Researcher Reveals Secrets Of Us Deep State Politics Dr Aaron Good

TITLE: Researcher REVEALS Secrets of US Deep State Politics | Dr. Aaron Good CHANNEL: Neutrality Studies DATE: 2026-06-03 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Welcome back everybody to Neutrality Studies today for the second time with Dr. Aaron Good, the author of American Exception, Empire and the Deep State. Aaron, welcome back.

Thank you, Pascal. It’s great to be here. Great having you again. Um, can we discuss a little bit something that you reacted to the other day via email um that there I had a couple of guests on my show including uh Professor Radik Desai and uh um Professor Keith Fondil um who do this kind of of structural analysis or or they use the structure of the system in order to explain where we are today in world politics. And um you pointed out this that this type of um hyper um hyperructuralism as you called it um also leaves us with a couple of problems. Um can you maybe can we go into that? Sure. And uh I appreciate actually both of these commentators that you had on these two uh scholars Radic Desai and Case Vanderpeel if I’m saying his name right. Um but I would have disagreements on with with each of them. I think that uh Radica’s conception of the Marxist idea of the state as just sort of the collective monolithic black box uh that represents the power of the the Bourgeoa state and Bajgeois civil society collectively uh and is basically animated in a sort of autonomous way by the class interests of the the the capitalist class. uh that it has its uses when you in the abstract when you want to understand the behavior of empires. I mean in sort of in the same way that the realist abstraction of a monolithic rational actor state has its uses as well when you’re thinking about you know competitions and politics between states but it also has its its limitations and as you pointed out in the in the interview uh people like Mirshimer Mirshimer is a realist but he departs from that realist convention of conceiving of the state as a unitary you know, uh, actor and as a as a monolithic black box in order to try to understand why is the US not acting in a realist fashion in terms of pursuing its interests in a rational way. Why has it pursued policies that have been detrimental to its goal of of hegemony? Uh, and this and so therefore Mirshimer realizes that these realist uh these these realist conventions do not help him to explain this. And so he and Steven Walt wrote the uh the Israel lobby, which is a good explanation of how these powerful actors can influence the behavior of the state and US grand strategy in ways that have been really detrimental to the project of hegemony. And in the 21st century that it’s been an unbroken pretty much procession of disastrous wars that were laid out in the mid9s pretty much by the logic of the clean break report which was commissioned by BB Netanyahu and written by people like Richard Pearl and Paul Wolitz and David Worms are uh super neocons uh the people that would become the neocons and this this is a rather than the US state acting you know, in the the same way across administrations across decades. This was a 180 from the previous administration. Uh the and I know that Bill Clinton doesn’t really start all of these things, but he does sign the Iraq Liberation Act. He does pardon Mark Rich, whose lawyer uh was Scooter Libby uh you know, who was one of the guys who was one of Cheni’s main people. So these neocons are are really significant and the policy under HW Bush was announced very early in his presidency. He sent James Baker to Apac and in May of 1989, so just a couple a few months into his presidency, James Baker says um it’s time to put aside once and for all the unrealistic dream of greater Israel. And then he he following the advice of conservatives like Barry Goldwater uh and others they cut off they said there will not be loan guarantees made to Israel unless they agree to enter into negotiations in over a Palestinian state. And Reagan when he was out the door, he’d already, you know, the the other president had already been elected, HW Bush. His one of his last acts in office, if not the last act, was to recognize the PLO, uh, which which was done with great objection from the Zionist lobby who wanted to say, “No, no, no. You can’t negotiate with them because they’re terrorists.” But, of course, we know now that they don’t want to negotiate with anyone. They’ll kill people who are negotiating. So, that’s very dubious. But we can see why they wouldn’t have wanted Reagan to recognize the PLO because they don’t want there to be any chance for the creation of a Palestinian state. They’re obsessed with this. So you we can talk about how uh the two-state solution is dead and it’s it’s not feasible and it’s just a a distraction to kick the can down the road. But there were people who are actually pursuing it and there were Zionists who were deathly afraid of it apparently. And so there’s a 180 in the way that the state behaves, the policy of the US, which really gets consolidated with 911 and then launching off two and two and a half decades of wars that follow the clean break script. But you have to be able to explor or you don’t have to, but I would be interested in explaining how do you go from HW Bush saying no greater Israel to the clean break report becoming orthodoxy in just a few years. And if you’re going to try to explain that question, if you think it’s a question worth trying to find the answer to, the realist idea or even the western Marxist radical idea of the state as a monolithic unitary actor is inadequate. And so there are other traditions that try to look at state behavior. Some of them are considered liberalism and international relations, which I’m sure you know pretty well, right? But there’s also uh a small group of scholars whose politics could are to the left of center but they’re not all the same. People like Cight Mills. Cight Mills wrote that there are two flawed ideal types of of history philosophy. One of them is history as drift or fate as history as being overdetermined by structural factors to the point that whatever people do it doesn’t really matter very much. And then on the other side there’s history as uh conspiracy whereas where everything is really about conspiratorial groups who are either good or bad but they’re very powerful. It’s sort of like the great man theory of history is kind of compatible with this too. But it’s the idea of agency and groups and conspirators perhaps being able to impact history through their own human agency. So in a in a way this is a question of two ideal types of bad history that are related to the general social science argument of structure versus agency. And I think that what you get with the realists or some of these Marxists in the west is a h what I would call hyper structuralism which is which is that everything is kind of overdetermined by the structure of the system the class structure. For the for the Marxists, it’s the class structure that is overdetermining in terms of the behavior of the state. And for the realists, it’s the structure of the international system, the anarchy of the international system which forces states to act in a predictable rational self maximizing utility sort of way like you know if you teach IR. So I think this is kind of the heart of the the problem or or the question here. And to my mind, you need to look you need to open up the black box. You need to look inside the black box of the regime, the state if you want to understand certain questions because there are some things that they you cannot answer if you just ignore this whole inquiry of the the politics at the