Ari Ben-Menashe, Dugin and the Epstein-Mossad story

CounterOffensive Hi, everybody. Welcome to the CounterOffensive with Ryan Mauro. I am Ryan Mauro. And this episode is probably going to blow the minds of 99 % of you out there. This is one of those things that you’re going to want to bookmark, favorite, and be ready to give to people that you know that are even dabbling in conspiracy theories, because at the very least, it’ll make for a good conversation. At the very best, it’s going to be like medication for a poison mind.

What we’re going to be talking about today is not the overall truth from every angle about Jeffrey Epstein. That’d be too much. I’m probably going to, next week, dive into some more of the details about what I think was going on there. But we’re going to tackle the narrative, which is the most important part, because your average person on the street—not just people that are on social media and into political conversations. This isn’t something just for wonks and people interested in politics. When it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, everybody knows who he is now and talks about it.

And he’s playing a role perhaps more than any other issue in forming the foundation for how people see the world, their level of cynicism, and really how they view the society that they live in. This has an effect on the health of someone’s brain, their cognitive ability, not just their politics, not just how they view foreign policy, and not just national security.

This is one of the most important podcasts I think I’ll probably ever do. And it’s going to shock a lot of people, because you have this general narrative out there where people refer to the Epstein class or all these different terms. And it goes back to the idea that Epstein is a tool of the CIA, the U.S. government, Israel, as if he’s a horny James Bond, extra horny James Bond, who just went around blackmailing people on behalf of Israel in the United States. And it’s the single smoking gun in the minds of most people, especially low information people and voters, that shapes their worldview. And that worldview is that the West is a villain. And how do we know? Because of one name, Jeffrey Epstein.

Now, what if it’s true that there is somewhat of a cover-up, that there is disinformation, that there is a hidden agenda, that a lot of what you’re seeing and hearing has been authored, but that includes even your own thoughts? What if it’s actually darker in that respect than people realize? Because people are proud of themselves, and they say, “Well, I’ve gotten to the truth,” because, especially for low information people, they’ve finally read some books about a topic. They’ve finally gone down the rabbit hole about something, because most people find this very interesting and salacious.

A lot of people are getting into research and understanding the world for the first time through studying Jeffrey Epstein. So they go a layer below the surface. They get to something new that maybe their friends don’t know. And they say, “Well, I’ve found the truth now. I’ve found the methodology to get there.” But then they stop. Not because they’re lazy, but because they don’t even know that they need to go deeper. Let the adversaries of the United States plan for you to only go that deep, for you to get that little bit of satisfaction, that self-satisfaction that tells you that you did your job as a responsible citizen in educating yourself. And now you know what you need to know in order to understand the world. You’ve taken the pill that you need to.

So there are two things I would say people have to be ready for and be armed with at all times if you follow this podcast. I just made a post on X outlining how most of the people involved in the Charlie Kirk assassination conspiracy realm all have contacts with the same people. There’s common denominators. That you want to have ready for when that topic comes up. The other big topic is kind of like Charlie Kirk assassination, but then much wider, is Jeffrey Epstein. And that’s what this podcast is going to address, and probably next week’s podcast is going to address from another angle.

We brought in truly the best expert for the angle that we’re going to be talking about, David Reaboi, a guy who I’ve known for a very long time. We’ve dealt with a lot of the same crazy people, a lot of the same influential, incredible people. And so I’ve gotten to know him largely through his work, and I can vouch for it. Definitely being credible, whether you agree or not, it’s credible. Ten times over. And I read most of his book that just came out that I hope all of you will buy, because it’s important for you to have.

I would happily recommend it being mandatory part of the curriculum in military related universities, intelligence related universities. I think it has to be part of a curriculum for our professional class working national security, those working in media, those working in politics. And you’re also supporting a good guy. And the best way I can summarize David Reaboi’s credibility, I would say, is if the brain could be worked out like a bicep, his brain would be bigger than his biceps and his shoulders, as you’re going to see in a moment what I’m referring to. Totally not driven by steroids, too. So before I bring on David Reaboi, let’s play the trailer for his book.

And I encourage everybody to buy it. I think it’s a necessity, not just something that you would enjoy reading. It’s not just fascinating. You need it in order to be a responsible citizen.

Let’s do it.

You’ve heard it everywhere on social media and on podcasts that Jeffrey Epstein worked for Mossad, running a decades-long sexual blackmail operation to trap and control American leaders on behalf of Israel. The mystery of his staggering wealth, his private island, and his suspicious death sent millions of Americans looking for a motive for Epstein’s crimes. This one seemed to explain the dark forces supposedly controlling their country. Only it’s not true.

I’m David Reaboi. My new book, The Epstein Conspiracy, follows its lie through books, Russian state media, and some of America’s biggest podcasts. The whole story rests on one man, Ari Ben-Menashe, a serial fabricator, paid by warlords and Russia-linked regimes to manufacture fake intelligence against their enemies. And here’s the craziest part. He’s done the same thing before. In 1991, he invented the story that media baron Robert Maxwell was also a Mossad spy. He spent decades feeding that story into books until people accepted it as history. Then, just weeks after Epstein’s death, he claimed the same about Epstein and offered no evidence. His story from 30 years ago became the supposed proof of his new one.

So the same man ran the same information operation twice, and much of the world bought it. It was only possible through source laundering, where people hear the same allegation in different places and mistake repetition for independent confirmation.

The forensic trail points straight to Moscow. Weaponizing the biggest story in the world was a state-level information operation designed to fracture America from within. We’ve already seen a historic rise in anti-Semitic violence in America. But the real prize for Moscow goes far beyond any military alliance in the Middle East, beyond Israel or even Jews. It targets America’s capacity to govern itself. And the damage is already visible. Conspiracy theories break brains. When millions are taken in, they can no longer think clearly or make decisions based on reality for themselves or for their country. The intended result? An America consumed by the hunt for a phantom enemy and defenseless against a real one. The Epstein Conspiracy. How Russia turned a lie about Jeffrey Epstein into a weapon against America, Israel, and Jews. Out now.

Well, that’s just about the best video promo for a book I’ve ever seen. Let’s bring in Dave Reaboi. David, thanks for joining us. Thanks for joining the Counteroffensive. And thanks for the work that you do. I’m not joking or exaggerating. And I’m not incentivized to say what I’m about to say. Your book is one of the best I’ve read in my life. Really. It’s one of my favorite. If I could only have a bookshelf with just the top shelf, it’d be right on there. So this is phenomenal work that you’ve done. Thanks for joining us. We do have a PowerPoint that you can just direct Regina, the producer, to go through at your leisure.

But why don’t I just let you take it away and explain to us: what would you say is the mystery that you’re solving? What was the question you were trying to answer that got you started on this project?

Well, first of all, thank you so much for the kind words in the prior segment and now. I very much appreciate it. And yes, we’ve known each other forever and have been on the same side of some ridiculous battles, specifically, I guess, first against Islamists and now against Russian information operations, which you’ve been right on top of in a way that a lot of people have not. So I just wanted to thank you for having me on and thank you for your work as well. So what the book is about, really, is it’s an investigation into how information warfare works. And what is the goal of information warfare? It’s to get people to change their minds about something that is dear to them without necessarily doing it directly.

So it is giving them a story, usually totally false, but maybe likely or plausible. And then that story has a moral weight to it. So if you buy into the story, it will knock down dominoes further along. So, for example, this Epstein story: the story that Jeffrey Epstein was an agent of Mossad that was sent on behalf of the Israeli government to blackmail American and world leaders and elites in order to benefit the Israeli government. That was a lie that I tracked in the book by people close to the Russians. And what I did was I basically told the story of how that happened and why it happened.

And basically what the Russians did.

So, was your mission—because I know people in chat are going to say this—you heard about Epstein talking to a former Israeli prime minister and having connections to Israel. And you said, “I, as a Jewish person, had to debunk it.” Is that what happened?

No, that’s not what happened.

That’s not what happened at all. It began because, like everyone else—I wasn’t terribly obsessed with the Epstein story over the course of years. I don’t like these types of stories. I don’t get—I see everyone else obsessed with them, so I don’t obsess with them. This was before he was arrested, before he died, the whole thing. And then he was arrested, and then he died in custody. And what was the narrative? What was everybody saying? Everyone was blaming Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton. And it was “Epstein didn’t kill himself.” And it was a story about the Clintons. It wasn’t even really serious. It was like a laugh line.

The year that Epstein died, interestingly enough, I saw, as I was researching the book, that “Epstein didn’t kill himself” material, like swag, T-shirts and buttons and all kinds of stuff, outsold Game of Thrones that year.

For Christmas and or Halloween or something like that. I think Christmas. So it was a kind of huge thing that everyone was obsessed with. And then all of a sudden it shifted. All of a sudden it shifted to Israel. And I started to scratch my chin and wonder, “Hey, this is kind of weird how this happened.” And it’s kind of weird when it happened.

So this was a thing that was kind of floating under the surface on the Internet until something very significant and interesting happened, which is the 12-day war. Israel knocked the crap out of Iran, destroyed its air defenses, and managed to hit a massive amount of targets over the course of 11 or 12 days inside Iran in a really kind of unprecedented military operation. Immediately the day after, Steve Bannon came out and was talking about Epstein and Mossad. And then very in short order, within a week or two, Megyn Kelly was talking about it.

And Tucker Carlson was talking about it. And really everyone on the right was talking about it. Let’s say everyone on the kind of—who had a big mainstream audience on the right was talking about it.

Well, what about it? So the 12-day war happens. Is this when they started saying, “Oh, Israel’s doing this, Trump is doing that to distract from the Epstein files”? Is that the timing that overlapped?

Well, this was before. This was the 12-day war. So this was prior. Yeah, 12-day war. This was 2025. So what happened there was that Israel proved that it was a military superpower, that it was an intelligence superpower, that it was the most powerful and effective military in the Middle East, full stop. And it is obviously a very valuable U.S. ally.

And so the motivation from the point of view of the Russians, or from the point of view of anyone who wants to harm America strategically, whether it be the Chinese or the Qataris or whoever, is to damage that relationship. And you damage that relationship by running around and screaming about Jeffrey Epstein controlling the government. But what the Epstein-Mossad story really does—or what it was intended to do—is convince Americans that the government of the United States is not really theirs. That we are in an occupied country, occupied by the Jews, by the Israelis, the Zionists, whatever words you want to use, depending on your particular positioning.

And that’s how they get Americans, patriotic Americans, to despise their own country and to work with enemies of the country against it.

I would even go, if I may, just a step further, and studies show this in regards to Islamist terrorists, but I’m sure it applies to everybody. In my own monitoring of extremist chats and just closely following prosecutions and investigations, that’s kind of the linchpin for violence: real radicalization, where someone wants to engage in treason and where they’re willing to harm people. You can have somebody who doesn’t want to harm anyone, but it still feels somewhat reluctantly that they have to at least support a violent cause, if not be violent themselves.

