JIANG XUEQIN IS A BEIJING-BASED HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER with a BA in English literature who runs the YouTube channel “Predictive History.” He gained massive popularity in 2024-2026 for geopolitical predictions, including aspects of the 2024 U.S. election and U.S.-Iran tensions that some viewed as prescient. His March 2026 Breaking Points appearance with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti went viral in clips, with combined related viewership in the millions. In it, he explicitly stated that the Epstein files prove the world is run by secret societies one can call the “Illuminati,” composed of three groups: Jesuits (who control the Vatican), Sabbatean-Frankists, and implied others, with a center of power in Jerusalem. According to this view, these forces control the military and national security, and he frames this as a predictive analyst’s observation rather than deep historiographical or philosophical study.
PROFESSOR JIANG’S NARRATIVE
In Jiang Xueqin’s appearance on Breaking Points, he linked the Epstein files to a centuries-old “Illuminati” cabal composed of the Vatican, Jesuits, and Sabbatean-Frankists controlling the U.S. military and national security apparatus, which is a recurring and counterproductive pattern in the paranoid style of American politics. This engages in a dangerous pattern of immortalizing the oligarchy, financiers and political centers of powers that need to be re-examined. His lectures seem normal, until you examine his appropriation of the history of the Gnostics and the Ancient Mysteries which he synthesizes with pop cultural explanation about international rings of sex trafficking networks and the religious psychotic delusions of the political and business class. By framing documented elite criminality and institutional failures through the lens of esoteric secret societies with which they have no connection, such theories mystify power, rather than expose it. They substitute a pop-cultural narrative of hidden “Illuminati” masters for the harder work of analyzing verifiable networks of financiers, intelligence operatives, politicians, and blackmail operations that operate in plain sight through public institutions and capital flows. This also perpetuates the misuse of “occultism” in popular imagination through negative associations and eschatological categories.
I have used Jiang Xueqin before explaining the collapse of the post-World War global order and war with Iran, which was not conspiratorial coded. After going more into his work however, he does unfortunately adapt anti-Gnostic narratives of the history of religion and politics, then weaves them into his Illuminati theories about who controls the world that prove to be counter-productive and ahistorical. These narratives and theories of history, which are often not backed by any primary sources give the mistaken notion, that a historically consistent singular force or body of influence underlies the current political and geopolitical structure of the U.S., replacing norm political analysis with cross-disciplinary blending historical precedent with speculative forecasting, and conspiracism similar to the style of Michael Tsarion.
9,000,000 people have viewed this, and many of those numbers are glee that the conspiracy has been mentioned beyond the limits of niche digital spaces.
CLOSE INSPECTION OF PROFESSOR JIANG’S INTERVIEW
Jiang is also engaged in spreading the disorganizing and chaotic propaganda that makes it infinitely more difficult on a global scale, because now we have Illuminati and Dajjalic-mythic depictions about the West in Iran competing against an actual Zionist-Evangelical coalition that are engaged in the theatrics of Apocalyptic prophecy. Instead of a populace of citizens capable of putting our psychotic political class in its place, the people are engrossed and engaged in fantastical myths.
Professor Jiang Xueqin on Breaking Points stated that by observing the Epstein files, the world appears to be run by secret societies, but then he connects this to a long history of secret societies. He was allowed to spread his view across many platforms to boost metrics without an equally viewed challenge, especially because journalism norms largely avoid these subjects. However, a perpetuation of these myths on such large of a platform gives those in power an advantage that I discuss further in The Founders, Montesquieu, Machiavelli, and Harrington Warning Against the People’s Love of Political Fantasy.
Popular culture myths keep associating the political and financial elite class going through religious psychosis with the historical development of the ancient Mysteries, cultic institutions and ancient ritual colleges, yet not a single political representative supposedly in “the Illuminati” has displayed the temperament, character, discipline, or shown any signs they possess the knowledge that would signify they are connected to this ancient history. Professor Jiang nor the public seem to understand this history, which is demonized. The fact that a large mass of the populace engages in this conspiracism is actually a weakness, for it protects the criminality of the power structure with fable.
Jiang says that you can name them the Illuminati, but he states, we don’t know who they are, yet they control the military and national security operatives.
