Dr. Aaron Good: “The US has always been an oligarchy”

Dr. Aaron Good. D.R.

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: We understand many things about the United States by reading your masterful work American Exception Empire and the Deep State. How would you define the deep state?

Dr. Aaron Good: Well, thank you for the kind words. The deep state is a main subject of my book and it’s a term that I will sometimes use not as specifically as you could if you’re talking about social science terms because I use it to apply to a couple of different phenomena. I’ll try to explain what I mean.

In the more conspiratorial spooky sense, the deep state can refer to essentially the clandestine apparatus of the US regime which is also the regime of the west or the regime of the US-led global capitalist system whatever…ever we would want to call it.

This is one way to think of the deep state–so not merely the bureaucracies of, say, the CIA or the FBI but more the powerful political authority at the top of these that is typically obscure. This is this whole realm that is deep, meaning that you don’t really understand what’s going on and you never really totally know. So, it’s really the clandestine apparatus of the American State. Now the other definition of it is more about a regime or a regime type. It’s the oligarchic regime of the West—the hidden oligarchic regime or the obscured oligarchic regime that is in power regardless of who wins elections and can impose overriding power to essentially dominate elected officials and subordinate the security state to its own agendas. So, it doesn’t matter who the president appoints to be the head of the CIA in some sense because there are extant networks and expectations and grand policy strategies that have been already established across administrations such that you can’t think of these forces as administrations or even really just the state. The definition of the state in political science is that organization which enjoys a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in a particular geographic area. And the regime is, in political science terms, all of those institutions which collectively determine who it is that has access to the power of the state, to state control.

So, the regime type of any country can be explained. The Chinese have a one-party communist or socialist regime. The US ostensibly has a sort of liberal democratic regime with a capitalist political economy. You could say Russia has some sort of nationalist regime with some democratic procedures to determine who office holders are etc. etc. But regime really is not just a term that means country that we don’t like or bad country. Every nation state has a regime and the deep regime of the United States is all those institutions which collectively allow for oligarchic rule in a nominal democracy. That’s why you call it the deep state. You could call it the deep regime if you wanted to. I didn’t use the term deep regime in my dissertation and the published version, but I could have. So that’s the deep state and I’ve spent a lot of time writing about it. It can either refer to—again let me say it in very simple terms—the clandestine arm of the US Empire, or it can refer to the overall regime which is all of those institutions which allow for top-down governance in a nominal democracy.

What can you tell us about your concept the tripartite state?

The tripartite state is a way to explain how the system in the US works, the system of governance. It consists of the democratic state which is the constitutionally delineated state so the congress and the presidency and the judiciary…these are all the main branches of the federal government. But then there are also state governments and local governments and their powers are explained in the constitution. This is what we learn about in civics classes and so on in the US. The national security state is all of those institutions that are supposed to handle the security of the US. They are not as open or democratic as the public/democratic state. They sometimes operate or often operate in secrecy and will sometimes break laws or do things that are not really constitutional historically. They are supposed to be doing these things to protect the democratic state so they’re more hierarchical and top-down, but supposedly this is at the service of the democratic state which writes the laws that determine their authority and the executive branch is supposed to see to the execution of the laws and rules that the state is supposed to operate by.

The deep state is the oligarchic part. It’s the part that’s not in the Constitution even though it exercises power over both the national security state and the democratic state. So it’s really the oligarchic state or the hidden oligarchic state or it’s the permanent regime. It’s the top-down part of our system, and it has the ability to override constitutional governance. It can’t really be located to any one particular organization but there are some key points in the national security state and the democratic state that are important. It’s important that these oligarchs have someone in the presidency who is not opposed to their dominance over society. Since we live in a capitalist society and all the politicians have to depend on wealthy people to fund their campaigns.