Because if your government is occupied, your country is no longer free. The elections are all fraudulent. And you’re going back to before 1776, and you’re now governed by the British Empire or the modern equivalent of it. I guess the Zionist conspiracy is violence justifiable. That’s a very disturbing and unsettling question to have to ask. But someone who believes that most of the time is going to be backed into a corner, and they’re going to have to say, “Well, it may not be my first option. But yes, if America is occupied and everyone’s being persecuted and our freedom has been totally taken away from us and everything you see is fake because there’s an entity so powerful and so evil that everything’s a mirage.”

Do you not have an obligation to fight that with everything that you have? So it’s a very dangerous line.

Yes, I agree with you completely. That’s the idea. And what it ends up doing as well, in regards to people who are not going to be violent or pre-violent or literally taking up arms, is it basically collapses politics in the country. So nothing matters anymore. No policy disagreements. Nothing matters anymore. And the only thing that really matters is, “OK, what do we do about the Jews? Because the Jews are controlling us. So let’s just start hunting Jews.”

And this is exactly what is going on in so many countries in the world, for the last several decades or even over the course of millennia. We wonder why Yemen is in the shape that it’s in or Egypt is in the shape that it’s in. It’s not because those people are necessarily stupid. It’s because they are obsessed. My favorite Wikipedia article for years, for decades now, has been Israel-related animal conspiracy theories.

Animal conspiracy theories. It’s an amazing—I hope they didn’t take it down, because Wikipedia now is very anti-Israel and this makes anti-Israel people look bad. But it’s an amazing page, and it’s like allegations in the Muslim world that Israel is using dolphins to be spies. And then there’s bugs and then there’s—Hey, wait a minute.

That one’s not that crazy, is it? The dolphins are spies. All right. But the other ones I know are not.

If you’re the Israelis, at that point, you may as well. You may as well say, “Hey, that’s a great idea.”

Let’s do this. Let’s go for it.

So this book originally—and I’m sorry we’re kind of jumping around, but I think it’ll make sense to the viewers. This book began as a chapter, as chapter six of a much larger book that I’m working on called Viral Libels, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories as information warfare. This was going to be the example: the particular case of the Epstein’s Mossad narrative. And then it grew and it got too big.

And as I started to look into it, I noticed a few things that—at first I thought that this was just a plain old internet conspiracy theory. And I was like, “Okay, let me look into it. Let me see how it goes.” And then I find that the same guy whose testimony is the basis for this entire Epstein-Mossad narrative, a guy named Ari Ben-Menashe, 30 years prior was also the same guy who popped up and said, “Hey, Robert Maxwell is Mossad,” again, without any evidence.

And then I started to scratch my head and I was like, “This is really weird,” because here’s this guy and he seems to be a professional in showing up and pointing a finger and saying, “This guy is Mossad and that guy is Mossad and this guy is Mossad and that guy is Mossad.” Usually after the person in question is deceased. So he does this not just with Epstein.

He does this with a series of people.

Yes. Okay. So when he came out and he accused Epstein three months after Epstein died, he said, “Oh, yes, how do I know? It’s because I met Epstein in Robert Maxwell’s office when he was working for Mossad and I was working for Mossad and it was all good.” And do you have any evidence? Did he work for Mossad? No. He worked for Aman. He worked for Aman?

Oh, no, he.

Did work for the… Okay. Which is Israeli military intelligence, but it’s not Mossad. It’s a different portfolio. But he was fired by the Israelis in the 80s.

Up. Somebody made a very good comment in the chat about Alex Stein yelling at one of our friends. If we can put that up on the screen. Yeah, because he was so infuriated at the rejection of the idea of Epstein being a Mossad agent, because he presented the fact he was very proud of, which is that Robert Maxwell was working for Mossad. So you must be an idiot to not buy the conspiracy theory, because Alex Stein, he’s a master of intelligence and the history of intelligence operations. But that just shows you how even very recent history, people are so convinced of this that they feel that they can talk down to people who know a hell of a lot more than them.

This is like their litmus test: “If you agree with me on Epstein being connected to Israel, maybe I’ll listen to you. If you don’t, then you must be an idiot or a nefarious actor.” And this is pervasive, not just in the world of influencers, but that’s what will happen at the supermarket.

That’s how much people have bought this, the average person who’s not in tune with this.

Okay, so this would be a good place to go. Okay. So we’re going to talk about the origin of this particular narrative. And we’re going to then trace how it made its way through the information ecosystem. And I guess we’ll land on who benefits. And then we can talk about attribution at the end also. So next slide.

And when I say attribution, it is a technical term for figuring out who did it, and how to attribute this particular operation. And I just want to say before we go on, as I was writing it, I was acutely aware that I would be accused of being a conspiracy theorist myself in terms of debunking this. Because, of course, folks who didn’t read it would already jump in and they say the most ridiculous things. And they say, “Isn’t blaming Russia a conspiracy theory itself?”

And I.

Say, well, no. Russia, right?

Right. Well, I say no, because I tried very hard actually to use methodology that’s acknowledged and has been around for a while in terms of tracking and attributing information operations. This is a thing that exists. We had the Active Measures Working Group in the 1980s. Active Measures, as I’m sure your listeners know by now, is a term of art used by the Russians, used by the Soviets over the course of many decades. And basically it’s another name for information warfare or cognitive warfare. This is just what they call it.

So the Active Measures Working Group was started in the 1980s when Reagan came in. And it was people inside and outside of government. And they sat down and they were like, “Okay, we need to be able to track information warfare on the part of the Soviets and show what they’re doing. And apply sunlight.”

And they came up with a methodology because when you get to information warfare, you don’t have a guy with an email saying, “Oh, yes, this is what we did.” You usually don’t have someone testifying, “Here’s the smoking gun evidence that you have.” It’s not a courtroom situation. It’s not a crime in a courtroom situation. You just don’t have access to the information, because it’s in Moscow or it’s in Doha or somewhere else. So you have to come up with alternate ways of making the case and proving it in a rigorous way. So what you want to do is you want to make sure that you cross your T’s and dot every I and you take the attribution of these things very seriously.

So that’s what I tried to do in this particular case. And the way the Active Measures Working Group attributed information warfare is they had kind of three boxes that kind of need to be checked.

The first box is the political or geopolitical interest of the state in doing this. So it would be like motivation, like, “OK, why would the Russians do this in this case?” Well, we can get back to the specifics of these at the end. But one is motivation. The other one is the cast of characters. If there’s a recurring cast of characters from one information operation or Active Measures campaign to another, then that would be an indication.

And the last one has to do with technique. So are these information warfare methods something that the Russians or anyone else has used often and repeatedly? And you combine these three and then you can get to attribution. You can get to making a good case in a kind of legitimate way.

So Epstein dies. Three weeks after Epstein dies, this guy, Ari Ben-Menashe, shows up on a really obscure podcast that’s dedicated to Russiagate, to Trump Russia conspiracy theories, which I thought was interesting, called Narrative. And he alleges that he worked with Maxwell. And at that point in London and Maxwell’s office, he met Jeffrey Epstein, and that Ghislaine Maxwell was introduced to him. And Ghislaine and Epstein went off to start a blackmail operation on behalf of Mossad. And obviously he had no evidence to support any of this. He just made the claim.

And as soon as he makes the claim, it starts to—he makes a claim that he met with them. Just to do that already says it about himself, that he met with Epstein and Robert Maxwell.

Right. OK. And then this starts picking up in different places. Interestingly enough, one of the first people to pick this up is a Dugin linked website, which I thought was kind of interesting. Another person that picked up this particular story was a super far left journalist who is in her 20s named Whitney Webb, who lives in Patagonia in Chile, which is kind of interesting because—and she was writing at that time for an outlet called MintPress, which is still existing. And it’s like a kind of anti imperialist position. It was formed by a Palestinian American. And it’s Minnesota, I think.

Right. Yeah. I’m thinking of the right one. They went after me pretty hard once or twice. So, yeah, I thought that was an American opera. They actually endorsed some anti-Israel protests and added their logo to things. So you’re saying that this goes from Ari, who lies about his resume with Israeli intelligence—he works for another part—he puts it out there. And then Dugin is the next one. And then Whitney Webb was connected to MintPress. Am I following that right? That it goes from him to those two people at the same time?

Yeah. Relatively at the same time. Because immediately Whitney Webb starts doing articles at MintPress about Ben-Menashe and based on interviews with him. But to rewind a little bit, let’s get into who Ari Ben-Menashe is. Ari Ben-Menashe was born in Iran and he moved to Israel. He joined the army in his youth, where he served in intelligence as a civilian analyst. He was fired by the Israelis for corruption and mental problems. There’s so much on him that’s just completely crazy. He tried to sell Iran U.S. planes. He trekked through South America, defrauding people and convincing people that he was super spy, and it was all nonsense.

He’s just has this long history of this kind of thing. But 1991 was really a banner year for him. So in 1991, really interestingly, he was behind two of the biggest scandals of that year. So the first one was the October surprise scandal. Gary Sick wrote a book called The October Surprise. And that’s where our kind of common understanding of—that’s where the term comes from, where we think about some kind of political scandal that hits in October where the elections are in November. That’s where it comes from. So the original October surprise.

Like someone hiding—if I have a good bomb to throw at my opponent, I wait until October. And that’s my October surprise for you at the last moment.

Right. Exactly. OK. So this book alleged that prior to the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan sent his campaign manager, who was later to be a CIA director, to Paris to meet with the Iranians and convince the Iranians not to hand over or release the American hostages from the Tehran embassy that they were holding until Reagan was inaugurated. The witness for this was allegedly—not allegedly, but the witness for this alleged event was Ari Ben-Menashe, who claimed to be in Paris at these meetings. No shit. So this was in the book.

I must have skipped that in your book. That’s the first time I’ve heard that. So the same guy that—see this narrative. See, that’s where October surprise comes from. And that whole idea that Reagan wanted the mullahs to just hold on to the hostages until he was inaugurated. It comes from this guy.

So in 1991, the book came out and, as you can imagine, it caused a huge firestorm. And there was an investigation in both the House and the Senate. It was all over the media in 91. And it was a huge scandal, as you can imagine it was, if it were true. So Congress investigated and bipartisan congressional investigation came to the conclusion that it was complete bullshit.

They looked at travel records. They looked at passports. They looked at—none of the people that Ben-Menashe claimed were at the meeting were actually there at the meeting at that time. There was no evidence for any of this. And he took and failed multiple lie detector tests. Both the House and the Senate came back and they just said that his testimony is completely worthless and it’s just a complete fabrication. So that thing went nowhere.

But of course, it generated a lot of publicity. Interestingly enough, kind of amazingly, at the very same time that Ben-Menashe was seeding that particular story to Gary Sick, who was the writer of the book, he was also seeding a different story to Seymour Hersh, who many of your listeners may be familiar with. Seymour Hersh is or was a longtime reporter. He’s still alive, but he was a longtime reporter at the New Yorker. And he was the guy responsible for uncovering the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Basically, his thing was he’s a far left reporter and he just attacks the U.S. military in every way he can. And obviously he hates Israel. So he was writing a book called The Samson Option about Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program.