apex of the regime. Hey, very brief intermission because I was recently banned from YouTube. And although I’m back, this can happen anytime again. So, please consider subscribing not only here, but to my mailing list on Substack. That’s pascalota.supstack.com. The link’s going to be in the description below. And now back to the video. These are very very good observations and you know they they go also for other branches of uh of academia or or scholarly inquiry of course, right? Um, you can I I like that this this um metaphor and it’s a it’s it’s an um it’s an old um it’s an old metaphor I think a Chinese one of the elephant. If you want to see the entire elephant and you have all of these blind experts and one one touches the trunk, the other one the tail and the third one the foot, they will all describe the elephant but in completely different ways, right? Um and if you try to see the whole thing, even if you completely zoom out, you will never see more than one half of it. And if you go even further, I literally have colleagues who study elephants. They tell me that within their field, some people study the entire ecosystem and other people actually study the footprints because footprints of of elephants create many ecosystems for for amoeba and whatnot [laughter] and you can study all of those, right? And you still study this related phenomena. But the question that we then have with international relations is of course which one is most productive in order to help us to wrap our minds around what’s going on. Um now when we when we use this structural approach and I would actually also put Brian Berlettic clearly into that into that tradition. He keeps saying like look it’s the it’s the way that the US war machine is designed that then outputs on the other end uh uh this this uh this um destruction and warfare. It doesn’t really matter who who is president. It doesn’t really matter what kind of speech acts the Democrats or the Republicans use. The fact that they’re all integrated into the larger structure then means that nothing else can be produced. Um, and that of course always diminishes agency. Um, in your research you looked very much at the agency of these individual actors, which is also why in your explanations you’re you’re able to go from from one to the other and explain how they interact with each other. What what do you find though? I mean the structure does determine to to some extent who can sit in what place, right? And and it’s also the outcome of Chsky and Herman’s uh uh critique of how how propaganda in in in liberals liberal societies functions. On the other hand, it would be it’s it’s weird to say that individuals have zero agency actually. How how do you how do you square that circle? Well, I think even Markx uh said something to the effect of uh you know, men make history, but that history determines the options available to the man in the specific circumstance. Right? That’s not exactly how he said it. It was more clever the way that he phrased it. But that’s basically the idea. Even Markx wasn’t really a hyperructuralist if you look at that that statement. So how do you determine well this it I think it involves you have to have a certain understanding of the sociological setting of the elites at the time and the political spectrum at the time as it exists and what sort of interests might lie behind it or animate them. Uh, I I find the Kennedy presidency to be fascinating because he pursued policies that had antecedance with Roosevelt’s good neighbor policy or or Wallace’s uh idea for a century of the common man. He he bas wanted to move the US towards lawful peaceful internationalism and yet he’s the president and the you know chief executive of this massive capitalist empire. Uh however because the empire doesn’t call itself an empire it doesn’t there’s some space for for le there’s some leeway in terms of maneuverability that he had and so he was able to pursue some policies up to and including you know using back channel negot people communicators to talk to Castro about normalizing relations and he was working with the Soviets about the taunt really about ending the cold war and he passed a nuclear testban treaty despite the fact that Congress was was very much opposed to it when he first started out, but he managed to sort of mobilize public opinion on his side. So, there was a certain amount of space that he had because of the time that he was in. And the and he had enough uh he was threatening enough as Michael Pari has pointed out, he was threatening enough to the establishment for them to kill him. I mean, just because we as leftist academics don’t think that he was any threat to the class interests of the of the American ruling class, it doesn’t mean that they think that they see the world the same way as as we do. Uh, Parenti was very very good on this. And so something like the Kennedy assassination is really notable when the American institutional left can’t really grapple with it. Even though on its face, it’s not very hard to solve at all. It’s the regime killed the Kennedy brothers and that’s why you can’t ever have it investigated by any prevailing authority. It that part is straightforward enough. It’s just a question of well then what kind of regime do we really have because the constitution doesn’t allow for that sort of action. So how could this be? But you know Kennedy himself this is in the memoirs of GO and he said there were that he had conversations with Kennedy. GMO was a Soviet who was the sort of spy in the White House, but not really because everybody knew he was a way to sort of communicate with the Soviets uh about what you know that a way to have the the White House to be able to communicate with the Soviets in some way. And he wrote in his memoir that there were that Kennedy spoke to him about the two enemies the two main enemies of his policies of dant and peace with the Soviets and you know finding a motus with vendi and he said there were hardline cold warriors and they’re pretty easy to understand because they’re you know they’re right-wing they want more war military spending anti-communist action wherever but then the other group was a certain nationality and it’s pretty clear that he’s talking about like Zionists or he he might he might have said something to the effect Jews, but this at that time that would have been about, you know, synonymous more or less. And so right there you see uh part of the society, part of the ruling class, part of the oligarchy that is against the actual policies of the president of the United States. And Kennedy, when he gets killed a week later, he sends an envoy, Robert, Robert Kennedy does this and Jackie Kennedy after the JFK assassination, they sent an a friend of theirs, William Walton, to to Moscow with a message that we know that you didn’t you weren’t behind the assassination. it was domestic opponents and uh LBJ is not going to be a partner for peace, but you know eventually Robert Kennedy will make a run for the White House and then we can resume the sort of quest for peace, right? They sent this a week after the Kennedy assassination. So the Kennedys knew um what what had happened and uh well then of course when Robert is getting close to getting the uh presidency, he wins the California primary and they shoot him in the back of the head as well. Uh, and even though the person’s in front of him uh by six feet, he’s shot in the back of the head at point blank range. And that’s just one of these like mysteries of the of US history. But, you know, these were powerful people and the system, the structure itself was not sufficient to allow them to take the reigns of power using these democratic institutions and