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Feb. 4, 2026 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
30:47
Epstein ... Israel ... Russia ... China

Richard and Deep Left discuss the geopolitics of Jeffrey Epstein. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Chinese Dissident Faction 00:15:04
And so they're creating a lot of distraction around anti-Semitism.
And that serves to say, okay, well, the story, and this is what Nick Fuente said, and I hope he does, I hope he evolves on this or maybe reveals more in the future and makes the story more multifaceted.
But right now, he says the story of Jeffrey Epstein is about Jewish power, that Epstein was an agent for Israel.
He's furthering the goals of Israel.
That's the story, open, close, shut.
And see, I'm not like those radical conspiracy theorists like Kano Sohan.
So he kind of does that meme where he's in the center and then maybe Michael Tracy is on the right, but then the conspiracy theorists have just gone like far to the left and you know on this spectrum and they've just gone wild and crazy and he's just stayed right where he is.
Well, that's still not a complete picture.
It's not an accurate picture.
It's not one I would agree with.
This is really more of a story about how there is what I call a Chinese dissident faction that are literally in the deep state.
Like Epstein, we're getting to the point where he is like an unofficial government agent.
He is a diplomat.
He is a moneyman.
He's part of the people running the global financial system.
So he literally is the deep state.
And the deep state is working for Russia.
The deep state, now, obviously that's a one-sided view as well, because there's two.
There's obviously, we then get Victoria Newland.
We get people who are like, no, we don't want to ally with Russia.
We have an opportunity here to unite Europe and unite NATO.
And we're going to pursue that strategy.
But the Chinese dissidents, you look at the text between Bannon and Epstein, and they're calling Xi Jinping a peasant.
And they're saying, oh, these people can't create anything.
And the Chinese are just a race of, you know, autistic robots and slaves.
And we're going to crush them.
We're going to destroy them.
Now, if you really believe that, then allying with Russia makes perfect sense.
If on the other hand, you believe China is a faraway country, we're not going to go to war with China.
We can trade with them.
They're creative in their own way.
Maybe they're not the same creativity as the West or whatever, but they have some, they can, you know, help build the economy and make a better world.
So why don't we just work with them?
Whereas Russia is this Rivanchist revisionist power.
We have no reason to cooperate with a country that has the GDP the size of Italy.
You know, we should be expanding into the East.
We should be uniting Europe.
We shouldn't be risking another World War III by breaking up the EU.
So these are diametrically opposed ideologies.
You could say both of them are competing within the deep state, that there are two deep states.
There's a red deep state and a blue deep state.
And Epstein was clearly aligned with the red deep state.
Now, you know, who knows what would have happened when he donated to Ehud Barak and he was working with Barack, that connection was made on the grounds that I think Barack said, wow, Netanyahu has all these connections with Putin.
I need somebody who can help me out with Russia because Russia is influencing Israel's elections.
And that's when all of this went down.
And that's when this huge split emerged that, you know, again, there's a gradual process of an emergence.
You could say that we're almost splitting hairs here, but there's clearly what Jeffrey Epstein envisioned as a path forward for a Russian-American alliance.
He did not have this full-blown Christian nationalist, like hyper-Zionist.
Like he did not envision that type of coalition.
Or at least he thought it's a bigger tent than that, right?
We're going to have Noam Chomsky.
We're going to have liberals.
We're going to have leftists in this.
And at some point, that coalition broke down.
You could say 2019 was an important year for that.
And of course, after 2022, there were very few liberals left in that coalition.
He may have been one of the last holdovers just because he had built up those contacts over three decades.
And he probably couldn't, it was hard to extricate himself from that after all that time.
But you know, after 2022, it's very hard to envision the world of Jeffrey Epstein, where you could be like just a sort of genuine liberal guy and a Steven Pinker type guy.
And then you go from that to, yeah, I'm going to support Russia.
Like that after 2022, I think there was a coup within America, in a sense, in breaking apart those two factions.
Like, no, if you're a liberal, we can't, that door is closed.
We are not cooperating with Russia.
We are anti-Russia.
So that was a definitive moment that he didn't really live to see, but all of that was building up.
So there's a huge geopolitical angle here that's being swamped by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and just conflating.
Oh, no, he was an agent for Israel.
I'm sorry, there are other countries in the world besides Israel.
And that's the hyper-focus and the schizophrenia and the single-mindedness, the fetishization, which is like a post-Christianity, right?
It is the element, this complicated love-hate relationship with Judaism that is at the center of Christianity is now being secularized by these QAnon anti-Semites, and they can't see anything else.