The oligarchy controls the democratic state through various means of campaign finance and other forms of patronage that they can give to leaders—not to mention their ownership of media etc. etc. etc. And they have power over the national security state by virtue of the fact that the first people to set up the national security state institutions, especially the CIA, were drawn from Wall Street circles. These agencies were created through acts of Congress but really to the specifications of very wealthy people, especially in the case of the CIA with these Wall Street lawyers–Sullivan and Cromwell lawyers, white shoe lawyers from places like Dillon Read, Sullivan Cromwell etc. So, this is a way that the deep state exercises power. It’s like a Venn diagram in how the deep state exercises power in this system. We can think of it as a Venn diagram because the deep state is on top of or overlaps with the democratic state and the national security state and there’s very little autonomy in either realm.

It doesn’t mean that no there’s no politics in this system because there are political battles that do get fought. It’s through this tripartite state structure that the deep state can ultimately intervene to exercise a veto over democracy, if need be, and it can use elements of the national security state to do that. This happened most famously with the JFK assassination, but we also see events like Watergate and Iran Contra and Russiagate and so on, which show how these deep political conflicts between powerful factions play out in the United States.

Could you explain what the security state is in the United States and what its close links are with organized crime?

There are all of these institutions tasked with national security and law enforcement. So the FBI, the CIA, NSA Homeland Security, and the military—as well as “continuity of government” emergency networks…FEMA which is now folded into Homeland Security. All of these organizations that are tasked with “national security.” Now the links to organized crime are fascinating and they date back to World War II… World War II is really the era that the US decides to go for global empire and at this time you had people in the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Office of Strategic Services (the US intelligence agency of World War II), they worked in collaboration with the leaders of the National Crime Syndicate, most notably Meyer Lansky. When they approached Meyer Lansky about helping them to control the docks and deal with other issues that they had, Lansky said, Well you’ll need to get my friend Lucky Luciano out of jail because he has a lot of sway over people on the docks, so you do that and then we’ll be in business. So, the US did that and they facilitated supposedly securing the docks in the United States and keeping them safe from sabotage, but they also help with the US invasion of Sicily. Eventually in 1945 Harry Truman gives the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Meyer Lansky, and as it turns out Meyer Lansky was a huge Zionist and along with his other partner a huge figure in the national crime syndicate—Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters—these were two of the guys who had the biggest role in making sure that the people in Palestine, the Zionists, got the weapons they needed to steal all that land and such.

There are these ties to organized crime which become institutionalized and taken advantage of by the CIA and so on; these also represent ties to Zionism. In a sense, this is part of the basis for how I would I argue that Zionist actors have been able to blackmail the United States because of their all of the dirty tricks that they have been involved in with the US clandestine intelligence services as well as the enormous amount of money generated by the national the drug traffic which is essentially monopolized under the Lansky-Teamster-mafia Syndicate and which gets laundered in places like Las Vegas. This is why Las Vegas was created, and in so doing it was made a very important part of the economy. The drug traffic is very lucrative and it also entails the wide-scale corrupting of law enforcement and politics. This relationship has served to corrupt US politics and society. It’s a big part of the why the US has this strange relationship with Israel which doesn’t really make sense in the way that it’s explained to us. Part of that is because it involves the criminality of the American state and the blackmail that comes along with such institutionalized criminality.

These connections between the national security state and organized crime are huge and it’s worth noting that Meyer Lansky—who was the head of the national crime syndicate up until about 1970 when he fled to Israel to escape prosecution—he essentially had protection, a “get out of jail free” card from the head of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover who he may have had blackmail on. This is one of those things that’s often stated and taken as a truism, and it may in fact be true that Lansky had blackmail material on Hoover, who was gay of course, famously. The FBN (Federal Bureau of Narcotics) also protected Lansky from prosecution. This is the key thing to understand in terms of what they’re really up to. The head of CIA counterintelligence, James Angleton, also intervened at least once to protect the Syndicate by preventing the Kennedy Justice Department from using the CIA to investigate Lansky’s connections to money laundering operations in Panama that were connected to the National Crime Syndicate. So, this apex fix that exists here is really a notable thing and is something that has to be understood if you’re going to understand the deep politics of the U.S. Empire.

The more we read your writings, the more we discover a frightening world far removed from the postcards. In your opinion, what are the real forces that control the United States of America?

