Although the Penguin is the movie’s “monster,” he is not its true villain: that dubious honor goes to Schreck. However, every villain in Burton’s sequel either is or is created by Jewishness.
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Nazi Germany had The Eternal Jew and The Rothschilds, movies that posited Jewish parasitism and financial domination. For various reasons, that would not fly in 1990s America. Instead, we had Batman Returns, which is (and I say this as someone who unequivocally adores Tim Burton and the film itself) one of the most outrageously antisemitic movies ever put to screen. The premise is this: an Illuminati financier, a renegade Jew, and a radical feminist team up to wreak havoc in Christendom and frame benevolent patriarchy … hinging on a plot device hammered on by conspiracy theorists since 1913: the Federal Reserve.
Burton’s 1991 sequel picks up at Christmastime, positioning Gotham as a proxy for the white, Christian West. Festivities are already under way, but that’s no reason for financial titan and department store owner Max Schreck (Christopher Walken) to pause his unsavory business dealings. His current project: pitching a power plant to the mayor that will generate light for years to come. Only (as we come to learn) the “generator” exists in name only and will actually siphon power from Gotham and its citizens instead. This could, of course, be a Ron Paul critique of the Fed; books like G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island argue it was created in secret by shadowy elites and is neither “federal” nor a “reserve” but rather a con that drains wealth from the population and funnels it to… the Illuminati (by way of the Rothschilds).
1898 antisemitic cartoon “The Commercial Vampire,” with an exaggerated Jewish head ironically atop a bat, lording over a department store like “SCHRECKS.” Max Shreck is also the actor who played Count Orlok in the F. W. Murnau vampire film Nosferatu.
Driving the point home, Schreck’s design for the plant is a pyramid with the capstone missing (the exact design on the back of the dollar), and he wears the “All-Seeing Eye” of Illuminism on his turban to his costume ball. Moreover, he is named after the actor who played Count Orlok in Nosferatu, echoing comparisons of the Illuminati to vampires… but not just any vampires. Quite specifically, Schreck is modeled after the Rothschilds, reiterating theories that the banking family was behind the creation of the Fed as part of a greater scheme to take over America. Consider this quote of Schreck’s to Bruce Wayne: “I am the light of this city, and I am its mean, twisted soul. Does it matter who’s mayor?” Compare this to the notorious apocryphal Rothschild quote: “Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.” Whatever the case, Burton’s ruthless critique of unfettered capitalism is duly noted.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild, unflatteringly captured in Max Schreck to put it mildly. Here we see Schreck’s unfinished pyramid power plant design symbolic of the Federal Reserve …
… along with his All-Seeing-Eye-in-the-Triangle masked ball costume… both present on the back of the dollar bill over the words NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM – allegedly a reference to the New World Order.
Meanwhile, while Schreck is scheming from his tower in the sky against Gotham, a subterranean force is rising to terrorize the city from below: the Red Triangle Circus Gang, representing the Freemasons and riffing on popular conspiracy theories that they were behind the French and Russian Revolutions (the “red triangle” is the symbol that Nazis forced Masons to wear in their camps). Tying them to communism, the Red Triangle Circus Gang all live and eat together communally… and are subjecting Gotham to a veritable terror.
Other writers have charted the connection between Masons and circuses – specifically crediting Masonry with the creation of the white-faced “Joey clown” of today. In his 2024 book The Nephilim Looked Like Clowns, Paul Stobbs analyzes the historical significance of the white face and clown makeup. He hypothesizes that Masons ritually channel pale ancient beings through circuses. And the leader of these rituals is a man in a top hat. Notably, the Red Triangle Circus Gang is led by a mysterious white-faced man in a top hat as well: the umbrella-toting Penguin (Danny DeVito). In fact, the Penguin’s connection to Masonry is so underscored that one of his umbrellas sports the red-and-white design of the Freemasons’ predecessors, the Knights Templar. After the opening scene, the movie also jumps 33 years ahead, which seems random unless the viewer is aware that 33 is the highest degree in Scottish Rite Masonry (the branch accused most often of revolutionary aims). Oh yes, and there is one more thing about the Penguin that viewers should note, especially in light of the common accusation that Masonry is controlled by Jews to subjugate the West: the Penguin is very, very Jewish.
The penguin’s final umbrella, bearing the design and colors of the Knights Templar.