So, why do you call them the ILLUMINATI?
Professor Jiang claims, that the Illuminati are composed of three groups: the Vatican, the Jesuits and the Sabbatean-Frankists. By admitting “we don’t know who they are” yet naming a precise (and false) appellation by which to identify unknown underlying elites, Jiang abuses the term “Illuminati” to conflate unrelated groups, slander historical rationalists, and perpetuate urban legends that obscure verifiable power analysis.
Archaeology with Flint Dibble analyzed his rise in popularity and his predictive history, refuting his ideas about Roman and Egyptian history, pseudoscientific positions on evolution, holocaust denialism and anti-Jewish (Jewish-Masonic) conspiracies.
THE PARANOID STYLE OF AMERICAN POLITICS AND THE SABBATEAN-FRANKIST CONSPIRACY
As many of you that have been readers for long, I began the pivot of focus from Asia to the Americas as a concern for my own country, and as a critical reaction to Manly P. Hall’s book Secret Destiny of America — contrasting it with H.P. Blavatsky’s (19ᵗʰ c. Buddhist Theosophist) rejection of the Illuminati conspiracy in Adepts in America in 1776. Here, Blavatasky states, that the American Revolution owes itself to an independent operation of settlers not associated with Oriental adepts, and among the human agency involved in this revolution were Freemasons, Rosicrucians and other European spiritual movements.
In my article, Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment Republicanism against Illuminati Panic: Letter on Weishaupt’s Perfectibilist Ideal, I detail the early attacks in the early U.S. Republic against Thomas Jefferson in his defense of Adam Weishaupt in a private letter. To spread the hysteria to the masses, factionists needed to villainize and implicate a Founding Father to give it legitimacy. Jefferson picked the Illuminati scare apart with philosophical and historical context, but once the letter became public, the conspiracists adapted their tactic by using the letter to support their conspiracy about Illuminati infiltration in the American government. In the 1820s, this led to the creation of the earliest third party in the U.S. known as the Anti-Masonic Party.
These tactics were used long before social media and the age of post-truth, which has proven that no amount of fact-giving can defuse the spread of a conspiratorial lie once it has circulated in the minds of the masses, shaping how they read and view everything in accordance with religious fears and anxieties from economic woes.
These views that immortalizes perverted materialists in power composes a pop-culture syncretism that is distinct from the historically documented Bavarian Order of the Illuminati.
Founded May 1st, 1776, initially as the Perfectibilists by Johann Adam Weishaupt (1748-1830), a professor of canon law at Ingolstadt, the Illuminati (Latin illuminatus, “enlightened” or “initiated adepts”) in Bavaria was suppressed by Bavarian edicts 1784-1785 after exposure. Weishaupt did explicitly model its graded structure on Jesuit constitutions for discipline yet abhorred the Society of Jesus and used the Order to advance anti-clerical, secular Enlightenment goals: education reform separating church and state in Bavaria, moral self-scrutiny, republicanism, and human “perfectibility,” which is opposite of the Frankists. Weishaupt invoked Zoroastrian “Fire-Worship of the Magi” as allegory for the divine principle of reason (LOGOS) and posited an anarchist utopianism.
As I detailed in “Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment Republicanism against Illuminati Panic,” the 1798-1800 scare was a partisan Federalist weapon against Democratic-Republicans, amplified by Barruel’s and Robison’s hearsay-filled works that conflated Weishaupt’s order with the French Revolution and invented ongoing cabals. Modern claims of world domination, financier elites, or occult cabals reflect this eighteenth-century instigation. The Illuminati Order failed as a vehicle for change, but Weishaupt’s ideas succeeded indirectly through broader Enlightenment secularism and revolutions.
The Illuminati were explicitly anti-Jesuit, anti-Vatican, and are unrelated to Sabbatean-Frankists. The words, Illuminati and Sabbatean-Frankists should not be used together. Jiang’s tripartite Vatican, Jesuits and Sabbatean-Frankists is pure conspiracy syncretism. This is the “Epsteinism” propaganda against the West I have written about used to justify the Shaytan or Dajjalic West discourse from the other side.
