How Russia slipstreamed a lie into the Epstein story

But without further ado, I do want to invite and welcome David Reaboi to the show. David, thank you so much for coming on. I am looking forward to this conversation. This is what I’ve been talking about and trying to convince people for the last year or so. Look, we are under attack when it comes to social media, when it comes to information and psychological operations by many different vectors. And I know you’ve been covering this, and I’m looking forward to hearing from you. But if you will, take a minute and just kind of introduce yourself to everybody out there.

Sure. Thank you for having me. So I have been kind of studying information warfare for the last several decades, really. It started when I was a kid. My family is originally from communist Romania, Hungarians from communist Romania, from Transylvania. And they fled communism. They came to the United States in the 1960s. I was a kid in the United States.

But the Cold War always fascinated me. And I ended up getting a degree in Cold War history from GW in college. And then sort of immediately after that, 9-11 happened. I was in New York for 9-11, and immediately I thought to myself, man, I need to find out what these guys who are attacking us actually believe, because I understood what the Marxists during the Cold War believed.

You can’t defeat an enemy without knowing him, as they say. So I then undertook several years of dealing with Muslim Brotherhood, dealing with Islamism and Al-Qaeda and Jamaat al-Islamiyah. The different groups, the different intellectual currents that end up becoming a threat to us and to our allies. So after spending, I guess, about two decades on that, I look around and I see the Russians are back. And they’re now using, exactly as you said, they’re now using the unprecedented ability to scale information operations that is enabled by social media, really to run wild in a way that is kind of historically unprecedented.

Because of the communications, because of the technology of social media, we have never been in a situation where, for such a low cost, a foreign nation can influence how Americans see the world, how we see our leaders, how we see our allies, how we understand ourselves.

And it’s a tremendous vulnerability that I don’t think—that I know—we are not taking seriously at the government level. We’re also not taking it seriously at the level of platforms. Between TikTok and X—the other ones, Meta and some of the other ones, they’re bad too, but they’re far less bad than the free-for-all freak show that X and TikTok have turned into.

And the sad fact of the matter is, and we’ll get to discussing my book in a second, but the last chapter of my book is called Imposing Costs. And it’s about how the U.S. government really needs to get its ass in gear when it comes to this issue. And right now it doesn’t at all. We’ve got, I think, 16 different departments dealing with sort of issues surrounding information operations, information warfare, but not one department that is in charge of actually combating it.

As such, the U.S. government does an amazing job when it comes to hacking groups or plots to sabotage our infrastructure or things like that. Those guys, it can catch, but it’s not even looking for the guys that—most of them live in Moscow, and they wake up in the morning and they go to the office and they punch the clock and they’re like normal white-collar workers. What’s their job? Their job is to make sure Americans hate one another.

Or like are obsessed in the third world way with the Jews. And they suffer absolutely no consequences for doing so. In my book, I suggest that the U.S. government needs to start imposing real costs on these individuals and the infrastructure that supports it. Meaning the bot farms, the boiler rooms where a lot of this happens. And frankly, to my mind, it would be kind of a slam dunk because it’s not an issue of free speech. Ivan in Moscow is not entitled to U.S. First Amendment protection, whereas an American would be. So I say, let’s start there. Let’s make sure to go and try to detect and disrupt these operators running foreign information ops against us.

Well, yeah. And like you said, the cost of this is extremely low. It costs them almost nothing when it comes to the larger scheme of things. The return of investment is huge. And the risk is nothing. There’s nothing stopping them from doing this. And unfortunately, I think we have Iran, China, Russia, and many others that are taking advantage of our free speech and our free and open internet. And that’s one of the challenges that I see with this. Even if we wanted to, and I would love to see America start having some bot farms and doing the exact same thing, wage psychological and informational warfare in those countries.

But we’d have a hard time doing that because they do have their internet locked down. They don’t have a free and open internet. They make sure they know exactly what is coming into their country. To an extreme degree, everything is censored. People need to wake up and be able to recognize this.

What I see that’s taking place is these different countries. And it’s not just those three I mentioned, by the way, there’s many others. But these countries are taking advantages of situations here in the United States, whether we’re talking about the Charlie Kirk assassination, whether we’re talking about other political scandals, other societal issues that we have here in the United States and amplifying those things and creating division.

Creating, look, I think one of the biggest things we have going on right now is that China, Russia, Iran, they do not want Trump in office. They don’t want him to be effective. And they sure as heck don’t want MAGA to continue past 2028. So they’re using all of those things. And one of the things we’re going to get to is one of the political weapons that they’re using against this president especially is the Epstein files.

So, I agree with you. I don’t see any indicator whatsoever that we have any sort of defense against this. And I want to throw this up here. X just purged 13,000 accounts linked to suspected meddling ahead of the U.S. midterms. And folks, I talked about this the other day. The moment that this happened, the amount of bots that were constantly in my comments just went away. I still get a few, but I used to have hundreds.

Anytime that I would post about Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Baron Coleman, I would have hundreds of what are very clearly bots down in my comment section. And now, yeah, there’s a couple here and there, but nothing like there was before. So, one of the other challenges was this too, David, is the fact that these platforms aren’t incentivized to do anything about it either.

Like none of these platforms want to say, you know what? Half of the people on my platform are actually not even real people. So, I agree. The government has started taking this seriously.

That’s exactly right. Elon Musk depends on bots. He depends on bots in order to justify the advertising rates. Because it just makes it look like there are more people on the platform. It’s very clear that he’s got no problem with what’s going on. I don’t know the inner workings of TikTok, but I assume it’s the same. I’m not even sure what has happened from the back room since it’s no longer Chinese. But I suspect not much has changed, just in terms of, as you said, the incentives of the thing.

But at the end of the day, I thought about this and what I wrote, I think is really the only first step forward, which is to say, okay, we recognize that this is a problem. We recognize that it’s no small thing. The Reagan administration recognized that it’s no small thing back in the day when they put together the Active Measures Working Group, which is something else that I write about. And that group was a bunch of really smart folks, some inside government, some outside government.