then redirect the state. So that’s something we should understand and think okay we should understand how the regime actually functions and this is a part of the way that it functions. It eliminates the people that that see that are not in favor with the people who have the real power. And I find that really really important because in our last discussion you you pointed out very correctly that a lot of political scientists they they study how the United States and all the states function according to the constitutional order. And then you look at the executive judicial blah blah blah and then you leave out the entire other part of the black box um which is the the the in unofficial power structure. Some people still venture into the topic of um of lobbying of course but lobbying is also it had there’s a legal framework for it. And then there’s the entire part that shouldn’t exist but obviously does, including the mafia, including the the different uh the different interest groups that then also bribe each other and whatnot, including targeted assassinations. And you know, we know and Epstein by now and we we we every once in a while we get glimpses of this, but as soon as you get near to it, also on a journalistic basis, you are immediately called a conspiracy theorist because you’re pointing out that the obvious is there that shouldn’t be there, but is and impacts the other one and but vice versa as well because they obviously also intersect. I mean the the connections of the Kennedys with the with the mafia is also like just a a well doumented fact. Um so the how um [clears throat] how how should we then then properly try to understand what you pointed out as regime. And just to make the point in political science we use the term regime regime type in order to to to compare also different uh ways in which states function and structure themselves. So it’s not a derogative term in fact in political science even if we used it on Iran although for Iran it is being used constantly as a derogative term just just to point that out. So the the US regime but what’s the best way to understand it? How it in its totality actually works? Well, this that is the question and in in political science terms regime doesn’t just mean the state. It means all of those institutions that determine who has access to the state and the and state power. And so the US is supposedly a democratic regime type. But in reality that it democracy gets overridden in different ways. Of course, the one person, one vote rule gets uh negated by massive campaign contributions, legalized bribery, and that’s straightforward enough. But in the more extreme cases, they can just assassinate people. You also have bribery uh of or excuse me, blackmail. [clears throat] You have blackmail at the same time, which I think is a huge institution in DC. We probably don’t know the half of it. I mean, Dennis Hastard was a later found out to be a huge pedophile going back to his days as a wrestling coach, and it’s not a coincidence that he became speaker of the house. You know, it was known by FBI sources that he was being bribed by foreign networks, uh, you know, for having sex with young boys and they would provide him with with young boys and so on. So, this this must be this. It wasn’t that he succeeded in spite of this. This probably is a big part of the reason why this unimpressive person was able to be the speaker of the house, the longest serving Republican speaker of the house. And that is a kind of regime or system of government that our social scientists have no they have no interest in actually grappling with that. But the funny thing is for other systems we actually know about that. I mean the the the the Russian term of compromat, right, of having something uh compromising uh uh um facts about you and proofs that then that then make sure that whoever is in office actually behaves the way that they are supposed to. which is not to say that everything is just guided as you said uh earlier by just the the the few four five Rockefeller people in the back room but the uh but the fact that that is one of the ways in which uh political political groups and and classes then structure also who they who they agree upon who should who should take the hot seat right um also behind closed doors uh why is it that for the United States up until Epstein this has been this has been very much on the back burner. It’s been on the back burner, but it’s been in in the subconscious of the US in many ways. I mean, look at the public opinion over the JFK assassination. It fell down in the 70s after they showed the Zapruder film on the air to the single digits in terms of people who actually believed the story about one lone nut who kills the president with these lucky shots from a a sixth floor window and then he gets killed by another lone nut, you know, who was very clever and sneaky and killed him in a room full of cops. Like Americans didn’t buy that story. And then when they saw the video which showed that Kennedy got shot from the front very clearly then you know almost no one believed it and yet it can’t be addressed because the regime just says no further you know over and over again and the they did an investigation of it a second one but then the more you look at these investigations they’re very weird too. It seems that some other deep political actors use this. I mean the I Uh my understanding now of the JFK assassination has evolved to be that it must have been endorsed on some level by powerful actors in the US regime, probably the Pentagon, the joint chiefs and yet they had networks tied to the CIA but not you know in in obscure ways like people can connected to that James Angel Israel side of it, Israel account side of it and the the Lansky the National Crime Syndicate it. And so this is an area that of the assassination that’s kind of a black hole. People know Angleton was involved because that’s pretty obvious, but then there are these ties to Israel and the this this national crime syndicate that people that they can’t address. So even when they reinvestigated in the 70s, the person behind that, he really obscures the n he he blames it on the mafia. So the second investigation in the 70s said it was a probable conspiracy and this is the most recent investigation by by an official body said it was a probable conspiracy and it puts the blame on mafia Italian mafia figures. But Robert Kennedy knew that that idea of the National Crime Syndicate was bogus and that it was that he really went after the Teamsters and he wanted to go after Vegas and Lansky and he was stopped in different ways for political reasons. James Angleton himself intervened to stop him from being able to investigate Lansky Las Vegas money that was going to Panama Banks uh and elsewhere. But Kennedy had the idea of a national crime syndicate that was you know multithnic but centered around Vegas and the Teamsters. If you look at the Teamsters, they’re their massive loans to Vegas built up these casinos and Vegas was established by Lansky in order to launder drug money. And the Teamsters also they were the biggest union purchaser of Israeli bonds. So they were you and Hawa was involved in shipping the weapons to Israel in 1948 along with Myer Lansky like key really key figures. He visited Israel many times. Jimmy Hawa did. There’s like a Jimmy Hoffa Yitzac Rabbine Center. It’s very weird. there’s still these strange connections and it’s these are things that that the left or I mean American historians can’t grapple with but even the left when you start to think about the role of labor unions you realize you know in the crime syndicate and also tied to Zionism neoconservatism and this lunatic Zionist