Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Jeffrey Epstein and the American Empire w/ Van Jackson | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

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Jeffrey Epstein and the American Empire w/ Van Jackson | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: The old world is dying, the new world struggles to reborn, now is the time of monsters.
• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: With those words, I welcome you to the time of monsters podcast.
• 0:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm G.T.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: here of the nation magazine, which is the sponsor of this podcast.
• 0:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: But this week is actually a kind of special podcast.
• 0:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're still the time of monsters because we're going to take up one of these.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: biggest monsters of our era.
• 0:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Jeffrey Epidene, but we are co-producing this with another podcast hosted by my guest, Van Jackson, who has been on the show before, is a international relations scholar, although one who perhaps has a different depth than the mainstream of that field, who is a hostie, a diplomatic podcast, and this will also run on a diplomatic show.
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll let Van introduce himself.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for being on, and yeah, let's do the intro for your show.
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, what's up, gang, thanks for joining the undyplomatic podcast crossover with the time of monster's podcast.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is such an important episode.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I feel like as we're, as we're recording this, I'm every, every tweet I see, every new email I open is another crazy bombshell that is just mind blowing about the Jeffrey Epstein stuff.
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I think, I mean, and so there's an infinite amount of like Jeffrey Epstein content to talk about here.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: But aside from like the humor and scandalousness in outrage of it all, which is worth talking about, I felt like you and I were two of the few people who were like actively trying to make sense of this stuff or like put it in a context or a framework or something, you know?
• 1:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm like we, we saw more than just the sex capades.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh no, absolutely.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, like obviously, you know, when people mentioned the name of Jeffrey Epstein's, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind, you know, quite properly are those sort of horrific crimes that he was guilty of, which kind of like boggled the imagination.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the second thing that comes to mind is, you know, like his many elite associates, including some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world.
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this is a guy who received, you know, a salacious birthday greetings from to like, you know, let me present it.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And has been responsible for, I remember the House of Windsor, losing their royal status.
• 2:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, former Prince, known as Prince Andrew.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think that lost in all this is a sense of something that incorporates the sex scandal, but is also who this figure is.
• 2:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, how did he get into all these elite circles?
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this is actually someone who's like, like, a college dropout was kind of a financial advisor.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean,
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: the famous Kornan O'Brien thing is you know, Jeffrey Epstein, the New York financier, but who, but also knew all these elite people.
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that his ties to all these elite people, when we want to see this in the sort of emails that are dropping, you know, some of these people might have been accomplices of his in sex crimes, but not necessarily like all of them.
• 2:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there are many of them are very elite people, especially in the sort of realm of foreign policy.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: which is why I think I'm diplomatic.
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hey, it's a good venue for this.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: We love people who are like leaders in the CIA and involved heavily in the Clinton, Obama, and Trump administrations.
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, this is stuff that generally gets ignored.
• 3:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I want to do a call out to like two venues that have not ignored it, which are going to be the source for our conversation.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of which is a reason magazine, which did a story about by Matthew Petty, about Epstein's connections with the spy industry, how he was involved with.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Former Israeli Prime Minister, Hudbrok, and a surveillance tech company.
• 3:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And building on that and doing a lot of groundbreaking research, drop site.
• 3:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: has done a whole bunch of articles, basically flushing out just how tight Epstein's connections were with Barack and the services that Epstein provided these really state and I think you know there's not so much evidence of this but I we have to put this I think foreground on the table but there's no way an American citizen was involved with these activities without the knowledge of the American intelligence at least.
• 4:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, totally.
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so so I mean, what Dropside to excellent reporting by Ryan Graham and where Taza Hussain has shown is that Epstein was involved with back-town negotiations between Israel and Russia to deal with the settlement of Syria.
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was involved with opening up ties between Israel and Mongolia and selling Israeli surveillance technology to African countries.
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that's quite a list of activities.
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Can I go slightly further, even?
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the Israeli relationship to Mongolia and West African countries, they were selling in Israeli security state in a box.
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like the tools of repression, soup to nuts, almost like it was an app, like, you know, plug-in play kind of thing, selling that to West African countries to Mongolia.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this was the tip of the iceberg.