They can't envision a world without Israel because then Satan wouldn't exist and there would be no, you could really go back to Zoroastrianism.
The Jews are the Angrimainu and insert whoever multi-racial working class anti-Semites you want for the place of Mahura Mazda.
But that is the basic dichotomy: they need that dualism.
And so they're actually more wedded to Jews in a sense.
Jews are their foundational myth.
And then you just kind of like slot in and out.
Well, today we've decided Hitler was good.
Oh, no, actually, Hitler was working for the Jews.
Now it's now David Eyck is the hero and now Nick Fuentes is the hero, whatever.
You can just slot in people.
Kanye West is the hero.
So they don't actually have anything positive or constructive that they value.
They don't have any virtues.
They just have schizophrenic, hysterical scapegoating.
It is the mob crucify him.
And Jeffrey Epstein's the new Adolf Hitler, as we said previously.
So yeah, this is not a, this type of thinking is what you would encourage if you are trying to destroy democracy.
And by that, I mean the institutions of Harvard and, you know, the FBI, CIA, whatever.
You want to destroy that so that you can do to America what the oligarchs did to Russia.
That's what Elon Musk wants to do.
That's what Peter Thiel wants to do.
They want to destroy Harvard, FBI, CIA, so that they can literally buy up the entire government and rule over it as moneymen, as Crassus in ancient Rome.
And they want to do the same thing to China.
They want to destroy China so that people can become trillionaires by owning all of the industry over there.
So it's a playbook.
The breakup of the Soviet Union is what they're trying to do to America.
It's what they're trying to do to China.
And I don't think it's good for world peace or prosperity, but I think it's very good for these will-be trillionaires at the top.
And Jeffrey Epstein was a part of that.
Yes.
So did the recent document dump change your opinion about Epstein at all?
I guess I'll just ask that as an open-ended question.
Do you think that something was revealed by this?
Yes, I think the revelations about Russia went far beyond.
You know, I originally, I knew Veckelsberg and I knew that he had these connections with Russian models, whatever.
And I thought, you know what?
Jeffrey Epstein's a pragmatist.
He has friends and I have friends with everybody.
He had this kind of Trumpian attitude that he would get along with anybody.
He wasn't really ideological.
He would be friends with ideological people, Bannon, Dershowitz.
He'd be friends with these people, but he never really fully bought into the bullshit.
Kill that.
There's actually a meeting.
He it's an email he sent to himself.
And he says, I was hanging out with these anti-Semites.
And I said, Why are you guys so anti-Semitic?
And they said, Well, the Jews control the world.
And he was like, What evidence do you have for that?
And they're like, Well, look at you.
You're one of the Jews who control the world.
He said, Well, I got to give it to you.
You know, you guys are right.
And so he would literally hang out with anti-Semites.
He would hang out with people who were literal Jewish supremacists who were like, Your percent of Jewish DNA determines your superiority.
He would hang out with everybody.
And so, this was my conception that Jeffrey Epstein didn't really have an ideology.
He didn't really have an agenda.
He wanted to make money.
He was influenced by the last person he was around.
He was influenced by Ghylaine Maxwell, who I do believe had an ideology.
And I still would stand by saying that I think Ghillain Maxwell, as a figure, is distinct and much less malicious toward kind of the EU and liberal ideas.
But yeah, he clearly had an antipathy toward China.
He clearly had, he saw potential in Russia.
He saw that Russia could be a crypto empire.
And this is basically what Bukele implemented: if the state buys up a bunch of crypto and then that pumps crypto and it creates this feedback loop, you can make trillions of dollars off that.
And Jeffrey Epstein was an early investor in crypto.
So the question is: was he a double agent?
You know, that I think that's an open question.
Clearly, he was an agent of Russia, but the secondary question is: was he a double agent?
Because in the emails, he says occasionally, it's not safe for us to talk about this via email.
We need to have a meeting.
So he knew that the FBI had access to his emails.
And so, if he was really like Michael Flynn, if he was really just like a traitor taking cash from the Russians or whatever, then would they have allowed him to get that far?
Would he have been arrested much earlier?
The question, so that opens up a whole new slew of questions, which is that is there a faction within the deep state that's protecting Russian agents from arrest because it wants to work with Russia in the same way that we have Israeli agents working in America who are protected from arrest because of our control by Israel or influence from Israel.
So, or they want to see how far they can go.
Yeah, they have more evidence on you by allowing you free reign.
Yeah, there's a lot of ambiguity here.
