Epstein Conspiracy Theories, Weaponized

My name is Kemberlee Kaye, and I’m here with Professor William Jacobson, our president and founder of the Legal Insurrection Foundation. I’m super excited about this episode. I’m very excited to introduce you to Dave Reaboi, if you are not familiar with his work. He’s an incredible researcher, someone I have known for a very long time. And I’m really excited to have him here today to talk about his latest book, The Epstein Conspiracy, which, if you were watching, we have pictured here. And we’ll put all the links where you can find it. Welcome, Dave. We’re excited to have you here today.

I’m really glad to have you also. I followed you on social media, but I think this is the first time we’ve spoken. And I know we’ll get deeper into your book, but I’ve got to tell you, I am so thrilled that somebody wrote this book, because what’s going on is so insane. And I’ll let you explain what the book is about. But this is a really important book, because hardly a minute—but definitely not a day—goes by that some bot someplace calls me a member of the Epstein class. Or says I’m covering up for pedophiles and Epstein. And it’s so insane what has happened. I’m really glad you wrote this book. Maybe the place to start is for you to explain: what’s the main thesis of the book?

Sure, I’ll be happy to. The main thesis of the book is—I guess, first of all, I wanted to make clear that this is not a book about Jeffrey Epstein. This is a book about a lie about Jeffrey Epstein. Had it been a book about Epstein, it would have probably gone into several hundred more pages. And it wouldn’t have been as interesting to my mind. I wanted to tightly focus on one particular thing, which was a manufactured lie that I traced to an information operation that I also attributed to the Russian state, to Russian intelligence and Russian media. And I show how this particular lie, which is the lie being that Jeffrey Epstein worked for Mossad in order to provide sexual blackmail to the Israelis in which to influence American elites—

This is actually a lie. It’s nonsense. It was a fabricated operation that was created and then laundered using a technique called source laundering through different media outlets and books and people, with the main idea of having the original source of that lie disappear. That’s why we call it source laundering, just like money laundering. The original source disappears. But what you get is you get the lie proliferated through several different voices. And then, after enough time, it becomes something that sort of everybody knows and everyone takes for granted, like conventional wisdom. So that’s the lie that I was dealing with.

And I’ll tell you, I began to write this as a chapter of a much longer book that I’m still working on called Viral Libels: Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories as Information Warfare. And this was going to be like the marquee case.

As I got more involved and as I started doing more and more research, I realized that this needed to be a book on its own, because the story is kind of so wild. And at the end, when you see it and you see all the evidence laid out, I think it’s so obviously the case that it was an information operation that I felt that packaging it into a much larger book would sort of—would kind of make it disappear. So I thought that this was important as well, because this lie, which was injected into, let’s say, the American media bloodstream, was so consequential. And what it did was—the Russians came in and they inserted this lie through an information operation, and they inserted it into what was then the biggest story in the world.

Not only was it the biggest story in the world, it was also the story in the world that drew in the most conspiratorial and, let’s say, easily led people in America today. And they were able to do this successfully. So what are the wages of that? Well, the wages of that is that it basically changed the way Americans understand Israel, understand Jews, understand America itself. Because if you buy into the lie that Epstein was an Israeli agent blackmailing American elites and politicians, then what you get is you get an America that is, quote unquote, occupied—which is, whatever, being run, being controlled by Jews from outside. And then you’re in classic Protocols of the Elders of Zion territory; you’re in classic Zionist occupied government territory.

Not only is that dangerous to—obviously, it’s dangerous to Jews, but it’s actually more dangerous to the larger society, because it makes people crazy and it collapses politics. So politics no longer becomes a question of what do we do about the economy or immigration or national security? Or all the things that we kind of care about as issues. We collapse it this way and turn it into a hunt for where the Jews that are secretly controlling everything. And it doesn’t matter how we feel or what we argue about when it comes to AI data centers or the tax rates or whatever it is, because the priority is getting rid of the Jews that run everything anyway.

So once you have embedded this idea into the public’s consciousness, it ends up with societal collapse. There’s just no—this has happened in so many places, in so many countries. I’d like to say that—

that it’s possible for America to decide to take on the conspiratorial mental habits of places like Yemen and Egypt and whatever. And if we think that we’re going to get different results from that, I think we’re sadly mistaken.

So where did the claim actually start? You trace it in your book, and I urge people to buy the book and to read it. But kind of short story: how did this start?

In my mind, this is kind of the most interesting part of the story, and it kind of reads like true crime—a true crime novel or book. So there’s a guy named Ari Ben-Menashe. He’s a kind of professional shady guy. He used to work for Israeli intelligence—not Mossad, but Aman, which is Israeli military intelligence—until he was fired by the Israelis in the 1980s. And ever since, he has specialized in running these kind of weird information operations in order to damage the U.S. or Israel, mostly Israel. So he’s sort of ground zero.

So three months after Epstein is dead, Ari Ben-Menashe shows up on an obscure podcast that usually traffics in anti-Trump Russia conspiracy theories. And he says, “Oh, yeah, Epstein was Mossad. I know because I met him in Robert Maxwell’s office, and he and Ghislaine Maxwell were tasked by the Mossad with getting sexual material, compromising material on American elites in order to blackmail them on behalf of Israeli interests.”

So there’s no more evidence than that, no more. He showed up with no other kind of contemporaneous evidence. He just made the allegation, and this allegation sort of—for a while it kind of petered around, and it was picked up primarily by Russian state media, which is kind of interesting. And it started to kind of make its way through the information space. But something that I thought was really interesting is, okay, so who is this Ari Ben-Menashe character?