As articles argued when the movie came out: the Penguin has an affinity for herring and has a large hooknose. When he was born, his parents put him in a basket and sent him down a waterway, echoing Moses hidden in a basket and pushed down the Nile. But that’s just for starters – as he later quips, he has “contempt for the czars of fashion” – a stereotypical nod to Jewish resentment of monarchy and authority in their host countries. Parallels only get darker from here, with ties directly to the Blood Libel and hints at cannibalism: children go missing wherever the Penguin and his circus pop up. This culminates in the Penguin’s extremely Jewish-coded plan to “kill all the first-born children” of Gotham’s elite just as God killed the first-born of Egypt to free the Israelites (commemorated in the holiday of Passover). Were these similarities intentional, though? I mean, come on; in his top hat and tails, the guy looks like a literal Der Stürmer caricature. I’m going to argue yes.
Understanding the Penguin’s Jewishness provides deeper insight into his actions and motivation. First, there are his earnest attempts to assimilate and eventual violent rejection of the dominant culture (changing his name to Oswald Cobblepot and trying to “dress human,” until his eventual denunciation of his “human” side entirely). There is also his fatal ambivalence toward Western women – moments such as him “pinning” campaign buttons on the attractive girls’ blouses evoke atrocity propaganda (that the Bolsheviks were led by Jews and tortured Christian women by pushing pins into their breasts, etc.). Indeed, each time the Penguin is aroused by a woman, violence is implied or ensues. He fancies his brunette stylist and subsequently bites the nose of her assistant. He aggressively pursues Michelle’s Pfeiffer’s blond Catwoman and tries to kill her when rebuffed. His ultimate rancor, however, is saved for the lovely Ice Princess, who sports a jarringly Texan accent (actress Christi Conaway is a Lubbock native) and epitomizes the alleged apex of Jewish animosity: the white, Southern woman. In literally every scene she shares with the Penguin, he attacks and/or murders her.
The Penguin in Batman Returns looking like a Jewish caricature straight out of Der Stürmer (complete with top hat and tails), and a common depiction of a Jewish person (sometimes shown surrounded by coins) “puppeteering” both Communism and Freemasonry.
But … back to Catwoman for a moment.
The final prong in the movie’s antagonistic triangle is Selina Kyle. She begins as Max Schreck’s mousy assistant but becomes Catwoman after she discovers the true nature of her boss’s central bank – sorry, “power plant” – and he shoves her out a window. As argued in Fritz Springmeier’s books on “Illuminati mind control,” the trauma of being “murdered” (she plummets through a series of canopies, representing falling levels of consciousness) splits Selina’s psyche into multiple “alters.” Springmeier states that this method can create sexually dominant and aggressive personalities called cat alters – accounting for her transformation into the whip-wielding femme fatale Catwoman. Mirror motifs in the film further reflect theories of Illuminati/CIA trauma-based disassociation experiments like the notorious Project Monarch.
In this framing, Schreck becomes Selina’s “handler” whose control over her she must shatter to reconcile her disparate personalities. Consequently, those who see Catwoman as a feminist icon may be missing the commentary: Conspiracy writers such as Henry Makow accuse the Illuminati of cynically deploying “feminism” as a psyop, designed to divide men and women and recruit women into their revolutionary ranks. It is worth noting that although Catwoman wants revenge against capitalist Schreck, she instead spends the majority of the film fighting benevolent protector Batman instead. Self-admittedly, her newfound empowerment ruins any chance of happiness (she rejects a dream life with Bruce Wayne at the end of film because she “just couldn’t live with herself”). Catwoman’s “feminism” is indifferent to women at best and actively hostile at worst; although she stops a mugging in her first outing, her intent is to hurt the male attacker – she only saves his victim incidentally. When the woman tries to thank her, Catwoman grabs her by the face and expresses disdain for being a damsel in distress. Even more telling, Catwoman’s collaboration with the Penguin leads directly to the Ice Princess’s death. This brand of feminism kills.
Selina shattering her mirror before splitting into Catwoman, the shards a common motif representing the fractured psyche of mind control victims, each shard containing a different personality.
