This article was originally published in German.
Humanity is in danger once again. Why? “All the globalists care about is power and control” is how the far-right media activist Stefan Magnet kicked off his “special broadcast” on Auf1, a portal specialising in conspiracy ideologies. In the world of conspiracy ideologies, this sounds like a plausible argument. The alarming title of the video, which was posted on 12 November 2022, is “Deadly Agenda: The Plan Has Been Found Out!”. The plan that Magnet allegedly uncovered is nothing more than the latest conspiracy narrative – one that can best be summed up in a single word: transhumanism. It likely comes as little surprise that Magnet has written a book on the subject and is busy promoting it left, right and centre. The transhumanist conspiracy narrative purports that an evil financial elite is seeking to replace humanity with machines.
This is not the first time human beings have been threatened with replacement. Following on the heels of the “Great Replacement”, or the alleged efforts to replace the white population with migrants, and the “Great Reset”, a carefully orchestrated financial crash designed to create an oppressive new world order, transhumanism is the latest narrative to emerge from – and stoke the fires of – the scene. Here, the twin narratives of the population being replaced and the Great Reset are folded into the new ideology, with conspiracy propagandists using the narrative surrounding transhumanism to flesh out the overarching concept of the Great Reset.
What is transhumanism?
Once upon a time, transhumanism was a non-political, philosophical school of thought. It is based on the notion of optimising human beings through a combination of technology and science. Transhumanists seek to combine human resources and technology to bring about progress. Transhumanists want to overcome biological and intellectual boundaries. They want to use technology to gain mastery over illness, ageing and even death.
One prominent proponent of this idea is the Israeli historian Yuval Harari, whose non-fiction book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow is a bestseller. Critics of this ideology have ethical concerns. They are afraid that this will lead to a race to create the perfect human being.
By contrast, Stefan Magnet and various other conspiracy prophets and far-right supporters have been using this theory to promote their own ideological purposes for some time now. According to Magnet, transhumanism is a “Satanist plan” implemented by the globalists and the foundation on which everything they do is based. Magnet believes the globalists seek to “hold humanity in contempt”. For the globalists, he states, the majority of people are “simply a useless, homogeneous mass”. He goes on to state that the globalists want to use transhumanist ideas to make a “concrete attempt to eliminate large swathes of humanity and enslave the rest”. Their goal, he states, is to gain complete control over humanity. Magnet claims that “the Great Reset, the homosexual and transgender movement, scaremongering about the climate, media-led brainwashing, and [our] dependence on Microsoft and Google” are all in service of gaining control over humanity as a whole. These efforts by conspiracy ideologists to drum up panic about science and progress dovetail perfectly with the hostility toward science and fears of anti-vaccine campaigners.
The claim: White people will be infertile from 2045 – and LGBTQ* has a role to play
Magnet has no doubts: “White people will be infertile” by 2045. Why? Because from that point on, he contends, people will be made in a lab, produced according to a transhumanist mould. He states that the climate movement is a contributing factor to this form of birth control, as some activists do not want to have children for environmental reasons. However, he goes on to point out that it is the “brutal, omnipresent, trans-homo-gender propaganda” that is the primary cause of infertility among Europeans and North Americans.
Above all, Magnet blames people who define themselves as queer for allegedly enslaving all of humanity. He has perfected the art of the conspiracy ideology, allowing him to decipher the hidden messages behind the alleged signs and symbols on show. His argument is as follows: major corporations are very interested in controlling and suppressing people because Magnet believes these corporations are led by Satanic globalists. And who supports the LGBTQ* community once a year by posting rainbow flags on their social media profiles? Corporations! In the world of the conspiracy ideologists, this has nothing to do with capitalism or marketing – the aim is to bring about the extinction of the human race.
For Stefan Magnet, colours and symbols represent a conspiracy
The Vatican also has a role to play, at least according to Magnet and his interpretation of the Vatican’s logo. There is no doubt in Magnet’s mind: all the evildoers in the world will eventually reveal their true purpose through a multicoloured circle or a combination of colours. Believers in this conspiracy myth will find this colour combination virtually everywhere.
Magnet isn’t alone in propagating this absurd narrative about a Satanist, money-fed elite that wants to exterminate humanity by using queer propaganda and implanted chips.
Jürgen Elsässer, editor-in-chief of the far-right magazine Compact, has been running with this story for some time now. He claims people are being injected with microprocessors when they receive the corona vaccine. “The organisers behind the Great Reset are doing this to control people and create a new species”. Conspiracy narratives are always a matter of “good versus evil”. In this bipolar context, Elsässer believes Russia is the only remaining power capable of defeating the evil transhumanists. Against the backdrop of Putin’s Russia, Elsässer believes that “the forces of the world will unite to defend our traditional identities – peoples and nation states, religion and transcendence, the bipolarity of the sexes and the sanctity of our genetic material – against the transhumanist onslaught of the elite”.
Alexander Dugin, a “New Right thinker” from Russia, is another who has much to say about transhumanism. His is perhaps the loudest voice in rejection of everything modern and the West. In an interview with Compact, he said that the devil and the “globalist agenda” have almost achieved their goal of creating the “Antichrist”. Dugin, for whom everything is charged with esoteric, Christian meaning in a far-right sense, considers transhumanism to be an idea of the devil. By positioning the transhumanism conspiracy narrative as a foil to Christianity, it can be embedded deeply within a fundamentally Christian context.
Inherent racism
The idea of “natural versus artificial” is a key element of the transhumanism conspiracy narrative. In the eyes of the far right, “the people” or “the race” is a natural phenomenon that is threatened by external forces, such as migration.
Martin Sellner, the head of the German-speaking far-right “Identitarian movement”, has also written about transhumanism, making it part of various other far-right narratives. “Transhumanism, the ideology of gender, anti-racism and digitalisation of human identity are all following a vector” (sic). There is one overarching goal: to bring about the Great Reset or the New World Order. According to Sellner, the globalists’ main goal is to create a diverse society. As it will still take some time to turn transhumanism to their advantage, he believes the Great Replacement is the number one risk at present. Like Compact, Sellner contends that the main driving force behind these conspiracy ideas is the Jewish billionaire George Soros – a go-to enemy of anti-Semites worldwide.
The transhumanism conspiracy narrative has many proponents in the USA, too. Conspiracy guru Alex Jones from Infowars has been warning about transhumanists for years. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon has also frequently leaned into this narrative. The criminal who broke into the home of democratic US politician Nancy Pelosi (82) on 28 October and violently attacked her husband Paul Pelosi also published content relating to this conspiracy narrative on his blog.
As is so often the case for conspiracy myths, that of the “Satanist” transhumanists is charged with antisemitism. Even if its proponents are rarely explicit about this, they drop enough hints to make it clear that influential Jews are the root of all this evil. The term “globalists” used by Stefan Magnet is another anti-Semitic code for the Jews.
George Soros and Klaus Schwab are described as the personification of the all-powerful villains in the narratives revolving around the Great Replacement and the Great Reset. Meanwhile, Yuval Noah Harari is the ultimate antagonist in the transhumanist conspiracy ideology. The fact that Harari is a Jew and in a homosexual relationship is fuel to the fire for the scene, as it means those hostile toward democracy have not one, but two bogeymen with which to associate him: the Jews and the LGBTQ* movement.
This text was written and published in cooperation with the Get The Trolls Out project.