Interestingly enough, in 1991, he was the basis for two massive stories, probably the biggest stories of 1991, politically speaking. And in both cases, he was a serial fabricator. So the first one was Gary Sick’s book. He was the source for a book called The October Surprise. And that’s where that phrase comes from in American politics. It comes from that book, October Surprise. And in it, Ben-Menashe alleges that then-candidate Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager flew to Tehran prior to the 1980 election and made an agreement with the Iranians to say, “Don’t release the hostages until after the election.”

Now, this would be a massive bombshell allegation to make. And so, of course, it set American politics on fire. There were two congressional investigations, one in the House and one in the Senate, bipartisan. And this is a story that was just kind of consumed the whole year.

And Ben-Menashe was the source. Well, of course, after some investigation, it turned out that these meetings did not occur, because plane records and passport records and all this other evidence showed that none of these people were in Paris together with Ari Ben-Menashe at that time. Both the bipartisan House and Senate investigations called Ben-Menashe a complete fabricator. And he was just kind of completely discredited at that time.

At the same time, though, interestingly enough, Ben-Menashe was being the source for Seymour Hersh’s book, The Samson Option. Seymour Hersh was, at that time, a New Yorker reporter who was most famous for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. So basically another far-left reporter, investigative reporter in a mainstream media outlet who will go and will sort of jump on any story that’s embarrassing to the United States and its allies.

And The Samson Option was a book about the Israeli nuclear program. And in it, Hersh alleges that Robert Maxwell, who was the media baron—big-time media baron in London—was a Mossad spy. And the basis for this claim was Ari Ben-Menashe. And so this hits the newspapers—this comes out, and it creates a big firestorm. And immediately Robert Maxwell says, “This is nonsense. I’m going to sue all of you people.” Well, two weeks later, he was found dead off of his boat. So the libel suit went nowhere.

And Ben-Menashe and Hersh and whoever were free to spend the next several decades basically working to cement this allegation about Maxwell into as many books as possible. The first book after The Samson Option was by Gordon Thomas. It was called Gideon’s Spies, just like a—I don’t know—six, seven hundred page book about the secret history of the Mossad.

Now, I read this book 20 years ago, and I have to say it’s entertaining as anything. But, since it’s sourced to Ari Ben-Menashe, it’s also probably significantly nonsense as well. And it’s been translated into 16 languages. It is literally the authoritative book on the Mossad. And it forms much of the Mossad legend in the West, or let’s say outside of Israel.

Another book that Ben-Menashe worked on with Gordon Thomas was called Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy. So, not very subtle. But the effect of all of this publication and all of this work that Ben-Menashe did in order to inject these narratives into books—they bore fruit, because after a certain amount of time, these books become authoritative history. They become the sources in Wikipedia; they become sort of the conventional wisdom that everyone knows.

So for Ben-Menashe to jump on a podcast in 2019 and link Epstein with Maxwell was quite wild, because here he is making an allegation against Epstein that uses as proof his allegation 30 years ago against Maxwell. And then, after doing this interview, he does the same thing that he did with Maxwell. So he goes and he finds himself several different writers who write authoritative-looking books. The first one was named Dylan Howard, who was at the National Enquirer. That one was kind of tabloid trashy, so that one didn’t really go anywhere.

But the next one he hit pay dirt with, which was Whitney Webb’s book, One Nation Under Blackmail. And Whitney Webb is a young, super far-left, super anti-Israel reporter at MintPress, which is, again, anti-imperialist—kind of crazy anti-Israel news site: anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-Russia, pro-Iran.

And so she writes this book about Epstein being Mossad and blackmailing America’s leaders, etc. And pretty much her entire case—actually, I’ll say her entire case—for Epstein being Mossad is based on Ari Ben-Menashe. And it is sourced to her interviews with him and his other appearances on a couple of podcasts.

So what we see is we see an amazing—obviously, I don’t think it’s a coincidence, but we see the same guy show up making the same allegation of someone who is either almost dead—who will be dead very soon—on one hand with Maxwell. And then, on the other hand, with Epstein, who was just recently dead. And then spending the next couple of years doing source laundering to get this into mainstream authoritative books so that he can disappear, because he is someone whose credibility is very easily exposed—or lack of credibility is exposed.

So in the intervening 30-some years between Maxwell and Epstein, what was Ben-Menashe doing? Well, he moved to Montreal, and he opened up a lobbying firm that’s not really a lobbying firm. So it is a firm that is a kind of fake news, information-warfare-for-hire company whose clients are exclusively warlords and Russia. Well, let’s say Russia-linked warlords and bad actors, from Robert Mugabe to the Wagner Group to pro-Putin folks in Serbia, which is—he’s got a current contract with some of these guys down. So his relationship with the Russians and with Russian intelligence is very tight. So you add all this stuff up together, and I think the picture becomes pretty clear.

One thing that I always would kind of love to ask is, okay, if this story is legitimate and Ari Ben-Menashe is legitimate, then why hasn’t he appeared on the largest podcasts in America that have discussed this issue?

Both Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly have said his name and have referenced Ari Ben-Menashe’s testimony about Maxwell being Mossad. Okay, have him on. Why won’t he come on? Why won’t they have him on? I’m not sure.

I tried to track down the original. His name is Zev Shalev—he’s the original podcaster who had Ben-Menashe appear on his show in, I guess, September 2019 to make this allegation. And there is no way—as soon as I asked him a question about Ari Ben-Menashe, this guy was gone. He did not—he was not really interested in responding, and he kind of blocked me on social media. Okay, so I guess this guy is pretty sensitive to questions about Ari Ben-Menashe.