I believe that the US has always been an oligarchy. It’s always been a set of business enterprises from the very beginning. The first people to land here from England were part of the Virginia Company, and they wanted to make money. They didn’t want land in order to be subsistence farmers. They wanted to find some sort of cash crop or something else that would be lucrative enough to sell to make a buck on the international market, and the way that they first did this was with tobacco. The other group that came over early on…you had the Pilgrims. They were trying to get to Virginia, but they landed around Boston. Soon you had the Massachusetts Bay Company. And you have this whole era of the “Protestant work ethic” and good capitalists who are Protestant working to be industrious and prosperous and so on and so forth. So, this myth of capitalism and the industriousness of these people, which is part of the mythology of American exceptionalism.  What’s important to keep in mind is that these forces that control the US are imperial capitalist forces. I say “forces” and that makes it seem impersonal. We’re really talking about oligarchs and oligarchy.

The US from the beginning was an oligarchy. Initially you had to own land to be able to vote, but there were some people who were wealthy in the north but they didn’t have wealth in land. So, then it became a sort of property/wealth qualification. Eventually suffrage gets expanded to even include women and other people who weren’t white. I mean, there’s some white women too, but you get what I’m saying: Suffrage expanded to the propertyless, women, and non-whites. What’s worth noting is that due to the expensive nature of campaigns and so on, even when they expand suffrage, it doesn’t risk upsetting the whole system. Money still dominates so much that you have oligarchic political actors in charge regardless because who else has the resources to attain office an such? Additionally, there were other institutions like the US Senate where Senators were not popularly elected for a long time. There’s also the judiciary which is typically not under democratic control. There’s the national banking system, and this issue was a cite of deep political conflict before the Federal Reserve was created, though it is still a highly political institution…so political that its politics are not honestly discussed in mainstream discourse.

One really true and pithy way of summing it up comes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt who wrote to Colonel House something to this effect—and this is close to an exact quote: As you and I both know, a financial element in the larger centers has ruled this country since the days of Andrew Jackson.

Oligarchs of wealth of corporate wealth—that’s who controls the US. And these are, of course, imperial minded forces, by and large, with maybe one or two exceptions among oligarchs. The steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie founded the Anti-Imperialist League. He was an oligarch didn’t want an imperialist US foreign policy, but he’s an outlier. It’s been imperialism that has won the day…basically 99.9% of the time.

The UN Charter was ratified by Congress and constitutes an international treaty which, according to the Constitution, makes it the supreme law of the land. The UN Charter stipulates that the United States cannot act aggressively, commit aggression against other countries, or even threaten aggression against another country. Yet they do so constantly, which categorically constitutes a violation of the United States Constitution. Why, in your view, is there no institution or legal mechanism capable of challenging the criminality of the United States? Is it because the state functions in an exceptionalist manner?

It is absolutely true that the UN Charter has been ratified by the US Congress, and as such it is the “supreme law of the land” according to the supremacy clause. The UN Charter outlaws aggression against other countries without UN Security Council approval, and it even outlaws the threat of aggression against other countries. This means that the US is constantly violating international law. Of course, nobody takes that too seriously in the US because we consider this to be not a real set of laws—international is something that we’re not subjected to because we are the sovereign USA. People very rarely mention this major Constitutional aspect. I notice that since I wrote my book, I do hear more people pointing this out, which is encouraging. It’s not that I was the first person to discover this, but it’s rare that you see it mentioned in social science literature or history literature.

One place that I did notice it was stated plainly was in a book co-written by Richard Falk on the way the media covered the Iraq War. The explanation was in reference to a group that opposed the Vietnam War and had hearings and deliberations about it back in the 60s and 70s. It is definitely worth noting and repeating that the Constitution outlaws all of these policies by virtue of the UN security Charter which outlaws aggression. The US has ratified the treaty, so it’s the “supreme law of the land” but the US still attacks anyone, bombs anyone at its whim. There’s no one to stop them because there’s really no teeth in the UN. It is not going to take action against the USA. The US was by far the most powerful country…the most powerful superpower even in the Cold War. It was far stronger than the Soviet Union, so there’s never been anyone to stop the US from doing what the US wanted to do, unfortunately.

