical innovation. He invented the siren. How fitting, for the alarm he set more than 200 years ago is still ringing.