But anyway, that’s what I track in the book, and I track how this happened, and then sort of what happened next, which is the American podcast space picking up on all this through Whitney Webb especially. So Whitney Webb goes—she writes the book, Ben-Menashe is allowed to recede into the background, and it’s Whitney Webb.

And her books are, I guess, both of them together, maybe like eighteen hundred pages. So it seems like authoritative and scholarly, with tons of footnotes. They’re nonsense footnotes, but footnotes nonetheless. So she goes on podcasts, and then people like Ian Carroll talk about her at length, mention her twice to Joe Rogan when he’s on. So this kind of goes through the atmosphere, and it goes through pro-Russia podcasters and pro-Russia media and what I call conspiracy entrepreneurs.

Great people like Ian.

Yeah. Who are people like Ian Carroll, who are like, “Okay, this is just what I do, is I just talk about conspiracy theories, and I make a living on social media like this.” So that’s pretty much the story.

And the last two chapters are a chapter on how I attributed this to Russia and on what basis. And I thought that was an important section to add, because I’m writing this story, and I was very aware of why I didn’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist talking about an information operation. I didn’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist myself. So I’m like, okay, well, there are actually ways—legitimate ways. There’s a methodology that has been developed over the course of decades on how to attribute foreign information operations. You can’t just point and say, “Well, yeah, I think it’s those guys,” whatever.

And I looked to the Active Measures Working Group, which was a group that was kind of half inside, outside government during the Reagan administration. And they were tasked with doing exactly that. They were tasked with tracking and attributing Russian—or at that time, Soviet—information operations. And they were very successful. So they used a methodology that I used as well for this book.

And the last chapter, Imposing Costs, is sort of my suggestion, my thinking that these information operations are costly to the United States, and they should be taken seriously. And I think that we have this idea that, as soon as we start talking about this, people will pipe up and they’ll say, “Oh, no, this is a free speech issue.” And I say, well, it’s not really—it may be a free speech issue when Americans discuss it. But where it begins is not—it’s not a free speech. They don’t have First Amendment protections in Moscow or in Doha or in Tehran.

Americans need to understand that there are places, like Moscow, where people wake up in the morning and they go to work, they go to the office, they punch in. And their job for the next eight to ten hours is: how do I screw with the American public, make them hate their country and make them lose their minds?

And that’s the job. And I would suggest that—let’s make things much harder for them personally. Let’s make it so that these people have to look over their shoulder, at the very least, number one. And number two is, I don’t understand why we don’t target bot farms and some of these boiler rooms where this stuff is happening, whether it be in Karachi or in Moscow or, really, throughout Africa, wherever it is. This is a serious thing. And I think that we’re just not treating it with any seriousness whatsoever. I’ve never seen anything like it.

You have people who are in America that had been concerned about the negative effects of video games. And that’s like, okay, that was an issue back then. But compared to social media—in terms of how ubiquitous it is, in terms of how many people are on it, and the ability for it to really shape and disfigure everything in your brain.

It’s not even close, and nobody cares. There’s no attention on it whatsoever. I think there are a lot of reasons for that. I think at the end of the day, it’s a business reason. But I don’t know—this book, and whenever I open my mouth and talk about it anywhere, is like my little contribution to trying to push back on this, then to make people aware that this is a real problem that needs to be addressed.

One of the things I wanted to ask you—I think when I was on Twitter—it will forever be Twitter to me, not X.

I just, you know, you tell them on the subway.

So when I was on last night, and I was just doom scrolling for a little bit before I called it a day, I was, for the first time in a very long time—I know we’re generally positive, but I was very deeply concerned. The factions that are forming seem completely by design. I know you have noticed this. We have been talking about this for well over a year before Candace Owens hijacked the assassination of Charlie Kirk. We’ve kind of had a finger on the pulse of what we call the woke right, and I think that term is something that’s widely accepted now. But why do you think that these types of conspiracies bounce around with such proliferation in the woke right sphere over something that would be far more truthful?

Well, number one is, behind the woke right is really the Russians. And that’s true. I don’t want to be kind of too expansive about it, because I don’t think it includes everybody. And we’re in an environment here where you don’t necessarily need command and control. And that’s something that people really misunderstand. I think there’s very little command and control, actually. I think you have a lot of ideological affinity. People just kind of agree. They hold kind of crazy opinions, and they’re wrong, and they’ve—people radicalized.

The nature of what we have now on social media—and when I say social media, I mean the platforms themselves, but then also the way that we’ve sort of organized ourselves to consume and to interact with those platforms, like group chats and, whatever, text groups and things like that.

All of which are sort of by their nature given to making people more and more crazy and more radical. So you don’t necessarily have to have someone who was picking up the phone and saying, “Okay, all you people need to do X, Y, or Z.” And I think that happens organically, because there is some identification with, “This is what we’re all doing. This is what my side is doing now. This is what my group is doing now.” And, for example, with Aleksandr Dugin, who I’m sure your listeners are very familiar with.

Well, actually, they may not be. So you may want to explain who he is.

Okay. So Dugin is a really kind of interesting figure. To give, I guess, the full backstory: Dugin emerged from the French far right. He’s obviously a Russian. He was a big fan of the Soviet Union, despite not entirely being a communist. He was more like a kind of fascist Stalinist, kind of temperamentally, but his intellectual background comes from the French far right after World War Two. Interestingly enough, a lot of those folks ended up converting to Shia Islam, of all things. And some of them actually even moved to Iran. Why? Because in 1979, 1980, the early eighties, the absolute vanguard against the West was Iran. It may not have been the most powerful, but it was definitely the most purely anti-American.