Why is there no domestic US institution capable of challenging the criminality of the US? This is where you see the deep state in command. The oligarchs benefit from this system of international lawlessness and surveillance and whatever sort of dirty tricks that have been played on the domestic population to keep them in power. There simply isn’t any political formation with the money and power to move this system because it ultimately is animated by money. Because this is capitalism, there is no group that can offset the power of all the people and all the constituencies—the oligarchs and their subordinates—who benefit from having this lawless imperial capitalist system. Therefore, we are left to quietly make an argument: “Hey, that’s illegal! You can’t do that!”  This is the only thing that we can say. There’s no prevailing lawful authority because the public state has abdicated its authority.  They’ve defaulted on doing what they are required to do. There are excuses as to why they don’t have to follow the UN charter even though it’s the “supreme law of the land,” but it is all absurd sophistry.

The truth is that the US is an exceptionalist regime, meaning that it operates in a state of legal exception. They can, at will, make an exception to the rule of law which is something that in theory—even according to nazi political thinkers like Carl Scmitt most infamously—only happens in an emergency. But US regime simply declares its national security priorities to be open-ended emergencies—like when Obama declared a state of emergency over Venezuela. What Venezuela was doing was no threat to the United States in any sort of legally understood way. You just declare an emergency and then you can do whatever you want.

Similar things happened after 9-11. We don’t even really know what emergency provisions keep getting renewed year after year since the 9/11 spectacle. The Congress isn’t even allowed to know even though they’re supposed to review and vote on this. In the Cold War, era, it is pretty easy to argue now that the US broke the law constantly. I don’t think anyone has tried to argue seriously with the case that I make in the book on this regard. If it wasn’t obvious before, it’s very much obvious now with the Gaza Genocide and so on.

In your opinion, is there a similarity between the Nazi regime and that of the United States?

As I alluded to earlier, the idea of the exception to the rule of law in a state of emergency is pretty much the basis of Nazi jurisprudence or juridical theory. And in the U.S., we also operate in an exceptionalist manner, though we don’t have an explicitly stated Fuhrer principle. The institutions and parties that are allowed to act with exceptionalist overriding power are these national security bureaucracies that we can’t really observe, so we don’t really know what all they are doing. This is a little different than the Nazi regime—which isn’t to say that it was open and transparent, but you had this Fuhrer principle that had a stated objective of protecting the state no matter what. It was understood that whatever the Fuhrer decided, that was acceptable. In the US, we have this mythology about being lawful, so you have these strange cases where Nixon says to a reporter “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” At the time, because people had wanted to get rid of Nixon, this was treated as scandalous: You can’t say that! America is a lawful nation! But the more you look at the way presidents behave, lawfulness is not the norm. It pretty much is the norm that when the POTUS does it, it’s not deemed illegal—not to mention that if the national security state does it, it’s also not illegal. The president may be totally unaware of the illegal things that the national security state is doing. In fact, that’s often the case.

So, while they may be different in their institutional structures and legitimizing myths, the Nazi and US regimes do share exceptionalism. There’s ultimately no rule of law to restrain the sovereign in the US—the sovereign power of the US regime. That was also the case in Nazi Germany. What is different is that in the US case, there is not an explicitly formulated Nazi ideology or an openly acknowledged state of exception. I use the term exceptionism to describe the US regime’s institutionalized and unacknowledged abrogation of the rule of law. I believe that the lawlessness is significant. It persists because US elites believe that they are the leaders of the “free world” and so in the United States this entails making the state’s law-breaking “covert,” which has generally been the case in the US. Most of the blatant law-breaking is covert and then denied with cover stories to make the deniability plausible. Even when the criminality is exposed, there is no accountability and no reform to prevent similar or worse crimes in the future.

