Aaron and Bryce discuss recent political events with the sorry state of the US imperial project as the central theme.

Check out Bryce Greene’s Newsletter!

Special thanks to:

• Dana Chavarria, production

• Casey Moore, graphics

• Michelle Boley, animated intro

• Mock Orange, music

Aaron is joined by Tonery and Professor Peter Kuznick to discuss political developments—including the rising chances for nuclear war and efforts to stop it!

Peter Kuznick is Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. The author of numerous books and articles, Kuznick is the co-creator—with Oliver Stone—of The Untold History of the United States. It is a 12-part documentary series that first played on Showtime, and there’s also an excellent book version, now in its second edition.

Follow and subscribe to Tonery Rose on Substack!

Special thanks to:

• Dana Chavarria, production

• Casey Moore, graphics

• Michelle Boley, animated intro

• Mock Orange, music

In this episode—Part 2 of The Syndicate, the Octopus, and the Gray Alliance—we look at how the JFK assassination and other deep political scandals were deployed by Zionists to blackmail the US deep state and advance Zionist goals.

This series expands on my 2025 presentation from the 9/11 Turning the Tide conference. The working plan is for the series to eventually be transcribed and edited for a journal article.

Check out:

• The Gray Alliance: How Ultra-Zionist Neoconservatism Took Over the American Deep State - Part 1: The Regime and the Syndicate

• The Lansky-Teamster Syndicate and the Deep State Global Drug Connection - Part 2 of “The Gray Alliance: How Ultra-Zionist Neoconservatism Took Over the American Deep State”

• James Angleton, Mossad, the Syndicate, and the CIA’s ‘Cuban Business’: How the Deep State 86ed Truth and Justice

Special thanks to:

• Dana Chavarria, production

• Casey Moore, graphics

• Michelle Boley, animated intro

• Mock Orange, music

This series expands on my 2025 presentation from the 9/11 Turning the Tide conference. The working plan is for the series to …

Read more

This is Part 1 of a series that expands on my 2025 presentation from the 9/11 Turning the Tide conference. The series will eventually be transcribed and edited for a journal article.

Check out:

• The Gray Alliance: How Ultra-Zionist Neoconservatism Took Over the American Deep State - Part 1: The Regime and the Syndicate

• The Lansky-Teamster Syndicate and the Deep State Global Drug Connection - Part 2 of “The Gray Alliance: How Ultra-Zionist Neoconservatism Took Over the American Deep State”

• James Angleton, Mossad, the Syndicate, and the CIA’s ‘Cuban Business’: How the Deep State 86ed Truth and Justice

Special thanks to:

• Dana Chavarria, production

• Casey Moore, graphics

• Michelle Boley, animated intro

• Mock Orange, music

Check out:

• The Gray Alliance: How Ultra-Zionist Neoconservatism Took Over the American Deep State - Part 1: The Regime and the Syndicate

• The Lansky-Teamster Syndicate and the …

Read more

John Kiriakou joins us to discuss the history of the CIA and its evolving relationship with “Israel.” Kirakou is the former CIA officer who famously blew the whistle on the agency’s illegal torture program.

Check out:

• John Kiriakou

• Remains of the Day: A Guide to Historic Cemeteries of Washington, DC

• Substack: Loud & Clear with John Kiriakou

Special thanks to:

• Dana Chavarria, production

• Casey Moore, graphics

• Michelle Boley, animated intro

• Mock Orange, music

Moe Tkacik joins us to talk about the absurdly suspicious circumstances surrounding the Charlie Kirk assassination.

Check out recent articles from Moe:

• “The Kleptocrat Nesting Dolls Behind Trump’s Potemkin Gas Stations”

• “A Hole in the ‘Open-and-Shut’ Case Against Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Assassin?”