And their task was to track Russian information operations against the United States. And to explain how they work and then shine some sunlight on it. So actually the most famous case that they worked on was something called Operation Infection, which was the lie that the KGB spread that the U.S. military created the AIDS virus in a lab and sort of sent it out to terrorize the third world.

The Active Measures Working Group tracked it. It all started in a KGB-linked newspaper in India. In those days it was kind of pre-internet. So it took a little longer than it would today, but it took about two years for this thing to move from this rinky-dink Indian newspaper all the way to Dan Rather and the CBS Evening News. But it did move throughout using source laundering and all kinds of KGB techniques. That accusation went around the world.

It even went into the United States, into people’s living rooms and bedrooms via Dan Rather. So the Active Measures Working Group put all that together and they actually slapped the report down on the table when Reagan was meeting with the Soviet leader. I’m not sure if it was Gorbachev or Andropov, specifically which one it was, and said, “Okay, knock it off. We’re watching you.” And they knocked it off for a little while. Why we don’t care about these things is an interesting question.

Why we don’t care about these things in 2026 is a really interesting question. And frankly, I think we kind of don’t care about it. When I say we, Republicans or Democrats aren’t incentivized to care about it because kind of everyone uses bots. And nobody wants to talk about it. Donald Trump won because of bots. Democrats win because of bots. It’s just one of those things that’s in the toolkit that I think everyone is kind of afraid to look too closely at because it would mean that sort of everybody suffers.

But look, this is something that greatly affects the health of the Republic because it affects people’s minds. At the end of the day, sure, there’s an effect, a terrible effect on the people at large and the political debate and all that stuff. Yes. We kind of understand that it kind of does those things. But on a micro level, the spreading of insane conspiracy theories, like Israel killed Charlie Kirk and whatever you hear nightly on Candace’s show and Tucker’s show, breaks people’s brains.

In the sense that it rewires their brains to no longer be able to deal with two plus two equals four. Like these two things contribute to a third thing or the ability to evaluate evidence, the ability to evaluate cause and effect. This has an effect on the body politic, but it also has an effect on people’s own lives.

I think basically everyone listening right now knows someone who’s gone off the deep end when it comes to stuff like this. Maybe they’ve cut off family members and friends and stuff like that. I didn’t—look, every time that happens, that’s a tragedy. And there are people who wake up in the morning and their job is to make it worse for Americans.

Yeah. And the crazy thing is they can actually, using bots and using this influence, they can kind of dictate what is trending, right? So if they pump a bunch of bots into a particular narrative, whether it’s Candace Owens or whatever it is, suddenly that’s the dominant thing. And then you have other influencers that look at that, and now you get what’s known as algorithmic velocity. So now just the natural nature or the nature of the algorithm, what it’s programmed to do is like, oh, this is a hot topic because now there’s a hundred thousand artificial views on this thing.

The algorithm is going to pick it up and now everybody sees what’s trending and now they want to cover that so they can get on the coattails of that momentum, if you will. And so now you actually have these foreign influence where they’re actually dictating, even what we’re talking about.

And it’s real simple. It’s not even that complicated, not that sophisticated, but we also happen to be in an era and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this. We do seem to be in a very unique era where Americans seem to be more gullible than they ever have been.

Like when I have these conversations with people where they believe these things that are just manufactured out of their own imaginations or the imaginations of other people. And now this being presented as fact, they’re just like, yeah, this makes sense. Forget about all the evidence. Forget about using any sort of logic and reason. Forget about the fact that there was a guy, for instance, that actually admitted to killing Charlie Kirk 11 different times at a minimum, just in this text. And that it was his grandfather’s rifle. “That’s not what really—it was Israel that killed Charlie Kirk.”

Yeah, look, it’s really funny because we think of the people in the past as kind of country bumpkins compared to how sophisticated we are now. And yet, people have lost their minds. I don’t think there’s any contest that 10 years ago, people were more intelligent. 10 years ago, people knew how to follow an argument. 10 years ago, people’s bullshit detectors weren’t completely broken.

I’ll give you an example. One of my favorite examples from when the book came out and the day the book came out, there were people who were, let’s say, not anonymous bots or stupid trolls, but still kind of folks who were real people who were not using their brains. And they would come back to me and they would say, “Look, obviously Epstein was an agent of Mossad, because look, we have a photo of him wearing an IDF T-shirt.”

And I’m like, “So this is convincing evidence to you.” Or the other one that I like, which I also got, which is: here is an email from the Epstein files of Epstein emailing Peter Thiel and opening with, “I represent the Rothschilds.”

So it’s like, okay, number one, in order for that to be evidence—look, it seems like we need a kind of remedial course for how to deal with reality. So the first thing you do when you see that is you say, “Well, did he really represent the Rothschilds, or was he bullshitting?”

Is that even true? Anyone can say that they represent anyone. Like, is there any evidence that this is actually real, or did he make it up? Number one. Number two is if he says he represents the Rothschilds, what does that even mean? Is there a capital-T, capital-R Rothschilds? Is there an organization or something or a family?

Or maybe there’s a random Rothschild that he may represent. Or the third option, which is how does this even apply to Israel? Well, it only applies to Israel through a conspiracy theory that the Rothschilds control Israel. So you need to believe many things. You need to have several different inputs that have to be true in order for this to be evidence.

But for a lot of people, they kind of skip over those steps. And one of the things that I think that we kind of really need as a society, and I don’t know who’s going to do it, but somebody should do it, is to teach people how to evaluate evidence. Does two plus two equal four?

Or even better, how do we really know this thing that we think we know? Do we really know this to be true? Or is it just something we heard and we just assume that it’s true? Yeah. And that really is a kind of good segue into the book because—

Well, let me break in real quick. Because I just put the link to your book down in the comments, folks. Go, number one, make sure you guys go follow David Reaboi. He’s on X, among many other platforms. And I just put the link to his book. I’m going to order it right after this. I should have ordered it beforehand, but I will order it now. Let’s talk a little bit about the ways.

