The rise of the self-styled “Professor Jiang” Xueqin, host of Predictive History, was like a golden horse soaring into the blue sky, to use a Chinese metaphor. His main topics are civilisational life cycles, causes of collapse, the centrality of religion, etc.

These are hobby horses of mine, so I welcomed him to my feed, but I was disappointed with each new video and increasingly sceptical of his motives. Worst of all, popular and edgy influencers are turning to “China’s Nostradamus” as an oracle to guide them through the storm of the US/Israel-Iran conflict and beyond. His interview with The Diary of a CEO channel passed seven million views in just a few days. This case of the blind leading the blind has come at a terrible time.

Of course, challenging Jiang incurs accusations of jealousy. Critics who believe they are smarter, but lack the rizz and delivery, often resort to ankle-biting their betters. Nevertheless, I contend that Jiang is not peddling a predictive history framework at all, that his predictions are not unique or even superior, and that he is subverting the discourse on the right with feminist and gnostic slop.

Currently working at the Moonshot Academy high school in Beijing, Professor Jiang’s video series feature a small classroom smartboard with several recurring students in the Q&A, all in English. This set captures an early Jordan Peterson lecture motif. The audience feels they are ahead of the curve, not just the tides of history, earning the kudos of early discovery, before it was cool.

The similarities with Jordan Peterson are more than superficial: a lesser-known academic, no stranger to mental illness but with an engaging teaching style, develops a skyrocketing career online, influencing Western youths’ opinions on geopolitics, religion, civilisation, focusing particularly on Israel and Christianity, and promoting gnosticism. Is that too cynical of me? Professor Jiang is a stage name after all; Jiang has no doctorate, albeit his English Lit degree was from Yale. His academic background does not lend itself to mapping civilisational life cycles onto the future, but it does make accusations of spying in China less surprising. Wikipedia notes: “contracted to conduct an undercover U.S.-funded PBS documentary about the labor movement in China…Jiang was arrested and detained for two days before he was deported from China on 5 June 2002.” In fairness, he wasn’t charged but was allowed to return a year later to spearhead educational reforms at high-profile schools, pushing “a more liberal system of learning with focus on creativity.’” Am I cynical or do Jiang’s fans lack critical thinking and circumspection?

I set out to answer that question: Are Jiang fans as gullible as atheist, normie, Dan Brown readers were in the 2000s? I must be upfront though: Jiang is fun to watch. If anything, I love to hate his takes. So, I started at his intellectual foundations, critiquing his reading list and then his series on Civilization. What I found was outdated nothing-burgers and a litany of errors; by comparison, Jordan Peterson seemed to live up to Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing’s ingratiating hype as the “the pre-eminent public intellectual of our time.”

The Re-Reading List

If you knew nothing else about Jiang, you would think his reading list were thrown together by AI with a handful of mainstream academic, leftist and feminist shoehorns. Jiang himself presents this as the reading list that “they” do not want you to read, providing a gnostic, elite, secret knowledge or “Secret History” of the world, as he titles one of his lecture series. This is the foundation for his framework (introduced here) whereby he claims to understand the past (the Secret History of the humanity and the world), present geopolitical events and, thus, make accurate predictions about the future.

Yet, aside from all the standard classics, the modern philosophy and PoliSci-101 entries, his reading list has outmoded theories and texts which were mainstream a decade or more ago, like Weber’s work on the Protestant work ethic, Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Gimbutas’ oft-disproven feminist favourite Language of the Goddess, which is astonishingly the anthropological keystone of Jiang’s framework. What else? Pseudo-intellectual airport books like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens? Where is the sexy scandal I was promised? Piketty’s criticism of capitalism for future growth? The only hot writer is the increasingly popular Peter Turchin, whose academic papers on the origins of empire were proven by a fascinating computer-modelling technique he developed, even factoring for human agency, proving the 250-year life cycle of empires as observed much earlier by Sir John Glubb and others. Turchin has since erred more towards economic reductionist explanations of collapse, which are still insightful but less helpful overall. Jiang works the theory of the overproduction of elites and the overthrowing of old regimes into his framework nevertheless, but it is hardly central.

The reading list had dried me out, but maybe Jiang had some esoteric juice in the lecture series.

The Secret History Framework

Rather than emerging from academic schools of thought, the central features of Jiang’s Secret History framework come from his imagination. Perhaps the most gymnastic of his arguments is that the Romans invented monotheism and that Christianity invented imperialism. (No, I am not kidding, see here.) Such a Gordian knot defies chronology itself. Another unique assertion is his whole videos dedicated to the secret gnostic teachings of Dante; reading way too much into superficial similarities, Jiang seems oblivious to the absence of any historical evidence Dante even encountered gnostic texts, or to the plain and plentiful evidence that he was an orthodox Catholic. One must question Jiang’s motives here.

Nevertheless, here is the Secret History the elites are hiding from us: patriarchy, bad; Christianity, bad; Roman civilisation, bad. Put another way, simping is our natural state, gnosticism or spiritual egoism (via Kant) is true, and Western civilisation (conflated with Israel) deserves to fall. This must be the elites’ worst-kept secret — with the exception of criticising Israel, it is the mainstream curriculum throughout the West. I am surprised Jiang got through Yale, he was clearly paying so little attention; at least he came away with their reading list.