I’ll add something. I was going to say this for a future podcast, which is it fits too well. So you might already know this, David. But if you guys remember the super group I call M.K.N.E. that formed in Moscow in 2025 that we exposed on the podcast in September, when I did those four media events, four podcasts, just exposing them. If you go to their website, one of the people who at least isn’t listed as a member—I don’t know if he’s a member or not, but is involved in that with them in their media production and was doing interviews or something like that with them—is this guy who’s like a legendary reporter, not like Bob Woodward to step down, but he’s held in really high esteem, the Seymour Hersh guy.

So, man, even that comes around now. And so I was holding on to that. But then you just said that he’s connected to this. So I was like, that’s—it’s just remarkable. That goes full circle. Go on.

It’s really, honestly, once you get into this and you know this for sure, it’s basically the same people. It’s the same basic cast of characters over and over again, which makes it a lot easier to track these guys. But anyway, Ben-Menashe serves as the main source for Hersh’s book, The Samson Option.

The interesting part about the book is that Hersh and Ben-Menashe make an allegation that Robert Maxwell was a Mossad spy. Robert Maxwell, of course, was a tabloid baron in the UK, originally from Czechoslovakia. But he was a very wealthy tabloid king of Fleet Street in London. As soon as this came out, Maxwell was outraged. He said it’s complete nonsense. And he sued Hersh and his publisher for libel.

Well, two weeks later, Maxwell was found dead off the side of his boat. And the libel suit that he launched against Hersh died with him. So that was kind of very convenient and interesting.

And then that would mean there’s deadlier— it’s not just one fraudster talking to an ideologically biased reporter. Whenever he launches the lawsuit, he ends up dead; you would assume you now have a bigger—potentially a government—involved, or something like that. And usually people say Robert Maxwell was working with the Israelis, and therefore Israel killed him.

Right. It’s really weird, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense. So the allegation is that Maxwell was an Israeli spy who was then killed by Israel, and then his daughter decided to go to work for her dad’s killers. So that’s the basic narrative. And people think that’s totally normal. So that’s the basic narrative that these guys are advancing.

But anyway, Maxwell dies. And Ari Ben-Menashe, for the next several years, goes to work in planting this story, his particular narrative, into books. And he does that by serving as the principal source, really, on books by Gordon Thomas, who was a Welsh reporter who wrote a bunch of books. He wrote this book called Gideon’s Spies, which is this huge 700-page book about the history of Mossad that’s been translated into 16 languages.

And it’s a bestseller. And frankly, I read it 25 years ago, or 20—about 25 years ago. And I loved it because it feels like a movie. It’s only later on that I realized that most of it is actually bullshit, because it all comes from Ari Ben-Menashe.

It’s not even— I don’t even— that was one of the first books I read. I might’ve been 12 when I read that.

Yeah. And when you’re reading, it’s like, “Wow.” I’ve got the audio book. The audio book was read by Theodore Bikel from the Fiddler on the Roof. It’s a quote unquote legit book that is a bestseller, and it’s based on completely fraudulent testimony by this Ari Ben-Menashe guy.

So in addition to that, Gordon Thomas wrote another book with Ari Ben-Menashe as the source, called Robert Maxwell, Israel’s super spy. So between these two books that make the case on Maxwell—that pushed the Maxwell narrative very hard over the course of many years—this has hardened into conventional wisdom. Because it made its way into these books, it then made its way into Wikipedia. It made its way into what everyone knows.

So, for example, before, when you were talking about someone who was angrily arguing that—no, obviously it was Alex Stein—“Obviously Maxwell was Mossad because everyone knows he is.”

That actually came from Ari Ben-Menashe as well. Anyway, interestingly enough, I dug into the Maxwell allegations, and they were as thin as Ben-Menashe’s Epstein allegations later on. Which is to say, a lot of, “Hey, yeah, we had meetings a lot and we discussed Mossad stuff.” And the next question is, “Well, do you have any proof of that? What did you discuss? What did you—” Nothing. And, “Who else was at the meeting?” “Well, these guys were at the meeting, but I’m sorry, they’re all dead. So you can’t ask them any questions.” Which is obviously very convenient. But what Ben-Menashe was able to do with Maxwell was exactly what he did with Epstein later on.

So just like with Maxwell, he went to Gordon Thomas, and he went to Seymour Hersh, and he had gone to seed a particular narrative to Gary Sick for the October surprise. With Epstein, Ben-Menashe did that with two writers. The first one was Dylan Thomas. Dylan Thomas is a National Enquirer guy. And he was the first one who had a book out on Epstein, called Dead Men Tell No Tales. And the sort of promo copy—the ad copy for selling the book—promised interviews with, I think, quote, “Epstein’s Mossad handler, and the people who ended up killing Epstein.” Which is just kind of nonsense, because he’s already publicly discredited at this point.

But he’s.

But he’s getting— he’s publicly discredited. But if nobody pops up and says, “Hey, wait a minute, this guy has a record of 30 years of being publicly discredited. We should probably take what he says with a grain of salt, if not more than that,” then it just goes by like nothing.

Anyway, so Dylan Howard was the first one. And Dylan Howard’s book is what you’d expect from the National Enquirer. So it’s totally salacious and ridiculous. And there’s no evidence there. And what counts as evidence is completely absurd. For example, Howard will talk to someone who was like the sister of a friend of Ghislaine Maxwell’s from the time when they were in high school, and have the sister of the friend sort of reveal a bombshell.

Theorize. Yeah. Theorize. Oh, just theorize. So not even make a claim, just theorize.

Yeah. So it’s all kind of stuff like that. And of course, the book was on Jeffrey Epstein. So the book sold—I think the book sold pretty well. But it didn’t make an impact, because it was too National Enquirer.

Then Ben-Menashe turned to Whitney Webb. And Whitney Webb had already done interviews for MintPress with Ben-Menashe. Whitney Webb— I say that, I think it’s kind of significant that she lives in Chile, because that means that she doesn’t pay U.S. taxes. And that means that her income is totally opaque. And we know nothing about who pays her or anything like that. I don’t say that as definitive proof. I just think it’s really interesting.

Her career at MintPress consisted of blaming Israel specifically, and Israeli intelligence, on anything you can think of. So Israel was behind 9-11, according to Whitney Webb. And in MintPress, Israel was doing all of this allegedly nefarious stuff with public schools.

Just any Israel conspiracy theory, Whitney Webb is going to endorse it. Anyway, so she writes this two-volume massive text called One Nation Under Blackmail, volumes one and two. And volume two in particular, that deals with Epstein, is very heavily leaning on Ari Ben-Menashe. And basically it says that. So everything about Epstein’s alleged recruitment by Mossad was sourced to Ari Ben-Menashe.

I know everybody’s going to be asking this, but I just got to ask this question. Is Ben-Menashe— what is his motivation? Is he getting paid? Is he connected to Iran, Russia, or some other country? What’s his story?

Well, we’ll get to that.

We’ll.

Get to that right now. Yeah.

Oh, we’ll get to that. Okay.

So with his allegations sort of— embedded into these Whitney Webb books, it was then time for Ari Ben-Menashe to sort of slip away. And that is a technique called source laundering.

And that is the basic working method for these types of information operations, which is: you pop up, you make an allegation. Oftentimes the person making the allegation has zero credibility, and it’s just a laughingstock or a joke. That’s why it’s important to launder the source. So the person who has no credibility making the allegation can then recede into the background, while people with maybe a little more credibility, or at least less exposure, get to carry the story forward.

So why does that person cite the discredited source for that process to happen?

Why does that person? Well, yeah.

You’re saying that the discredited source that disappears.

Yeah. It’s different in every case. So, for example, in the case of Gary Sick and Seymour Hersh, these people hate Israel. They hate Israel. They hate Republicans. Gary Sick hates Republicans. Gary Sick served in the National Security Council and then totally lost his mind with this particular story, and was convinced that Reagan did this. And all he was doing, really, for the rest of his life was trying to find evidence that this story was real, because he just was kind of so obsessed with it.

Do they know that Ben-Menashe is a BS-er?

When they do this. Do they know? I don’t know. I think it depends. I think that all of these people that we’re talking about, from Gary Sick to Hersh to Whitney Webb to Dylan Howard to others, they desperately want to believe. They desperately want to believe. And that doesn’t mean that they’re being controlled by Moscow or whatever. Some of them could be, but I think the much more reasonable basic explanation is they really want to believe. And I think that’s the case for most of the people that sort of buy into this. And maybe some of the people who even propagate it.

Anyway, so Ben-Menashe disappears. And now it’s a good time to go into what Ben-Menashe was doing from 1991 until 2019, when Epstein died. So Ben-Menashe shows up in Montreal and starts a lobbying firm. And the lobbying firm is not a traditional lobbying firm.

We understand lobbying to be: you go and you kind of make your case for specific policy changes to a government, often to the United States government. You go and you say, “Hey, this is what we think. This is what you guys should do. This is some advice.” And that’s it. And it’s a completely legitimate way of operating. But Ari Ben-Menashe does not do that. Instead, his clients are pretty much exclusively Russia-linked, Wagner Group-linked warlords. It’s mostly in Africa, but not exclusively.

So, for example, right now he’s repping the pro-Moscow Serbians. And basically anywhere where there is shady stuff that Russia is involved in, that’s where Ben-Menashe is. And his idea of lobbying, as I said, it’s not really lobbying. What he does is he makes up fake stories and fake narratives for his clients. So he was working for Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Oh my God. And it was a kind of— it was a big story in Zimbabwe because Mugabe had a— no, he’s a communist, genocidal communist dictator.

Yeah. So Mugabe had a rival who somehow met with Ari Ben-Menashe. And Ari Ben-Menashe allegedly audio taped this rival claiming that he was going to kill Mugabe. So, of course, they arrest the rival. Blah. One thing leads to another. And it comes out that Ari Ben-Menashe was actually— it was just a fraud. It was fake. It was a totally doctored tape. It was just complete nonsense.

So this was stuff that kind of blows up in African regional media, or maybe even in Canadian media, because he’s in Montreal. But it’s not stuff that pops up for most Americans. You really have to look.

And the really interesting thing that Ben-Menashe has been doing is— so why is he a lobbyist? Why would you say that you’re a lobbyist? And when I first read that, I thought it was kind of curious, and then it hit me. So he files as a lobbyist under FARA, which is a U.S.

Law. He’s Canadian. He alleges that he advises and lobbies the U.S. government, specifically the National Security Council and specifically the President of the United States. So he makes these— which means he’s got to file at least every year and sort of explain what he does, or what he did—what he allegedly did.

And how much money does it have to be verified? You can just register as a foreign agent under FARA, and it’s not like you have to prove that you’re actually doing it?