Anyway, so Dugin is a kind of long time—he comes from a KGB family. He is a philosopher of some kind, specializing in Heidegger. But what I think he is chiefly is, he is for the export market pretty much alone. So in Russia, I don’t think he has a lot of juice, but he is amplified as an influencer in the West to target a very specific type of disaffected right-winger. And, frankly, he’s been successful in that.

His main kind of ideological preoccupation is called multipolarity. And multipolarity, when used by someone like Dugin with a kind of capital M, basically means the end of the American hegemony. And you basically split the world up between the American sphere, the Chinese sphere and the Russian sphere.

And really, what that is—incredibly disadvantageous to the United States, not only politically, but also economically and militarily, et cetera. So that’s his thing. He deeply hates the United States. This year, even—I think he said that Russia’s policy should be to hand over nuclear weapons to any country that hates the United States and is willing to use them. So it’s kind of hard to take seriously when you have Westerners who kind of fancy Dugin.

But interestingly enough, as it relates to my book—so I’ve been doing this a long time. My background is—I have a degree in Cold War history, and I was always obsessed with Soviet active measures and really kind of the legacy of the Cold War when it came to this stuff, and in information warfare. And for many years, I’ve been noticing, kind of here and there, about the link between conspiracism in American media and the Russians.

It felt like wherever you would look, when there was a big, kind of crazy conspiracy something, there was always some kind of Russian figure pushing it, whether it be Dugin’s very strange relationship with Alex Jones that goes back like 20 years, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Let’s say it: I can’t come up with an honest—with a nice explanation for what that is. Or someone like Elizabeth Lane, who was, again, obvious Russian bad actor, whose prior job before she became like a Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens epigone was the CEO of a weird conspiracy internet TV network.

So I was like, there’s some kind of weird relationship with this. The Russians must have some kind of understanding of conspiracism and, frankly, of the negative effects of conspiracism.

They need to know this. This is why I think they’re pushing it. So as I was writing the larger book, and then also this chapter, the way I wanted to present it was as follows. I wanted to say, on one hand, you have what information warfare ideally does to a target population. It destroys their faith in their own system. It makes them question the virtue of their own country. It makes them go to war with their own countrymen and take their foreign enemies as allies. It makes them unable to think clearly and rationally. And it makes them unable to really kind of follow or even understand evidence—what makes two plus two equal four.

So on one hand you have information warfare doing that. And on the other hand, you have conspiracy theories doing exactly the same thing. The effect of both conspiracy theories and information warfare—

it’s like the same. So that’s what I’m saying. So that was the argument that I was going to make: that the Russians understand this. What I didn’t appreciate, or what I didn’t know, was, yes, in fact, there’s actually Russian writing on this exact topic.

And when I found it, I was really in shock, and it was written by none other than Aleksandr Dugin. So I found a book about conspiracy theories as information warfare by Dugin that had never been translated into English—written at various times, but published together in one volume in 2005, which is prior to the publication of his other, more celebrated books. And I tracked it down, and I translated it, and I went through it very deeply. And I was in shock at how closely Dugin’s language mirrors the language and the concerns and the topics of woke right people.

And, you know—

Hardcore—let’s say hardcore anti-Israel people on the right. For example, Dugin was obsessed with the Scofield Bible. And the Scofield Bible and the importance of creating an alliance between Catholics and Muslims and other—so, Eastern Orthodox Christians—against evangelicals in particular. And Israel-supporting Christians also. And talk about the Scofield Bible. This is stuff that you see on Twitter every day. You see on podcasts every day. Yes. And here’s Dugin in 2005 saying this stuff.

The other thing that Dugin said in the book, which was, again, very significant: it’s about conspiracy theories, but most of the book actually is about Jews. And it’s about Jews because he identifies anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in particular as the most potent form of information warfare weapon. And reading that was wild, because it was like everything that appeared to be happening—

as you look around, was actually kind of written by Dugin and operationalized years later—frankly, when it became easy, when technology made it easy: Twitter and podcasts and whatever. So segments of that Dugin book appear as the appendix in my book.

Which is fantastically.

Helpful, by the way.

Yeah, I really didn’t want to characterize it.

Yeah.

I didn’t want to just characterize it and move on. I wanted to supply people with kind of more primary source information, because I knew that there would be people who would be interested. And me just saying, “Hey, there’s this book,” is not the same as being able to actually read the book. And I think once anyone reads the excerpts from the book, I think they realize very quickly what the game is.

I completely agree. It’s such a fantastic source material that, once you know the pattern, you can spot the pattern in so many different venues. So I really appreciated that was included.

When you look at what Tucker has been doing relentlessly for three years, it looks like the Dugin script. It really does—to use conspiracies about Jews. Of course, he’s smart enough to let his guests do the bad stuff. So what he does is he brings on crazy lunatic, dishonest conspiracy theorists, Nazi revisionists, all sorts. And he sits there nodding. And he said, “Well, I didn’t say that.” But what he’s doing is using conspiracy theories about Jewish control to destroy our society, destroy our presidency, destroy our foreign policy.

Do you think he’s actually following that script? Do you think he’s a disciple of Dugin? Do you think there’s a connection there? And I only want you to say what you know, what you have a reasonable belief in, and you can tell us why. But it sure seems to me that he scripted.