Jesting aside, we must suppose that Jiang is either a sincere gnostic (and in the early 2000s, he was a writer for the doctrinally-gnostic Christian Science Monitor) or he is a deliberately subversive force, perhaps stoking divisions between Israel and Western countries but without strengthening the religio-political foundations of either. One might further speculate on the resultant geopolitical advantages of Jiang’s influence for China. Regardless, the right have taken to Jiang’s criticism of Israel without understanding the dangers of his spiritual individualism, his feminism, and his mischaracterisation of the ongoing elite capture in Western countries, whether by mystery schools, secret societies, or otherwise.

As indicated in his introduction to the Secret History series, Jiang’s predictive power depends on whether his anthropological and theological views are correct. I cannot simply argue that the elites are pushing this stuff, contra Jiang’s claims, they must be disproven. Thankfully, this is easily done. Gimbutas’ theories of some pre-patriarchal paradise, before those pesky nomads showed up, is a non-starter; there were prehistoric male gods among the cherrypicked female idols. Also, just consider Steven Goldberg’s still uncontested theory of The Inevitability of Patriarchy (here). I had the great pleasure of interviewing the late Dr. Goldberg (here), and he remained confident in his wager that no truly matriarchal society could ever or has ever existed.

As for nomads being patriarchal villains with their sky gods, this flies in the face of Turchin’s research, which Jiang otherwise claims to have incorporated into his framework. Turchin, like Oppenheimer, demonstrates that nomads and peasants are in a continual arms race and that empires arise out of their borderlands (here). Rome, far from being ‘the anti-civilisation’, escaped this endless cycle by merging both nomads and peasants into a single body politic. Ricardo Duchesne is the best source for debunking any and all anti-Western propaganda against our nomadic Indo-European heritage, most readably in his Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age.

Nor is Catholicism the ‘church of Satan’, as he claims in lecture 22 of his Secret History series; rather than a cynical power structure, I outlined the Catholic Church’s central role in European history as fostering that liberty-conscious and aristocratic spirit of Faustian Europeans, not as an alien force but very much at home in Europe, in The Uniqueness of Western Law.

Among Jiang’s mishmash of conspiracy theories, the most niche might be the accusation that the Catholic order of Jesuits really run the world, empowering a Jewish sect of Sabbatean-Frankists to push for a new Jerusalem-centred world order. I will leave you, dear reader, to find any credible evidence for this — unless we should just trust China’s Nostradamus…

Predicting the Future

Jiang’s three major predictions, supposedly indicated by his framework, were made in 2024 whilst Biden was still US President:

• Trump would win in 2024;
• Trump, influenced by Israel and Saudi interests and other geopolitical concerns, would go to war with Iran;
• the US would lose this war, reshaping the global, multipolar order.

However, others had suggested similar things. Reactionary firebrand Nick Fuentes paid great attention to the ‘liberal immigrants’ of Silicon Valley switching to Republican after Hamas’ October 7^th attacks on Israel; Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks and others shifted to supporting Trump as a platform for criticising Democrats on issues like antisemitism, most notably under the guide of anti-wokeness. This was part of a broader “tech-right” realignment involving Peter Thiel-aligned networks which led Fuentes and many others to suggest a Trump landslide in August 2024.

Fuentes also explicitly predicted the war with Iran prior to Trump’s presidency: “If Donald Trump is elected, we are getting a U.S. war with Iran. 100%.” The basis for this was not a feminist, gnostic view of prehistory and religion, nor a view of civilisational cycles, but Fuentes’ observation of Trump’s staffing choices: “Jared Kushner and Howard Lutnick are doing the hiring. Ben Shapiro and American Moment and Brooke Rollins and AFPI are doing the hiring, and they all want to bomb Iran.” These quotes were being reported in October 2024 (here).

Also, Jiang was wrong about certain things which Fuentes had accurately predicted, such as Nikki Haley being Trump’s VP; Fuentes predicted Thiel-connected J.D. Vance as the pick in April 2024. Consider also larger geopolitical predictions like the US having an allied coalition and launching a ground invasion of Iran in 2027, rather than the failed efforts of the US alone in early 2026. As the conflict with Iran is still ongoing mid-2026, we cannot say whether Jiang will be right about the US-Israeli defeat in the conflict with Iran.

But, that’s not the point! The point is that Jiang made predictions which were readily available to other observant commentators who acknowledge the Israeli and neocon influences on the Trump campaign. Rather than acknowledging that, Jiang has used this to retrospectively justify beliefs: “I made those predictions because I used a method, a framework. And that framework is what I call predictive history.” Essential to this “framework’s” success is, apparently, Jiang’s gnostic understanding of religion and his feminist views of history and anthropology. Fuentes appears to have greater predictive power, so does that mean his Catholicism is true? I am Catholic too, but I’m not prepared to play such a cynically disingenuous game.

In truth, I am deeply wary of Jiang’s undermining of our Western heritage: our Catholic spiritual and philosophical rigour, and our shared cultural roots emerging from a patriarchal, nomadic, Indo-European pre-history. Unlike Jordan Peterson, I think Jiang genuinely believes the things he teaches, he is a gnostic, an anthropological feminist, etc. and he is entertaining.

His views make much more sense in a Chinese context, where docility, conformity, and Eastern mystical views of spirit and matter are longstanding. From that perspective, his critique of the West makes most sense. Hopefully, this will start an honest conversation about his predictive history framework, its impact on the Western audience, and why I think we can do much better ourselves.

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