• “Onward Christian Soldier”

Special thanks to:

• Dana Chavarria, production

• Casey Moore, graphics

• Michelle Boley, animated intro

• Mock Orange, music

Check out:

• John Kiriakou

• Remains of the Day: A Guide to Historic Cemeteries of Washington, DC

• Substack: Loud & Clear with John Kiriakou

Special thanks to:

Read more

Moe Tkacik joins us to talk about the MeToo takedown of Graham Platner.

Check out recent articles from Moe:

• “The Kleptocrat Nesting Dolls Behind Trump’s Potemkin Gas Stations”

• “A Hole in the ‘Open-and-Shut’ Case Against Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Assassin?”

• “Onward Christian Soldier”

Special thanks to:

• Dana Chavarria, production

• Casey Moore, graphics

• Michelle Boley, animated intro

• Mock Orange, music

Check out recent articles from Moe:

• “The Kleptocrat Nesting Dolls Behind Trump’s Potemkin Gas Stations”

• “A Hole in the ‘Open-and-Shut’ Case Against Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Assassin?”

• “Onward Christian Soldier”

Special thanks to:

• Dana Chavarria, p…

Read more

Check out recent articles from Moe:

• “The Kleptocrat Nesting Dolls Behind Trump’s Potemkin Gas Stations”

• “A Hole in the ‘Open-and-Shut’ Case Against Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Assassin?”

• “Onward Christian Soldier”

Special thanks to:

• Dana Chavarria, production

• Casey Moore, graphics

• Michelle Boley…

Read more

Aaron and Bryce discuss the strange demise of Lindsey Graham, the Epstein Regime’s resumption of hot war on Iran, Roger Waters on 911, and Graham Platner.

Check out Bryce Greene’s Newsletter!

Special thanks to:

• Dana Chavarria, production

• Casey Moore, graphics

• Michelle Boley, animated intro

• Mock Orange, music

Check out Bryce Greene’s Newsletter!

Special thanks to:

• Dana Chavarria, production

• Casey Moore, graphics

• Michelle Boley, animated intro

• Mock Orange, music

Read more

Aaron and Tonery discuss wars in West Asia and Ukraine--as well as the Graham Platner affair and its implications for the US Left.

Follow and Subscribe to Tonery Rose on Substack!

Special thanks to:

• Dana Chavarria, production

• Casey Moore, graphics

• Michelle Boley, animated intro

• Mock Orange, music

This is the fifth part of a long interview with Mohsen Abdelmoumen that I did for the Algerian publication, Algeria Patriotique in June 2026. I transcribed and edited the initial interview before Mohsen translated it into French. This Substack version has been given a final edit. I hope that it clarifies and expands on my previous published work on the US Empire. See my book, American Exception: Empire as the Deep State, as well as my other previously published articles for more background information and details on sources.

Your remarkable work grounded in facts enables us to better understand the United States. In your opinion, why did the United States and its criminal history represent an “exception”?

The title of my book, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, is a little ironic because I don’t believe in the myth of American exceptionalism which maintains that America is this special, uniquely great country compared to all other countries—a place in which the corruption and problems of other countries do not prevail because America is so special and good, and that’s why it’s so powerful. That’s American exceptionalism, and I obviously don’t believe in that because I am not intellectually a child. Exception in the title refers to the US regime’s institutionalized but denied exception to the rule of law. I think this captures the essence of the obscure sovereign power at the apex of the US regime. That might have seemed radical when I first wrote a journal article on the subject in 2015. That one was titled “American Exception: Hegemony and the Dissimulation of the State.” It was in the journal, Administration & Society, which is a good public administration/political science journal.

Today with Trump, Biden, Epstein, and the Gaza Genocide, the lawlessness is right there in the open. For me, it has been amazing—in some ways cool, but mostly really depressing—to be proven correct about these things. With Trump in office and what we’ve seen in the last decade plus—it all demonstrates that this is a lawless enterprise. It’s something that US social science, amazingly, hadn’t really acknowledged. That’s what I was trying to point to…the exception. The US operates in a state of exception to the rule of law along the lines laid out by the Nazi Carl Schimtt. The difference in the US case is that that the US exception is not acknowledged in mainstream discourse or even in most ostensibly “radical” discourse.