I think it’s for these people. So this is why the last chapter of the book is important, because there are things that we will never know, because we don’t have access to the investigative tools. This is the most obvious. At this point now, where you have—talking about the headlines, ripped straight from today’s headlines—we are seeing a full-court press by the Russians and by many of their friends and allies in this country on the right to take out Donald Trump. They tanked the midterms for this reason: to put the Democrats in power, and to maybe impeach him, and to get Vice President Vance in power. That’s the goal. That’s always been the goal.

And I think that even knowing that much—let’s say you’re skeptical of that. Let’s say, “Yeah, I’m not sure that’s happening. Let me go see.” That should be more than enough for any counterintelligence investigation.

Let’s look at it. The U.S. government has the ability to go and find things out that we don’t. We’re just people, we’re just citizens. We can’t intercept phone communications. And you don’t even need to intercept Tucker’s, or those of American citizens, though there’s plenty of cause. Look at Dugin, look at the people around him. Look at the posse of guys. I didn’t write about this in the book, but there’s a whole group of former KGB and GRU guys who are now professors at Moscow State University.

And guess what—they’re publishing the papers, like any academic would. One of them is called, like, influencing Gen Z Americans on TikTok. They’re thinking about these things, and they’re pretty open about it. So this is a task for the U.S. government.

This is a task for—frankly, for the CIA, for our intelligence services. Unfortunately, I’m not confident that under this administration we will have any answers. So I want to answer your question. I think that we will never know if it’s an ideological affinity or if it’s something more than that. I think in every case is probably different. My particular read of Tucker Carlson is that he is absolutely a true believer.

And I think so too.

And in the absence of having people telling him what he can and cannot say, this is exactly who he is.

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

You mentioned in the book in passing, and you mentioned here in passing, but to me, it’s kind of an example that has stuck with me throughout the post-October seven world. This guy, Ian Carroll, never heard of him. All of a sudden he shows up on X, gets a million, 2 million followers. Batshit crazy conspiracy stuff. Who is this guy? How does a guy like that—is that just a social phenomenon, that he tapped into what he recognized was a great commercial opportunity? Does he have connections to Dugin? Who is this guy, and how does somebody like that rise so quickly?

He had a following before, though, because I used to watch his videos before he went crazy. What he would do is he would look at a shelf at, let’s just say, one of the big box stores. And he would look at shampoos and he would go through which ones were owned by what companies, to show that almost everything on the shelf is owned by two or three companies. And even though you think you’re getting a superior product by purchasing this brand, it’s still owned by X, one of three brands that’s represented on the shelf. I thought this was really interesting. He had a whole research methodology for that. Being a pretty crunchy person myself, and being very conscientious of ingredients and everything, I found that to be very interesting.

And then it’s like all of the sudden this took an extreme hard left turn into crazy town. And I think that’s what most people know him for now. Not that I followed him religiously, but he was someone who popped up in my feed with these types of things. But anyway, I’m sorry, go ahead.

No, I didn’t know about that part. I think a lot of people have tried to look into some of these folks. I noticed too that you have your Ian Carrolls—I call them conspiracy entrepreneurs, because there’s a whole lot of them, on YouTube in particular. There are a whole bunch of people who have appeared out of nowhere. I’m trying to think of what this guy’s name is. Dalton something. Anyway, these guys appeared out of nowhere with a very expensive studio. And they’re doing like three-hour podcasts with John Kiriakou, former CIA traitor who was in jail.

And, who now. You can never tell the same story.

He never tells the same story twice. Every single time he tells a story, something’s completely different, and you can tell this guy is nothing more than a disinformation agent. It’s not hard to sniff him out at all. I think some of the others are far more nefarious and a lot more innocuous than him. But yes.

But I would see these people pop up out of nowhere with amazing production values and cameras that are in tens of thousands of dollars. And just the art direction alone is—you have to hire someone. It’s not like we’re doing it here, or anything that I’ve got access to. And all of a sudden their first shows are like millions of views. And they go and they talk about Bigfoot one day, and then they talk about Epstein Island the other day, and blah.

And for some of these people, I was like, okay, I’m going to look to see who they are. And for a lot of them, either they’re totally fake made-up names, and they’ve done their best to sort of obscure who they are, where they’re from, what their deal is. Maybe they’ll talk about CIA stuff or black ops or whatever, or Bigfoot.

And these people generate an insane amount of clicks—just huge audiences. And so it’s a kind of vicious circle, because on one hand you have people who are probably doing this for ideological reasons. And then you have other people who are probably doing this for money reasons. And then you have a massive bot and sort of fake infrastructure that rewards people doing it.

So then you have people who are kind of late adopters, who were just random people who say, “Hey, I can make a ton of money on Elon’s platform or on TikTok or wherever through monetization by talking about the Jews.” And of course, it’s all being powered by bots. So it’s really a vicious cycle, because you have ideology on one hand coming together with the possibility of making a lot of money.

And it’s hard to disentangle it, but that’s why it shouldn’t be left up to normal schnooks like us on the outside to investigate this stuff. There are people who do this for a living and who have access to the investigative tools, and we just need to demand it.

Yeah.

Getting back to the Epstein-specific conspiracy, the conspiracy, as I understand it, is that he was running an international blackmail ring. That’s the claim. Is there anybody who has come forward? Because if he were doing that along the lines that were described, you would have hundreds of witnesses. Maybe thousands, but let’s say hundreds of witnesses. It’s very hard to keep a conspiracy quiet when you have hundreds of people who are in on it. Has anyone come forward and said, “I was blackmailed by him”? Has anybody come forward that said, “I participated in blackmail”? Is there any person who has firsthand knowledge of it beyond a theory who has come forward? And there certainly would be incentives. If you’re part of something like this and the cops are after you, cut a deal and you turn states out. Has any of that ever happened?