Correct. So that’s what he’s doing. So Washingtonian Magazine, God bless him, several years ago, they went back and they were like, “This is really weird. This shady guy in Montreal is claiming that he’s getting these contracts from African dictators worth like 25 million. And he’s claiming he’s talking to the President of the United States every week. It’s really weird. Let’s try to track down some of these African warlords to see, is this real? Did you pay this guy 25 million or whatever?”

So they went, and they couldn’t find a single warlord or dictator that had actually contracted with him for this particular service. And then I was like, “Okay, why would anyone do that?” And then I realized, well, someone would do that if they wanted to burnish their credentials and reputation as a mover and a shaker. And basically, it’s a small price to pay to file under FARA in the United States, just to keep your— sort of your name alive as someone who’s a player in this space.

And you can lie on your FARA forms and nothing’s going to happen to you, because you say you made $30 million from some dictator in Africa. Nobody’s going to come and check. And so that’s what this guy does professionally. This guy is like a professional bullshit artist for pay.

So, really interestingly, he shows up and he makes allegations against Epstein, and then he kind of disappears. Interestingly enough, he doesn’t totally disappear. The main place where he reappears often is Russian state media. So he’s got several appearances on Going Underground on Russia Today, where he’s just basically saying the same thing. And he just updates his story based on whatever’s happening in the news.

So, for example, at the very beginning he was talking about them, the Israelis, blackmailing Bill Clinton, because that’s when everything was going on with the Clintons and Epstein. And then, of course, later on, when it gets to Trump, “Oh yeah, of course they’re blackmailing Trump. They’re blackmailing all of that.” It’s whatever’s happening in the media. He just ties it into that. He has no evidence. That’s his shtick.

And as I was going through this, I noticed that both Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly—I think only those two—have mentioned Ari Ben-Menashe by name as a source for the Epstein Mossad allegation.

As a credible source.

Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly refer to him as a credible source.

Well, they said, “Here’s this guy who was former Mossad, who made this allegation.” So immediately I thought, well, okay, if they know enough to know who Ari Ben-Menashe is, why wouldn’t they have him on? Wouldn’t this be a total blockbuster?

Oh, he’s not, he’s not dead.

No, he’s not dead. He’s in Montreal.

This guy’s still alive. He’s in Montreal now.

He’s in Canada, so he’s half dead. But he’s not— he’s still alive. So they know who he is. They can very easily call him and get him on the air. And frankly, it would be amazing TV. If that’s what you wanted to do, you could really do a number. You could really have big ratings. And you could get the story from the horse’s mouth. But I think they realize, and I think Ben-Menashe realizes, that it would just be way too flimsy. Because at first contact to reality, or the first question that’s even slightly skeptical, or like, “Okay, how do you know that?”—the whole story falls apart. And I think—

Even Candace kind of has to ask.

Right. Well, RT— there’s a clip from RT where the host was like, “Okay, well, I kind of have to ask, how do you know this?” And Ben-Menashe started to giggle and said, “This is my truth.”

Oh my God. Oh my God. They don’t even put enough pride into their lying. I know. Have an answer for the most predictable question.

Right. So as I was going through Ben-Menashe’s career in doing this stuff, I kind of realized that he did— he’s very shady, but, well, he’s not that stupid. Because at the very beginning, he made a lot of claims during the October surprise situation. He made very specific claims: “I was here at this time. This was a thing that I saw. These were people who are—” He made claims that could be verified. They were all nonsense, but he made them. Subsequent to that, he stopped making any claims with any detail or specificity whatsoever. So he was like, “Okay, I’m just saying my thing. This is what it is.” So anyway, we had that.

I think the Ari Ben-Menashe story is such an open-and-shut case of information operations, information warfare, active measures.

It’s like not even— it’s almost embarrassing to deny it. And as soon as someone mentions his name as part of this, you know that it’s bullshit. But from there, the whole game is he disappeared, pretty much. He wasn’t out there screaming about it and going, for example— I went and I did this research, and I wrote a book, and I’m on your show. I’m doing other shows. I’m out there. I’m tweeting. I’m reachable in terms of asking me questions or interrogating me about my working methods or whatever. Not so for this guy, who is the ground zero, really, for this allegation.

And that’s normally what someone like him—kind of a public figure, even though he’s not doing interviews—you always want to promote yourself. That’s how you get business. You claim to be part of a cause, you want to be out there. But it’s very anomalous that for some reason he says these things and then hides, like he’s living in an igloo in Antarctica. Which that itself should be— even if he had a resume that was not debunked, just that alone would tell you this guy’s a BS or working for a foreign government. There’s something wrong here.

But you have Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens saying, “Well, Epstein, we know, was connected to Mossad, because look, even an Israeli intelligence guy says it.” But the guy’s nowhere to be found. And they know it, because they’re not bringing them on the show, which is the second thought you would have if you’re a producer for them, or you are Candace or Megyn Kelly themselves. You would find this out, and you would say— the next thought would be, “I want to say it on my show.” The very next thought would be, “Can I get them on the show?” And you’re saying it just stops there.

Yes. Unbelievable. You would think that he’d be like the biggest get. If this story was even remotely true, you would think that he would be everywhere, but he’s not. And it’s not because— I’m sure it’s not because people don’t want to hear the story. But I think that for the people that he works for, he is absolutely doing an amazing— he’s doing a bang-up job, because part of the gig is you put it out there, you seed it, and then you disappear. And that’s how this stuff is done.

And the people that he works for, the people who are his potential clients down the road, that’s what they want. They don’t want the guy who’s on TV all the time speaking, sort of testifying about what he knows. They want the guy who’s smart enough to inject it into the public conversation and then split. So that’s really what happens.

So after Ben-Menashe disengages from the public in most ways, Whitney Webb takes it up, and she appears on countless podcasts. She is everywhere, and her demeanor is, “I’m an independent journalist,” and, like she was Elizabeth Lane line independent journalist.

Well, right. But she’s got more credibility than Elizabeth Lane, who comes off like a complete nut. But Whitney Webb actually— she comes off as more serious. She looks like a librarian. She goes on Patrick Bet David and all these podcasts. And her book becomes the standard for this argument, for the Mossad-did-it argument. And we saw, actually, twice when Ian Carroll was on with Joe Rogan—two separate times—Ian Carroll recommended Whitney Webb’s book to Rogan. And he’s tweeted about the book all the time.

Now, tell me if I’m wrong about this—sorry to cut you off—but I think it illustrates a point. Patrick Bet-David is Iranian. I believe he opposed the Iranian regime. I remember him speaking out about it.

I remember when I looked into MintPress, because many years—like maybe 2017 or something like that—when they were going after me, I was like, “Who the hell are these guys?” And I’m almost positive I connected them to— but it wasn’t gray zone. It was definitely either someone really close or directly tied to the Syrian regime, which was a puppet of the Iranian regime. I feel like I might’ve connected them to the Iranian regime. I know they’re pro-Russia. I’m almost positive about that. But at the very least, they were pro-Assad, pro-Iranian regime.

So it shows how the process for some of the biggest podcasters here— if they are well-meaning, because I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Patrick Bet-David, when he says he opposed the Iranian regime. But to have someone like that from MintPress go through whatever vetting process, to what extent it exists, and get onto his podcast is— it’s embarrassing for him. It’s frightening for our society. And that’s just a crazy answer that really illustrates your point, because I’m sure people are saying right now, “Well, how does this happen?”

I know with Candace, she doesn’t really check things. Megyn is surprising. I’ve personally dealt with her when she was at Fox, and she was very thorough. But the idea that Whitney Webb, connected to MintPress, when MintPress is so clearly bad and such a narrative launderer for foreign governments, to the point that it’s not really deniable— it’s not subtle. It is just jaw-dropping for me.

Yeah. And he’s not the only one. She actually did a number of conservative podcasts, because she had built up some goodwill with conservative audiences during COVID, because I think she was opposed to lockdowns. And she was talking about financial stuff, and getting rid of paper money, and kind of all this stuff that folks on the right were concerned about, which is in itself a source laundering, or reputation laundering, exercise. But no, you’re absolutely right. She was able to go around, and she was able to be the face of this particular narrative.

And so when I first graduated college, my first real job out of college was I was a technical writer. I was writing software documentation.

This was in the nineties. And they were something at that time called the thump factor. And the thump factor was: if you’ve got a very powerful piece of software, you want your manual to be correspondingly large, to show that this is a serious piece of software. And you put it on the table, it’s supposed to go thump. And if it’s loud, it’s like, okay, this is like Photoshop or something, a substantial piece of software. Whereas on the other side of it, you have some little dinky video player, and it’s like, whatever, the manual is like four pages.

So the Whitney Webb’s book, I think it’s like 1500 pages spread over the course of two volumes. So that was a very thump factor book, in the sense that, oh my God, that’s gotta be authoritative because it’s so big—all these footnotes.

And then, of course, I look at the footnotes. When it comes to this stuff, the footnotes are primarily to her own articles in MintPress, interviews with Ben-Menashe. So it’s just a whole circle jerk of source laundering all the way.

The laziest source laundering in history, man.

Yeah. If I were to do it, and I was that kind of person, I would at least pick different people. I wouldn’t pick my own work. But that’s me.

It shows just how highly they think of our media’s producers and the vetting process and the American people. They’re like, “I don’t even need to put that much effort into it.”

So anyway, what comes from this story? What do I want people to think about this? What I want people to think about this is, I think people should immediately say to themselves, “How is it that I know this? How is it that I really know this thing that I believe that I know?” And I think that we need to interrogate ourselves all the time when it comes to this stuff. Because that’s the only way to keep from going crazy and believing all kinds of nonsense. It’s like, “Okay, let’s stop. How do I actually know this? Is this even true, or is this just something that I’ve heard?”

And I think we should— there’s no harm in doing it, really, with everything, with every story, because then it keeps you grounded. And I find that we’re in a place—and social media in particular is trying to get us to this place—where we just, whatever, we just accept it. We hear something and it’s like, “Okay, how do you know it’s true?” “I don’t know.”

“I just heard it, but my truth— I’m my truth. I am now totally emotionally invested in this.” And unfortunately, part of the horrible thing about conspiracy theories is that it creates this weird emotional investment once you are in. And it’s very hard then to go and begin interrogating, like, “Okay, let me go back. Let me take five paces back and see if the original idea that I had when I began this journey was true, or if it was false, or whatever it was.”

Because, for example, someone will say— right now, someone will respond to this on Twitter by saying, “Well, Maxwell was Mossad, and Ghislaine Maxwell was Mossad. So obviously Epstein was also Mossad.” And it’s like, okay, well, if that’s true, then that’s one thing.

But if that’s not true, then that actually destroys the whole argument that you’ve been making. So I think that, in general, people don’t want to go, and they don’t want to interrogate what they believe that they already know. That’s just human nature.

So as I’m doing this, interestingly enough, and I think your listeners will kind of appreciate this. So I’ve been interested, as you have. I’ve been obsessed with active measures, and specifically informational warfare, Soviet information warfare, since I’m a kid. And because I’ve been looking at it for so long, I kind of have these hunches. And because it’s a hunch, it’s just a hunch. And I’m like, okay, well, I’m not going to say that this is true. I’m going to keep it as a hunch, which is an area to investigate.