I do believe that there are some ways in which the US has been exceptional. For all of its flaws—and it always was an oligarchy—the US established a regime, a constitutional regime, that was more enlightened and progressive than what existed elsewhere in the advanced world, such that there was a world that we could call “advanced” at the time. Freedom of speech and the rest of the Bill of Rights, these were advances in human progress and governance. But under capitalist oligarchy, as we see unmistakably, these things are limited in how much they can achieve in practice for the common man in terms of good governance and a just system. The irresolvable problem is that money always wins out in the end. All of these freedoms and the concept of one person/one vote…these are ultimately negotiable and thus illusory.

How do you respond to those who describe the United States as a democracy even though it is ruled by a mafioso oligarchy?

“Mafioso oligarchy” is maybe putting too fine a point on it…but just barely! Collectively, this is a lawless set of oligarchs. Typically, the oligarchs try to have buffers between them and actual crime syndicate enterprises and operatives. But this is a regime that relies upon the institutionalized power and political dominance of criminal organizations and actors—including lawless national security state entities and networks. We could split hairs about how to classify the regime or just how hyperbolic or accurate it is to describe the US regime categorically as a crime syndicate. But as far as the US being a democracy, this is ridiculous in 2026. “US democracy” is just an implausible propaganda element at this point.

Consider that one of the biggest neocon Zionist organizations in the US is the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. It’s a Zionist advocacy group. It even initially had a more overtly Zionist name…something like Hebrew Pravda or something. And Zionism is essentially a nazified project—it has a “master race,” lebensraum, and untermenschen. So these are the political actors who want to defend something called “democracy”? This is absurd, obviously. Whatever democratic victories have been achieved throughout US history, their net effects are visible today. The monument to capitalist “democracy” is all around us. In the US/West, democracy is an Orwellian euphemism for top-down oligarchy—the opposite of rule by the demos,the people. The regime and the economy are dominated by a tiny minority of wealth. This is the oligarchy that really pulls the strings.

American sociologist US C. Wright Mills explained this very well in his book The Power Elite. It took US political scientists almost 60 years to catch up. In 2014, Gillens and Page, two mainstream political scientists, published a journal article on democracy in the US which found that average people in the US have essentially no political power whatsoever. It’s basically moneyed elites that have all the political power in the US. Their preferences are what get translated into US policy. Anyone who is going to describe the US as a democracy in any meaningful sense at this point is either a propagandist or is a brainwashed victim of propagandists. The US is ruled by a tiny minority and that’s the definition of oligarchy. It is also lawless which is not supposed to be the case in a democracy. There is supposed to be transparency and the rule of law. We have neither. It is not a lawful, transparent democracy; it is a lawless, secretive oligarchy.

JFK had a very special and friendly relationship with my country Algeria and as Algerian patriots we will never forget the historic speech that JFK gave on our independence. Why did they kill JFK?

As a Senator in 1957, JFK gave a landmark speech in the Senate denouncing Western imperialism and the foolishness of backing the French in Algeria. Years prior, he gave a similar, very prescient speech on the French in Vietnam. More than any other top US statesman, JFK called for decolonization and supported third world nationalism. His positions were sufficiently radical that even Adlai Stevenson, who was supposedly this very liberal Democrat who was pilloried by US conservatives…he wanted JFK to dial it down.

JFK obviously did not seek to promote socialism, but he argued for allowing other countries—in the “Third World,” the decolonizing world, the Global South—to pursue their own national interests and national projects rather than being forced into neocolonial peonage. Yes, this was rhetoric, but there was some policy substance there as well.