project then the idea of labor and or and organized labor as a progressive force even that gets called into question it’s in a way I think Marx wasn’t sufficient ly cynical about capitalism if you can believe that because there are just things that have happened in the in the US where you’re just like this goes beyond what he would have he said he understood that labor could be co-opted and this and that but when you look at like the teamersters and the national crime syndicate working handinand glove with like intelligence agencies and you know the AFL CIO working with the CIA and other countries to overthrow them. This is uh it’s a darker type of entity. this US regime. And so trying to understand it is something we should be very interested in if we are on the left in my opinion and if we’re against imperial capitalism because this is how it functions and it’s indefensible if you look at it. Yeah. It’s you know it’s it’s a it’s a little bit it’s a little bit like a discussion about time and then and then saying look look we need we need to understand how the how the actual how the actual clock on the inside works in order in order to understand the movements of the hands. And then the the structuralists go like no we need to understand the nature of time in in order in order to figure out how the hands have to move within [laughter] how how how they do. But um because it gets so intricate and it gets so extremely detailed and and also person and action and and whatever drinking events oriented where some things are just being decided and again like even at the end of the second world war you have the famous little napkin right where where Churchill and and and Stalin basically uh divide divide Europe and that just happened that just happened. Um but at the same time you of course have then the forces of the way that the second world war developed that would allow that moment to to then in the end happen and give them the the well uh you know the the the the the structural possibilities to to do that. Um, so how do you think that for this regime type in the United States, we should conceive of how where power actually lies? Because in the end, the Kennedy assassination is just proof that the the US regime is able to get rid of um of elements that are dangerous to the way it works. And we’ve we’ve seen glimpses of that again with Donald Trump during his during his presidential run. I mean, he he got he nearly had his his head shot off and then two years down the road, it seems to me that the system managed to get to him in another way to just make him conform with the uh with the expectations of the regime because by now he’s he’s basically did 180 on the entire peace agenda. And he was the man who said this administration will not only be remembered for the wars we ended but also the wars we never got in in his commencement speech, which is a commendable thing to say. And then of course he’s he’s the architect of the of the now Iran war and the Ukraine war also still still very much ongoing and transforming and maybe maybe getting bigger but I’ll let you talk again. [snorts] Yeah. I I mean Trump is a key case because he ran I mean it shows that these ideas were popular in a democratic sense. The idea of not having forever wars, you know, not going to war with Iran. He keeps wanting the Nobel Peace Prize. So it’s in a way he’s affirming the idea that peace is better than war which you know I guess needs to be affirmed in some way but you know there’s there seems to be this Epstein episode and you know they were they spent a lot of time together. People have seen that insane birthday card. Mhm. Epstein was known to be a person who looked to compromise powerful actors and his mansion and uh you know other properties were wired for sound and video. There’s all these trafficking of young girls. It’s not very difficult to figure out what the game was there. And when you know about episodes like the Dennis Hastard case that should make you even more aware of it. And even with Watergate there’s a lot of sexual blackmail in the background of the Watergate, you know. offices that were burglarized that made that very sensitive. So, there’s a good history of sexual blackmail going on in the in the US. And the Epstein thing just seems obvious. I mean, if you know what Epstein was up to and you know who Trump is and you’ve seen some of the exchanges between them, what are the chances that he didn’t do anything that would have compromised himself in this way and all the time that he spent with Epstein and on the jet and at the island and etc, etc. It’s pretty it’s pretty clear. And yet it’s it’s too much in some ways for people to grasp apparently if it if it conflicts with their priors. And so like you see um Finkelstein who I generally have I have respect for him as a very diligent you know uh academic and uh very smart researcher and so on but he just scoffed at the idea that Epstein is blackmailing Trump and the Epstein network and and so on. this this policy is not positive for the US. It seems to be destroying US hijgemony. And so to really understand how these forces interact with these bigger projects, I I you know I wrote a whole dissertation on the way the US regime after the World War II established a lawless national security state that was partnered with organized crime in order and rule. It was essentially able to operate without any legal constraints doing everything with covert operations. It was basically covertly fascistic. It was capitalism uberis and imperialism uberallist, but it pretended not to be. And it used a lot of covert operations to hide it. And it was a pretty sinister, you know, enterprise with many crimes committed, you know, overall. I mean, one to three million people in Indonesia, you all the other people we killed in Southeast Asia, Congo, millions and millions have died in the decades after US interventions there, Latin America. I mean, you you can’t even begin to summarize the crime. These are just documented facts. These are documented conspiracies that were were perpetrated by the United States in cooperation. I mean not incorporation or orchestrated by several agencies first among them of course the CIA that just did that and we know that the the whole Indonesia the the millions of people who died in Indonesia just because the United States wanted to purge the leftists there. uh and that’s just documented and but then at the same time it’s we are also supposed to believe that that the the deep state that that does stuff documented stuff like this on the outside would never ever touch the inside because there’s the constitution. Right. I mean that’s that’s the thing we must accept otherwise we’re not part of polite society anymore. Right. Right. I mean, the things that Richard Nixon does, you know, that’s the that’s the fascinating case is that he is, oh no, he said the when the president does it, it’s not illegal. Well, that’s so terrible. But that’s really been the policy and the things he did were things that the national security state had been doing. I mean, the co-intel pro stuff, uh, all these things that came out. Nixon was not, there was nothing unique except for Nixon’s perhaps personal the personal White House role in it. But it’s even scarier if it’s faceless unelected bureaucrats doing it in my in my opinion. Although Nixon was a criminal, too. So, I’m not trying to make a hero out of him. Nixon did a fascinating thing. He wiretapped himself. Do you think I mean, if we if we think of all the ways in which power actually works? I mean, it makes much more sense that he would actually want to keep a clean record of what happened in his goddamn Oval Office for the for for f for the