But the covert fascist regime that we can say the US had—that the clandestine deep state really represents…I argue that it became essentially and covertly nazified in the mid-90s when Zionist neoconservatism became orthodoxy or at least hegemonic at the apex of the US regime. The reason I say that this makes the US covertly nazified is that grand strategy was tailored to the preferences of neocon Zionist actors working at the behest of Zionist oligarchs in the US. This led to the adoption of the “Clean Break” report’s general strategy—laid out in this report commissioned by Netanyahu and written by a number of US ultra-Zionist neoconservatives…partisans of Israel and partisans of the Greater Israel project. It was very much opposed to the foreign policy of George H.W. Bush and even Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, if you can believe it. These conservative US imperialists actually wanted to force the Zionists to accept a Palestinian state. That was what George H.W. Bush attempted to do, but he failed. He ended up losing his reelection bid in 1992.

I surmise that since shortly thereafter, the US and Israel have pursued this “Clean Break” strategy to make a clean break with the peace process—to try to make Israel unassailable in the region, to create a Greater Israel” that is essentially hegemonic over the Middle East/West Asia with the full backing of the United States. This has been disastrous for the US. We can say that the US became covertly nazified because it’s been pursuing what is basically a nazi project of supporting “Greater Israel” Zionism which entails genocide for lebensraum—expansionist policies across West Asia for a tiny population of white people who claim Palestine as their ancestral homeland despite their fair complexion and Eastern European origins. It’s a very, very strange, bizarre twist of history that we’ve seen here.

How would you explain the influence of the Zionist lobby in the United States?

Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer do a very good job in The Israel Lobby explaining this. If you listen to John Mearsheimer now talk about it, he says that these lobbying activities are just the tip of the iceberg—that in fact, there’s a lot more power that they wield besides just the lobbying organizations. That’s obviously true. Consider the outright purchase Of TikTok and CBS and what this represents. Those aren’t lobbying organizations. We’re talking about billionaire Jewish Zionist oligarchs who buy up huge media platforms and then make them even more propagandistic on behalf of the Zionist project. If you’re familiar with how much US mass media was already supportive of Zionism prior to these purchases, it should be alarming to think that that was insufficient for these people, and that they needed to buy up even more of these media outlets.

Besides the power to buy up media, there is the ability to exercise power over the clandestine deep state and the way it interfaces with oligarchs of extreme wealth, national security state officials, and other political actors. This is an obscure but important angle to understand. I’ll talk more about the Epstein business later on, but in short Zionism has enormous power in the US and one aspect that I argue is key to understanding it—even though it’s largely opaque and cannot be understand perfectly—is the intertwining of clandestine operations in the US with Zionist entities such as the National Crime Syndicate as well as Israeli intelligence. There was a CIA program called KK Mountain which our collaborator Max Arvo has written an article on and we released a podcast episode about it. This was a secret conduit for funds to be used by the director of the CIA to carry out who-knows-what. It was kept secret, what the funds were used for. So, if ever they wanted something that they didn’t want any record of—things that are too sensitive to handle themselves—they could easily just farm it out to Israel and Mossad, etc. This almost certainly became another way for the Zionists to have blackmail material on the US because it established another kind of Faustian bargain… Oh, sure, we can handle this problem you have; we’ll take care of it for you. These must have been very sinister things if they’re too sensitive for even the CIA to want to handle, and so this is another way that they have pressure over the US.

This seems to have been brought to bear when Jack Ruby was sitting in jail in Dallas. That represented a real problem for the US government at the time because of all the scandalous activity that he was connected to including the Lansky Syndicate—those ties between the Jewish mob figures and Teamsters in Chicago, Vegas, L.A. Ruby was essentially (or literally) the Syndicate lieutenant in Dallas. In 1963, Ruby was tasked with killing Oswald. If the US government had investigated and exposed Ruby’s world, it would reveal so many mind-blowing scandals that it would have been a disaster for the US in the Cold War. This blackmail angle is huge, and I think we’ve seen something similar with Epstein, but I’ll probably come back to that.

In your view, where does the strength of the Zionist networks in the US come from?

