Rudyard Lynch - Agent of Odin?
Take Him At His Word. He Talked to Something.
A decade ago a thirteen-year-old teenager in Pennsylvania started an alternate history channel that he called Whatifalthist with this two-minute video linked below:
Ten years and more than three hundred videos later, we’re here, where the man, only 23 years old but with 700,000+ YouTube subscribers, dozens of appearances on top podcasts, and a new focus on politics and culture, including creating a new future for the American political right with everyone from the presidents of countries around the world to tech CEOs following his work, suddenly came out with a (since-deleted) ten-hour long video autobiography, manifesto, and rant.
Most 23-year-olds don’t even make a 30-minute autobiography, but Rudyard’s ten-hour series of videos started as normally as you might expect for any detail-obsessed intellectual to have made such a thing, with reflections on his family background and ancestry mixed in with childhood anecdotes, interests, challenges, and adventures. Still, it grew progressively, weirder and wilder over time. References now and again like “I can just read persons” turned into “my mother believed that hospital births damaged the baby’s soul” to “she’s a psychic”, and then into Rudyard saying “I talked to God and the devil” to “I am channeling the Greek god Odin” and, eventually, to his ranting for nearly an hour, in (apparently) the voice of Odin about himself having a special mission for the reinvigoration of the American right. He spends an hour talking about and waving around the weapons in his room. He talks for an hour about EMDR therapy for PTSD he has from past violence within his family. He talks, and talks, and talks, about his experiences while taking ayahuasca and related drugs. It’s a wild, wild, wild ride as this video, heavily critical of Rudyard argues that it proves definitively that he’s simply crazy, and perhaps wild and dangerous:
I’ve watched many of Rudyard’s earlier videos and found him to be an amazing intellect over the last year and a half that I’ve known about him. Perhaps he seemed a little narcissistic, but with the hundreds of books he’s read, the hundreds of hours of well-researched, well-produced, and informative videos on topics from geopolitics to anthropology, future forecasting, political philosophy, and religion, and that he’s done all this at the mere age of 23, I thought he’s well earned that vice.
After this autobiography dropped, the crowd, the world, and even many of his acquaintances and friends, like Monseiur Dean of the MonsieurZ geopolitics YouTube channel, turned against Rudyard, and seemingly rightfully. Everyone agreed that he had gone crazy.1 Because, well, why else would one claim to have talked to God, talked to the devil, and be an agent of a member of the Greek pantheon? Only crazy people make such claims and they do so because they are crazy.
But what if he’s not crazy? Or what if, more precisely, he is crazy, but he is so because he actually had the experiences he claims he did? Rudyard later backtracked, but notably only subtly and slightly, in later commentary posts on his wild experiences. He has stood by the essence if not necessarily the full range of emotive experience that he recollected in his autobiography. And the basic arguments all line up with claims he’s made in other, more mainstream videos on his channel.2 We know there’s a spiritual reality and battle out there, even though we don’t often think about the implications of this in any non-notional way. It’s clear Rudyard is also a very not-very-ordinary individual and has done many “not-so-ordinary” things in his life. Not all of them sound good. He’s been through a lot of family strife and tragedy, and endless pain, physical and psychological. He’s been taking ayahuasca and many other drugs. He’s suddenly rocketed to fame and popularity, and then, as he claims in this autobiography, lost a lot of his former affluence and income over the last few months due to political censorship of his content.
His life, purely materially and psychologically at least, has been a roller coaster, but a roller coaster with influence over hundreds of thousands of people. But wouldn’t such a man be the type of person that you, if you were a demon (or Greek deity, if you wish to use that language, though to me there’s little difference) would want to influence, and use?
Or, put yet another way, Rudyard, through reading what at this point must amount to thousands of books and engaging intellectually with just about every philosophy, idea, and religion out there, has by definition opened himself to a lot of ideas, or let’s say spirits that influence and/or operate his intellect, will, emotions, and imagination. Yes, we influence, work with, play with, and experiment upon the ideas and thoughts in our minds. But isn’t it just as valid of a way of looking at it to say that the ideas work on us, act upon us, even experiment upon us? And that, perhaps, “ideas” are maybe not the best word—or at least the only word, for thinking about them? What if he did have an experience with, well, let’s just call it something?
It’s also interesting to ask why we are so quick to assume that “our thoughts” are really ours. We’re aware of them, yes. But we’re also aware of a lot of things that are not us, like the table, walls, window, and other things around me right now. Those things are not me. That’s obvious. But, “my ideas”, while I am aware of them in a way that seems like an exclusive relationship, and which seems to make them only accidental characteristics of me, are not necessarily “mine.” What reason is there for assuming that this is always the case? Habit and convenience alone.3 And as Christians, we have to assume otherwise anyway, even if we often forget about these implications on a practical level. That the temptations of the world and the devil are out there, as are the inspirations of God, the saints, and the angels, and that these all operate through “thoughts,” argues otherwise
Now, isn’t craziness like Rudyard’s also the kind of thing one would expect to see with an individual with very far out-of-the-ordinary experiences trying to relate or communicate them back to the rest of us? As in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, it is loathesomely difficult to communicate any uncommon knowledge back to those who don’t yet have it. Those who come back from outside of the cave, bearing knowledge of reality as it really is, or might be,4 known in a way that those in the cave perceive imperfectly and only as shadows, are, in Plato’s account, ridiculed for their seeming lunacy.