histories of the future. knowing knowing that these that the other parts of the state would try to distort anything. Do you do you read his self-wiretapping in in that in in in in that way too? I believe he did so in order to keep track I think he said this in his memoirs or elsewhere that he did this in order to keep track and it was really building on the Kennedy system that he had put up and I think Kenn JFK did it I believe after maybe the Bay of Pigs because he wanted to have these conversations recorded so people couldn’t distort what they had said earlier something to that effect so he had created this system and but then I think Nixon maybe even had a more elaborate one but you know the fact that the I mean the regime removed Nixon in the same way he believed that himself. He said he would get he would have a few drinks with his biographer Frank Ganon and Ganon would ask him who he thought was really behind Watergate and he would say the same people that killed JFK. And I think that he was basically correct about that. It was a it well look at Woodward and Bernstein. Who did uh who did JFK say his two enemies were? Hardline cold warriors and Zionists. Well, Woodward and Bernstein Woodward was connected to military intelligence. He went basically from military intelligence, you know, briefing very powerful figures in the Pentagon uh to to uh being this reporter and then Carl Bernstein was like Beny Brrith, you know, Zionist kid like they just teamed up and took down. So, you know, I think it’s in in some ways kind of as simple as that. Only Nixon gets caricatured. You know, we talk about how Nixon was going on and on about his enemies and he was an anti-semite because he was always complaining about the Jews, but like he had, you know, organized Zionism as some of his enemies like uh Hank Greenbomb or Greenspun out in Las Vegas. uh all of these strange actors that were in uh and Mormons like Jack Anderson and uh Edward uh not Edward Bennett Williams although he was on his enemy’s list as well uh Robert Bennett the guy uh the guy who owned the Mullen company that was that employed Howard Hunt like very strange actors so you know this is a case where the this he doesn’t even totally understand the forces that he’s dealing with but he he he believes the CIA is involved in it, you know. So, he hire he fires Richard Helms and he replaces him with Schlesinger and Slesinger digs up the Family Jewels report to try to get dirt on the CIA and there’s it’s it just plays out as like we’re going to spill your crimes to the public and then the CIA spills more crime or the the burglars and other forces spill more of Nixon’s crimes out there and it was a way to get rid of Nixon without without killing him. Uh but but the the the issue is the continuity of the crime, right? the criminality of the regime and Nixon dabbled in it for his own devices, but it was really because he pursued policies that upset powerful actors like Dayant and and maybe dialing back Israel’s role and also he went after Meer Lansky and the you know his war on drugs and he and Lansky was indicted. Lansky flees to Israel and he doesn’t come back until after the Watergate burglars are already in jail and then he never gets uh never gets convicted of anything. So Nick, he upset this relationship that I and I wrote about how the mob uh was involved with from Operation Underworld in World War II. They basically were integrated into into the the covert operations of the US, the Lansky Syndicate, the the National Crime Syndicate. And so this not only gave it was an element of criminality that made the US very susceptible to blackmail if the people key figures wanted to use it for that reason which is I think part of what happens with Jack Ruby. He kind of guarantees the cover up because he’s connected to the national crime syndicate. Um, and it is it gives Israel in particular, you can argue the n I I would the national crime syndicate headed by Lansky was essentially a functional asset of Zionism because they had corrupted the entire country to be able to operate and sell drugs wherever and and do it with impunity and launder the money and put the proceeds where they wanted to. And this had compromised the US in a way. And I think that’s that plays a factor in the Jack Ruby Jack Ruby and the cover up the Warren Commission cover up of his mob ties and everything else. And even with Watergate, you can’t really invest those investigate those burglars because they tie into the same mindblowing criminality. And so this this is this exists before the ‘9s and the the the neocon takeover, but it it shows you how the the system works. So this global dominance project always relied on criminality to pursue the a US policy of hegemony over global capitalism. But it changes to intertwine super greater Israel Zionism with the global dominance project and the in the in the 90s and that’s the that’s what’s happened up to the present day. So yes, they do want to control the oil and ma manage the petro dollar, but why and and rule capitalism, rule the world basically. But why did they do it in a way that puts Israel so much at the center of it and really to the point that it’s actually been unrealistic and it’s destroying the whole project? That’s the question I would like to answer. And they they really cannot, I don’t believe. No, but this is again like where some other scholars then try to zoom out. And the biggest zoom out that you can get is probably by people like uh Husa Nunan and uh and Manuel Ramos who actually put the entire Zionist project into the long array of the crusades and just say like look we have basically a nearly 1,000year history of trying to of the West trying to re of to occupy and rule over the holy lands and Zionism is really just the latest manifestation of that and it’s it’s it’s straight line of ideology that goes back also not just two but straight through also the ninth templars and you know this is where like some of these histories then actually also start interlinking again when you see the the the two of the current u secretary of war right with the night empress and so on and this is not to say that he’s part of that conspiracy it’s just to say that the ideological basis the fundament does is rooted in some form of imagined history right um of of what you’re doing and that ideology does play a role because it helps coordinate actors that otherwise wouldn’t be the from the from the secretary of of of war to the somewhere the the Las Vegas mobster right as long as they share the same overarching type of ideology even if they connected to different things they will work toward the same end goal so that’s where then the structuralists again go and say like look it’s it’s certain aspects of this of this way um um the the the system develops that actually then determines the the actions of the actors and I think we cannot we cannot discard that while on the other hand also we cannot we cannot get rid of the of the individuals that then take the the decisions to put bullets in people’s heads. Yeah. I mean the I in a generic sense we can say Israel represents you know uh western imperialism and its attempt to take over the whole world uh and all the places that are worth controlling strategically. But in the US case regarding Zionism there were powerful opponents of it at the very beginning like people like James Forestall who was the secretary of defense and George Marshall who was the secretary of state. But the Democratic Party was at this point the more corrupt one because it was more tied to like labor unions and the mob basically especially in the south and the Republicans were more the party of Standard Oil and you know corporate America. So this