I’ve spoken to that a little already… the ability to buy up media outlets is significant. The ability to fund things in the US through these oligarchs who make lots of donations in many places. I mean, if you are looking at East Coast private schools, for example, even ones that are supposed to be pro-peace, etc., etc., none of them really did much to protest the Gaza genocide. I believe that the reason for that is that they pretty much all depend on money from wealthy Zionist oligarchs and other rich people. Not everybody who would give money to a private school would be a billionaire or an oligarch, but there are enough Zionist donors to worry the people who run institutions that depend on donors.

So, it’s really remarkable: organizations in the US, even if they have no real attachment to Zionism, would go out of their way to make sure that they didn’t upset Zionists during the last few years when people were so outraged over the genocide in Gaza. Some ways that this manifests is through donations to civil society, buying up media outlets, enormous donations to politicians—and if you don’t toe the line on Israel issues then they can give a lot of money to your opponents and you can get bad media coverage too from their media assets and so on. You may find that one way to get to a higher position in the US is to make yourself a blackmail slave to them. Apparently, this is what happened to Dennis Hastert. RFK Jr. seems to be in this mold although he wasn’t, at least as far as we know, any sort of pedophile like Dennis Hastert was. Dennis Hastert was the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House. An FBI official—apparently with confirmation from other FBI officials–has reported that he was known by the FBI to be a blackmail thrall with a predilection for young boys, and that foreign intelligence services—I believe, tied to Israel—essentially were using him or using this material to control the Speaker of the House. This probably explains why he got to be the Speaker of the House in the first place. That’s a scary thing to think about—that in this system to be a vile pedophile could actually allow you to attain one of the highest offices in the United States. The Speaker of the House is third in line for the presidency, so that’s a pretty important and powerful position.

Another troubling issue is that we don’t really understand how so many Zionists in the US became so wealthy. There have been many “reforms” of the US economy over the years. There’s Reagan’s “supply side economics” and the deregulation of finance which continued under Bill Clinton. I believe that the composition of American billionaires—the richest 100, 200 people or so—may likely have become increasingly Jewish in the recent decades. That may have some connection to massive amounts of Vegas mob money laundered and then distributed to people who are politically sympathetic to this project, making it a very networked and pretty nefarious element of capitalist oligarchy, which is already a pretty grim undertaking in the first place. We have many homeless people in the US, and we have billionaires. To people who are not steeped in Americanist thinking, it’s obscene to have billionaires in a society where you also have many homeless people and many desperate people who can’t get health care or who go bankrupt over medical bills, etc. etc.

This system has empowered a class of billionaire oligarchs, and no one can say precisely—it would take a massive forensic accounting initiative—to determine the degree to which illicit funds and money generated from criminal enterprises (especially the global drug trade) have been laundered and introduced into these networks over decades. It’s the money and the money system and the ability to compromise law enforcement and to dominate political parties and systems. This collectively is to be the problem. We can talk about how Zionism has warped US policy in really tragic and dangerous ways, but if you step back, the bigger issue is a system where money can and does buy anything—where the whole of society is organized around the accumulation of money, around capitalist exploitation and expropriation, and with imperialism always operating as well. This unfolds internationally, not just domestically. Ultimately, the strength of the Zionist networks, in a larger fundamental sense, can be said to derive from the fundamentally exploitative and habitually criminal aspects of the imperial capitalist American system.

I’ve long been very interested in the work of Peter Dale Scott with whom I once exchanged ideas. He has done remarkable work writing about the CIA drug trafficking and related topics. Peter Dale Scott often uses the term gray alliance to describe the highly significant institutionalized relationship between the US national security state and organized crime. In your opinion, why is his work of crucial importance for understanding the nature of the regime of the United States of America?