This all threatened the profits of the oligarchs and their multinational corporations. The resource wealth of places like Congo, Indonesia, and Brazil is enormous. Under the next administration, once JFK is assassinated, LBJ reverses the Kennedy policies in these countries. Terrible puppet regimes were installed in Brazil, Indonesia, and Congo with disastrous results. Millions of people die in Congo over the decades that follow, up to the present day. We can trace this back to the assassinations of Hammarskjold and Lumumba. JFK tried to manage the unhappy situation and was effective considering the circumstances. Then under LBJ, to run Congo the CIA basically installed the people who had killed Lumumba. That is another reversal of JFK’s policy. Under LBJ, Sukarno in Indonesia was removed from power through an elaborate coup plot that was designed to fail. This allowed Suharto, a CIA asset, to take power after massacring 1 to 3 million Indonesian peasants and ethnic Chinese people. Suharto allowed US corporations to control and profit from Indonesia’s vast enormous mineral wealth and oil wealth, especially in West Papua, for example. In Brazil there was a US-backed coup in 1964. They overthrew a liberal reformer and installed a military dictatorship.

These were big factors behind the assassination. In a larger sense, JFK wanted to end the Cold War, the structural condition that rationalized all these neocolonial interventions. He wanted rapprochement with Cuba, using secret back channels to discuss potential normalization. He wanted to cooperate with the Soviet Union in a number of different ways. He called for reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles and working towards eventual disarmament.

His policies toward Israel may have been the most crucial in terms of the actual timing and execution of the assassination plot. One of the most important things which most Americans don’t understand is that JFK was dead set against Israel getting the nuclear bomb. He was also trying to force the American Zionist Council—the precursor to AIPAC—to register as a foreign agent. Kennedy wanted to solve the Palestinian refugee problem once and for all, and he was friendly with Nasser. He was interested in potentially putting in people like Mossadegh back in charge of Iran. He tasked US officials with looking into that possibility.

The Kennedy administration also pursued the actual National Crime Syndicate. The top US law enforcement entities clung to contrived myths of the cosa nostra or Italian mafia. This was a way to avoid addressing the actual structure of the Syndicate. In reality, the Syndicate was centered around Las Vegas, Meyer Lansky, Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters, and the Italian mafia. Only the Kennedys went after Hoffa. They even went after the Vegas mob. They tried to go after Lansky. RFK wanted to investigate what Lansky was doing with Vegas skim going to offshore banking centers in Panama. James Angleton of the CIA prevented this. Besides Angleton, the heads of the FBI and Federal Bureau of Narcotics protected Lansky… Hoffa and Lansky were also key figures behind the illegal transfer of weapons to Palestine to allow the Zionist to kill Palestinians and steal their land.

In sum, JFK Kennedy went after the main pillars of the US deep state. His assassination was basically overdetermined. He wanted to move the US and the world in a different direction. He didn’t want to fight the Vietnam War. The month before his assassination, in October of 1963, a memo was sent out by the Joint Chiefs chair, Maxwell Taylor, saying that all planning in Vietnam was to be towards the phased withdrawal ordered by JFK to be completed in 1965. That policy was reversed almost immediately once Kennedy was killed. They killed JFK for many reasons. Ultimately, I would say he was killed because he wanted to move the US away from being the global empire. He wanted to move the world away from being defined by the Cold War—which I think he came to understand as being, in part, a cover story for open-ended Western imperialism and neocolonialism. JFK sought to move in the direction of an international system characterized by lawful peaceful international cooperation. For this, John Kennedy was assassinated—along with people from this era like Patrice Lumumba, Dag Hammarskjold, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy. This was how the oligarchs of the West responded to the forces pushing for positive change in the world in the 1960s.

As a committed American intellectual who fights for a more just world what can you say to our readership in the Global South?

This is a difficult question for me as a US citizen. There is an American tendency to tell other people in other parts of the world what is good and bad and what they should and shouldn’t do. This is, let’s say, problematic given the history we’re dealing with. So with that as a caveat and an apology in advance for an inadequate answer, I’ll say that I believe that if the world is going to be saved from lawless Western imperial capitalism—and we may be living through its most dangerous and desperate phase as we’re seeing—it’s going to be the Global South—the non-West—that does it. It’s going to be the Global Majority. It’s not going to be enlightened elements of the West. There are no moral actors anywhere near the levers of power in the West. The hope for salvation lies with the countries and peoples who successfully oppose and resist the US.