So my hunch was there’s something about conspiracy theories, conspiracy media, conspiracism in general, that the Russians really like, because it seems like— why is it that Alex Jones has been, for so many years, so closely tied to the Russians, even to Dugin?

What is going on there? What’s the deal? I would see— when I first started to look into Elizabeth Lane, I’m sure as you have, the first thing we saw is, like, what is she doing as the CEO of this weird conspiracy TV network that doesn’t exist? What is that?

It was pro-Russian, very pro-Russian, unified. All the content was like pro-Russia, and then UFOs, conspiracy theories. It was all fused into one thing.

Right. So what is that? So I’m looking at that and I’m like, “This is really weird. There’s something going on here.” There’s something that they see correctly is a vulnerability to us. And when I say correctly is they must understand that conspiracism breaks brains and basically destroys— when it’s going crazy, it basically destroys societies.

But people act like assholes. The more they go down— I’m seeing it enough now that I’m comfortable saying that’s not just anecdotal at this point. See, I know perfectly nice people. They go down that path. It’s not just that their critical thinking weakens and, yeah, they say crazy things. They get kind of schizophrenic and how they talk about all that happens, but they also just turn into assholes. And I’ve been wondering why that happens, and if that’s almost like implanted in there somehow.

Well, there are a number of books that I would recommend about the QAnon phenomenon. They’re written by leftists. Sometimes the claims that they make about people on the right go too far, but just as facts and history and the kind of basic stuff goes, man, some of the most depressing stuff that I’ve ever read in my life. And absolutely destroys people on an individual level, and then also in a societal level when large numbers of people go in this direction.

So I was like, I feel it in my bones that the Russians have some kind of an idea about this stuff. But man, I wish I had a document. I wish I had some kind of a text from someone with a reputation on the Russian side who is listened to, who is important, who talks about this in a way that this makes sense. Because initially when I began writing the book, I was writing it differently. I was saying, okay, these are the things that information warfare is designed to do to an enemy population:

To disorient, to make them hate their leaders, to make them incapable of functioning in normal society, blah. And here are the things that conspiracism does. And I would say these two things are the same. That was how I was going to do the book. And then I find that Alexander Dugin himself, of all people, had written a book specifically about conspiracy theories as information warfare. And then on top of that, what does he say in the book is the most potent conspiracy theory of all is the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

And I remember when you texted me, when you said that you found that, and I couldn’t believe that there was an actual book by Dugin about this and, number two, that nobody had heard of it. And I remember you saying, “Oh, I’ve got to rewrite everything over again.” Cause I was waiting for you to come out with this book or this article. I was so eager for it. It’s so needed.

And then you showed me that. And I’m like, first of all, you should get a Pulitzer Prize or something for it. It is historically important that you found that. It’s like unrestricted warfare with the Chinese. It’s one of these seminal documents that reorients everything. And it should be the thing that people reference in order to understand everything happening around them. It’s astonishing, but go on.

This is super interesting to me. I think your listeners will enjoy it too. The book is called Conspirology. And I find this book on a Russian site called all conspiracy ology.com. And the whole site is just all in Russian, and it’s just conspiracy theories, texts and posts and articles, things like that, blah. And it’s antisemitism. It’s this, it’s that, it’s UFOs. It’s everything that you can think of.

And the centerpiece of the site is this Dugin article split up into whatever it was, 180 chapters, 120 chapters, however it was. But each page was — you had to click next. So I’m sitting here, I’m clicking next. And I look at it and I grabbed the text and I’m like, “That’s really weird at this Russian site. Let’s see if I can find out more about it.”

So I find that several of the people who were writers at this site ended up having FSB and GRU connections — not connections, but they were literally FSB and GRU guys.

And then I noticed that the website stopped in 2014. It just stopped — no updates, no nothing. It’s still online. Somebody’s paying for the hosting, but it’s just kind of dormant. I’m like, “That’s really weird. I wonder what happened around that.” So it was like a month before the invasion of Crimea. And I’m like, “Wait a minute, a bunch of Russian intelligence guys working on a conspiracy website.” And then right before the invasion of Crimea, it goes black. Oh, okay. That kind of makes sense to me, is these guys were on assignment and then they got diverted to Crimea, because it’s not like they have a million of these guys. You have to choose yet. You get reassigned.

And so what was the purpose of the website, though? I’m not getting that. I get, all right, Construciments here on one spot. So what?

I think it was a first — this was 2014. I think the 2012 to 2014, I think this was all in its infancy. I don’t think that they had any idea of what was coming. I don’t think they had any idea of what would then become available to them with social media. I think that they were just kind of workshopping this whole conspiracy thing. And obviously, it’s in Russia, so it was not geared toward Americans. I think that, in some ways, your guess is as good as mine, but it’s very shady. And I think it’s a kind of significant thing that you have a bunch of Russian intelligence kinds of things.

That’s a decision that we need to direct resources, of which there’s a limited amount, here. There’s something they’re getting that’s so valuable that they say, “We need to invest in that.”

Right. Someone made a decision. And we don’t know why. And we’re not even sure when or what the deal is there. But I think it behooves us to figure that out. I think that would be a natural thing. So anyway, back to your point, though, about — you’re like, “You should get a Pulitzer Prize for this.” Well, so I find this Dugin book, and as I’m going through it and I’m reading it, I’m having a translator, and my jaw is on the floor. I’m thinking, man, it’s probably a multi-billion dollar industry.

The Russian disinformation, misinformation industry, the industry of think tanks who are — some of them are doing decent work. We’re doing good work digging into what the Russians are doing as far as information warfare in Europe and the United States and throughout Asia, whatever. There are people who wake up in the morning and this is their job. And you’re telling me that over the course of whatever, 10, 15 years, nobody found this. Really? Isn’t that weird? It’s just weird considering all the attention and all the time and all the stuff.

We go back a ways, and we go back to the days when, out of nowhere, a whole bunch of people decided to become countering violent extremism experts. And it’s like these people — I don’t even know what they did before that, but there was just newly minted. This is what they do there. There were — they could get grants from countries and governments and whatever. DHS, anybody: you just say that you’re a CVE person and this is your ticket in.

And most of these people — a lot of these people moved on after 2016, after the Trump election from 2016, they moved on. They went from CVE to misinformation, disinformation. And what are they doing? Are they doing anything? So that’s what I was shocked, that nobody kind of — nobody really put this together.

So nobody found this book by Dugin, who — he was well known enough at that point, by the time you found it, that you would have thought people had scooped up everything about this guy by this point.

Well, this book was on his wiki page. There was no link. It was listed as a book, but there was no link to it. It was like, good luck to you. And honestly, had I not found the website where it was split up chapter by chapter, I would have never been able to have it translated correctly. Anyway, I thought that elements of this book were important enough to have translated and include in an annotated appendix that is in the book.

So you’re making a book off of Dugin. I like it.

I want it. You know what? There was a part of me.

You’re selling his book as part of your book. I love it.

Initially. There was a part of me that thought, you know what? I just want to publish his book in English, just straight up, and let him sue me because he can’t — he can’t sue me in the United States because he’s a sanctioned guy.

But after asking AI was smart and they said, “Well, it may not be a legal issue, but all they have to do is make a complaint to Amazon or wherever and they’ll just yank it.” So I didn’t want to be in that situation where I would be in the clear legally, but I would spend all this time getting this book out and it would just not be for sale.

So they can’t, but it’s part of the appendix of your current book, and they can’t file a complaint to say that you — Dugin can’t just file a complaint and be like, “Well, yeah, you have your own book, but my book is in the appendix.” You have the actual book from beginning to end in the appendix.

No. I’ve got 13 chapters of, whatever, 120 chapters. But I grabbed the ones that were particularly germane. And if you’ve read Dugin, you know that it’s not a straightforward thing. He’s all over the place. Oh, he sucks. It works. He’s just — he’s a really bad writer. He’s lying about and making up all kinds of stuff, especially when it comes to Talmud and any kind of Jewish stuff. It’s almost always just complete nonsense and the opposite of true.

So I thought that making sure that it was annotated, specifically in the margins where he says stuff that isn’t true, blah. It’s included in there.

So anyway, I find the Dugin book — this is not in the book, by the way, this is just for your aficionados. So I find the book and I read the book and I’m like, okay, this is a high level theoretical impressionistic idea of argument for how we should see conspiracy theories as information warfare.

It’s not a programmatic thing. So if you gave this to somebody in Russian intelligence and you were like, “Okay, do this,” they wouldn’t know what to do. So I was like, okay, there needs to be a layer in there, a professional layer, a group of people or one person or somebody at least who is going to say, I’m going to take the Dugin insight. And then I’m going to put it into bureaucrat language and military intelligence language to then explain to people who are working in the departments how to do this — how do you implement this? Because it’s not exactly apparent.

So then I’m like, okay, I bet you I could find these guys. So I found them. It’s a whole bunch of former KGB, former Russian intelligence guys who are now professors at Moscow State University.

And they’re teaching how to create conspiracy theories. And you should be teaching how they’re teaching information warfare.

And they’re also engaging with Dugin. So that was what I was looking for. I wasn’t looking for just random bunch of Russians doing info warfare. I was looking for: Are you a Russian? Are you doing information warfare? And do you have a Dugin connection? Have you operationalized Dugin before? And there’s a whole bunch of these guys.

And if you go to some of the academic journal websites — I’m forgetting some of them — anyone who’s in academic circles, they go and they publish papers, and sometimes you can get access to the papers on these websites. Sometimes you actually have to pay. I know. So, whatever, I dropped a few hundred bucks and I got some amazing papers from Russian information warfare guys. Some of them were how to manipulate Gen Z voters through TikTok. How to — blah. It was all stuff like this. It wasn’t theoretical.

So what are you doing with this stuff?

I’ve got it. I was going to put it in the book, but it’s like, what is this?

It’s a whole nother book.

That’s a whole nother book. It’s a whole other book. And originally, as I was writing this book, the book was actually twice the size, and it dealt with the Russian network — the pro-Russian network within the United States in media. And then I just decided, it’s too much. I need to focus on the Epstein Mossad narrative, only because that’s the case that I wanted to make. And as the book started to get bigger and bigger, that part of it necessarily would get smaller and smaller. And I didn’t want to do that. And so that’s when I decided to kind of break it off.

And again, I started doing this research in like February of this year, and by April, May, I had the book done. And it wasn’t really a book at that point. It was a long article. I had websites that wanted to publish it, websites that everyone would know. And everyone ended up loving it, but then getting cold feet.

Because of Epstein, because — and already said, the first day that I put the book out, I was deluged by Russian bots, and…

That was crazy. If people can — what day did the book come out?

It came out, I think, on the 19th of October.