And, you know, one of the kind of possibilities that would be less malicious from the point of view of wanting to keep the EU together, wanting to keep NATO together, would be that, you know, Epstein was trying to rug pull Putin.
He was trying to get Putin to buy into all these crypto schemes so that then these whales, these Western whales, Satoshi, whoever that is, would have the ability to go to the Russians and say, Oh, you're now dependent on crypto.
Well, we actually hold the keys to crypto.
And so you have to now do what we say.
So that's one angle on it.
But clearly, I think it's very unambiguous that the guy hated China.
He had no contacts with China.
He had no relations with Chinese people.
He just didn't like.
He was just racist against Chinese people and he wanted to destroy China.
And so that's very consistent.
The Russia pro-Russia sentiment aligns with that.
You know, I think he's a complicated figure.
I obviously, here's the thing I'll say on an emotional level: is when I discovered the Michael Tracy thesis that there was no sexual blackmail, he wasn't raping kids.
This is all just schizophrenic stuff that's being promoted by Netanyahu, and we know it's being promoted by Netanyahu in all of his downstream channels.
When you have to defend someone every day against the crime of pedophilia or whatever, you start to develop a kind of empathy for that person.
You start to, in your mind, you start to say, those are the evil people.
And so he must be a good guy.
But, you know, it's like sunk cost fallacy.
And so I think I developed a rosy picture of this guy or rosier than maybe he deserved.
And I really do have some disagreements with his life work and his ideology.
I mean, I still try to understand and be objective about things, but I definitely underestimated to the extent to which he, if he was alive today, I don't know, would he have changed?
Would the invasion of Ukraine have changed any of his opinions?
I mean, we can't know that, but certainly he was instrumental in founding the alt-right, the dissident right.
And even QAnon, his personal hacker, Vincenzo Yozo, sent him the Gussifer link June 15th, 2016.
He says, looks fun, but the only important ones would be Hillary's secret.
And Yozo replies, I think you need to wait for WikiLeaks for those.
And this is, he's talking about the Access Hollywood tapes.
They're releasing all this, you know, the Hillary email.
So he was clearly driving QAnon.
He was driving, you know, I don't know, specifically Pizzagate.
I guess you could say that's part of.
There was a meeting with Teal, I believe, on the day that the Access Hollywood, that is Grab Him by the Pussy tape was released, which is interesting.
I doubt they were involved in the release of that.
I mean, Teal, at least ostensibly, was very pro-Trump at that point, but perhaps it was a sort of meeting about a counter-strike that was coming in the next weeks, which was the WikiLeaks email of the Democratic server that included that was the origin of Pizzagate and all sorts of stuff involving Hillary and Podesta.
Yeah, and I think based off these meetings that are coming out, I have to give a point back to the Russian hacker narrative because, you know, this whole time, I've been saying, look, there's clearly Israel has an interest in promoting Trump over Clinton.
The reason why is her husband campaigned against Netanyahu.
She was literally Secretary of State when the Iran deal was done.
Clearly, Israel hates Hillary Clinton.
They want Trump to win Kushner connections to Netanyahu.
That all makes sense.
Israeli hackers, notorious, use proxies.
They mask their ISPs as Russian.
They use Russian proxies.
Then the media says, oh, we found evidence that the ISP for these hackers comes from Russia.
And it's the most bullshit cover story.
And everyone just accepts it because, oh, well, we don't want to be anti-Semitic.
We don't want to be anti-Israel.
And so that's been my narrative for a while.
And I think that given the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was so pro-Russia, and given the fact that he does seem to be knee-deep in all of this WikiLeaks, QAnon, all of this stuff, the hacking of the DNC, Hillary's emails, I have to kind of give a point back to the Russian hacker narrative and say that, you know, while I think what I said before is plausible and I don't think we should discount that, I also think, well, clearly, Epstein is,
Interest Groups and Conspiracy Theories 00:06:45
he's kind of acting on behalf of Russia when he is hiring these hackers.
I mean, I guess in this case, an Italian hacker, but he's hiring hackers to push these narratives to save the election for Trump.
It was a close election.
You know, if you didn't have WikiLeaks, I don't see how Trump wins that election.
I mean, that's that moved independent voters and those are the voters who mattered.
He didn't win by appealing to constitutional conservatives.
He won by appealing to non-engaged voters, voters who were not Republicans, voters who voted for Obama, voters who were.
And I talked to these people at the time.
They're like, yeah, like weed-smoking Bernie bros who are just totally disengaged.
They hated Hillary for beating Bernie.