is why in 1956 when they staged the Suez crisis uh Eisenhower leaves them hanging basically and says no you’re not going to do this and and the reasoning was it would have destroyed the US image in the in the developing world and uh this gets reversed in 1967 because LBJ is similar to uh Harry Truman in that he’s tied he’s even more tied to Zionism. He’s kind of the original Donald Trump. He grew up in a weird Texan cult that’s like less Christian almost weird like a Zionist you know franchise or something and uh he had all these Zionists around him that that helped to finance him and you know help his career and so on. So he does a 180 in 1967 and uh he even there’s a story that breaks right on the eve of the six day war about the mafia plots to kill Castro at the CIA and this um LBJ has the CIA write a an inspector general report confessing to their you know criminal behavior here and how they went against what the what President Kennedy wanted right because President Kennedy didn’t want them to use the mob to assassinate Castro and he And LBJ forces the CIA to admit this. And he really it it’s a way of getting this like the same way that Nixon tried to get the family jewels in order to control the CIA. Right? In this case, what I believe happens is that this story is leaked at a particular time in order to give these actors more control over the CIA because it was more conventionally, even though you have James Angle and the people tied to the crime syndicate, the CIA as an institution was closer aligned to like Rockefeller types and they would go and they would retire after they left the CIA. They could go work for a Ramco, make a lot of money. They just had a different idea. This is like the same group, the same forces behind Eisenhower not backing the the Suez crisis, you know, villains of Israel and Britain and and uh France, right? It’s these sort of same forces. And so, you know, I I how does this happen? What h what’s different? What’s really changed fundamentally in the US national interest between Eisenhower and LBJ, you know, and it’s nothing really had. JFK had a totally JFK was even more anti-, you know, anti-Zionist even though he was he wouldn’t he wouldn’t have said, “I’m against Zionism.” But he tried to stop their nuclear program. He tried to force the American Zionist Council to register as a foreign agent and he wanted to solve the refugee crisis and he was friendly with Nasser. These were all things that that LBJ completely reverses. So, you know what? What happens there? If it’s if the policy if it doesn’t matter who’s president, then why the 180 from LBJ? Why the 180 in the ‘9s when you go from no greater Israel to greater Israel uber ales in a very short period of time? Something happens. And I don’t think you can explain it without reference to deep politics, to things like the Kennedy assassination, things like Iran Contra, uh, and why that even became a scandal. Because I Ron Contra really only ends just days before the 1992 election, an indictment of, uh, Casper Weinberger, I believe. And it it emerges for the first time that HW Bush knew more and was more involved than anyone had previously thought. And this really hurt him in the election. Some people said it’s why he lost. But you know, how does something like that happen days before the election? What powerful interest in the US would not have would have wanted that to happen to HW Bush? Mhm. Like what what issue was there a difference between the two of them that you could see something like this something a deep political act of power where a US official comes out and indictes a like indirectly indictes uh a sitting president you know and I think this is why and there’s there’s more that happens under HW Bush but there’s a whole lot of scandals and even assassinations like Robert Maxwell dies in that time in like 91 1 two senators die like within a couple days of each other in plane crashes in 1991. It’s uh very strange things are happening. So these are things that these shifts in policy. It’s not just oh going back from the crusades the west has just been single-minded like no there have been 180s and much disagreement over this issue. Uh and I think you have to understand the deep politics of the US really to under to understand it. and in particular my f my my friend and mentor Peter Dell Scott. I mean he worked on these issues in different ways and he didn’t really necessarily realize it at the time but they it made more sense to him later. He in the 70s was being paid by a super Zionist family to work with people who were trying to reopen the Kennedy assassination case. So why would they be doing this? I I think it’s because they were a part of it and they wanted to blackmail the US over these issues. Uh likewise, Peter worked for John Kerry to investigate Iran Contra cocaine connections and the person he was working under was a guy named Jack Blum who was listed in a book about lobbyists as the guy to see if you wanted to to get to un to you know the Israel relations basically USI Israel lobby like this was the guy. So why is he investigating this uh the Iran Contra cocaine connections? Why is he trying to like damage the CIA? And what I think happens more or less is that after the 90s and after they get rid of HW Bush, they eventually reconstruct the old role of of the Lansky Syndicate only with like people like Epstein and people like the Sands Casino, you know, which was still powerful, you know, in between in between Watergate and uh and I Ron Contra and all that, but these I think are really key issues and they’re they’re so underststudied as to be not even things people un even think about. True. True. And I I do want to ask you about your interpretation of what Messi is doing at the moment. But before we do that, I mean, one of the reasons why this is underststudied in my view. Um, if especially if you’re correct, if that’s actually how the regime works, is of course that what you are doing is highly dangerous. I mean, you’re basically you’re you’re pinning a little little bullseye on your on on your forehead because if you’re correct and you get too far, you get you get too too deep. I mean something has to be done about that and we know these things if there were if they can get rid of US presidents I mean what can they do to little researchers on the ground right and we’ve seen how how viscerally the system reacts when too much is exposed we saw it I mean Mr. Epstein conveniently disappeared and he was a very powerful figure. I mean conveniently died right under in custody in prison when suddenly the the cameras didn’t work all of a sudden. Too bad. Um but he was a powerful man within that system and uh well he he got taken out. Uh we’ve we’ve seen how the system treated Julian Assange who got closer and unearthed uh part of the important uh uh um files that show how the system is working. And then the entire machine including the official the official part cracked down on him right kill him. They tried to kill him. They you know who they used to kill him? Who? The sand the Aden’s Sans Casino which was a Lansky joint. That’s who they hired to do it. So, I mean, if you’re correct, then you’re setting yourself up for for for trouble. If you’re not correct and you continue doing this, then you’re not a threat because you’re basically starting distracting in the wrong way, right? So, it’s it’s it’s a very it’s a very difficult position to be in. Well, let me say say this for people who would think like well I don’t even want to believe that Z or I don’t believe that Zionism as a independent or you know powerful force in and of itself can influence the grand strategy of the US empire right that these oligarchs would have