First of all, you should follow David on X, but if you go to that date and you go into the search settings and you go on his page, that — you want proof that there’s some sort of directing force behind these bots and trolls, including the human operated ones. And look at what happened to David on that day. Man, you announced that book was coming out, and the — yeah. When you first announced the book was coming out. And then I guess when it was actually released — when the trailer came out was when I first saw it. And I was like, “Man, they did a number on you.”

Yeah, it was interesting because I first posted it. I think it’s like midnight the night before. And I went to bed and I wake up in the morning and it’s like 6am, 7am. And I see that I’ve already got thousands of quote tweets and replies and whatever. And it’s before like 8am. And I’m like, “Yeah, well, it’s a little later in Moscow.” Or Lahore or Karachi or whatever, where these bots are located. But I have a hard time believing that many Americans woke up before it was light out and decided to jump on my Twitter.

That was the controversial issue of the day.

And so there were also websites and magazines that wanted to run this, but they want to run it in a shortened way. And that’s when I was very concerned. And some of them still are pissed at me to this day because I was like, “Look, I can cut it. But if I cut it’s then going to make it appear to be less strong than it is.”

No. And having read your book and knowing the topic — no, you made the right decision. Plus after your book comes out, they can always do a shorter version themselves. They’re being silly.

So I’ve got the shorter version coming out in The Free Press this coming week.

Cool. Good spot for it too. So, just make sure I was right in the head that we don’t miss a link here. The Epstein narrative saying that’s Mossad. So we know now from what you found with Alexander Dugin’s book that they treated it as a science. I know that they’ve referred to as the science of disinformation during the Cold War. And then the modern iteration of that is that you have Dugin made a text that you found showing, yeah, conspiracy theories is an actual strategy. It’s not just a consequence. This is a thing, this is a weapon.

And so that’s kind of the template — how you just suspect that things like this are constructed, but then we know it’s constructed because you trace it back to Ari Ben-Menashe, who we know is a fraudster. He worked for Israeli intelligence, but not where he said he did. Ends up working for Russian state media when he goes away for a while. So he’s working in their disinformation campaigns. It goes from him to Whitney Webb. Can you just summarize? What is the chain of custody here?

Yeah, that’s basically right. It goes from Ari Ben-Menashe to Whitney Webb, to Dylan Howard and Whitney Webb. And then from Whitney Webb to the influencers, so people like Ian Carroll and others. Had I had more research time and a lot more patience, I could have mapped it on TikTok. But I didn’t. I think TikTok was a huge vector for this stuff in particular. But it got around. It became an influencer-led thing.

And then, of course, from influencers like Ian Carroll, it then migrated to podcast hosts. And my initial observation as I was doing this was, wait a minute, 100% of these people who are pushing these narratives…

Let’s say not 100%, but an overwhelming majority of the people who are pushing these narratives have been pro Russia. And one thing that I did — and I’m doing this other project too, where I’m kind of tracking over time, based on transcripts and all kinds of other stuff, the change of influencers and podcasters and whatever when it comes to Israel and Jews over the course of the last several years. Because it’s obvious, we know, we just see it. We know that people have gone through a radicalization arc, a metamorphosis, if you will.

But I think it’s really interesting and instructive to be able to break it down and to say, okay, where are the plot points? Where exactly did some of this get to be more acute? And I’m looking at folks on the left and the right, probably about 50 people.

And there’s folks on the left, there’s folks on the right, and then there are opportunists. Megyn Kelly would be an opportunist, who would — and there are other people too, like Sean Ryan and whatever. When they see that the bots and the audience is, “Hey, let’s beat up on Israel and Jews,” they’ll join in. Just for monetary advantage.

But with others, it’s not the logical. I think they genuinely think it represents people. They like being liked. If you’re going to be an influencer, most of the time you’re going to be addicted to the dopamine hits because you’re a human being. But these are also personalities that like to be liked too. And so if they think that X number of the bots — even if they know some are bots — are actual people, I think they’re really influenced by that positive — by what’s the positive feedback, by the negative feedback. And then, yes, everyone, we got some questions that we’ll go to in a little bit if David’s comfortable with it, but go on and then we’ll get to the questions.

So one of the things that I learned from kind of doing this exercise is that most of these people started off — everyone other than the opportunists started off, whether on left or on the right, as someone who, at the very least, amplified and took seriously Russian narratives about Ukraine and several other things.

And I did notice — and I’m able to track it and plot it on different charts — which is to say that even people who began as hostile to Israel got a lot more hostile to Israel. People who began as neutral went hostile, but basically all the negatives just shot up. So wherever you were, you got to be more negative, regardless of where you began. Krystal Ball is such a great example, or Anna, what’s her name?

It is. Kasparian. These are people who were not really Israel focused at all. And now they’re basically Hamas.

I know. And they’re obsessed with it. Just like you said, it’s not even just convincing someone. It’s just getting people obsessed with it. It’s kind of like the key.

Yes. I think that’s a very important point: what this ends up doing is it ends up becoming an obsession. And the obsession is — it just leads you to madness. It’s something that has been — Dugin in the book writes about it. He literally writes about it. He’s like, “Look, the antisemitic thing is so powerful because it speaks to some kind of good and evil thing that is primordial in the West. And it just takes over people’s minds very significantly.” He says, whether it’s true or not.

So I was going to ask you, is he saying, oh, it’s bullshit — makeup lies. Or is he saying, we just need to emphasize these crazy things, I think it’s true. He’s actually saying, no, I know it’s false.

He’s saying it doesn’t matter. But that’s already got a long kind of pedigree, that particular point of view, because Hitler had the same point of view. So they asked Hitler about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and he was like, “Yeah, it’s bullshit, but it’s directionally true.”

He said it was bullshit.

Oh yeah. He said it. Yeah.

Oh, I thought he believed it.

It’s fake. No.

Huh? Wow.

He didn’t believe it. He thought that it was a forgery, but it was still true because it illuminated some very — that’s Dan Rather, right? That’s like “fake, but accurate.”

Right. It’s funny. On the topic of people that stand with people like Epstein, they talk about it all day. Candace Owens is the best example of all time, because you have John Mapp and her Russia link Scientologist mentor who appears in the frigging Epstein files. She goes to the SPIEF conference in Russia, which was literally partially organized by Jeffrey Epstein and his Russian assistant. She and her husband are friends with Andrew Tate and Tristan Tate, who are probably the most analogous example to Jeffrey Epstein out there. They literally had classes teaching how to abuse women, how to manipulate them, but also how to blackmail influencers and do the exact stuff that Jeffrey Epstein does.

They’re like Epstein without the dinner parties.

Right.

That’s exactly right. I do have a question. Here we go. So Bumps Johnson, this is the one. In terms of information warfare, is there an offense for the Western world, or just an attempt at defense? How could there be an offensive like Epstein files against the Russian government?

Well, that’s a really good question. And you’re not going to be happy when you read my final chapter, Imposing Costs, which deals with, OK, what now? How do we deal with this? How do we deal with this now? And I go back and I look at what the U.S. government is doing to address this problem. And I find that we have 16 different government offices or departments that are tasked with things surrounding information warfare, but not touching information warfare.

So, for example, we do a really good job in going after hacker teams that are hacking emails or whatever. We do a really good job in going after other hackers who are doing sabotage to try to attack our institutions, like power and water and power grid stuff. They do a bang up job with that. Information warfare: nobody’s minding the store. Nobody has that portfolio. Nobody cares.

As soon as this Trump administration came into office, the one State Department office that was responsible for doing anything, even looking at it or addressing it — gone.

By people who are sympathetic to the Russians. Surprise.

So I wonder if that kind of leads into this next question. Wasn’t the initial idea that a free and open Internet would destabilize regimes like Russia with information warfare? That’s exactly what you were just saying. What can be done to address the weaponization of the Internet by these regimes? Wow. That’s. Go ahead.

Yes, absolutely. That was the promise. But what ended up happening was that — just look at X. So if you’re Elon Musk or you’re someone — let’s see. We don’t even have to get into TikTok, the Chinese government creating and kind of weaponizing TikTok to their own ends. But just, for example, X, either under Elon or under the prior management, Jack Dorsey.

Even if they’re not actively trying to break the brains of Americans through confusion and mental retardation and whatever, you’re still dealing with the very potent motivation of money. And the more bots they have, the more people they have, the more advertising revenue that they can generate. So it’s in the interest of an Elon Musk to have as many bots as possible on his platform.

And if he goes and he makes sure that only people who are real are on X, then he loses a lot of money, because advertisers will not want to pay that much.

And I have a business idea. Yeah, this leads. Why don’t we do it ourselves? You should. This leads into the next question, which is amazing, if you have time for this last question or if you have time for more. But is there a monetary connection between Ian Carroll and Whitney Webb? And I think you might have addressed this already. Has anyone been able to find their connection, or did he seriously, quote, “just find her books”?

Honestly, I have no idea. I think someone like Ian Carroll, who is — I call him and his type, I call him conspiracy entrepreneurs. I think these people are more than capable of finding whatever shady bullshit to run around with, to use, and to promote. Whether there is another kind of monetary relationship, financial relationship between the two, or, let’s say, source of funding that’s common between the two of them — we will never know. Because that’s the kind of…

You’re on your timeline, right? Right. You don’t really need it.

But look, I think that would be a very fruitful line of investigation if you are in the U.S. government and you were looking into this kind of thing. So basically in my last chapter, what I’m dealing with is, on one hand, the history of dealing with disinformation and misinformation on the part of the left and the academy since 2016. Basically, they’re like, “We don’t care what happens outside of America. We’re going to focus on what Americans say.” Which, of course, is — it’s ridiculous. It doesn’t solve the problem at all. But it solves the problem for them, the problem they’re interested in solving, which is how to silence American citizens. So that’s what they’re after.

These people are all on the left, and they don’t care what comes out of other countries, hostile foreign countries. They don’t care. That’s why they couldn’t find the Dugin book. They’re not looking. No. What they care about is what Americans are saying, because they want speech controls for Americans. And obviously that doesn’t go.

That doesn’t work. A, it’s a violation of our First Amendment. And B, it’s just not effective in dealing with foreign information warfare. So my suggestion is, OK, you go after the foreigners and you treat information warfare the way you would treat other types of warfare. Sabotage.

These guys — there are people who are in Moscow and in Doha and in Beijing and in other places who wake up in the morning and they go to work and they check in and they sit down at their desks. And their job for the next eight to 10 hours is: How do I screw with the American population? How can I get them to break? And these people do it because — one reason they do it is because they understand that there will never be any consequences. There won’t be a guy following them down a dark alley when they go home. There won’t be a missile taking out their car. They are totally fine.

They are white collar professionals. So I say, OK, let’s bring some heat on them. Let’s bring some heat, some real military physical heat, on the infrastructure that enables this. Why are there bot farms that we know that are engaged in trying to break America? That should be a — that should just be a given. A cyber strike. That you do that.

We attack you with cyber warfare because you’re doing cyber warfare of a different kind.