• 5:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so there's a way in which Jeffrey Epstein was an arms dealer.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: We were talking about this before we hit record.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there's much more going on here and so like the way I, you know, I had a piece that I wrote about this in the newsletter a few days ago, I characterized him as as a geopolitician, which I is to me an epithet, but he's trying to and sort of succeeding in the worst way trying to manipulate power politics and what we saw like my my thesis was like Epstein is the embodiment of power politics.
• 5:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: in neoliberal globalization.
• 5:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that happens to be very corrupt at its core.
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's thing that we called like the liberal international order, right?
• 5:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Washington, there's like this romantic gloss on what that was, but what that really was was,
• 6:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: agents, like Epstein, profiteering from world affairs and helping consolidate state control of societies.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so American hegemony imposed a kind of imperialist piece on the world, especially in Asia.
• 6:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that imperialist piece was basically piece for rulers, but imperialism for
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: the rule, like society, and so American hegemony is like secured ruling class solidarity basically, but against working class interests.
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that sets up like everything that the nation magazine does, all the progressive politics stuff that we're like part of.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we talk about and write about the past decade.
• 6:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: All of that stuff, BDS, opposing genocide, eliminating tax havens, free buses, cutting military spending,
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: it's all a threat to the control of rulers over their people.
• 7:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as rulers have less control, their ruling class solidarity starts to break.
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Jeffrey Epstein was one of these guys who was making ruling class solidarity work.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And one of the sites of ruling class solidarity happened to be Peto Island.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you know, everybody gets to take their turn stabbing Caesar
• 7:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, no, no, absolutely.
• 7:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think maybe one way to kind of think about this is to sort of like historicize Jeffrey Epstein as a figure of the 1990s.
• 7:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it seems to have like acquired his sort of, you know, like wealth and elite collections, at some point in the 80s, but really like started like flourish in the sort of, you know, end of history moment.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: of the 1990s and if you look at I mean what we're getting is a sort of from some of these documents is a kind of flash out view of his politics and I should say like you know this isn't necessarily discredit these politics I mean obviously like many totally innocent people all these politics but basically like if you look at like what Epstein believed in and why he was so comfortable in
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: The company of people like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump was that FC basically believed what the American ruling class came to think in the 1990s.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: He believed in globalization via the Washington consensus, stem dominated education, US military hegemonies, especially in the Middle East, with Israel as a very important asset.
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll leave comedy like bringing together people from the
• 8:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: the fetishization of the tech industry, you know, very much into like a bit coin and things like that, and a kind of male-centered sexual liberalism.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, like, like, if that's what I'm like, you put it.
• 8:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, this is like basically that the, you know,
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is the sort of politics of a large chunk of the elite in the 1990s, and it still continues to be very powerful, although it has been increasingly under challenge from both the left and the right.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he operated within that ideological space, but was also an entrepreneur and was someone who realized that within this world there were a lot of opportunities as you said precisely because this end of history moment was a moment of deregulation
• 9:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the sort of flourishing, what was coded as you know, we're allowing civil society to flourish.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: But like, you know, allowing powerful business interests to kind of come to the fore.
• 9:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, I think that that is a sort of cultural milieu that he's sort of coming out of.
• 9:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you have any thoughts on that?
• 9:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, so everything you're saying, like Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine, back in the Bush years,
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was my the more like intense version of that argument was that like our foreign policy
• 10:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: creates destabilizing geopolitical events almost on purpose, because the chaos is then ripe for resource extraction and deregulation and kleptocracy.
• 10:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's how people secure the bag and get paid or whatever.
• 10:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So in the good faith about national security years of those early 2000s,
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: people read that almost as like conspiracy theory thinking, but like all of these email dumps from like drop site and from the house, the democratic house or oversight thing, these emails are like smoking gun proof that that thesis has legs.
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean like that's what's going on.
• 10:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, like what you see in the emails, we didn't talk about this yet, but like Jeffrey Epstein
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: talking about how Epstein was so close to Russian oligarchs that not only had he met with Putin repeatedly, but Putin sought a meeting with Jeffrey Epstein and Epstein turned him down at one point until I forget what the quote was, but until Putin could agree to meet in private in a secure setting or something like that.
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the whole triangle of conspiracy with Syria, Iran, Russia, and Israel, I guess that's not a triangle.
• 11:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The thing that was going on there was they were trying to, they being Epstein was trying to get the US to bomb Iran.
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were trying to undermine what became the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal.
• 11:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were trying to depose Bashar al-Assad because Israel saw Assad as an Iranian proxy.