Not to my knowledge. There’ve been more investigations on this than on most things, and we haven’t seen that at all. We haven’t seen an allegation of what the Israelis kind of theoretically would have gotten from such a blackmail operation. Even that isn’t alleged. I guess the closest we can get to something like that is them saying, “Oh, well, Trump launched the Iran war because Bibi had Epstein blackmail tapes on Trump.” And at that point, I kind of despair, because it’s very hard to argue with absolutely no fact—on no fact basis whatsoever. You could be arguing, like what my dad likes to say, “What if my grandmother was my grandfather?” It’s just—you could be kind of literal.

In 2026, anything’s possible. But along that line, it seems to me that these people have exploited what is the classic conspiracy theory methodology: rather than proving it, they make the accusation and then demand you disprove it. And that seems to be what’s going on here.

Right.

Yes. So I noticed that actually between November and January—probably November, December of 2020, after the election of 2020. That was when I first started—on a mass scale, I started to see people on Twitter who were saying, “Prove it’s not true,” in regards to the stolen election. “Prove it’s not true.” And when I saw that, I began to be very alarmed, because that’s not how any of this works. And you know right away that you can’t argue with anyone who’s kind of proposing that. In many ways too, the Epstein story is like part two of QAnon, which itself is part two of Pizzagate. And I think that the more time that passes, the more I’m inclined to believe that there are probably Russian fingerprints on both of those things.

I would not—I wouldn’t—I suspect it would be something to look into. I’ll say that. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were. Because I think that for those of us on the right who are not insane, QAnon in particular was not really something that we paid it so much attention to. Maybe we were lucky that we didn’t know people who kind of found themselves—wound up in all that insanity.

But there are a couple of really good books on that insanity. And that insanity was unbelievably potent. And it destroyed families. It destroyed lives. There’s something very deep and primordial about this stuff. And when I say this stuff—Pizzagate, Epstein, QAnon—what ties them all together is this idea of, whatever, sexual assault of children.

And sort of when you get to that topic, people feel it’s so obviously wrong. It’s so obviously evil and bad that people are willing then to make accommodations for things that they can’t prove, or things that they don’t know are true. So for example, it’s like, “Well, if this is the topic, then I’m not sure I need that much evidence to be persuaded that they did whatever. Or that they were drinking the blood of children in order to stay young or whatever.”

And it really infects the mind, and it breaks a kind of—let’s say a special kind of person. It targets a special kind of person and it breaks their brain. And what it does is it kind of overwhelms them, so that they believe that basically anything is justified and evidence to support their contention.

It’s such a big deal. It’s such a big allegation that no evidence is required. And they are full of anger and passion, such that it overwhelms any type of capacity for reason.

So for example, the day I released my book—granted, a decent number of these are bots, but still, to this day, I can log on to Instagram and I will see nasty comments accusing me of—“Oh, you don’t think that—you have to be able to have a—let’s say a different understanding of the Epstein story than I do. That means you’re obviously—you want to protect pedophiles, or you want—you’re also involved. You’re, blah.”

And the amount of anger and hysteria and passion that is ignited by these types of topics—I don’t think it’s an accident, for example, that—it would be really weirdly coincidental for these three particular, let’s say, social media viral events like Pizzagate and QAnon and Epstein to have so much in common, and to really target the same type of person.

It’s kind of remarkable in that respect.

What are the Epstein files, and how do politicians like Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna and Marjorie Taylor Greene—so this is not just something that randos on the Internet have picked up. They’ve picked it up, too. How does that factor into all this, that you have politicians in the U.S. who almost daily talk about the cover-up and “You’re covering up for people” and “We’re going to release everything”? And of course, they never did. Just tell people: what, succinctly, are the, quote, Epstein files that they say are not being released?

Honestly, I’m not 100 percent sure of exactly what they’re talking about. I suspect—we know that they’re playing a game. So we know that their audience and the people that they’re trying to attract have already fully convinced themselves that somewhere out there is a file or a storehouse of information that basically confirms all of their narratives about how horrible this case was. And it’s in a lockbox somewhere that the government is hiding because of whatever their imagination can concoct. So whether that be they’re hiding it because Israel is blackmailing them, or they’re hiding it because of other types of corruption—that would depend person to person.

But these are very dark, cynical politicians who are taking advantage of some of the more hysterical, intelligent folks in America to try to whip them up.

For example, we see what happened: Epstein had, I guess, a notebook or a little black book that was basically his phone book, his contact address book. Well, that contact address book morphed in the public consciousness, because of conspiracy entrepreneurs and what have you. It morphed into his client list. And he never had a client list—we have no evidence that he had a client list. I didn’t write this book about Epstein and the case as such. But part of the reason why the Russians were so keen on injecting their narrative into this particular story is because it’s a story wherein the gulf between what we think we know and what the evidence can show is so huge that it’s a total free-for-all, and it is like a fact-free zone.

And it’s a fact-free zone for a lot of different reasons. The main reason it’s a fact-free zone is because, for many years covering this story as a journalist, all of the incentives were to make it as sensational as possible from a variety of different directions. So, for example, I agree Epstein was a bad guy. We have records of him—not assaulting, but, whatever, sexually mistreating minors and other women, et cetera. We have plenty of evidence of that.