that power it’s really just the US it’s capitalism and so on well in a in a sense that’s fine if if everybody just understood that like okay this imperial lawless imperial capitalist system must be changed and it must be made into a lawful you know democratic u you know place where everybody can be prosperous basically more socialist you know uh enterprise and that Zionism should be dismantled because it’s illegitimate from the start then it really doesn’t matter whether you how you think we got to this point right so I I think in a sense I if you don’t really want to understand how the sausage got made or whatever or you just don’t find this this sort of line of argument and persuasive like it’s fine as long as you people understand that basic the US regime and Zionism neither one of them are defensible in any way shape or form in 2026 and so that’s the starting that should be the starting point for any person with any amount of morality or intellectual wherewithal yeah and the most important thing to know is that Zionism is not Judaism right I mean that’s what Jakin keeps pointing out and we have currently according to the estimates also of Jakovkin roughly roughly 50 million people in the United States who Christian Zionists who subscribe from the Christian side. I mean it’s it’s much larger than Jewish Zionism, Christian Zionism and and as such as an ideology that then with all of its weird quirks and so on to to suppose that this has structural effect and and also then um spawns people who work toward those end goals is not is not a far stretch at all. I mean that’s I mean we can even show it for the past. Yakovkin did a wonderful job of showing of of going um of showing how Zionism in the early days worked all the way basically until until the Second World War and how they even were in bed some of them with the Nazis because again like getting all out of Europe is a common was a common interest. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s just a proven fact. Yes. Yes. I mean that that’s that’s key. I mean the American Zionists in terms of the like people who aren’t really oligarchs. I think that they seem to be the project the product of a lot of social engineering. I mean a lot of money went into the Jerry Fwell the moral majority you know uh re the like massive increase in evangelical Christianity tied to things like the Scoffield Bible and other you know crackpot aspects of US US culture. But I think in a way they’re sort of socially engineered, but they’re as far as like their numbers, but they’re not really relevant. I mean, the more relevant people are like Bill Aman, the Crown family. I mean, the biggest military-industrial complex firm or or at least one of them, if not the biggest one, is General Dynamics, and they have been controlled by the Crown family, which is really the Kinsky family. And their fortune came from uh ties to the Chicago mob and the Lansky Syndicate and so on. They’re huge Zionists. So if you look at like, well, what’s the product of, you know, military industrial complex firms lobbying and then what’s the product of the Zionism here? How would you even assess that? I mean, that’s a family that was tied to the murder of the wire, the person that ran the National Racing Wire, and then it got taken over by more syndicate friendly people. And the Crown family was was involved in in this. Uh they endorsed Barack Obama uh back in 2008 which I think it said like he’s a guy that we can trust. He’s not John McCain but he’s he gets the the kosher seal, you know, no pun intended. Uh here and they also were involved in in financing the witch path to Persia report which came out in 2009. And there were two other the other entity behind that was the Sabbin family who are also Zionist billionaires. And I I don’t understand this, but Burlic always makes the argument that like because Brookings, a think tank in the US, issued this report, it shows that it’s that it’s the it’s the Americans who are behind the sort of greater Israel pac break thing. And I’m just like, this is how would you make that argument? These are super Zionist oligarchs. The Crown family is notoriously mobbed up and they pay for this report. And you’re saying that somehow this report shows that it’s it’s the it’s not Zionists who are in charge. Yeah. I don’t understand it. I I believe at this point um either argument like uh the argument, oh, it’s Israel that controls us US US politics um or US politics that controls Israel is missing the point. They are the great testament. They are they are one body. They are like different organs of the same body. Yes. How did they get the upper hand in the oligarchy is the is the question because it’s an oligarchic regime and how did this particular faction win and and and and tie itself to a project because now if you break off the Greater Israel project, you’re breaking off the Global Dominance Project. Yep. And and I think that’s by design. I think that they they did this on purpose because they’re obsessed with this. Like the you they’re insane about Zionism. I mean, and so they did everything possible. Everything in their mind was justified to to get to this end. And I and I don’t I don’t think that they’re going to make it across the finish line. It’s it’s it’s very scary. It’s an in this sense, you know, Zionism is an end and a tool at the same time in order to in order to interpret what what is happening. But yes, uh I think it’s it’s it’s it’s hitting a wall. But that’s where then people come in and say like look this is the this is just how empire how the empire cannot further sustain itself because it’s it’s reaching its natural limit. Um and but people knew that I mean why like HW Bush he’s he’s an imperialist par excalance and Reagan I mean they actually but Reagan calls on was it Bean at the time and says you you can’t keep bombing these people in Lebanon. It’s like a holocaust. I don’t want to look at all these people. And said something like, “Well, I know a lot about Holocaust.” And Reagan just said, “I’m not I don’t want to hear this, you know.” Uh, so these were powerful imperialists. They were the most corporate, conservative, pro-American, pro- capitalist people. And yet they were overcome by other constituencies in the US power structure. So how and why? That’s that’s important to to answer. No, no, I I agree. This is important to answer. This is absolutely a discussions that must be had. Um it’s just very difficult to integrate them all because they rely on a lot of different on a lot of different uh uh factors and knowledge about it. Um but you’re absolutely right. They should we this should be discussed and and yeah about can I talk about Vanderpill for for a moment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because I’m I’m getting excited here because I wanted to mention him and I I actually really appreciate his work and the if I understand it correctly because he’s got a book I think coming out on 911 in in Israel or something, right? Yeah. And I I think that the area where I would disagree with him about he’s very sophisticated and and I think on point in his analysis as I understand it which he argues that Israel has had this role as the sort of clo and dagger part of the deep state that they outsourced a whole lot of things to to make this system run. And I I do agree with that. I think that that’s key. However, what I think he doesn’t what I think he misses is the deep political games and conflicts whereby they’ve leveraged their role as the custodian and keeper of all of these dark practices and arts, you know, like the control of the drug syndicate up until at least Watergate and then the assassination apparatus and so on that they they