Well, let’s talk about the overarching, I guess, truths about the Epstein files. The way that you see it being used as a political and I guess information, a psychological operation. Because to me, it’s been obvious from the very beginning what this is, because I constantly hear the Epstein files being used as a political weapon against Trump. And they’re like, “Why haven’t people been arrested?” And I’m like, I’ve went through the Epstein files.

I know literally people have gone through the Epstein files, even using AI and people that are poring over these things all the time. And I’ve yet to see anybody present any credible evidence that would lead to probable cause for anybody. So give us kind of a breakdown of not only your book, but how you see the Epstein files in general.

Sure. Well, first, to be clear, my book is not about Jeffrey Epstein and it’s not about the Epstein files. What it’s about is very, very specific. It’s about a specific lie that was told about Jeffrey Epstein, which is that he was working for the Israelis running a blackmail operation to ensnare American elites to be influenced to do things on behalf of the state of Israel. So that was a very specific claim that I’m dealing with in the book. If it would have been a book about Epstein, it would be, whatever, 800 pages and would have ended up to be relatively inconclusive.

However, I was able to nail down this lie. And it was a lie that was manufactured, as I show in the book. It was created and manufactured by the Russians and pushed out through podcasts and through source laundering in order to affect policy outcomes that were favorable to the Russians that we can get into.

But what I think happened is that the Russians, kind of very smartly—they’re not stupid. They know that the easiest way to run an information warfare campaign is not to make something up from whole cloth, but to slipstream their particular narrative right into an issue that’s very big. So—“Israel killed Charlie Kirk.” Exactly right. Charlie Kirk was assassinated. That’s a real thing that happened. Then comes the information operation moving the target and moving the narrative away from the guy who did it to something that is advantageous for the people pushing it. So I don’t argue that Epstein was a Russian agent. I don’t argue that the whole thing is a big nothing burger, that is an insignificant news story or anything like that. Right.

I’m just saying that this narrative that took hold was a very deliberately planted narrative in order to advance Russian interests. And the first bit of evidence for that, maybe it’s not evidence, but you can tell that something is going on because every one of us listening remembers when Epstein died. What was the big joke? The big joke was, “Epstein didn’t kill himself. Here’s Hillary Clinton, who probably killed him.” Right. It was all about the Clintons. The narrative was wall to wall.

Bill had been good friends with Epstein. He had traveled on the plane. That was sort of part of it. It was American elites behaving badly, and Bill Clinton’s friends doing horrible things. And that’s really what it was. That year, Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself slash Hillary merchandise outsold Game of Thrones merchandise during the Christmas season. This was everyone’s understanding of it, especially on the right. And then very slowly, little by little, there began a trickle.

And I show how the trickle happened. First, it happened with a kind of nonsense little leak story to the Daily Beast, which was probably from Steve Bannon, who said that he’s being protected by intelligence, he belonged to intelligence. And of course, that became conventional wisdom when Alex Acosta denied it up and down many times under oath. It was just a kind of made-up thing. But it took on a life of its own that now forms the basis of people’s ideas about the story.

And then as I show in the book, three months later, a guy pops up named Ari Ben-Menashe. And he pops up on a totally obscure podcast called Narativ, which deals with Trump-Russia conspiracy theories. And he says, “Oh, yeah, I was in the Mossad. I knew Jeffrey Epstein and Robert Maxwell. And for sure, 100 percent, Epstein was a Mossad agent sent to compromise American elites through sexual blackmail.” And that disappears. But over the course of the next several years, that interview and subsequent interviews that the same guy, Ari Ben-Menashe, has given forms the basis of this whole mythology.

It’s just a matter of source laundering. So sometimes you hear it from here. Sometimes you hear it from here. Sometimes you hear it from here. But it all tracks back—the same source in the footnotes always tracks back to the same guy.

And I thought that was interesting when I was first digging this stuff up. I was like, that’s kind of weird. Let me see what else this guy has been involved in. And then I find out and I run down Ari Ben-Menashe and his record. And that’s where it starts to get into something that could be a movie, a true crime series or a movie, because this guy is kind of amazing.

He’s like the original shady guy. 30 years ago, he showed up. He was never in Mossad. He’s a former Israeli intelligence guy who was kicked out in the 1980s. And then he pops up in 1991 as the main source for Gary Sick’s book, The October Surprise.

And that’s where we get our phrase October Surprise from, is from this book. And the original October Surprise was the claim that Ronald Reagan, before he was elected, sent a representative to Paris to meet with the Ayatollahs and to convince the Ayatollahs not to release the hostages that they were holding in Tehran until Jimmy Carter was out of the White House.

And the source for this allegation was Ari Ben-Menashe, who claimed to be at the meeting in Paris. So, of course, this comes out in 1991. All of American politics goes completely bananas. There’s an investigation in the House and in the Senate. Bipartisan. Everyone’s looking into it. This is like a big, huge scandal, if it’s true. And turns out it’s not at all true. And Ari Ben-Menashe was judged by the bipartisan Senate and House reports as being completely unreliable and a total fabricator. He just made it up.

So, interestingly enough, this was in 1981. At the same time, literally at the same time all of this is going on, Ari Ben-Menashe is the source for someone else’s book. And this other writer is Seymour Hersh, who was with The New Yorker at that time. And he was writing a book called The Samson Option, which is about the Israeli nuclear program. Right. And in that book, Seymour Hersh is a far-left guy who made his bones exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

Basically any time there’s a story that would embarrass the United States or our allies, he’s there. Very kind of pro-Soviet guy. Anyway, so the Samson Option contains this really wild allegation that Robert Maxwell, who was the London-based tabloid mogul, was a Mossad agent. And the source for that was Ari Ben-Menashe, who claimed, “Oh, yeah, we knew each other. We hung out. We were part of the same group,” blah, blah, blah.

And this allegation pops up. It blows up in London. And two weeks after the allegation blows up, Robert Maxwell is found dead off the side of his boat. This is Ghislaine Maxwell’s dad. Father, yeah. Yeah. So really interesting stuff. The libel suit that Maxwell promised to launch against all these guys went nowhere because he was dead. And then Ari Ben-Menashe spent the next several years making sure to insert this allegation about Maxwell into several books.