With the pieces in place, we can return to the plot. With Gotham distracted, Schreck makes his move on his diabolical plan, but there is a hitch: Gotham’s mayor, who refuses to support the scheme. He is notably a combination of two political figures who opposed the Federal Reserve and subsequently become embroiled in mysterious and deadly conspiracies: Charles Lindbergh and JFK (Lindbergh publicly denounced the creation of the Federal Reserve, and JFK vowed to audit the Fed years later). Bruce Wayne takes the mayor’s side against Schreck and seems an avatar for “good” capitalist Henry Ford, who infamously promoted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his book The International Jew.
Schreck aims to replace the mayor with someone more “amenable” to his agenda (just as LBJ pulled an about-face on investigating the Fed following JFK’s death). Enter the Penguin, eager to rise in society. And so … here we see a metaphor for the alleged team-up that took place at the Congress of Wilhelmsbad in 1782, when alleged Rothschild agent Baron Von Knigge infiltrated European Masonry with the goal of bending the Strict Observance Templar System to Illuminati goals. His success led to “Illuminized” Masonry, immediately preceding the French Revolution (which conspiracy theorists naturally see as directly related). It is the coalition between “Capitalism” and “Communism” against the average citizen as suggested by Anthony Sutton – what Lenin referred to as the “pressure from above and the pressure from below.”
Once this Unholy Alliance has taken place, the movie revels in its most conspiratorial set pieces. For instance, at a speech by the mayor, the Penguin stages a false flag where he steals and then returns his infant child – an unmistakable reference to the Lindbergh baby’s abduction, albeit with a much happier ending. The real kidnapping was pinned on Bruno Hauptmann, whom antisemites would dubiously claim was Jewish. The Penguin then stages another false flag to frame Batman for his murder of the Ice Princess and turns Gotham against his foe – in a play straight out of the forged Protocols about turning the “goyim” (or, as the Penguin refers to them, the “squealing, wretched, pinhead puppets of Gotham” in yet another Judeo-Masonic trope of the Jew as malevolent puppeteer) against their natural protectors.
Later, in one of the movie’s best action sequences, the Penguin plants a device that allows him to control the Batmobile, reflecting theories that the CIA is the intelligence wing of the Illuminati in America and has the technology to control cars and stage “accidental” deaths. Some researchers (such as Craig Roberts in Kill Zone) have also blamed the Rothschilds/CIA for JFK’s assassination and cited the threat he posed to the Fed as motive. Anti-Masonic theorists point out that Dealey Plaza where JFK was killed is named for George Bannerman Dealey, 33rd-degree Scottish Rite Mason and Knight Templar. It was also the site of Dallas’s first Masonic lodge. Regardless of validity, such an interpretation does add intrigue to the Penguin’s predilection for umbrellas (the mysterious, hat-wearing Umbrella Man being a staple of conspiracy theories surrounding the president’s death). Notably, other theorists such as former US Navy Lieutenant Robert Cutler theorized the umbrella itself as a weapon capable of firing projectiles, and that the CIA had developed weapon-concealing umbrellas eerily reminiscent of the Penguin’s signature firearm.
The mysterious, behatted Umbrella Man near where JFK was shot… whose umbrella some have argued concealed a weapon developed by intelligence.
The Penguin confronting the mayor with his umbrella at Schreck’s ball, complete with Masonic checkered floor. Note the mayor’s “knife-in-the-back” costume, reminiscent of popular “traitorous Jew” tropes and theories of JFK as an inside job.
Of course, when Batman flips the script on the Penguin and exposes him by releasing a recording of his slander against the city, Schreck is the first to abandon his former partner – illustrating Samuel Roth’s rueful claim in Jews Must Live that – as opposed to antisemitic claims – rich Jews share no affinity with their “lesser brethren.” Unlike in real life, the plot to establish the “Fed” is ultimately foiled with Schreck’s death at the hands of Catwoman and the Penguin’s defeat in his subterranean lair by Batman. Although the Penguin is the movie’s “monster,” he is not its true villain: that dubious honor goes to Schreck. However, every villain in Burton’s sequel either is or is created by Jewishness. The script implies that Batman-caliber vigilance at the individual level is required to expel evil (also the theme of screenwriter Daniel Waters’s iconic and similarly esoteric teen satire Heathers). Forget reading Ron Paul; if libertarians really wanted to End the Fed, they would get Batman Returns shown in every school in America. I wouldn’t mention it to the ADL, however.
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