But then we also have a massive industry of victims’ lawyers. And the guy had a lot of money. And if you want to do—lawyers want to do class action stuff, or they want to enlist as many people as possible to be potential victims, in order to take as much money as possible from the guy.

There is such a thing as paying for reporters to cover this, and paying for media. And so we have a lot of the reporters who spent years covering Epstein—their agenda is not, “Hey, let me get to the bottom of the Epstein story.” Their agenda is like, “Let me do a salacious set of articles or book or whatever that can then be optioned into a Netflix series or something like that,” or, “Let me get paid on the backend by one of the victims’ attorneys.”

And so what you have is an incentive structure not to deliver the facts, and to make it as salacious as possible. And when you have folks in the media doing that all over the place, and really nobody responsible for getting the facts about this case out as best that they can, this is what happens. It just becomes like a free-fire zone for things we don’t know, things that are not—that are going to be true.

And everyone fills in the blanks.

Yeah.

And it ends up potentially driving an element of the public completely crazy. And I think that’s what happened.

So the Dugin methodology sounds like a more sophisticated version of what Nancy Pelosi referred to as the wrap-up smear, which is you plant a story in the media with your smear. Then you use the media reporting on it as the proof of the smear. And that seems a lot of what’s been happening: the uncorroborated story about the international blackmail ring gets planted in various sources. And now you don’t actually need the truth or proof, because the reporting is now the proof, even though it started from the person who planted the smear. And so it seems that’s a lot of what’s happened here.

And what I keep getting back to, whenever I see a conspiracy theory on a large scale, international scale, is: how did they keep it a secret for so long? How did hundreds and hundreds of people in disparate places keep it a secret for so long? And the problem is—and I think you pointed out—social media has a lot to do with it.

What do we do about social media? We’re no longer talking about differences of viewpoint or differences of opinion. We’re talking about, on a massive industrialized, governmental scale, just fake stuff being put out there. And I think—what do we do about this as a society?

That’s a big question. I think that, as I read in the book, the first thing to do about it is to go after the people who have it as their mission, who are abroad—they have it as their mission to use social media as information warfare against us. I think that’s an easy one. Not easy in the sense that it’ll happen. I’m not that crazy, but easy in the sense that it should be an easy call. I think it should be a very obvious call, but today, sadly, you can’t even get people to understand that it’s a problem.

This is what I’m kind of really worried about now, is that we just don’t understand that it’s a problem. We had an understanding, for example, of how much social media would negatively affect, or let’s say dating apps would negatively affect, the relationship between men and women, and how courtship works, and sex and all that stuff, and marriage, and blah.

There’s no question that these things have had an effect. Even if you think they’re good, they have absolutely powerful enough to have an effect on pretty much everything. But when it comes to this stuff—when it comes to the effect, politics and reality and conspiracy theories and whatever—all of a sudden we become libertarians, the most fanatical libertarians, where we say, “Actually, no, even—it’s sort of—there’s nothing we can do. We just have to sort of grin and bear it.”

We are in an unprecedented situation, where this stuff happens so fast. And I’ll tell you, I don’t think there’s an issue that’s more important. There’s no issue, in my mind, it’s more important to me than the cognitive health of the American people. And I think that’s where this stuff comes in. I think that’s exactly where it fits in. Because however many problems you have—a depression, you have another pandemic, you have wars, or anything you can think of—the American people can have a chance to fight back and to kind of defeat it.

However, if you have a bunch of crazy people running around who can’t think, who are fanatical, who don’t understand how the rules of evidence work, don’t understand that two plus two equals four and they think it’s 12, or are obsessed with hunting the Jews that they believe are actually secretly pulling the strings behind our society, then you really don’t have a chance, because you’re dealing with kind of a mentally damaged population.

And again, I say this all the time and I really mean it: Americans need to get over this really pernicious idea that nothing bad could ever happen to us and everything will always be fine. We are just like the rest of the world. We’re just like the rest of the world. And thankfully we have been successful. Actually, we are just like the rest of the world in terms of our biology—we’re human just like anyone else—but we’ve been successful because we’ve been smart and we haven’t allowed ourselves to go down the road of insane conspiracism that has destroyed so many societies before.

And what it does is it just makes them ill-prepared to deal with the problems that they have to face. And if we decide that, oh, we could just kind of go down this road and nothing bad will ever happen to us, I think we’ve got another thing coming, sadly. And we’re really going to find out in a bad way.

I think we’re already headed down that road. I think this last election—we’ve had this conversation with a handful of people, because, without getting too deep into the political weeds here, what we’re dealing with on the left is not the left of the early 1990s. This is not something where we have a moderate difference of opinion in a handful of ways. We’re engaging with actual communists and socialists who will behave that way, who will first seek to punish their enemies. There will be no reconciliation. There will be no reaching across the aisle, as it were. Their goal is to destroy that. That’s just the nature of their ideology, is to destroy the individual.

And that just has devastating consequences for many reasons, but America is nothing if not the land of the individual. And so I’m very concerned—not just what social media has done, what the public education system has done, what so many things that we have allowed have done to cognitive understanding, to mental health.

We have an incredibly toxic cocktail brewing right now. And I have no idea how we find our way out of it. I don’t know what the anti-venom is. I know we will continue doing what we’re doing, but it’s very concerned times. And I think people need to be aware of that—not to be afraid, not to be fearful, but the enemy is real. And we’re contending with them in a very different way than we have in the past.

And I think, of course, books like yours, I so appreciated again, for many reasons, but it spells out the playbook. And again, like I said before, once you know the pattern, you can spot the pattern. And we tend to be very ignorant here, except for people who are nerds like us, who love to read about these things and understand these things.

