The tragic loss of the OceanGate Titan submersible has sparked a renewed interest in the 1912 sinking of RMS Titanic. The crew on board the sub were hoping to see the wreckage of the ship.
While a lot of the attention on the shipwreck is benign, there are conspiracy theories that are running rampant. One of the theories claims that the sinking was a "hit job" organized by banking giant JP Morgan, who was supposed to travel on the ship but didn't at the last minute.
TikTok user @grinberg2024 posted a video in which he explains the newest version of the theory, which has been around for some time. He begins, "The Titanic was actually a hit job. All the richest people in the world in 1912 were supposed to be on this ship."
After bringing up John Astor, a passenger who went down with the ship, he continues, "He was the richest man in America at that time. Basically, this guy was in the way of the Federal Reserve. They wanted to create a central bank, the Rothschilds, and they couldn't. They already owned Europe, but they didn't own America yet."
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It's important to note here that the Federal Reserve is not a bank, and that many people speak about the Rothschild family using thinly veiled antisemitic language.
Professor Robert Hockett from Cornell Law School has stated, "It's always a tipoff that someone is ignorant of Fed matters when they refer to 'The Federal Reserve Bank.' There is no such entity. There is, rather, a 'Federal Reserve System' with 12 regional Federal Reserve District Banks spread all over the country (so as to avoid excessive centralization) and a regulatory agency called the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to oversee this system."
The TikToker goes on to insist that "they can't just take someone out of that importance" and adds "They made this big deal [of] everyone going on the ship. And then, in the last seconds, all the Rothschild people exited the ship, like, right before it was about to take off."
Another important note: No one from the Rothschild family was ever on board the Titanic, and therefore no one from the family got off the ship right before it was supposed to disembark. As one of the most influential families of the time, records would have been made to note that they planned to sail on the ship.
The original conspiracy theory insists that JP Morgan is the man who allegedly wanted to take out John Astor and others on board the Titanic. That theory is also heavily touted by the antigovernment group QAnon.
The Washington Post addressed the theory in 2018. As the outlet wrote at the time, the theory might be appealing to some "But the story falls apart fast if you spend a little time in historic newspaper databases or a good library."
The theory also claims that John Astor, Isidor Straus, and Benjamin Guggenheim, all of whom were supposed "enemies" of JP Morgan, weren't against the creation of the Federal Reserve System. The Washington Post writes, "A digital search of key U.S. newspapers of the era doesn’t show Astor or Guggenheim taking a position on the Fed. But Straus did. He spoke publicly in favor of the proposal to create a federal reserve, according to two October 1911 stories in the New York Times."
As for the Rothschild family, conspiracy theorists have been coming up with stories about the family as far back as the 1800s, when their series of successful banks were founded. The stories seem to have begun in 1815 during the Battle of Waterloo. Washington Post writes, "According to an 1846 political pamphlet signed 'Satan,' Nathan Rothschild, once the richest man in the world, exploited his knowledge of Napoleon’s defeat to make a fortune on the London Stock Exchange. Satan didn’t reveal his sources on this, but conspiracy theorists ate it up."