And this is where we see the identical source laundering technique between Maxwell and Epstein. He just runs the same play over and over, which is he drops the allegation, and then he finds, let’s say, credible-ish or slightly credible authors to write books to include this allegation. So that it would make him disappear and it would have the books carry the allegation.

And the better the books do, the better his allegation does. So, for example, with Maxwell, he partnered with a writer, who’s dead now, named Gordon Thomas. And Gordon Thomas wrote two massive books. One is called Gideon’s Spies. The other one is called Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy, just to be not subtle at all. And both of these books totally sourced to this fraudster, Ari Ben-Menashe. And I’ll tell you, Gideon’s Spies is available now in 16 languages.

It’s unbelievable. I read it 20 years ago. It’s unbelievably entertaining. It’s the story of the Mossad. It’s like, whatever, 800 pages, 600 pages. It reads like a movie. It’s in 16 languages. That book basically became the source text for 80% or 90% of everything we know about Mossad. On Wikipedia, in other books, in magazines, it became the conventional wisdom.

And it’s all sourced to this guy who’s a total fraud and a liar. Obviously, some things in the book are true. But there are a lot of things in the book that are not—that are transparently nonsense. And the mix of the two is like perfect information warfare. That’s as perfect information warfare as it gets.

And so moving ahead to September 2019, shortly after Epstein died, Ari Ben-Menashe pops up on a podcast and says, “Yeah, I met Epstein in Maxwell’s office.” So what is he doing? He’s making this claim and he’s using as evidence the 30-year-old claim that he made before. So he’s building one story off the other story. And then he speaks to a National Enquirer reporter named Dylan Howard, who wrote a kind of tabloid-type book. And he put it into that book. That book was okay, but it was a kind of tabloid trashy book. So it didn’t become part of the official record. But then he found Whitney Webb, who was a far-left reporter for MintPress, which is founded by a Palestinian American, super-duper hard left.

I guess the politics could be considered anti-imperialist. So pro-Russia, pro-Iran, pro-Cuba, anti-US, anti-Israel specifically. And her whole recorded output is basically, “What can I blame on the Israelis?” So, of course, she finds Ari Ben-Menashe and she writes a book or a two-volume book called One Nation Under Blackmail. Together, the two volumes is like 1500 pages. And that becomes the quote unquote authoritative source for Epstein as Mossad. And if you look in the footnotes, you’ll notice that it’s all goes back to her interviews with Ari Ben-Menashe.

All of it, every claim that Epstein was affiliated with Mossad just goes to Ari Ben-Menashe. So in that way, Ben-Menashe can disappear. He’s gone. His credibility is never looked into because he removed himself from the story after planting it. And he has these other people who maybe have more credibility, who can be out there sort of selling it.

And Whitney Webb goes on every podcast. She was on Patrick Bet-David. She was on Glenn Beck. She was everywhere. And then people like Ian Carroll will talk about her book on Joe Rogan’s show. So again, you’re doing source laundering, sort of one step removed. A game of telephone. This is eventually how you get to the entire right wing, or let’s say a segment of the right-wing influencer podcast class at all at the same time screaming the same thing.

Well, another great example of this—well, let me start off with this. As you stated, the way that good misinformation works is that you take a kernel of truth and you build on top of it a mountain of lies or a mix of truth and lies. That’s the only way that this stuff is even credible. I convince you of something that’s true. And I get your head nodding in the affirmative and I’m like, “Oh, and by the way, this other part of this.”

You’re smuggling these narratives in the form of truth. And another great example of this that I’m thinking about how these narratives get pushed using somewhat credible, like you said, credible-ish sources. A good example of this is the Hunter Biden laptop, where people are saying, “Hey, this is just all the Russian narrative.”

And then you have 51 members of the IC community come out and say that this is a Russian disinformation campaign. And we know it is Hunter’s laptop. Now, this wasn’t a very sophisticated, a very good—but it’s a great example of how these narratives get started. And there’s still lots of Democrats that will say, “Oh, well, we know that the Hunter laptop was just a Russian disinformation campaign.”

And it’s not—it was true. And it’s been verified in multiple different ways, but that narrative gets undercut by the more sensational element to this. I see this all the time. Again, for the last year or so, I’ve been very involved in watching what is going on with the Trump administration. Charlie Kirk assassination, what’s been going on with Candace Owens. And I’ll hear these narratives that are being passed around as fact, one after another after another.

And I try to trace that information down because it’s already in the zeitgeist now. It’s already accepted by everybody. “Hey, this is a fact.” And then I go to try to fact-check that and come to find out it always goes back to Candace Owens where she has just threw it out in the ether, no sources, no verification, no evidence of these things.

And yet it’s just continued to be pushed by podcaster after podcaster after podcaster that is now just mimicking or covering what she said because it is extremely profitable. But we need to stop accepting so many of these narratives as fact and start doing a little fact-checking with this.

Yeah, exactly. I couldn’t agree with you more. We need to do that on an individual level. And more people, I think, should be speaking up when they see this stuff happening. Look, at the end of the day, yes, the government has a responsibility to go and to deal with these types of hostile information operations, for sure. But we should also be kind of hygienic when it comes to what goes into our brains and the way we think and the way we evaluate evidence. And to make sure that we don’t allow ourselves to go crazy because the bad guys literally want us to go crazy. Yeah. That’s part of the plan.

And one of the things as I was researching my book, I had a feeling that the Russians understood the costs and the damage that conspiracy theories do to an enemy society. I had a feeling. It’s just sort of my training. When I have a hunch, it’s a pretty good idea that it’s a hunch. And then I go and I try to see if it’s right. And I’m thinking, from an important Russian information warfare person that understands this and kind of articulates the damage that conspiracism does. And then boom, I find that Alexander Dugin of all people literally wrote a book about conspiracy theories as information warfare, and as narratives that break people’s brains.