Rudyard has been in contact with something, and he’s communicating something from that something. But if you’re skeptical, just take the subjectivity and personality out of his claims and think about them again. At a base level, Rudyard is arguing that spiritual powers and realities influence events, history, and us, all the time and that we can communicate with such powers. And of course, I would have to agree with this. What faithful Christians, if they truly think about this claim, aside from the implicit subjective assumptions we’ve picked up from modernity, can disagree? We just don’t often phrase these claims in the way that Rudyard does, or perhaps have had experiences as visceral as those he claims for himself, but if you think through your life, there’s got to be some time where, either for good or for ill, you experienced contact with something.
At the age of 9, I had a weird period of several weeks following reading a book about “ghost stories” I had picked up while visiting a friend’s house where I felt or heard constant pounding in my ears every time I tried to go to sleep while intense terrifying fear took hold over my consciousness. And the big surprise? Reading and praying the Psalms as I went to bed ended this experience immediately.
“You scared yourself with a book. There’s a rational psychological explanation,” the skeptics chant. Perhaps yes, that’s true. But in my experience, it has always made more sense to perceive spiritual, yet in this case also intensely dark realities behind experiences like this one. Something was affecting me, and that something was afraid of prayer and stopped when the Bible was sung in its presence.
I’ve had positive experiences too, like a transformative moment several years ago where years of deeply engrained resentment and pride, built up over years, melted away in an instant of sorrowful, literally crying prayer in a chapel.
Even now, entering a dark room, or especially a dark church, feels like a quick shortcut version of an examination of conscience to me. When I have any lack of charity or any sin on my conscience, I literally feel the state of my soul as visceral fear and terror, visible goosebumps, and a terrifying feeling that something, something is there, that that something is not good, and that I can almost, almost just see it in the corner of my vision. The exact opposite is the case in such a place when in the perfect state of grace: calm, peace, a mind set on the contemplation of Jesus Christ, etc.
I’ve had others like these throughout my life,5 as well as many friends and acquaintances who have all had similar—and in many cases— even wilder experiences. I’m not judging the content necessarily, or the meaning. Just that something is there. Often, very often indeed, that something is a not-good sort of something out there.
The skeptic again objects: “You’re psycho. You’re schizo. You’re tricking yourself. You’re insane. You’re a stupid superstitious simpleton of a Christian. It’s all explainable with matter, atoms, and the void.”
And perhaps he’s right. But I’ve had too many weird experiences of my own, too many coincidences, to think that the mind and realm of ideas, whether or not they exist in a Platonic way or otherwise, are independent of the rest of us and merely material. No matter how long ago Lucretius came up with this deconstructionist, materialist view of reality, even his cosmology, like unto Richard Dawkins’s as it may be, also had its spiritual principle of the swerve sneaking into it. Ideas, influences, and sometimes, even viscerally physically sensed experiences come from outside of us, and we don’t pay enough attention to or fear well enough from whence they come. And certain things, it seems, like Rudyard’s consumption of ayahuasca, seem to make these somethings more capable of affecting us, and us of perceiving them, in dark and terrifying ways.6 Most of the time, though we ignore their reality, they’re still affecting us, just slyly and subtly.
The Christian who knows his catechism robotically answers “from a devil or an angel” when asked about where temptations and inspirations come from.7 But just how does it do so, and give you temptations or inspirations? Do you realize that in doing so it’s acting, upon you, right now? Think about the implications. And then stop and say a prayer, as you will be too terrified8 to proceed through the world without it.9
Rudyard Lynch is not insane. He’s not lying in his autobiography. He is an oracle. He is a psychic. I’m just not sure how much he was talking to God versus, well to something else…
Rudyard Lynch took down his autobiography and has been getting anyone who’s reposted it to take it down from YouTube/Rumble as well, so it’s hard to find. Although I have a copy I’m not putting it up either for that reason, but would be willing to share the file upon request unless/until Rudyard or a mutual friend that we share complains.
See also Rudyard’s non-retraction retraction of his autobiography here:
P.S. Order of the Crimson Dragon. Hmm, now I’m even more sure of whom he was communicating with, and I’m even more worried about Rudyard. He could probably use a prayer or two, or three, as well.
One of Rudyard’s best friends is an acquaintance of mine who I text occasionally, and he and I agreed that we actually liked Rudyard’s autobiography, even though we agreed that it gives his critics lots of fodder for further criticism.
See this great video by Rudyard for example:
Please don’t take me for a gnostic. I’m not saying that uncommon knowledge is always right. But sometimes it is.
The time I went solo backpacking without proper equipment in the rain and distinctly remember my chest engaging in a conversation with one of my toes about sacrificing the part that the whole might live (a dark version of John 12:24) is another moment of deep lore.
e.g. In any episode of the Joe Rogan Experience where they mention drugs. Aliens and demons are bound to be mentioned within a few minutes.
Coincidence?
If they’re not from your own fallen nature or regular comprehension of the things of the world, of course
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God Have Mercy on me a Sinner!
Another good one:
Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio, contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium. Imperet illi Deus, supplices deprecamur: tuque, Princeps militiae caelestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute, in infernum detrude. Amen.