• 11:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they were trying to get chemical weapons out of Syria because they were afraid that some proxy group or whatever would end up using them against Israel.
• 12:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so Russia was crucial in the Epstein imagination to resolving most of those wish list items.
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Epstein literally, like this, the Ryan Grimmutosa who's saying stuff is just mind-blowing because it shows Okay, Epstein and you would Barack, they're gonna go to the UN General Assembly and meet with all these people to persuade them about these wishlist items wishlist of death Right, they're gonna go meet with John Kerry when he's secretary of state and push him on this They're gonna go to Henry Kissinger's 90th birthday.
• 12:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not this is literally in the email
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Henry Kissinger's 90th birthday because they know John Kerry will be there and they know a bunch of so-and-so's from the White House will be there to push them on these agenda items.
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then they're literally in the same month going to go to
• 12:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: the Kremlin and meet with Russian oligarchs in the Russian Foreign Minister to get Russia to support deposing Bashar al-Assad and they don't end up getting Bashar al-Assad removal.
• 13:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: They don't get approval for that, but they do get this arrangement of what becomes the Russia U.S. agreement to inspect and dispose of Syrian chemical weapons in 2013.
• 13:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And just like a very small anecdote here,
• 13:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 2013, I worked in the Obama's Pentagon a lot of my friends worked on the WMD side of the Pentagon and most of what they did in 2013.
• 13:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: All of them was this project to get chemical weapons out of Syria.
• 13:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: So like mission accomplished from the Jeffrey Epstein perspective, but like what's crazy about is that from their perspective from this perspective of the policy Technocrat dude who was doing non-proliferation stuff and he thinks he's doing God's work, right, and there's a bunch of them in the system
• 13:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: what they were really doing the whole time was serving the agenda of Jeffrey Epstein and Israel who wanted that to happen and Jeffrey Epstein was the guy pushing on all the right doors to make it happen and then it happened.
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, and it's just wild to think that like your part of this, you know, national security machinery and you think you're doing stuff on behalf of whatever is going in your imagination about why this is a good thing to do, but that's not what's driving the train what's driving the train is this external force.
• 14:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: with the name Jeffrey Epstein and part, and it's serving is really interests, and it's only serving America's interest because of the way our elites choose to define U.S. interests as is really interests, right?
• 14:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Crazy.
• 14:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Crazy.
• 14:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
• 15:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Peter T.O.
• 15:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I perhaps leave it like Steve Bannon, because although Steve, you know, was obviously had been on the outs from Donald Trump for a long time.
• 15:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: He became very close to Bannon during Trump's first term and would beat up with Bannon and was trying to, I guess, facilitate Bannon's own efforts to like make an outreach into Europe.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I find that interesting, like, you know, there's like, I think these are all like actors with maybe like different overlapping, but, you know,
• 15:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uses for each other on occasion.
• 15:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I was kind of again mind-blown like a I didn't realize that Bannon was in cohoots with Epstein like that was that was news to me and maybe I just missed the boat earlier Oh, I have you I had one of the people just a little bit of credit.
• 15:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I did do a lot about this But like when I was working at the for the Dover Public in 2017 to 2018
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I had done a few like little items taking note of various reports that Bandit was reading with FC then like kind of like beat the drums on this like like why aren't people they like to keep note of you know this fact that like because I mean like to their credit that the New York Post did like report various sightings of Bandit going into FC's magic and so I missed that yeah yeah no I mean it was a totally flu under the radar because unless you were like really um
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: keyed into New York, tabloid press.
• 16:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was only once a gory, yet if you just read the New York Times, like this stuff, it wouldn't have even registered at all, which is interesting.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean like, you get to that later, but like the degree to which the elite media ignores this stuff.
• 16:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, we need to get more to the geopolitics, but just very quickly, in 2017, when everybody started realizing that Bannon is this this strategist intellectual for the far right, I wrote a piece about what what it meant that this guy was functioning in this power broker role, but for the far right, you know, and I had talked to two different editors,
• 17:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: they both told me separately, not about the merits of the peace, but that they don't want to give ban an oxygen.
• 17:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so they are refusing to publish any pieces about banning or that show ban and doing things in the world.