And of all of the conspiracy theories that he identified, he put his finger on one in particular that is the most potent. And what is that? That’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. And he discusses it and kind of gets into it, and he says, well, whether or not it’s true, it doesn’t really matter. But it’s potent and it can drive populations and countries completely crazy. And for him, it was a kind of interesting thing because he wrote the book shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Or he started writing elements of it during the fall of the Soviet Union and shortly after. And in the book, he was sort of grappling with how that happened and sort of his idea of why the Soviet Union fell. And what he concluded was that the West was able to convince a large percentage of Soviet elites that the system itself was evil and corrupt.

And those Soviet elites then went and shut off the system. So that’s how he sees the end of the Cold War and the fall of communism. So that actually has a perfect analog to the way he sees information warfare and the way he understands the war against the West and against America in particular today. Which is, “Okay, what we’re going to do now is we’re going to try to convince our enemies that their society is unjust and evil, that they are being ruled from without and within”—quote unquote, “occupied”—“by Zionists and Jews and Israel” and blah, blah, blah. And that then will enable American patriots to switch sides and begin fighting their own country, aligned with the Russians and Dugin and whatever.

So he’s very aware that if he shows up and he just says, “America sucks, Russia’s great,” then he wouldn’t get any traction in the United States.

But if he comes and he says, “Hey, you guys are occupied. We in Russia, we’re fighting for American conservatism”—which is something that he tweeted the other day—“Yeah, we’re fighting for American conservatism. And we’re going to do everything that we can to support you in your war against the Zionists who have occupied your government.” So in that way, he becomes their ally against the United States. And he’s just doing the same thing that he believes happened to the fall of the Soviet Union.

Well, and then he’s being platformed by the likes of Tucker Carlson, amongst many others. Many others. It’s interesting to watch somebody that is just, on his face, clearly an enemy of the United States. And all of these people that claim to be patriots are platforming this guy when I think he’s behind a lot of the ideology that is being put into our culture with this. We have multiple other people like Elizabeth Lane, who came from Russia. She’s originally Georgian, but she pops out of nowhere.

And suddenly she claims to be this journalist that says she’s been doing journalism for like 15 years. But yet we can only see that anything that she’s ever posted is coming back from like 2021. And suddenly out of nowhere, she’s now interviewing Tucker Carlson. She’s on Candace Owens. She’s talked about Dugin. She hates America. She says America is the cancer of the world. And yet constantly glazes Russia, constantly promotes Putin, constantly denigrates Trump.

And it’s just so obvious. And people are like, “Oh, she’s just a good old American first.”

But look, she’s such an absolute, obvious fraud. But before she appeared as a journalist person, she was like the CEO of a weird, basically pay-per-view conspiracy theory channel. Unified TV. Right.

And this is the weird part about this. She claims on her resume that she’s CEO. But if you go to Unified TV, all it actually says is that she was a contributor. So I don’t even know what’s true about that.

Well, that’s a data point that I saw. And I was like, oh, that’s really interesting. When thinking about the link between Russian information ops and conspiracism in general, it goes back a long ways. It seems like any time you have conspiracy theories being pushed into the American bloodstream, you have the Russians there kind of poking, pushing it forward. And that was another great example. The obvious one, the really big one is Alex Jones, who, weirdly enough, is promoting Dugin and Dugin’s books in 2014, 2015 and 2008.

I don’t know what the hookup there was. But it makes me furious that we should have a government to do things like, I don’t know, counterintelligence investigations on this stuff. Yeah. What is a popular American host doing hanging out with Alexander Dugin over the course of the last 20 years? Isn’t that weird?

Yes, today we understand that Dugin is a sanctioned person. He can’t enter the United States. He’s been sanctioned by the U.S. government. Okay. But when he was saying the same thing 20 years ago, I don’t know, you would think that would call for some kind of investigation being opened into Alex Jones, into Elizabeth Lane, into all of these people that have these very questionable relationships between hostile enemy information operators abroad.

And it’s especially scandalous to me because there are certain things that the open source community can investigate. And there’s a lot that they can’t. I can go and I can see what’s available online. We can go and we can make our educated guesses about the motivations, financial or otherwise, of a Tucker Carlson or a Candace Owens or Alex Jones or someone like that. But the government actually has tools to look into these things.

Yeah. And we can’t go and get bank records and track down crypto transactions and things like that. But the government can. That’s what the government is literally for. So the fact that they don’t do this is absolutely infuriating.

Well, no. Dugin is at the center of this. And I actually didn’t know that we were going to kind of tiptoe into this conversation, but I’m glad we are because I love it because this needs to be exposed. Again, when you look at Dugin, he is the center of this. I believe that Elizabeth Lane has interviewed him. She’s definitely talked about him multiple times. Another person that is involved in this is John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who is now a contributor to RT, and he’s pushing Duginism as well. Again, we’ve got Candace Owens going to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. I don’t know if she met directly with Dugin or not. We would never know that.

But run by a friend of Epstein’s.

Run by a friend of Epstein’s. It is wild when we see this huge conglomeration, this network of people, and Dugin is at the center of it all, ever since I first started investigating this stuff. So, I don’t know the ultimate answer, but I’m with you on that. I would like to know, is Elizabeth Lane—and whether—here’s what I’ll say with this, because she’s threatened to sue me because I called her a Russian asset.

But let’s go, because I would—let’s have discovery. Yeah. I would be interested in discovery on this. But with that being said, whether or not she is a direct paid asset, what she definitely is an anti-American, pro-Russian, pro-Putin propagandist. When she’s sitting there saying that she immigrated from Georgia to the United States, but yet she’s sitting there on a podcast doing two things.

Number one, saying that the U.S. is the cancer of the world, as I always say. And then on top of that, she’s openly advocating for violent revolution in the United States. She’s done this on multiple different platforms. Another person that has said similar with Elizabeth Lane is Buckley Carlson, who has also been involved in all of this.

And then we have another guy named John Mappin across the pond there that has inserted himself into this entire Charlie Kirk. He has ties to Dugin. He has ties to Russian intelligence and the Russian government. And it’s this whole network of anti-American infiltrators that are clearly pushing certain narratives and people are just gobbling it up left and right.