Right. And if the United States — and really I addressed the last chapter to the United States and Israel, too, because Israel is not on top of this. In a way, whatever. I give them a little bit of a break because they have actual guys with guns and missiles and developing nuclear weapons to deal with. OK, I get it. However, you can’t be in the Israeli government and not realize that this stuff has had a massive effect geopolitically over the last several years, because it absolutely has.

And I don’t understand. I think we’re way past the time when we can sort of wave off information warfare like it’s nothing, like it has no effect. It’s 2026. Everyone at this point should be able to say, “Yes, this is something that we need to take seriously.”

Yeah, I completely agree with you. But we have one question we’re going to go to about Promethean Action. You may or may not be familiar with them. I’m not going to speak to it because I don’t have the information at my disposal. Are you familiar with them? Promethean Action.

Oh, they’re kind of, if I remember right, some Lyndon LaRouche type of narrative, especially against the British. Like, oh, the British are — you’ll hear them say, even if they can see Russia and China problems, which usually they exempt Russia from that. But they’ll say, “All right, well, China, Iran and the British.” And it’s funny because I saw them get amplified at the same time. It’s been going on a while, but I saw a real spike maybe three months ago, maybe two, where Russian media, because of some weapon sales going from the British to Ukraine — I saw the RT drumming those lines.

I saw Elizabeth Lane suddenly switch. And she said, “Oh, I just learned about this, about how the British Empire still exists. And it’s behind all of this. And the British Empire actually controls Ukraine.” It’s always depending on what day it is. There’s always the hidden hand. But it’s the same carousel. And it just keeps changing and changing. I believe I’m part of the British Empire. I know she has said I’m part of Ukraine, NATO.

What else did she say? A Georgian warlord for Ukraine. Yeah.

The LaRouche guys have been around forever. I remember encountering them when I was in college. Really? Oh, yeah. They’ve been around forever.

I’ve just never come across them except the Internet.

So I came across them in college. And then also I moved to San Francisco after school. This was still in the 90s. And I would go to protests and I would see them. And my friends and I, we all knew the LaRouchies. They’re all completely nuts. In those days, the days before social media, it was like, “Oh, here are a bunch of nuts.”

And they’re never going to — you could have Russians or Chinese or North Koreans or whatever, spending millions of dollars, investing millions of dollars in getting their message out in the United States. But it’s not going to go anywhere because it’s fringe craziness. It’s the stuff that you would hear in a Berkeley coffee shop.

But now with social media, the stuff that I would hear at a Berkeley coffee shop is stuff that you hear from people who are millennials in West Virginia. But it’s true. It’s true. Now you have people who, in another age, would be sort of semi yuppies, maybe with tattoos or something.

And they have jobs and maybe they have kids and whatever. And they’re sort of normal. And in a prior age, they would be voting for Republicans. And today, because of Twitter and TikTok and whatever, they’re basically saying the same stuff that you would find at a Berkeley coffee shop. And I know because I was there. It’s literally the same stuff.

So I do have one question for you, Dave. And this will be our last question, because I know someone’s going to say, “Why didn’t you bring this up?” It’s the question that they think will debunk everything. There’s actually two parts. Number one, that’s all important. But wasn’t Jeffrey Epstein Jewish? And then didn’t he have something to do with a former Israeli prime minister? Ha, gotcha. There. I asked the question from the inevitable people that I’m going to see on X.

Right. No. It’s simple. I thought, should I deal with this? Should I spend time in the book kind of going through this? And then I thought, no, I’m not writing the book for stupid people. Somebody has there, though. Right. No. Yeah. To do it on X is one thing. But to do it in a book, I just felt like it was beneath me. I’m like, OK. So can you imagine a CIA, a very sensitive CIA operation where your handler is like Jimmy Carter or like a former president of the United States? That’s your handler who you’re going to meet. In what universe does this ever happen? Like, what is a good point?

You wouldn’t expose yourself for people that don’t quite get it. In terms of operational security, the last thing you would do is put your super agent James Bond type guy. Be like, “You know what you need to do is email the prime minister. That’ll hide your tracks.”

Right. And have him stay at your house. One of the most famous Israelis in the world. It’s just stupid. It’s as stupid as when the day I released the book, people came back to me and they were like, “What a liar you are. Look, here’s a photo of Jeffrey Epstein wearing an IDF T-shirt.” And I’m like, “Okay, yeah, you got me. My whole book is bullshit because a guy bought an IDF T-shirt off Amazon.” And if he really was working for Mossad, you think he’s going to wear that? What universe are these people living in?

So the one concession that I made to that kind of thing is I said people may forget that at the end of the day, intelligence — this is not a movie. Intelligence is a job. The IC is a job. It’s part of the government. That means every year there’s at least one person who’s a supervisor who’s responsible for signing their name on money being spent.

So if Mossad were to be running a Jeffrey Epstein operation, they would have to be paying for the plane, for the island, for the Palm Beach estate, for the New York estate, for his Paris apartment, for his massive operation in New Mexico. And God knows whatever else. Right? Right? Plane always on call. Blah. Okay. That’s a lot of money. That’s tens of millions a year, even if you’re faking it. Even if you’re faking it. Minimum. Yeah.

That means every year somebody has to sign on the dotted line, yes, this was worth it, that this was an expenditure that was worth it. What did we get for it? I don’t know. Nobody has ever made an allegation that there was any quid pro quo, that there was any — okay, what’s the result of this? Okay, you want to say blackmail? Fine. It was blackmail. You blackmail somebody for something. What was it? Make an allegation. Say something. Nobody said anything.

Nobody said anything. Because frankly, there’s nothing to say.

Well, Trump bombed Iran. This is what you’re going to hear. Just to give the strongest argument you can to the other side. They’ll say, well, Trump said he was against endless wars. He’s a non-interventionist. He hangs out with Epstein. Any Epstein blackmail on Trump is in the hands of the Israelis. Therefore, the Israelis made him do this completely illogical thing. You never would have done, which was bomb Iran, which we know was a campaign pledge going back to 2015. But anyway, that’s what you’re going to hear. And a lot of people are going to respond. So why don’t you address it? The eighties. Oh, you’re right. You’re right. You’re right. Right. Yep.

I think Trump’s hostility toward the Iranian regime is probably his most consistent policy out of anything. Out of anything. It’s that and tariffs going back to the 1980s. And he wanted to bomb them in the eighties. He’s always wanted to bomb them. Are you kidding me? It’s such a kind of nonsense thing. And it’s like, okay, if you believe — if you really think that, make the case.

Make the case in a real way that holds up to the smallest amount of scrutiny. Make it. I haven’t seen anyone make the case. I’ve seen a wild allegation, but it’s like, okay, prove that this connects to this. Show me how it connects to this. And they can’t do it. You want to show me a document, show me something.

JD Vance goes on Joe Rogan’s show and says, “I will take to my grave the idea that Epstein was involved with intelligence,” whether it’s Mossad or CIA or whoever, blah. He didn’t specify who. “I’ll take it to my grave. I believe it because I believe it.” Which is probably the most irresponsible thing any government official has said about the nature of reality. It’s very disqualifying.

Take away any issue or whatever, or matter of facts or something. But just in general, I believe this because I believe it. It’s in my bones. And no one will ever change this opinion. So it’s like, okay. Okay.

So then Rogan asked him, “Well, you’ve looked into the evidence. You’ve looked into all the records.” And he says, “Yeah, I have. We found nothing. But by the time I looked, they would have destroyed it by now.”

That’s not how it works.

That’s not how it works. That’s not how it works. It’s not how it works. There’s no, like, I have this hunch. And I found nothing. Earlier in the conversation, I said, I have this hunch that there’s some understanding that the Russians have in regards to conspiracy theories, conspiracism. Okay. Then I said, I’m going to look to see if that hunch is right. And if that hunch was wrong, then I would have never written it. But J.D. Vance is like— vice president. You know? Yeah. Yeah. He goes on Rogan. I think it’s insanely irresponsible. It’s insanely irresponsible. Not because of Epstein and Israel or Jews or whatever. Just as a thing. Just as a thought process, like, “This is how my mind works.” And he said it.

He lacks the self-awareness to even know that’s a really bad thing to say. So there’s like two layers. It’s bad that’s how you go about things. It’s about five times worse when you’re the vice president of the United States going on the highest rated podcast. And you think that’s a good answer. That’s like, your alarm bells don’t go off that might be a bad thing. Intellectually, that’s just scary. Even if I agreed with what somebody was saying.

And the other point I’d make, because I know that there were quotes out there with the court case, with Epstein and why he wasn’t prosecuted to the fullest extent, where people said, oh, well, he — I forget exactly what it was. But it was someone credible in government. Like, “Oh, well, he’s intelligence as well.” I was told that doesn’t mean working for Israel or being an employee. Let’s just say that’s true.

There’s also sometimes you cooperate with authorities and then they’re a little bit nicer to you. That’s just being a source. That’s very different than being a guy who’s like, “Oh, go get that person and get incriminating sexual material on them,” and then blackmailing them. The one thing is kind of — I want to say normal, but it’s more commonplace, where, OK, somebody has some information and intelligence services are either paying a little bit or, “Oh, we’re going to prosecute you, but we’ll be a little bit nicer because you helped us in some other ways.”

That’s actually not evidence for a conspiracy. That’s an evidence for normalcy. And then when someone says, “Oh, he’s intelligence,” and they’re referring to — that’s a deceptive — the kernel of truth might be there, might. And it’s just being completely misunderstood or deliberately mischaracterized. And it gets applied to this much bigger conspiracy theory that, like I said, he’s an extra horny James Bond and he’s going around and he has this vault of blackmail on everybody and all stuff like you. There’s 10 miles difference between those two things.

Can I ask a question real quick? J.D. Vance, I read his book, Hillbilly Elegy. That was an older book, but he did publish a book just after Charlie Kirk stopped by the name of God. But it was a book on Catholicism. I can’t remember the name of it, but I do not recollect him saying anything about any denomination in his book, Hillbilly Elegy. So do you know when he became Catholic and does that even matter?

I think he became — now we’re going to get controversial.

I’m so sorry. Let me stop. Look at what you did. You’ll have to answer anything just so you know. It’s the viewer’s fault. They’re throwing the comments. So I said, okay. But I did have that question. Go ahead, David.

So I think he became a Catholic like around 2013, if I’m not mistaken. I think he became a Catholic around 2013. And he’s part of a wave of intellectual new Catholics that are politicized, that have very little in common with people who are cradle Catholics, as is my understanding. I have a lot of friends that grew up in the Northeast. I have a lot of friends who are cradle Catholics who look at these guys and kind of don’t understand them. But it was a thing. And I have my own opinion about that particular thing and the motivation to do that. Folks who come from a background where they don’t have a particular real strong tie to one particular religious denomination or another. They come to Washington, D.C.