• 17:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're like, why should we care about Bannon and I'm like, well, I, the whole piece is about why we should care about Bannon, what are you talking about and they're like, well, we know that if we, if we publish it, we're making Bannon out to be an influencer and I'm like, but he is an influencer.
• 17:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So because the president of the president of the advisor like he ran the Trump's successful president I mean you don't know that was a kind of very common liberal reaction I remember either I mean you wouldn't debate the merits of the New Yorker inviting about into their festival and then later
• 18:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I was puzzled by people not understanding that this is an inherently newsworthy person and yeah ignoring his activities, which so I mean like like for someone like a hood baroque, but also Peter T. L. and Steve Vannon
• 18:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the uses of a Jeffrey Epstein is that you can open doors.
• 18:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can get you in with figures with Russian oligarchs or apparently with European figures in the case of Steve Bannon.
• 18:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So in some ways, I mean, this shows that the sort of networking aspect of
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Epstein, the sort of, you know, the famous social life, you know, it's included not just like the island, but also like dinner parties It has been had to residence where, you know, you would have, I think Woody Allen described it as, you know, you would see like all sorts of people like diplomats and military people and magicians Yeah, yeah, so I mean, I mean, that social like, that is actually something that he was selling, right?
• 19:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like he was selling an inability to connect people
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, 100%.
• 19:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's a way in which you could say that like the unipolar like so Jeffrey Epstein is a is a creature that the unipolar moment kind of created and in so far as that's true the unipolar moment also kind of
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Accelerated or caused the global far right, you know, because Epstein is this, like, banan is actively a transnational actor trying to foment far right governments around the world.
• 19:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in Trump 1.0, especially Russia was was widely viewed as like the cultural beacon for the global far right, because, you know, it's right coded politics.
• 19:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like, so the idea that like
• 19:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: and Eastern European countries and Steve Bannon and Peter Tiel, who's like the key finance here for a lot of this stuff and Russian oligarchs.
• 20:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's like the beating heart, all those characters of the global far right.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know what I mean?
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yeah.
• 20:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, absolutely, and I, but as you said, like in part, it's, um, alliance or consensus that is based on a shared vision of the world, which is authoritarianism and keeping the actual masses out of politics.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, some ways, that was what the end of history was.
• 20:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was like, you know, for whatever one can say.
• 20:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: about the Soviet Union and that that original state capitalism I think for the people who celebrated the end of history it was the idea of that but we don't have to worry about any challenges to the system the system is one and there's only everything only is going to operate within the system and you know you you might you would need military and surveillance to keep it that way to the main team that's that is going to make sure that you know we don't ever
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: situation again where any and really forces could present an alternative to the system.
• 21:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: This American hegemony was like way, way more dystopian than it was being narrated as and then as we were sort of taught growing up, you know.
• 21:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like our criticisms would get funneled in, like left criticisms would get funneled into like criticizing moments, like oh the Iraq war or something like that.
• 21:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: But
• 21:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The whole system that sort of gave rise to the Iraq war was this swampy pedo nonsense that Jeffrey Epstein kind of represented and like that's you just can't avoid reaching that conclusion when you look through the email after email from this this dump to your point about the parties dude that you know the
• 21:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: what's his name, the filmmaker guy that you just mentioned, Woody Allen, to the extent people know who I am, like they know I fled DC, they know I left the blob, I moved to the other side of the planet, I became Washington's biggest critic or whatever, what almost nobody knows is like,
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: why, and like, I don't want to overstate this, but a little bit of the why, like the Epstein stuff is the answer to that.
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's like, I was not in any of these Epstein emails for sure, and like, I didn't ever hear of the guy, but he is like an archetype or like a more exaggerated version of everybody in Washington.
• 22:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like, as I was moving up the ranks of the national security state, I saw more and more of power operating like Epstein and it was reaching the point where it was like, dude, I'm going to have to take my turn stabbing Caesar.
• 22:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, else I have to get out and it was clear that there wasn't going to be a third option at some point.
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that was, I mean, that's like, this is, like, the thing that disturbs me and is sort of damning and why I felt the need to even like write about it and even speak about it is because it's like.
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is emblematic of how the system operates.
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is not an anomaly.
• 23:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is not a weird one offer, whatever.
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Although some of this stuff is like comically flagrant and exaggerated.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, I mean, yeah, absolutely himself is very exaggerating, but he represents a type, like, of what's there, like, you know, more socially acceptable versions, but there's still on the same square curl.