Generally speaking, people are very unaware that the information warfare, the psychological warfare, is very real. It’s very real. It’s very active and it’s very present. So the ability to understand how this works and how it’s playing out and what we’re seeing in our own lives and our own politics and our own cultural battles is so important now, so much more than it was 15 years ago.

So I really appreciate that.

Are you able to tell us what other things you’re working on? What can we expect from you next?

Sure. I guess the first thing is I’m looking forward to finishing up the Viral Libels book—Viral Libels: Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories as Information Warfare—where I will kind of dig deeper into this topic, digging deeper into the topic of what is anti-Semitism, what are conspiracy theories, how does this whole thing work? And sort of the second half of the book is going to be definitive debunkings of some of the most popular ones that are on the American right now. And, sort of, with the awareness that, kind of insanely, no resource like this exists currently. If you want some of these conspiracy theories explained or debunked, you can find a little bit here, a little bit there, but very few resources exist to deal with it in a comprehensive way. So in addition to the book, I’m creating a system that will deal with this in a more comprehensive way.

And you’ll hear more about that as kind of time moves on.

Well, I’m sure Kemberlee will have our closing comments, but I’ll have my closing comment, which is, it’s a great book. People need to go out and read it and study it. And there’s nothing new under the sun. So what we’re seeing go on here is not new under the sun. There are people who have been advocating conspiracies as a method of destroying our country, of destroying the West. And this lays it out great.

So I’m personally thrilled you were able to come on. And as I said at the very start, I’m glad somebody finally wrote this book, because it’s been really bothering me, which is: where are the witnesses of the hundreds and hundreds of people who were supposedly blackmailed? And so I’m glad that you’ve described what this is about. It’s not actually about anything that happened. It’s about using speculation as to what happened as a tool for other purpose. So thank you very much for coming on our podcast, and I’ll let you, Kemberlee, wrap up here.

The last thing I want to talk about briefly is the cover art on your book—which, I never know which way this thing is going, but I know we have a picture of it there. I also have your other book. I really think these two would go together as a great Christmas holiday bundle for people who need this information in their lives. There are people that I know who have been led astray, and that’s also your book, and they’re—in their role in much of this too.

But if you go to my website, you can get them signed and I can ship them out to you together.

Exactly. See, that’s perfect. And we’ll put links to that. But these are both fantastic reads, very illuminating, but it’s the cover art. So of course I’ve known you long enough to know that you have a great appreciation for art and all of its manifestations. And when I saw the cover of this book, to me, I immediately thought: movie poster for a film noir. That’s what this read to me, and I loved it, and they’re beautiful in a very different way.

And it’s not a small thing, because I think something that I champion constantly in every way that I can is the virtue of beauty, and how good art form can reconnect us back to our own humanity and to the human experience. And at least in my view, to the glory of God and all of his creation. And so I really appreciated that this appears to be very thoughtful, and wondered if you could tell us a little bit about how you came to create this book cover.

Sure. Well, thank you. That means a lot. One of the things that I’ve done, sort of as a side hustle, for the last 20 years is book covers and other types of design work kind of like this. And if you go to my website, you can see more of them at davereaboi.com.

And with that cover, I was thinking of noir. I was thinking of German Expressionism, and something I wanted—something suggestive of Epstein, but I didn’t want to have a picture of Epstein. It could have looked a lot more like Epstein had I not had to put the title section there. It’s really funny, because if you put a little mark here, then it becomes absolutely Epstein spitting image. But I couldn’t do that, because I needed a place to put the title. But the inside also, it was kind of done with care, the typography and all that stuff, because I think it’s important.

I think it’s important. I agree with you that it’s a small thing. There are people that like to read these things. It’s funny: about 50% of the buyers of this book bought the paperback and the other 50% bought the Kindle. And the Kindle’s nice. It’s great to be able to read, especially for folks who are not in the United States. And you can sort of get it right away. You don’t have to wait.

But I like it when people buy the paperback, because then they kind of—it’s almost like album artwork. You get to see the thing, and it was kind of lovingly put together, with the intent of it looking good. And that’s just something that a lot of folks don’t appreciate anymore. And especially kind of in the age of AI, where you open up YouTube and it’s like every thumbnail is AI, and every—I’ve already seen several—Ron DeSantis put out a book last year or something.

And it was like the worst AI cover I’ve ever seen. And I just shake my head for many reasons. But the first reason is you’re putting artists out of work. The other reason, too, is that it just usually doesn’t do a good job.

It’s true. And all of those things matter as a bibliophile. We don’t hoard many things around my house, but we have stacks of books everywhere. There’s stacks of books. And it’s the whole experience. It’s the way the cover feels, the way the pages turn, the way the book is organized—all of these things matter. They’re not insignificant considerations by any means. So I definitely appreciated that about this book too.

But I want to thank you so much for your time. And of course, thank you for all the work that you have done here. It’s just such a tremendous resource. And I know it’s one that I will refer back to repeatedly. And I love that. I love when I find texts like this that I know will be of perpetual benefit and use. So that’s exactly what this is. When we go to post this, we will definitely include links on how you can purchase it, either directly from Dave or via Amazon or your retailer of choice, but it’s definitely a must-read. So add it to your list.

Thank you so much. And thank you guys for the work that you have done for so many years. And especially just kind of being brave against this onslaught of insanity. It certainly often feels like there are not many of us out there fighting.

It is true. It is true. Well, thanks again. And to all of our listeners and watchers: buy the book, promise you won’t regret it. And we’ll see y’all next time.