Or they come to, let’s say, the conservative intellectual universe. And they very quickly find that it’s basically Jews and Catholics who have been at the forefront of conservative intellectual life for the last 50 years. We see it on the Supreme Court. We see it in magazines and think tanks and whatever. This is the people who kind of go into this. And there’s a reason for it. There’s a reason for it because Catholics and Jews grew up together in New York and in Chicago and in other places. And number one. Number two is, they’re both very textual oriented. And this is the kind of — these types of intellectual pursuits are the kinds of intellectual pursuits that they are often interested in.

And for a lot of people who don’t come from that background, they come in and they kind of want to be a part of something. And obviously, they’re not going to become Jews, but they can kind of become Catholics.

And I think that’s what a lot of people did. And obviously, I think for all or most of these people, it’s a sincere thing. But it’s also remarkably political. There’s a lot of the trad thing. There is a rejection of Vatican II that is common with most of these people.

And I don’t think — Vatican II was quite a lot of different stuff, included a lot of different stuff, from prayer in languages that are not Latin to, for example, apologizing for the legacy of anti-Semitism within the Catholic Church. And these people are really against Vatican II. And in many ways, it’s weird to me because you go and you convert and you join a religion wherein you fundamentally disagree with its teachings. That to me is a little bit weird.

But OK, so it’s not a big surprise that if you hate Vatican II, and you think that the church made a really big mistake apologizing for its persecution of Jews over the last 1500, 2000 years, then I guess that’s a take.

Yeah, we did about two. I think we did two podcasts and it started with looking into George Farmer, Candace Owens, his husband. And I was looking into his background. I was shocked to see. That’s how I started learning about the Russia links and the anti-Western manipulation of some traditionalist Catholics. But it’s really becoming more and more of a thing where you have organizations that are tied to, for example, a former Vatican official who then teams up, becomes essentially a Russian agent of influence and is tied in with all this.

And it’s been a really remarkable trail to go down that and see other people going down. And then that looped in with some of what you actually talk about in your book with Bannon and also Epstein. Steve Bannon was communicating with Jeffrey Epstein about how to undermine the Vatican. And Bannon was sharing articles from Dugin with Epstein.

So it’s amazing how you get these conversations where you start discussing this other element. And that’s partially, I think, why Regina was asking that question, because we know that there’s this distinct effort now coming from the Russian side to stimulate Catholic sentiment against Rome, against the West, against the Vatican.

And to say that Moscow is the third Rome, that’s really where your allegiance should be. And then they have parallel ones going after the Protestants, of course. But it’s amazing to see how that kind of all comes together, where you think we’re going a little bit off topic. But then when you start talking about that same type of ideological push with the conspiracy theories and stuff, it ends up coming back to the same factory, the same Russian-speaking vodka-drinking factory.

You know what’s really wild? When I’m reading the Dugin book that was published, various chapters were written in various times, going all the way back to 1991, 93. But it was packaged in 2005. So it includes material that spans many years. But I thought it was fascinating that even as late as 2005, Dugin is screaming — what’s he screaming about? He’s screaming about evangelicals. He’s screaming, pro-Israel evangelicals. And he’s screaming about the Scofield Bible. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. When I read that, I was like, that’s wild.

So was Candace Owens. Candace Owens was saying that on her podcast about the Scofield Bible. And she had that same conversation with Judge Joe Brown. I kid you not. OK. Sorry. When you said Scofield Bible, I was like, I’m going to go back. That’s a big thing.

Tucker did a big episode about that, too. Right. Yeah. And he starts saying that was like a formative moment in his rejoining or getting more serious about Christianity. He wasn’t really into it before. He gets into it and then he said something to the effect of one of the big moments in his finding out true Christianity. Because apparently you can figure it out that quickly if you’re a genius like him. And it was the Scofield Bible and the hidden hands behind all of that.

And as far as this phenomenon that we have, and it’s Christians of all kinds, where some people, after they get born again, they go from the humility that is required to be born again to suddenly becoming arrogant because they feel like they’ve opened up the treasure chest of truth. And, “Oh, my God loves me. He has a purpose for me. Therefore, I’m really special. Plus, I figured out the truth.” And next thing you know, very rapidly, they’re saying, “I’m starting a ministry. I’m a preacher at churches. Let me educate Christians about their faith.” It’s a bizarre arrogance. I see it over and over. I remember when I was a kid seeing it coming from the Protestant side.

But I know that’s a little bit of a side tangent, but it does speak to the emotional connection that you mentioned with conspiracy theories. There’s something it taps into. Even if it’s just being able to sit around with a group of people, you know that rare theory, that rare fact that is reliable. And they all sound smart. But you know what? I can mention Operation Northwoods or something and be like, “Hey, guys, you’re all smart. You’ve done a lot with your life, but I’ve got a fact that can show what true reality is.” And so I’ve one-upped you. And it feels like that. Part of this is just wanting to one-up people.

But I know it’s a spot thing, but you— because she’s graduated past that. Right. She’s all-knowing. She’s mother. They’re calling her mother. Have you seen that? They’re calling her mother. I said, oh my gosh, is this mother 2.0, the cult leader mother? Yeah. And I have seen what appear to be bots or maybe they’re trolls, but that’s what really freaked me out. And I saw it around the time she went to Russia, because one of the people in Russia that was hosting her was trying to connect her to Virgin Mary in some of their rhetoric. And they were saying, oh, the only mother Mary could have had this pregnant woman, Candace, who clearly has a special connection with God, come to Moscow while these other things happen, and was drawing a parallel.

And then I’m looking in her chat before then and then especially after that. And yeah, there’s some wackos saying things. She’s cultivated that audience. But whoever’s directing some of the bots, there was clearly a decision at some point to popularize calling her that.

And we can speculate. I don’t know what the objective is, but there’s some reason that’s being scripted in there. I’m not sure why. I know it’s freaking dangerous, though.

It’s very dangerous. If I had nothing to do, I would probably go really deep on looking into the Russians and QAnon. Yeah. Yep. Because I was initially skeptical, because many of us were skeptical about this. When I first started saying, look, it’s the Russians after October 7th who were promoting a lot of the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic stuff, people jumped down my throat and they said, “No, you don’t understand. It’s Qatar.” And I was like, I wrote the first book and the only book on Qatar is information warfare.

I would love to be able to update the book and say that it’s Qatar, but this is not Qatar. And maybe they’re signing checks, but that’s all they’re doing because that’s all they’ve ever done. There’s no Qatari mastermind. There’s no Qatari information warfare mastermind. If they need stuff done information warfare-wise, they hire an ex-CIA guy like they have in the past, to hack people or to do something.

That’s kind of going back to the Active Measures Working Group, the three methods for attributing an information operation. Using that method, it’s not a Qatari. That’s how you know it’s not Qatari, because the operational signature, the technique is just not the same. And frankly, there isn’t anyone in Doha who’s kind of smart and sophisticated enough to be able to do this. They can go and they can throw money around and they can get an Alex Brusowicz or whatever to just be a hack and to support them.

But that’s a very big difference between doing that and running a real information warfare campaign. Which reminds me, one thing that I write about in the Qatar book is there is a difference between information operations and influence operations. And Russiagate, the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump and his people were being controlled by Moscow, that came out in 2015, 2016, and then basically took over his whole first term — what was that? That was an allegation of a Russian influence operation. Not information operation, an influence operation, because, allegedly, the story goes, they went and, through money or this or that, whatever, they flipped a bunch of elites, people, Trump or people close to Trump. That was the allegation. And I knew it was bullshit very early on because I had an understanding.

I knew. I was like, the Russians are actually bad at this. They do information operations well. They don’t do influence operations well. The Qataris are the same. They do influence operations well, and they don’t do — actually the opposite. I’m sorry. They’re the opposite. Right. Yeah. It’s the opposite because it’s a lot easier to do influence ops with money, because all you have to do is throw around money. Yeah.

And that works too, because what ends up happening is someone takes money or lends their credibility to some guys who are bad, and that person who’s did that is left with a choice. And the choice is, am I going to look like a fool by admitting that I screwed up and I trusted the wrong people or I took money from the wrong people? Or am I going to be defiant and try to hold on to my reputation and fight really hard?

And we saw this for 25 years with the Muslim Brotherhood. It was very dangerous because they were very good at these influence operations where they can go in and the Muslim Brotherhood guy talks to the Congressman or whatever, and gets him to say something pretty stupid and put his reputation on the line for the Muslim Brotherhood guy. And then the Congressman or whoever, even if he knows that he made a mistake, he is not going to admit to it.

And that’s when you have a problem, because the natural human reaction is not to admit to a mistake and not to admit that you got taken. And then what ends up happening is somebody who was wishy-washy ends up hardening his position because he doesn’t want to look like he was manipulated or fooled or whatever.

Yeah. That’s a great point. I remember seeing that a lot too, where somebody would end up — you’d give them the information on guard. So they definitely know better now. Right. But whether it’s election considerations — although I think if you just admit you’re wrong, I think they overestimate how damaging that is. I think it’s a good way to just be like, “Oh yeah, I screwed up. Here’s what happened. That guy donated a bunch of money. He wanted to meet.” I kind of — like, if you just take it like that, it would probably be more effective than doing this thing where they’re like, “Oh, well, technically what I said was this. So I didn’t really defend him,” or, “He’s not as bad as what those Islamophobes are saying.” Pride is — especially with public figures, it’s such a pollutant to everything that they do.

But it looks like we are out of the questions, aside from some things in the chat that are broad enough that it requires a little bit more of a written explanation, which I can do on X. So to close this out, was there anything you wanted to tell the audience, David? Mention also the name of your book on Qatar, because people are going to want to pick that up too.

It’s called Qatar’s Shadow War. And if you go to my website, davereaboi.com, you will see both. There’s a section for books and you can buy both. You could buy a signed copy. You can buy from Amazon. You could buy Kindle. But I kind of encourage you to buy the physical copy because the physical copy in this case is quite nicely put together. I’m proud of how it looks, visually and aesthetically.

Yeah, it is. I know what you’re referring to.

And I appreciate it very much and I appreciate all of your time and attention and listening, and Ryan, to having me on.

Sure thing. Sure thing. It was a really good show. I look forward to hearing stories from people who are listening to you. It’ll probably take a few weeks, but I know I’m going to hear them. People are like, “Look, I just blew someone’s mind with that.” Either showing them the podcast or sharing your book or making their own summary.

But when you show people as succinctly as you did — throughout the podcast, you went to more detail, but then when you succinctly were just saying, like, “This is where it came from. This fact that everybody thinks is this proven thing. It went from here to here. And now to you,” I think that could have a permanent effect on someone. It’s not just about Epstein or Israel. That’s a wake up call. That’s a moment that could change someone for the rest of their life. Really? If they’re into stuff and that it makes that light bulb go off.

I can’t think of a better microcosm for that to happen than the Epstein thing, everything else with Israel. And as I said, you get into the weeds on stuff, but what you have here is really a rare moment, a rare example, a rare weapon through your book and through your work, to start that process where someone can start thinking in a more healthy direction. So, again, I encourage everybody that you pick up a copy of both of Dave’s books.

And thank you for tuning in.