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was also like the band and stuff.
• 23:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, band and fashion himself as a, as a populist, he's present, like, you know, like financial times does interviews with him and they characterize him that way.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: But he's in elite just like all these other ones, operating in exactly the same way.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's just trying to achieve certain policy ends that we would call fascist or whatever, but he talks in the email as recently as 2018, he's talking to Epstein in this email about using the Fed as a tool of basically class war, or using it against workers.
• 24:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he calls it like an exquisite tool or sophisticated tool or something like that.
• 24:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Weapon.
• 24:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: But this is like what he's talking about, I think, and nobody's picked up on this is how we've used the Fed to send billions of dollars to Malay and Argentina.
• 24:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're using the Fed to actually bolster a far-right government in another country.
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: and you're even Trump is even making that support conditional on the far right government staying in power and he's like, we'll take all this money back.
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know.
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I know, you know, it made it offer to the Argentina voters.
• 24:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, yeah, like, if you, uh,
• 24:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: you don't want to like a recession, you know, like, you better vote for my boy.
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if you're thinking about it, you know, in terms of like these, like kind of like big structures, and like it, it is useful to think about the far right as a by-product of this.
• 24:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, you know, like able to exploit some of the contradictions.
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think that I mean, it is very ironic.
• 25:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: But true that like the people who first Provorted the FC's story were like the people like Bannon like like, you know, they'd be be presently Isn't that weird?
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, I don't know, but I mean they because I mean they saw it as a way of neutralizing any sort of like Friscus and Trump himself like basically, you know, saying like you know, if you bring up stuff about our guy, we you know
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: We can bring up Epstein, but also I mean like they're kind of I mean, yeah I've been in there with a where of how bad this stuff looks To our very people and I really to exploit it even though you know like bad in was like as he was quite close to Epstein I was close to Epstein like you know like not in like the period where people could have positive Ania ability this is we're talking about like 2017 2019 conviction.
• 25:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah
• 25:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: What, can I ask you, um, you had like two weeks before Epstein was found dead in his cell?
• 26:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: You had like before before.
• 26:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 26:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, tweeted out something very prescient.
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: What was that?
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like what was how how does this how do you say how does your prescience come about here?
• 26:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I I, I, I, I, what had happened was like that been initially a report of like a suicide attempt by Epstein and that he was under watch.
• 26:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was like a lot of people tweeting like, oh, you know, like,
• 26:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: It'd be great if Epsi did kill himself, but I just like tweeted like well, no, actually like you know like Epsi There was a lot of things about very important people that we need this testimony and that he should be like under very careful Watched I wrote that 60 days We were of steep it did not dead in his cell.
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I guess could us to be
• 26:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: but I mean the uh the uh called it I called it I called it but it also seems like in some ways the unwillingness of the I mean the way that the fact that the paradox it's suddenly abandoned and that teal and all these people are like are you know they they sponsored JD Vats right and then Vant was like their guy and Vant was guy who was like what all the podcast said you know released the FC files and
• 27:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: This looks like, you know, the vats were saying like the reason people believe in pizza gate is because of Jeffrey Epstein, and if he doesn't talk like that anymore, he was like, this is like vats.
• 27:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, representing this right wing faction was able to use it.
• 27:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's actually because the right is very intuitive to sort of contradictions of liberalism and the way that these contradictions can be like exploited to discredit the existing establishment and for their own power.
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, these two examples, one of which is, you know, after Epstein's death, it was the right that took up the slogan, Epstein didn't kill himself, and you saw a lot of liberals basically saying, well, there's nothing to see here, like prisons who sides are quite common, and like, this is a standard, like, liberty of mainstream liberal life.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that, like, it's the extent in which, you know, the mainstream liberal position was like, there's nothing to see here,
• 28:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'd like that actually does create an opening to the right.
• 28:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Liberals are too credulous, no offense to liberals listening, like they're too credulous about power.
• 28:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like when power tells you something, you can't just believe it.
• 28:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like if there's anything I agree with within Mago, which is basically nothing,
• 28:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's that they're skeptical of elites who will us, you know, for some of them.
• 28:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but they use that skepticism to put their faith in people like batting.
• 28:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, a deal, who are like, all sorts of elites, yeah, all sorts of elites.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, all sorts of elites.
• 28:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it bans on JD bands.