The most important positive thing that could happen, for anyone who cares about the human race, is for humanity’s biggest threat to be decisively defeated. The biggest threat to continued human existence in our time is the regime of the US-led West. The regime of the West has become a Zionist enterprise as well. My research has led me to conclude that Zionist neocons decisively took control of the apex of the US foreign policy deep state after defeating the last American nationalist statesman, George H.W. Bush. Since then, the neocons have intertwined the US pursuit of global dominance with this Zionist Greater Israel project. Today, to go after one pillar is to go after both of them. This must have been a calculated strategy from the Zionists to basically wed the global dominance project to the ultra-Zionist “Greater Israel” pipe dream of the Epstein Set. The military industrial complex, oil, the dollar, financial flows—including from the drug traffic…all are tied to this project of brutal US/Zionist dominance of the Middle East energy heartlands.

Once embarking on this strategy, it became very path dependent. This US full spectrum dominance project was intertwined with the lunatic Greater Israel project as a scheme for global domination. They cannot neatly disengage from either or both. There is no turning back in a way that would keep the imperial dream alive. What must happen is for the West—the Epstein Regime—to be defeated so that their genocidal, late imperial crime spree comes to an end. With the Iranian assertion of control over the Persian Gulf, US dollar hegemony may be fatally wounded. If the Epstein Regime no longer has all the money in the world, maybe they won’t even be able to dominate the US population as easily either. Maybe there will be less reason for the oligarchs to attempt to turn the US into a crumbling fascist garrison state, but this is perhaps overly optimistic.

What I would say to people in the Global South, especially if they are fighting the West, is that there are people who recognize that you represent the better parts of humanity, the hope of humanity. Even if you are not in the Axis of Resistance fighting directly, there are other ways you could support your own national projects to build towards a better internationalist world order.

Countries like China and Russia seem to be helping a lot behind the scenes, gradually creating new international security and economic institutions—alternatives to the US-led world order. These are promising developments. To the people in the Global South, I can offer some sort of apology as a white American person. My words cannot but be pretty hollow. I and my fellow US radicals haven’t accomplished much at all, and white guilt-type expressions can be a silly exercise in vanity. Someday, the top Western leaders should apologize to the Global Majority for all the terrible things that Western imperialism has done over the course of centuries.

I don’t have the authority to make my words impactful, but if I did, I would, so I’ll say something anyway… Apologies from me at least, a white anti-imperialist scholar in the West. I am horrified and saddened by what the West has done and is doing. I am sorry that anti-imperialist radicals in the West, including myself, have not been able to do anything to stop the Empire. The best hope for humanity lies with you—the people of the Global South—and your refusal to accept imperial subjugation forever. Let us hope that you will prove to be the dialectically-generated force that prevails. I salute and root for the Global Majority, for the people of the Global South.

Jeffrey Kaye joins us to discuss his important recently published article, “The Military Intelligence Connections Behind the JFK, Oswald Murders & Cover-up.” A retired psychologist turned blogger and forensic historian, Kaye is the author of Cover-up at Guantanamo and many articles on Korean War-era biowarfare and other subjects at the Hidden Histories Substack page.

Also check out:

• “CIA-Connected D.C. Hospital Chief Advised Warren Commission”

• “Historic CIA “Artichoke” Meeting Reveals Agency Asset Inside Warren Commission”

Special thanks to:

• Dana Chavarria, production

• Casey Moore, graphics

• Michelle Boley, animated intro

• Mock Orange, music

Read more

What is your analysis of what is now referred to as the Epstein case?