Weishaupt borrowed the Jesuit hierarchical model instrumentally while fighting their dominance over Bavarian education and politics. The Catholic Church and clergy (allied with anti-Illuminati Rosicrucians) instigated the Order’s suppression; and the edicts came from the Elector of Bavaria under ecclesiastical pressure.
Sabbatai Zevi (17ᵗʰ c.) and Jacob Frank (18ᵗʰ c.) led antinomian messianic Jewish movements. Later conspiracy literature (Protocols-style) weaponized them into Rothschild and “Jewish Illuminati” tropes. These antinomian messianic movements from Sabbatai Zevi to Jacob Frank are a staple of the evolving anti-Jewish grand Rothschild-Illuminati-Protocols conspiracy ecosystem. It began with the Illuminati panic caused by Barruel and Robison that slandered Weishaupt. Jesus was reframed as an ethical teacher of liberty and equality in Weishaupt’s philosophy, reflecting Enlightenment connotations of reason that derive from the Latin word illuminare meaning intellectual light.
The Epstein files reveal documented elite networks of financiers, politicians, intelligence ties, possible honeypot operations operating through public institutions, capital, and state agencies. Attributing this to an unknowable secret society but then saying that they are the Illuminati composed of Jesuits, the Vatican and Frankists imports 1798-1800 style panic and propaganda that continues to distract and confuse Americans.
Thomas Jefferson’s 31 January 1800 letter is decisive in explaining that during the early republic’s “Illuminati scare,” Federalist clergy and politicians (Jedidiah Morse et al.) claimed Weishaupt’s Order infiltrated America, caused the French Revolution, and threatened Christianity and the government. Jefferson called this the “ravings of a Bedlamite,” defended Weishaupt as an “enthusiastic Philanthropist” believing in “indefinite perfectibility of man,” and noted that secrecy was defensive against “tyranny & priests.” The real “conspiracy” was clerical-Federalist use of the label to attack republicanism. The conspiracists feared the spreading of information, reason and natural morality.
Jiang replicates this tactic, by propagating the idea that Epstein shows real power concentrations (military-intel operatives included) while labeling them Illuminati or Frankists, which mythologizes distributed institutional and oligarchic realities into a monolithic ancient cabal. The historical Illuminati sought the opposite of control, through moral perfection, which Weishaupt believed would dissolve the need for government domination, standing armies or security states. Jiang sadly engages in the subtle arts and specious half-truths that have served to discredit actual philanthropists and Enlightenment ideals, preventing the public from being educated well on the history, thereby undermining our own civilization. The Epstein files and related investigations do reveal disturbing, verifiable networks of powerful individuals exploiting positions across finance, politics, academia, and intelligence-adjacent circles. These demand rigorous investigation, empirical dissection of state-corporate-intel networks and accountability, but this is not an excuse to engage in mythologization by connecting them to an ancient occult cabal. Genuine scholarly study of these movements exists separately from conspiracy syncretism, yet this scholarship that has made advance does not inform our dialogue. Conspiracy framing and its method of dissemination allows actual perpetrators to dismiss all scrutiny, while also radicalizing people away from institutional reform toward apocalyptic waiting or scapegoating.
CONCLUSION
Some of Jiang’s geopolitical predictions landed well enough to gain traction, because he highlights real U.S. foreign policy failures and elite impunity. The problem is the explanatory framework. Citizens must learn to distinguish between (a) recognizing real conspiracies (small groups of people secretly coordinating crimes, which happen) and (b) grand, unfalsifiable secret-society narratives that explain everything. Jiang’s version falls into (b).
The 1798-1800 panic and Anti-Masonic Party show these dynamics are not new, and were used to attack republicans and rationalists then, just as similar framings today can sideline evidence-based critique. The only reason that we use that word “Illuminati” is because of the history of the initial Counter-Revolution artifice, and Jiang is effectively both deceiving and perpetuating ignorance about this history. The interview revealed that Professor Jiang’s view is ordinary, and not insight into secret control, but is the latest iteration of the panic the historical Illuminati’s own ideals were meant to dispel. Rational analysis of power does not require inventing ancient cabals or apocalyptic beliefs. It requires citizens willing to examine public records, institutional incentives, and documented networks without the distorting lens of myth. Rejecting Illuminati syncretism is not defense of any status quo, but a prerequisite for holding actual power accountable on its own terms.