Peter is a singularly brilliant scholar in the West. As time goes on, people will have more and more respect for his work because of the way that he illuminated very important political issues that mainstream authors can’t explain. As an individual, he a Canadian; he’s very polite; he’s actually very moderate in his political views which is hard to believe when you look at what he exposes in his research and writing. He was at a private symposium of JFK researchers at the home of one notable researcher, there were a number of JFK luminaries there, and Peter referred to me as “my heir.” To me, that is a great honor and yet I know my own work… I mean that I haven’t been at it as long as he has been, but I do not imagine I could ever be as prolific as him. I think that Peter really is in a class by himself. I’ve tried to pick up his work and follow it to places that he did not go for different reasons. It’s a bit of a lonely enterprise because people are resistant to this kind of scholarship and analysis. Even the conspiracy enthusiasts on the internet are a strange social milieu in many ways.

In this context, Peter stands out as a brilliant iconoclast in the US. In the early 1970’s, Peter coined the term parapolitics to describe his approach and area of inquiry. The term refers to political practices that in which accountability is consciously diminished so that people don’t know what political actors are behind certain important political events. This applies to things like covert operations and such. Eventually, Peter became disenchanted with the term parapolitics because it was too narrow and because it came to be adopted and sort of bastardized by people who were not meticulous and sober researchers… conspiracist cranks in some way or another if we want to be blunt. He eventually moved on to what he calls deep politics which we can define as: all of those political issues and arrangements which are repressed or suppressed rather than acknowledged in mainstream political discourse. This is a much broader—and, well, deeper—realm of inquiry. This is where one can discern the intersection of parapolitical actors—like the mob and national security entities—with oligarchic actors/coalitions, i.e., the political activities of very powerful people who are often not bound by laws. They operate in a system in which the law exists, but there are also other sources of power that that operate within and outside of the formal political/legal regime.

Peter explored and elaborated on these issues. He didn’t invent the term deep state; the term came out of Turkey in the later part of the 1990s. But this concept derived from Peter’s conception of deep politics what he called the deep political system which was essentially an precursor formulation of what we think of as the deep state. He described a system in which there is political practices and legal rules exist in both constitutional ways but also in informal ways—through agreements and arrangements including different powerful actors and entities. So this idea of the deep political system includes things that just can’t be discussed like the US national security state’s involvement in the national crime syndicate and so on. This is a concept which evolved into the idea of a deep state to describe Turkey and Turkish networks that operated with clandestine actors and the national security state and politicians to function as a shadow or covert government—a deep state that can override democratic politics and stage coups and use false flag violence and so on…

That was where the term became first used internationally. Then the Swedish peace studies scholar Ola Tunander wrote about the deep state in the West. Peter read this thought, Oh, this is great, and then he expanded on the deep state idea in The Road to 9/11 which was published, I believe, in 2007. In Peter’s brilliant follow-up, American War Machine, he writes more about these institutions and actors, and he also writes about them in the book The American Deep State. In sum, Peter is a scholar who offers indispensable research and analysis. His book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK is especially important to me these days, but his other books are as well. He’s produced a vast amount of amazing material.

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

I wrote about the Epstein network in my dissertation. I don’t believe at that point I connected it directly to Israel, but even then it was suspected that he was an Israeli asset…an element of Zionist influence in the US. But Epstein also apparently had protection from US intelligence agencies. Today, I understand this even better. Epstein is something that has to be placed in the context of sexual blackmail as an institution in the US. Honey traps and other types of sexual blackmail operations for powerful people are part of spycraft going back thousands of years in human history, to Chinese antiquity and so on. This is timeless; men especially are pitifully and predictably led astray by attractive women, especially, or other parties which can be even more scandalous in our society. Epstein’s role was to act as an agent for oligarchs and oligarchic interests—I mean, specifically, the Rothschilds, Les Wexner, etc. They represent two huge Zionist oligarchs that Epstein was very close to. He compromised a whole lot of wealthy people, but he also connected people who were involved in different sorts of creepy oligarchic enterprises.

This included things related to mass surveillance and biosecurity regimes and such. As I understand it, he was involved with some of these networks that handle different aspects of the COVID response, but also, you know, AI and other creepy ways to bring technology to bear over populations and political regimes and such. Epstein was close to Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, all of these oligarchs. He acted as a way to connect them and get them involved and invested in disturbingly fascistic projects. Most clearly, he acted as an agent of Israel. Israel wired his Manhattan property with all sorts of surveillance equipment and such. He got all this money from Lex Wexner, who was part of the MEGA group, this weird club of Zionist oligarchs who wanted to influence US foreign policy.