I wrote about the Epstein network in my dissertation. I don’t believe at that point I connected it directly to Israel, but even then it was widely believed that he was some kind of Israeli asset…an element of Zionist influence in the US. Epstein also apparently had protection from US intelligence agencies. Today, I understand this better. Epstein is something that has to be placed in the context of sexual blackmail as an institution in the US. Honey traps and other types of sexual blackmail operations for powerful people are part of spycraft going back thousands of years in human history…even to Chinese antiquity and so on. This is timeless. Men, especially, are pitifully and predictably led astray by attractive women, typically—or by other parties which can be even more scandalous in our society. Epstein’s role was to act as an agent for oligarchs and oligarchic interests—specifically, people like the Rothschilds, Les Wexner, etc. They represent two huge Zionist oligarchs that Epstein was very close to. He compromised a whole lot of wealthy people, but he also connected people who were involved in different sorts of creepy oligarchic enterprises. This included things related to mass surveillance and biosecurity regimes and such. As I understand it, he was involved with some of these networks that handled not just different aspects of the COVID response, but also AI and other creepy ways to bring technology to bear over populations and political regimes and such. Epstein was close to Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, all of these oligarchs. He acted as a means of connecting them and getting them involved and invested in disturbingly fascistic projects. Most clearly, he acted as an agent of Israel. Israel wired his Manhattan property with all sorts of surveillance equipment and such. He got all this money from Lex Wexner, who was part of the MEGA group, this weird club of Zionist oligarchs who wanted to influence US foreign policy.

In sum, it’s pretty straightforward to figure out that he is acting on behalf of Israel and blackmailing people this way. He may have been involved in the Lewinsky affair that got Bill Clinton into trouble. Clinton went on to sign the Iraq Liberation Act, committing the US to regime change in Iraq. He allowed the negotiation for a Palestinian state to collapse and blamed Arafat for what was really Israeli perfidy. He also pardoned Mark Rich, which was hugely scandalous. We can see how these people can be compromised and if they are compromised, this gives the oligarchs reason to back these individuals as politicians.

Who really knows what kind of dirt they had on George W. Bush? He did a 180 degree turn from his father’s anti-“Greater Israel” or anti-neocon policy. It is very possible that people like Epstein may have been involved there or they may have had some other sort of dirt on W, but who knows?

What’s really interesting to think about in terms of Epstein is something that almost no one can comment on in the US. I think I’m the main person who’s really looked into this in terms of American deep events. One of the recurring things—whether it’s the JFK assassination or Watergate or Iran-contra—is the leaking of stories that expose or risk exposing national security state criminality and things related to the covert operations arm or particularly scandalous clandestine operations. These things become exposed or partially exposed and this seems to be a part of the way that actors can use their position vis-à-vis these networks and these criminal policies to exercise power over the US government. In the case of the Kennedy assassination, there were Kennedy assassination stories that were leaked to the press on the eve of—just weeks before—the 1967 war in which the US basically acquiesced to Israel conquering Palestine and occupying territories like Gaza and the West Bank up to the present day. There’s also the case of Jack Ruby in jail. He had ties to these Zionist crime syndicate networks that, if exposed, would show that the US was in bed with the top gangsters in the country and that US officials had used them for “national security” purposes…covert operations and so on.

In Watergate, all the burglars were connected to a whole lot of spectacular intrigues including the Kennedy assassination, which Richard Nixon himself recognized. Nixon sent his own chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, to talk to the head of the CIA when Watergate first became an issue. He said, Tell the head of the CIA that this will open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing, which apparently was a reference to the Kennedy assassination. Nixon believed that he could use the Plumbers’ ties to state crimes to help him. What apparently happened was that the explosiveness of all these figures and the revelations that they could unleash helped to seal Nixon’s fate. It made it so that Nixon couldn’t really resist his ouster because it would have upset too many apple carts. Likewise, I think Iran-contra was similarly something that was pushed by Zionist actors when the Reagan administration and later H.W. Bush made moves to force Israel to recognize a Palestinian state. We then got the Iran-Contra scandal. There were strange things like the BBC putting out documentaries on Operation Gladio’s crimes in Europe during the Cold War. We had Bill Moyers on PBS talking about “the secret government,” the US partnership with organized crime, and CIA overthrows of different governments. Moyers even mentioned the Kennedy assassination in this context. There was also Oliver Stone’s JFK, which is a very illuminating movie that points to a lot of documented corruption in the JFK case. The film actually adheres very closely to the most important facts of the case. And yet, that movie was executive produced by a notorious Zionist agent, Arnon Milchan. He was one of the people responsible for Israel acquiring the nuclear bomb many years prior.