Yeah, I don’t know what to tell you. I think obviously we have a long list of people for counterintelligence investigations, a long list of targets. You would hope that the U.S. government is actually looking into it. My fear is that they’re not because they don’t take this seriously. Let’s say at the very least, they don’t take any of this stuff seriously. And look, the Republicans have a problem when it comes to this stuff.

The Democrats also have a problem because we have lived through, after 2016 and Trump won, the entire group of people who used to be on countering violent extremism—the kind of fake terrorism academic discipline. All those people retooled themselves and became experts in disinformation and misinformation. Right. And they set up this entire kind of quasi-legal regime in order, basically, to clamp down on the free speech of American citizens.

So they didn’t care at all about what was being pumped out of Russia or Iran or China or Qatar or wherever. All they wanted to do was get an excuse to ban the speech or restrict the speech of Americans who were Republicans.

That’s all they really cared about anyway. And a data point to that effect is the fact that I was able to find an untranslated Dugin book that nobody else had found. The Russia-critical disinformation, misinformation folks—it’s probably a billion-dollar industry. They get paid through NGOs and through the U.S. government, especially under Biden, and through universities and whatever, especially in Europe. Okay, maybe you guys can do some good work. But no, they didn’t even find the most basic Dugin text that was just sitting there untranslated since 2005. I found it because I was looking for such a thing. I’ll tell you what else I found, which is not included in the book.

But I thought that it was kind of fantastic: as I’m reading the Dugin stuff and I’ve read a ton of Dugin by this point, as I’m sure you have, too. And very obviously, it’s crazy town and it’s written like crazy town. Let’s just say that his book on conspiracy theories as information warfare, just like every other book, is not an operations manual. So you can’t give the book to someone in Russian intelligence to say, “Here, here’s your manual, go.”

So what I realized was missing was an operational layer. You have to have a guy whose job it is basically to translate Dugin’s insanity into something operational that intelligence operatives could actually do on a day-to-day basis. So it’s like, okay, so those guys must exist. I need to find them. So what do you know? Of course, I find them.

And there’s a bunch of former KGB, GRU guys at Moscow State University. They’re professors there. And many of them have relationships with Dugin in one way or another, either actual relationships or they’ve translated or operationalized his stuff before. And these guys are just literally putting out papers. They’re publishing papers the way a biology professor would publish a paper in an academic journal. And these papers are available in Russian and I downloaded a bunch of them and it was like, “how to manipulate Gen Z Americans through TikTok”—the stuff they’re writing.

And it’s very much like the Chinese, so much Chinese kind of anti-American—their battle plans are totally available. You can go and you can find the Chinese battle plans. You can go and find it for information warfare and you can find the Russians, too.

It’s completely available. It’s online. Now with AI, anybody can translate it, with kind of great effect. So after I found that, I started to wonder, why am I the guy who’s finding this? Aren’t there, I don’t know, maybe 5000 people who are making a living doing this, or should be doing this, in the disinformation, misinformation space, but apparently not. Apparently, they’re working on other things. So it’s up to folks like us to dig this stuff up.

No, I do think that, because of 9-11, we have redirected almost all assets. Well, for a long time, obviously, we’re caught up in the global war on terror. But this is what’s seen as the primary threat. And I guess to some extent, it probably is. It’s the immediate harm. But what we’re not addressing is the slow erosion of our country and the transfer of power of our country.

And of course, one of the things I always talk about is I see the DNC like they are completely and wholly aligned with the CCP. And you can throw Russia in there if you want as well. But these are the people that believe in globalism and in multipolarism. And because they don’t believe that the United States is virtuous enough to hold the power and the influence that we do.

So the only right thing to do is to make sure that we’re aligned with—they’re already ideological aligned with socialism, communism out of China to begin with. So I do think that our intelligence community is not paying attention to this or it’s just such a low priority that they’re definitely not educating the American public on this at all.

Yeah, I think that’s right. And it’s an important point you make about motivations. And I think that in general, we have gotten a little bit too obsessed with the idea of follow the money. We’ve gotten too obsessed with the idea of, oh, if someone is saying X, they must be being paid, or they must be being blackmailed, or something like that. Right. I think the far more likely explanation in the greatest number of cases is actually what you just described, which is ideological affinity. So they agree. They agree. The left agrees that the United States sucks. And in that way, there are elements of the right from Tucker to Candace to whomever that agree with the left. Look no further than this Michigan race, for example. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. Mike Rogers is the most milquetoast, vanilla Republican who would have—I was not a Mike Rogers fan for years because, frankly, I thought he was way soft on the Muslim Brotherhood of all things. And he had to be dragged kicking and screaming to say the words Muslim Brotherhood during the campaign trail only because he knew that if he didn’t, he would lose. So, on one hand, you have Mike Rogers, but on the other hand, you have this guy who’s—somebody joked that it’s like, “Yeah, I don’t know. On one hand, you have typical anonymous Republican. On the other hand, you have Osama bin Laden, Jr. I’m not sure which way to go.”

He’s literally the Muslim Brotherhood candidate.

Yeah. Literally. And down to his family and himself and whatever, these guys are up and down Ikhwanis.

But for Tucker and I guess now for Megyn Kelly and for a bunch of others, the imperative of being anti-Israel now trumps every other consideration. It trumps literally everything. It trumps literally everything. And that, to me, is a combination of demented radicalization plus whatever other corruption you can come up with. But I don’t think it’s possible without demented radicalization. Somebody has to lose their mind in order to be like, “Okay, obviously the most important issue that America faces right now is being occupied by the Jews.” Yeah.

And do you think that is the motivation behind Tucker? With Tucker, Candace, Megyn Kelly, Joe Kent, you can name 50 more, I guess. But that does seem to be what is the driving force in the constant narrative. They’re constantly talking about Jews. They’re constantly drawing everything back. Anything wrong with America, we can find it traced back to Israel. They’re now constantly glazing Islam, everything from Tucker defending Sharia law. What do you think happened to him?