• 28:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, but the other, I mean, the more recent examples of this, which is, I think, very telling us that, like I said, mentioned before, there's, you know, all this great reporting
• 28:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: on FC's Thai International Security State.
• 28:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: But where you will not find any of this reported, so far, is in the New York Times in the Washington Post or on CNN.
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they're right here to imagine why.
• 29:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I mean, there's a couple of things that are perhaps going on there.
• 29:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, what I would say maybe is like the sort of the sourcing of this, I mean, like I think that there is a kind of organization that received hacked information from a new Brox thing.
• 29:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I mean, like that hack, that information seems like all valid.
• 29:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like there's a lot of emails there with photos and private information about Brox that wasn't available anywhere else.
• 29:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: So like, like everything, you can,
• 29:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, well, it seems totally legit about it, but, and I guess some people claim that this hack information might have came from Iranian intelligence, which again, like to my mind, that I'll stipulate that that's the case, but like if a Iranian intelligence has accurate, you know, like, you know, like hacked information about something that happened and made it available, like I don't actually see that as a reason, like not to use that as a basis of reporting.
• 30:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: If it's available, it's available, it's new.
• 30:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's available, it's available, but yeah, that the whole unwillingness of the Vaci media to talk about is it actually does contribute to sort of the far right into conspiracy theories.
• 30:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And even like, you know, I would say, in this particular case, sort of like anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, like the idea that this all part of a kind of Jewish cabal went like, absolutely,
• 30:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's like the conspiracy theory deepens by the the dog that didn't bark.
• 31:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know what I mean?
• 31:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like once this information's out and it's so damning and yet they They find it still on newsworthy.
• 31:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's not credible anymore.
• 31:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: That heck justification doesn't hold water at this point.
• 31:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the, what the, some of the emails show is that CNN, Donna Brazil, some reporters at the New York Times, they are also in touch with Epstein, also backdoring information to him, previewing things, right?
• 31:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so it's like mainstream media, I'm sure there's lots of like good normal people who just have honest politics in mainstream media.
• 31:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: who do not fit that description and like some of them are named, you know, and so like it's it's like, of course, like this is one of the things so like in my the geopolitan, the Epstein geopolatics posted it for the newsletter, I I walked through some of this from the drop site news reporting, which is that like,
• 32:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Richard Clark, the cyber securities are, Leon Panetta, who is my boss in Obama's Pentagon, like Jeremy Bash, who is Leon Panetta's chief of staff, all these guys, Bill Burns, who was Obama's ambassador to Russia, like a who's who of democratic party national security people?
• 32:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Who's who?
• 32:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: was also in the Epstein files, was also colluding, sharing information, changing policies based on consultations with Epstein.
• 32:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And those people are the best and the brightest who give pull quotes to the New York Times, who are interviewed by the New York, I'm not focusing on just New York Times, but like mainstream media, they're the ones who go on MSNBC and CNN and all that.
• 32:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: of elites.
• 32:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're all sort of collectively implicated here.
• 32:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if you're a journalist at a mainstream newspaper or on MSNBC or whatever, you're going to, if you report on this, you're kind of, you're, you're telling on yourself almost like you're at risk of like, you stab Caesar too, man, you can't go tell everybody.
• 33:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, you know,
• 33:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: about like certain negative press coverage that might be coming up or rumors that he heard in a way to protect Epstein and like you know like I can certainly see like something like that it does not do any credit to the media and you know like obviously there's going to be a partisan lens a lot of this is news because Donald Trump is president and you know he is very much was very much connected with Epstein and the stuff that we've as come out has been very disturbing
• 34:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I mean like I think we would be a miss if we did acknowledge that like this actually implicates a far wider spectrum of people Then just Donald Trump we across both for both political parties like it is a it's not a Donald Trump scandal It's like an American political elite scandal
• 34:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: of which Trump is a part.
• 34:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 34:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: What's the part?
• 34:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 34:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's why the partisan lens really doesn't work.
• 34:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, we didn't even mention Larry Summers, who is King of Turd Mountain.
• 34:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like, just it comes across as an off, I've written before like years ago, before I knew about the Epidene stuff that this he was just like, he had awful views about everything.
• 34:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like Janice Verfakis had this giant memoir that he wrote after he was like Greek finance minister or whatever.
• 35:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Janice is like good, good guy, good politics, friend of the pod type person.