The reason that I am reviewing all this is because the Epstein story—the way that it unfolded over time—is very strange. I heard Ari Ben-Menash, a former Israeli intelligence officer, saying that he believed that these actors who were leaking or publishing some of these stories—like Rupert Murdoch—are well-known Zionists with many documented connections to Zionism and Israeli intelligence and so on. He posits that the story was used to turn up the heat on Trump even though Israel/Zionism was obviously involved in the Epstein Network. You’d think, Well, they wouldn’t want to expose their own crimes. However, this is similar to Jack Ruby and the JFK assassination or Iran-contra in that Zionists were involved in those networks too. Or think of all the intrigues of the Watergate burglars—McCord, Barker, Hunt, Sturgis, the Cubans... They were involved in operations that overlapped with Zionist/Lansky syndicate/CIA operations. But when they were arrested—after apparently being set up—they were used to destroy Nixon’s presidency. It was a game of deep political chicken, in a sense.

I believe that the Epstein leaks and stories were increased and that the pace and timing of them were managed in order to dovetail with an agenda centered around attacking Iran. Though the war is disastrous from the perspective of US hegemony, Trump apparently could not say no because of the amount of dirt they had on him. I believe that that is a big part of what is going on with the Epstein case and the way that it has unfolded in the public eye. That makes the most sense and it fits with this hidden history of deep state brinksmanship and blackmail over the US clandestine apparatus and its ties to the apex of the criminal underworld. Recall the scene in All the President’s Men which is a quote from one of Woodward’s sources, deep throat, whoever that really was. Throat says, Look, it’s not about the break-in. It’s not even about the cover-up. It’s about the entire covert operations apparatus of the US and it is sprawling and amazing and fantastical. People are going to start dying.

I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the gist of it. I think that that is similar to what’s going on with the Epstein case. It isn’t about the pedophilia per se, although in Trump’s case it may be very relevant. They start exposing some of these things, and the more they expose them, the more they expose the criminality of the whole enterprise that is the US regime. They’re playing with dynamite and calculating that they can get away with it. This is something we should be aware of. These networks and these crimes serve to perpetuate and facilitate even bigger crimes on a bigger scale—the crimes that allow oligarchs to be billionaires and multi-billionaires by rigging politics and the economy while so many people don’t have the material necessities of life. It’s an evil, indefensible system. This is why it is not just the observable workings of capitalist democracy. There’s a whole lot of hidden criminality helping this system function the way that it does. The Epstein Network is a is a perfect example of this.

In your opinion, why does the Epstein class require wars?

Well, capitalism requires imperialism, and that’s always been the case. Lenin said imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism. He probably understated the case. It’s really the only stage of capitalism. This even applies to the “enclosure movement” in which the people who became the capitalist class essentially just stole their countrymen’s land that they relied on to survive and subsist…the commons. This can be thought of as an imperialist dynamic even though it’s one class versus another class. Over time, it changes the whole character of British/English society. It creates these problems…overpopulation for the amount of land that’s actually available since the land is now being used for sheep and the textile industry. So, the Brits then go out and imperialize Ireland. They dominate Ireland, and this is what eventually leads to the potato famine centuries later. People like Sir Humphrey Gilbert killed scores and scores of Irish people.