I’m not sure what happened to him exactly, but I know that his father was a very strong Christian Zionist. Yeah. And as soon as his father passed away, Tucker flipped and sort of basically devoted his life to this. And as did his insane brother.

Now, there’s a phenomenon—I kind of came up with the term—which is rapid onset elite right-wing social media retardation. And it’s something that I’ve seen. Yeah, no, it’s not good as an acronym. But it’s a phenomenon, and it’s a real thing because I’ve seen it. And you spend a lot of time in group chats, it’s very easy to lose track of reality. It’s very easy to get caught up in—we’re moving, we’re radicalizing in the same way that it happens with jihadis.

If you have a group chat and you’ve got a lot of people who are kind of pushing hard in one direction, and you have nobody to stop and say, “Hey, wait a minute, you may be wrong about this”—it doesn’t take a long time to radicalize people. I think that’s what happened to J.D. Vance. I think J.D. Vance is a victim of group chats.

And kind of group chat dementia, where you don’t run into anyone who will sort of push back and contradict you and say, “Hey, that’s not exactly correct,” blah, blah, blah. And the way things go is the same way conspiracy theories go, which is you accept one thing and then you accept the next thing and then you accept the next thing and the next thing. And five of those steps in between could be complete nonsense. But by then you’re already way ahead. And it hardly even matters if the other stuff was complete nonsense because your brain has already rewired itself and oriented it that way.

There is a real conspiracy brain rot. And I think that’s exactly what you’re talking about there, that it is an evolution, or a process where you start believing one thing without evidence. And you start developing this confirmation of bias, this motivated reasoning. And then you jump onto the next thing because it’s tied to that. That doesn’t have any evidence. And now you have an entire worldview with zero evidence, completely detached from reality. And now anything is possible. And that’s one of the things that I hope somebody studying this at such a level going to me, it started with the Charlie Kirk assassination. It’s completely changed almost the fabric of our society from my perspective. And a lot of this is online, obviously.

It goes offline. Everyone—I remember when I was raising alarms about this and I’m sure you were doing the same and it was happening online and people would come back and they would say, “Look, this is only online.” And then their gardener would say something. Yes. And then someone at the gym would say something. And then the next thing is people who are on Facebook—whatever your next-door neighbor from 15 years ago—is saying craziness. Yeah. We’re no longer dealing with anonymous trolls. There’s kind of normal people who have picked this up from the zeitgeist because now everyone is online. Yeah. So the audience isn’t just broken random people on 4chan. It’s your uncle or your brother.

How many times has it happened where people’s families are just broken by this? This book, the Epstein Conspiracy book, began originally as chapter six of a much larger book that I’m writing called Viral Libels: anti-Semitic conspiracy theories as information warfare. And very quickly it outgrew the book and it just got to be kind of too extensive and telling the story got to be too involved.

So I just kind of broke it off, but I’m still working on that book and I’m dealing with a lot of the stuff that you just raised. And sadly, there is almost nothing from the perspective of the right on any of this stuff. So anytime you have a look into the psychology of conspiracy theories, or how conspiracy theories mutate and the effects that they have on society and on individuals, it almost invariably comes from the left.

Yes. Which has its own real problems too, because most of these books and studies are like, “Oh, the right’s just full of conspiracy theorists,” and it just pushes together basically everyone on the right and makes everyone on the right look bad because that’s their ideological frame.

And as I’m doing this, I’m kind of horrified because I noticed that nobody on the right cares about this stuff.

Yeah, no, not only do they not care about it, but they are quickly falling victim to it. And that’s the problem. The other thing I’ll say is that there is, and you kind of touched on this earlier, there is something—people seem to have an inherent vulnerability when it comes to these conspiracies concerning the Jews. And honestly, I think that’s spiritual in nature.

Not only that, it is biblical when you talk about how the Bible says that the Jews are gonna be scattered and no one’s gonna like them. And I think this goes back to—for those of us Christians out there—the original covenant between Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And that is where the devil decided that he was gonna wage spiritual warfare on people because now we have the ability to make amends, right?

We have redemption. And I don’t wanna get too churchy on too many people out there, but there is something very unique—people are very susceptible to any of the Jewish tropes, whatever they are. And when you start really looking at these things and realizing that they’re either false—most of them are just false. People have heard it before.

When this whole Charlie Kirk thing happened and people were saying Israel was involved, I was open to it. I was so indifferent, and in many ways I still am indifferent to Israel. So I started exploring all the different information out there of these different people, whether it’s Ian Carroll or some of these other people that are pushing these ideas. And I started going, “Hey, maybe it was Israel that killed Charlie Kirk. Maybe Israel did 9-11. Maybe Israel did this, killed JFK,” all of these things.

And I just started going down the rabbit hole and researching this. And I just find lie after lie after lie, misinformation, twisting of the truth, putting a little bit of truth in there, mixing up with a whole bunch of lies and then presenting it out there. That’s what these people do time and time again. And I don’t even mean to defend Israel or to defend Jews. I’m just defending the truth. And it’s always somehow these people that are intentionally trying to deceive people—their centerpiece is almost always Israel and the Jews. And it’s, I don’t know, it blows my mind to be honest with you.

Well, I think it’s definitely spiritual. I don’t think it can be explained really any other way. I agree. There are people who are racists and people who don’t like other people for any kind of other specific reason. Sure. And they are somehow able to manage their lives. Okay. They may not be good people or decent people, but it doesn’t make them slobbering maniacs. But for some reason, when it comes to the Jews, it seems to take over people’s minds, like a mind virus. Yes.

And I think there are a couple reasons for that. As you said, I happen to think it’s a kind of spiritual, religious thing. But an interesting characteristic of this, though, is that for these people, the Jews need no reason for doing anything bad. It’s just their nature. And I think that’s how you get to be and just swap out Israel, right? So, “Why did they kill Charlie Kirk? Well, they kill people, whatever, genocide in Gaza. Why? Because they’re bloodthirsty, because they like to kill people.” Yeah. “Why did they do this? Because they like to.” And it all goes back. I’m not saying this is where it begins.