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

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

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

In Watergate, all the burglars were connected to a whole lot of spectacular intrigues including the Kennedy assassination, which Richard Nixon recognized.  Nixon sent his own chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, to talk to the head of the CIA when Watergate first became an issue. He said, Tell the head of the CIA that this will open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing, which apparently was a reference to the Kennedy assassination. Nixon believed that he could use the Plumbers ties to state crimes to help him. What apparently happened was that the explosiveness of all these figures and the revelations that they could unleash helped to seal Nixon’s fate, It made it so that Nixon couldn’t really resist because it would have upset too many apple carts. Likewise, I think Iran-contra was similarly something that was pushed by Zionist actors when the Reagan administration and later H.W. Bush made moves to force Israel to recognize a Palestinian state. We then got the Iran-Contra scandal.

There were strange things like the BBC putting out documentaries on Operation Gladio’s crimes in Europe during the Cold War. We had Bill Moyers on PBS talking about “the secret government,” the US partnership with organized crime, and CIA overthrows of different governments. Moyers even mentioned the Kennedy assassination in this context. There was also Oliver Stone’s JFK which is a very illuminating movie that points to a lot of documented corruption in the JFK case. The film is actually pretty close to the most important facts of the case. And yet, that movie was executive produced by a notorious Zionist agent, Arnon Milchan. He was one of the people responsible for Israel acquiring the nuclear bomb many years prior.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They have sought to intertwine the global dominance project the Greater Israel project, using Zionism to subjugate West Asia/the Middle East so that the Empire dominates global dominance via its control of the world’s energy heartlands. It was an intertwining of ultra-Zionist policy with the US pursuit of hegemony. There were alternative options. Think of the case of George H.W. Bush. He was Mr. US Empire—WASP, Republican, Yale, CIA, oil, Wall Street, etc. etc.  And yet, he had a different view of the Middle East. He wanted a Palestinian State. He apparently figured that with Israel-Palestine settled, the US could make deals and buy off the regimes in the region, turning them into prosperous client states. That would be a system that most everybody would benefit from. Bush lost in 1992.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview conducted by Mohsen Abdelmoumen

Dr. Aaron Good is an American political scientist, historian, and author, known for his critical work on the « deep state, » American imperialism, and undemocratic power structures in the United States. He is the author of the book American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (2022) and hosts the podcast of the same name.

He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Temple University in Philadelphia, where his dissertation, titled « American Exception: Hegemony and the Tripartite State, » examined the intersections between the state, elite criminality, and American hegemony.

Having lived and worked in Taiwan and Shanghai, he has enriched his perspective on global geopolitical dynamics. He currently resides in the Philadelphia area, where he teaches history and social sciences. He hosts the American Exception podcast and is a frequent guest on alternative media platforms, notably Benjamin Norton’s Geopolitical Economy Report, where he discusses the central themes of his work. He is also active on YouTube.

His work has received high praise from major intellectual and artistic figures, such as filmmaker Oliver Stone: « A gifted student of history […] who sheds light on the pernicious impact of intelligence and security forces »; Peter Dale Scott (Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley): « A penetrating and highly original study […] an unparalleled synthesis of a new critical perspective on American hegemony »; and Peter Kuznick (American University): « An ‘untold’ social science that brilliantly illuminates the deep political forces of the American empire. »

Aaron Good and Oliver Stone have collaborated on several occasions, notably surrounding the release of Stone’s documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass. They have appeared together on various political analysis platforms, such as the special « Assassination Day » episode of the Chapo Trap House podcast and on Abby Martin’s Empire Files. As a political scientist and author, Good, alongside acclaimed filmmaker Stone, stands as a prominent intellectual and critical voice regarding the American « deep state » and imperialism. Their work frequently intersects and complements one another, particularly concerning the political assassinations of the 1960s and U.S. foreign policy.

Published in French in La Nouvelle République