Ireland is small, so they go to the New World, to North America. To become economically viable in America, they created colonies to make money. The colonists eventually want to expand even more than the British want them to, because the British don’t want to fight wars with the Indians—the Seven Years War was very expensive. There’s the War for Independence and once that’s done, the Americans just go west and west and west practicing imperialism. They go “from sea to shining sea,” and then they go and take over Hawaii. Before that they had sailed into Tokyo Bay, just after they stole California and the whole Southwest US from Mexico. They just keep expanding the empire. There were people at the end of the 1800s who said we shouldn’t have imperialism. They argued that we should focus on building up our own domestic manufacturing and be prosperous and stop practicing imperialism like the European powers. Those people lost. The US pursued an international empire—maritime imperialism mostly in the Western Hemisphere, but there were things like the Boxer Rebellion and taking over the Philippines. They eventually joined in the two massive imperialist wars over control of the international capitalist system.

After World War II, the US—by virtue of its own successful participation in imperialism and imperialist conflict—found itself as the hegemon of global capitalism. Since then, they’ve worked to attempt to ensure that no countries could defy them or set up an alternative system that would be more powerful than the US-led western imperial capitalist system. That has meant constant overthrows, destabilizations, assassinations, invasions, and bombings all throughout the Cold War. Then the Cold War ended. There’s nobody to stand up to the US. You get these wars in Yugoslavia. You have the first Gulf War, which is right at the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Union can’t really do anything about it because they’re going through all these crises.

Under Bill Clinton, you have covert warfare using al-Qaeda types in places like Bosnia, Azerbaijan, Kosovo, Chechnya… They tried to assassinate Gaddafi with al-Qaeda people in the mid-90s. Then at the dawn of the 21st century, with the Zionist neocon takeover basically complete, we get 9-11 and the 9-11 Wars and the Arab Spring and the Arab Spring Wars. They pursued NATO expansion to try to further encircle Russia and to keep Russia from having any sort of influence internationally, especially in West Asia, it seems. We get the Ukraine War and the Gaza Genocide and the Iran War… For basically the whole 21st century, the empire has pursued this Clean Break/Project for a New American Century agenda. It is the same Zionist neoconservatives fighting wars to attempt to create a world where America is the reigning hegemon with full spectrum dominance.

They have sought to intertwine the global dominance project with the Greater Israel project, using Zionism to subjugate West Asia/the Middle East so that the Empire dominates global capitalism and it monetary system by means of its control of the world’s energy heartlands. It was an intertwining of ultra-Zionist policy with the US pursuit of hegemony. There were alternative options. Think of the case of George H.W. Bush. He was Mr. US Empire—WASP, Republican, Yale, CIA, oil, Wall Street, etc. etc. And yet, he had a different view of the Middle East. He wanted a Palestinian State. He apparently figured that with Israel-Palestine settled, the US could make deals and buy off the regimes in the region, turning them into prosperous client states. That would be a system that, from Bush’s calculation, most everybody who mattered would benefit from.

But Bush lost in 1992. The Zionist neocons took over the apex of the deep state. They really do need these perpetual wars in order to make sure there’s no country that can get in the way of the US-Zionist prime directives: full spectrum dominance and “Greater Israel.” This is the essence of the so-called “Wolfowitz doctrine.” In the Pentagon in the early 1990s under H.W. Bush, Wolfowitz wrote this policy paper calling for preemptive attacks on any country that might be able to one day challenge US dominance. President H.W. Bush called these guys—Wolfowitz and his ilk—”the crazies.” Administration actors leaked the report to the press and it became a scandal. The policy planning was then altered—specifically, the Zionist Mein Kampf aspects were dialed down.

Tragically, “the crazies” soon triumphed. They defeated George H.W. Bush in 1992, and they set about working away on their crackpot schemes. Among other things, they worked on continuity of government planning for emergency situations. People like Cheney and Rumsfeld worked in these areas during the Clinton years, largely in secrecy. When George W. Bush comes to office, we get the 9-11 terror spectacle. This kicks off an era of unending war which has been unfolding ever since.

They need these wars. There are military industrial complex profits, of course, but also the wars are indispensable parts of their plan to control the global politico-economic system and especially to make the world safe for the lunatic Greater Israel project. They need to keep fighting until that is totally secured. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen because with Iran they appear to have finally summoned Nemesis.