But if you go back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is a forgery created and promoted by the czars in the late 19th century. Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a kind of famous fake document that alleges to be a bunch of Jews who run the world getting together, and they wrote down their meeting minutes.

And anyone reading it should know right away that it’s insanely fake. Your brain has to be mush coming out of your ears to think that, “Oh, yeah, this is how people think.” Right. But what is common, when you read it, though, it hits you right away where you’re like, okay, they give no reasons for what they’re doing.

All the reasons are like, “We are destroying the family. We are looting the treasuries out of these governments. We are making wars. We are doing it.” This is like, okay, why? Like every other person or type of person kind of gets a motivation. We were like, okay, they have this thing and they want this thing and it’s going to make their life better.

The blah, blah, blah. Okay. Like there’s some kind of rationale. There’s a logic to people doing what they do, even if it’s bad. But when it comes to the Jews, it’s like, you don’t need that. It’s just because that’s their nature. Like they’re just bad. And what that is, that’s just a good and evil story, because—Satan is that—that’s the attribute of the devil.

Yeah.

Well, and all Jews are held to like this weird monolithic standard too. They can find some Jews somewhere, probably a secular Jew, probably a leftist, completely non-religious guy, but he’s involved in some sort of crime. And they’re like, “Oh, look at this guy, Jewish,” even though there’s another guy right next to him that’s Italian or whatever. Right. Or American, whatever it is. And then that is used as some sort of proof of a larger conspiracy that the Jews, Israel is doing something when there’s no association between.

If nothing else, what strikes me so odd is that there is so much diversity within the Jewish community. I don’t even know how they would be able to get together and conspire. You have extremely conservative right wing Jews.

You have extremely religious Jews. You have extremely leftist Jews, non-secular Jews, non-Zionist Jews. But yet “it’s all the Jews, they think the same way, they do the same things. And they’re all here to destroy our lives somehow.” I wonder, people in Israel that are Jewish, I don’t know how they go through life.

Who do they get to blame for all of their problems? I don’t really know.

Well, look, and obviously these people have never met Jews at all because we don’t agree on anything. Even within these little categories. It’s so funny going—and I encourage everyone to go to Israel because it’s amazing—but among other things, as soon as you get there, you’re just like, yeah, these people have no idea how to stand in line at a grocery store. They’re just pushing each other and fighting and it’s just total chaos. Yeah, these people are not organizing anything.

It’s just one of those things. But look, to the extent that this becomes a thing in American politics, in American society, it’s so bad. It’s really, really bad. And I know it’s like a kind of cliche to say, but countries that go down this road, the very fact that they go down this road is a sign that things are really bad and things are ending.

And that’s really what alarms me, because at the end of the day, I said, honestly, the Jews will be fine. I will be fine. We will figure it out. We’ve been through worse. Yeah. Even in the last hundred years. America, though, won’t be fine. Yeah. America importing the mental patterns and obsessions, conspiratorial obsessions of places like Egypt and Yemen. Is that good?

That’s not good. I don’t know why Americans believe that we are immune to stupidity that has infected so many other countries and so many other parts of the world. But we’re just not. These are decisions that we kind of make collectively, whether or not to go down these roads. And if we do go down this road, it’s really bad. And we see already in Michigan—the Democrats are perfectly happy, Michigan, New York, and elsewhere. We’re going to see a straight-up jihadi gets elected to Congress out of New Jersey, who was buddies with the Blind Sheikh.

I’m sure he won that particular—I’m from Jersey. So I can basically guarantee that where he was running, he won. And that’s when you have one party going down that road, that’s bad enough. And to have two parties going down that road, it’s just an absolute disaster. And America’s going to suffer.

Yeah.

And all you got to do is look to Iran to see what happens where you have leftists and jihadis banding together, taking over a country and destroying what was once something pretty nice. And then of course the communists got rounded up and killed after that. But I digress. Well, listen, David, I feel like we’d barely scratched the surface on like 10 different topics that we could spend several hour podcasting each one. And I enjoyed this tremendously. It was great getting to know you. I want to get you back on very soon. Cause like I said, we have a lot more to talk about. I think that the American people need to know about, but do me a favor, just take a minute. And I don’t know, provide some parting and encouraging words to the viewers out there.

Oh boy. Wow. Well, my nickname with my friends is Black Pill Dave. But lately I’ve kind of changed my tune in some ways. Look, I don’t think there’s anything more important than the cognitive health of our country. And to the extent that we continue down these roads, being influenced by hostile foreign information warfare campaigns is terrible. And it is unbelievably damaging. In my mind, it’s larger than most other political issues. Obviously I care about U.S. foreign policy and about Israel and about a bunch of these other things. But like all of those things will sort themselves out if we’re sane. And we’re staring at whatever, right around the corner.

You never know economic calamity, all kinds of other stuff. G-d forbid we have another COVID-type pandemic or something. You literally never know what’s popping up around the corner. Yeah. And a country where the people are mentally broken is really not good. We need as many people alert and sane and able to make it and understand the reality of the world around them. That’s urgent. And right now, what worries me the most is that we’re being led by technology, by social media in particular to making ourselves crazy.

No, I agree. If we don’t smarten up at the individual level and at a government level and understand this and recognize this for the threat that it is, I’m very concerned about where this heads for sure. Well, listen, David, thank you so much for coming on. Folks, thank you so much for tuning in. We’re going to get David back on. We’ve got a lot more to discuss for sure.

Make sure you go buy his book. I dropped that link down description. I’m going to buy it. I’ll be looking for the new Viral Libels that he will be writing pretty soon. I look forward to reading both of those. So thank you very much, David and folks. We will be back on here in about 30 minutes at 10 PM, doing live election coverage.

I’m interested to see what was going on just since we’ve been having this conversation. But you guys, thank you for supporting us. Go support David too. And until next time, David, you don’t go anywhere, but everybody else until next time, stay armed, stay ready. We’ll talk to you soon.