• 35:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the memoir, though, he opens it up with an anecdote about a conversation he had with Larry Summers.
• 35:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first time he goes to Washington.
• 35:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And can I read this out real quick?
• 35:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but I don't believe that it's very relevant, yeah.
• 35:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this is from Janice's memoir.
• 35:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Larry Summers says to him, there are two kinds of politicians he said.
• 35:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Insiders and outsiders.
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth.
• 35:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders who make the important decisions.
• 35:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule.
• 35:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do.
• 35:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their reward, access to information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes.
• 35:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: With that, summers arrived at his question.
• 35:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Janis, he said, which of the two are you?
• 36:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has so much more flavor and light of all these email.
• 36:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely absolutely, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
• 36:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's has a lot of very friendly, sociable things where he's asking for, he says, you know, very mad, whatever.
• 36:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he's asking for advice on like various women that he's romantically interested in and ask me Jeffrey Epstein.
• 36:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's just like, I see.
• 36:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And making comments about it.
• 36:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't feel quite caught this, but he had this comment like, well, I told him, you know, like women have half the insults in the world.
• 37:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I do mention that you're more than 51% of the population, which is like a sliding way of saying like, you know, well, I think we have our stupidity, which is what like Larry and which summers actually believes because when he was president of Harvard, he would go into like, you know, long discourses about how women didn't have quite the IQ for in math that men do.
• 37:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why?
• 37:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah, those are the famous like this is one of the causes for him to,
• 37:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: when he was forced out of being president of Harvard.
• 37:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And also trying to get F.D.
• 37:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: to secure money for his wife, she's an English professor at Harvard and her project of like filming various people reading poetry to make sure that like the money, things in her hands and is not, you know, has to be buried up with Harvard, so financial advice of that sort.
• 37:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then she herself wants to
• 37:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: about men that are influenced by contact with young girls, including Vladimir and Dhabic Alps, Lolita, Lolita.
• 38:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is like the whole thing is like, really, you couldn't write this.
• 38:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, I just like, you know, it's actually like, you know, I started off with not a very high opinion of Larry Summers, but I had to love like, I was just expecting it to be this bad.
• 38:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know what?
• 38:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like I was I was super late to to feminism it like just as a world view or like a mode of analysis and like one There's many reasons for that one of the reasons for that is because my contact with feminism like initially when I was in the national security state it came in the form of this like agenda that was called women peace and security So WPS and
• 38:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every, every dude that I knew who was like involved in WPS and they would go to these like feminist conferences where they would get on a stage and talk about inclusion and all these things and diversity.
• 39:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The specific dudes that I knew who were doing that were the skum baggyist people on earth.
• 39:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, they were pure hypocrites, like misogynists, they would go to Thailand and then, you know, do human trafficking stuff.
• 39:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, it was the worst, lowest bottom of the barrel type, like people.
• 39:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they were like the ones who were espousing these virtues that were the opposite of how they lived and conducted themselves in power.
• 39:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so the hypocrisy of it made it such a farce to me and I'm like, why are other feminists, like real feminists going along with this?
• 39:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, what is the deal?
• 39:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then you see in the emails, I haven't said that out loud very much.
• 39:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: But you see in the emails exactly what I'm talking about and Larry Summers is like an avatar of this he's like wildly misogynistic anti feminist to the point of actually thinking women are stupid as a category like just while man
• 40:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then he talks about inclusion.
• 40:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's like, I went to a sad, I went to the Saudis and I dipped about inclusion.
• 40:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, like exactly, yeah, yeah.
• 40:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, but, but again, I mean, like one of the ways that this does serve, um, um, the, the, the right is that it confirms, you know, like one part of their critique, you know, like that's, he does tell the, the kind of, uh, liberal elite at its kind of like hypocritical worst.
• 40:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: and you know like so so I mean in some ways both the the uh that kind of centers the lead and the far right you know are often for true scene as offices but there's always a part of the same system where they're like you know one is a kind of logical outgrowth of the other but I mean there's so much where we could say but we know like where our purposes were uh at the time but uh I want to like uh revenge actually what's again for being on the the podcast that uh yeah do you have any uh closing out thoughts
• 40:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to thank Jeet here for coming on the podcast.
• 41:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was fun.
• 41:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like, yeah, there was so much more we could have said, but another day maybe.