acquired so much blackmail over the US that that enabled them to get the strategy that they wanted for the empire. So the empire was always vicious and lawless and imperialist neocolonialist and they use the Israelis in certain ways but it’s a fouian sort of thing because the more you rely on Zionist networks to be the the hidden you know knife in the dark for for capitalism and to do the things that that need to be done but that you can’t talk about or admit openly the more blackmail they have on you and I I think that that’s a part of what happened in the Epstein thing is like the perfect case of this because he had a pass from the intelligence community and law enforcement to operate and yet he was also undermining all of our institutions and really our national security by any rational conception of it by getting the worst kind of blackmail dirt on our leaders. So, you know, I think that that’s where Vanderpee is is wrong. But I also, you know, I I I definitely don’t want to get to the point of like saying the problem is Jewish people or if it weren’t for if it weren’t for the Zionists, this would be a great system. It’s not. It’s that’s I think that that’s why the right-wingers love to fixate on this because it gives them a boogeyman, but they miss the criminality of the system as well. It’s not just the criminality of Zionists. They were able to do this because of the criminality of the system. And this is where Panderpiel actually studies or his his main his core subject is you know elite formation. So how these groups and these networks first form in the first place and then how they change over time because they they also they they run on they run with opportunities right you work with what you’ve got and sometimes something happens that that is very uh unfortunate for certain parts of it. I mean the the exposure of the ex of Epstein and what was going on is very unfortunate and this definitely led to the demise to a certain part of the group right Epstein first and foremost but the entire Maxwell kind of operation as well and um so you you then you then have a reconfiguration of the system I think he goes after that and that also makes a lot of sense in order to connect the structural to the uh uh to the individual. I do not know quite what to make of the exposure of Epstein. To my mind, it echoes with previous patterns in the past in that, as people like Ari Minaj have noted, these leaks have come, some of the more spectacular ones and timely ones have come from sources like Murdoch Press who are known to be sympathetic to Zionism and and they seem to be brought to bear when it comes to decisions especially around attacking Iran. And so for me, I mean, what he suggests is that these stories are being rolled out in a way to manipulate and control Trump. That’s what Ari bin Minaj says. And he was MSAD. He did know Epstein and worked with him and he worked with Ahud Barack and so on. So he’s not someone you can really write off. But to my mind, this this reminds me of the Jack Ruby case or Jack Ruby being in jail and him being somebody who guaranteed that the assassination couldn’t be investigated because if he did, it would tie into all these networks of criminality in the national security state and also just in law enforcement and basically the overlooking of massive amounts of of drug money coming into the system, you know, and and enriching CIA people and other elite elites in the US and it would just have been a catastrophe. Similarly, and even so even though Zionists and other actors were involved in all of this and were involved in the assassination, their their criminality was so spectacular that it actually helped them to get away with these things. Similarly with Watergate and those burglars in jail, you can’t investigate those things. And so and with Iran Contra, you know, the Israelis were involved in all of those operations, the arm sales to Iran, the Contras, you know, the Israelis were close to Samosa, you know, key Zionists were like Irving Davidson and other people. And and yet they it looks like I mean Peter believes some aspects of this and he he was very important in terms of researchers back then, Peter Dell Scott, that they were involved in exposing it and uh using it to damage Reagan and Bush. I believe right at the time that Reagan and Bush were moving towards understanding that there should be a Palestinian state. So is the Epstein case a sort of similar thing where the criminality is so huge that like it gives the criminals more leeway because the whole society or the whole regime is so corrupt that you can’t really ever they won’t allow it to be exposed and the people have a ton of power because they’ve been keeping they’ve been maintaining these networks that that are so sensitive. La last point and then we have to wrap it up. But what Matthew is doing right now, he was just again also thrown out of the system. He lost the the primary. He will least lose his seat in uh in Congress, right? Uh at the same time, he’s the he’s the force behind like we will uh uh publish the Epstein files and then he he doesn’t. [laughter] So what do you make of Bessie? I really have no idea. His politics are so strange and to some extent the Epstein controversy seems to be helping the Epstein, you know, the Epstein set get their some of their objectives like getting Trump to go along with this Iran war, it seems. And so I really don’t know. He seems sincere. He seems like a sincere super right-wing American nationalist guy, you know, who is really against Israel on the surface. So that’s kind of how I take it. and he was destroyed by a massive amount of money that went into his campaign, which is very weird for one congressional race. I think it makes them look bad in a bigger sense, the Zionist, because it just shows that American democracy is just you can just throw enough money at it and that that you whoever has the most money wins. And if you’re going to sum up the problems of our whole society, you could do worse than just saying, “Well, yeah, that’s it. All the whoever has the most money wins over and over and over and over again and just gets worse and worse.” That seems to be a pretty good description of it. And Massie is his defeat seems to to prove that rule again. Yeah, I still wonder what happened that made Marjgery Taylor Green give up her seat, but we’ll um that’s maybe a discussion for another day. Um Aaron, I don’t know. Uh Aaron, like thank you so much for for that for that very deep uh talk. Uh very much appreciated that we can also kind of like discuss how we discuss things. People who want to find your book, they should Google American Exception Empire and the Deep State. Where else should they go to find your work? The American Exception podcast on Patreon is the way that I’m able to support myself and we have about 300 or so episodes now on a lot of different subjects. We do pretty deep dives into some of these episodes. So, um that I I would encourage people to check that out if they’re into podcasts at all and uh into this material which is really underdised among uh leftist academics, let’s say. So, uh, I, you know, I really appreciate you giving me the time to talk about these things cuz, uh, I’ve been, I ponder them all the time and it’s good to be able to reach your audience. And the good thing is we actually do like anyone listening to this also ponders about it and it helps pondering together because at some point maybe we will get somewhere. Uh, so everybody the American exception podcast go there, listen to it and also subscribe to it. Um, so support Aaron Good and independent uh, scholarship and journalism. Aring good. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you.