And they were just like, well, I don't even like Trump, but I don't know.
This stuff is weird.
Have you seen these paintings?
Have you seen these rich people and stuff?
I mean, that's how he won.
So, yeah, I mean, the Russian collusion narrative is gaining some more credibility with the influence of Epstein.
I totally agree.
That has been my takeaway.
And just to answer the question I asked as a prompt, I actually do think these leaks have changed my opinion, altered it a little bit.
And that is that he was deeper in with Russia than we imagined.
I want to talk about, I was talking about this with RFH actually over the last few days of a sort of more general theory of Trump.
Have you ever seen this image?
It's actually from a scientific paper, but it's become a meme.
And it's a heat map of liberal opinion and conservative opinion.
And the liberal opinion, let's just imagine it as blue, is sort of centered.
It's like a concentric circle of you believe in equality in the welfare state.
And then there's some like opinions that seem to sort of emanate from that.
And then you have the right wing heat map, and it's just all over the place.
It's here, there, and everywhere.
And right wingers have been saying things like, well, this just shows that we're the open-minded ones.
Like liberals are totalitarian, they're dogmatic, et cetera, et cetera.
And that's maybe one way of looking at it.
Another way of looking at it is that the right wing is totally incoherent.
And they believe in the welfare state in certain circumstances.
They believe in anarcho-capitalism in certain circumstances.
They believe in the military.
They believe in the ICE agents should kill people or they should never kill anyone at all.
Like they're just all over the place.
And that really is what Trumpism represents on some level.
So liberalism has a core ideology, however hazy it might be at times.
It has a core ideology and then it has interest groups.
So it's like, we help out the single women.
We help out the blacks.
We help out the Jews.
We help out farmers or whatever.
That's sort of its coalition is interest groups that are maybe even incoherent on some level.
You know, the Muslims and the single mothers are interest groups and they have nothing in common or whatever.
The right wing tried to do that with it had policy and an ideology, but no interest groups.
So it's like, we're going to lower your taxes.
We're not going to give you any Gibbs goodies.
And we've got some foreign policy that's a little bit more aggressive.
They try to tried that.
I think the magic of Trumpism is that he is this screen that you project upon.
And you, his interest groups now are like Joe Rogan listeners who believe that Israel killed Kennedy or whatever.
His new constituency are people who believe that COVID was a pandemic and that they're all trying to kill us with vaccines, despite Trump's overt actions on the pandemic.
He believed his constituency are Catholic traditionalists who want to install a monarchy and bring back the stoning of abortionists and adulteresses.
It's this radically incoherent group of people who just seem to all project upon him their hopes and dreams and fears and fantasies and desires.
And this really works when he's out of power and it doesn't work when he's in power.
And so where has Trump been successful?
He was successful in 2015 and 2016 when the alt-right had fantasies about Trumpian fascism and libertarians like Trump because he's anti-war or whatever.
He ultimately failed in 2020.
He ultimately succeeded again in 2024 when the alt-right was expanded beyond proportion, in fact.
The alt-right included people with podcasts that had 10 million listeners and so on.
And it's all about these sort of unhappy groups of cranks on some level that all project their mutually exclusive fears and conspiracy theories upon this man.
And he is this sort of postmodern president, but that is what the right is on some level.
The right has no ideology.
It has conspiracy theories that Trump represents some sort of battle leader against.
And so I really think that is where we are in terms of the left-right divide.
The left is this fading 20th century ideology of the welfare state and the great society.
And the right is winning in many cases, losing in others, as a kind of coalition of discontented, crankish, schizophrenic freaks.
And that's a successful strategy, as we've learned.
Right vs. Aztec Empire 00:02:56
That actually can continue.
I don't think it's going away, in fact.
Is there someone after Trump?
I don't know.
But that is the way to corral the right, is to corral all of these weird, incoherent people into the same barn where they can yell at each other, but ultimately believe that Trump is their savior, precisely because he's so vacuous, precisely because Trump has no ideology outside of himself, precisely because it just seems to work in some weird,
inexplicable way to view him as the one guy standing up against these forces of like liberalism and atheism or the Jews or the deep state or China, whatever, pizza eating child rapist or whatever it is, he seems to be the guy standing before them.
So that really is what the right has become.
Yeah, it reminds me of Cortez and the Aztec Empire.
And, you know, there's among white nationalists have a concept of a race war that the white man came in, he just overwhelmed with his genius and his big brawny muscles.
What actually happened was it was a small contingent of 500 guys, and they very quickly found these disaffected tribal forces that the Aztecs had been just, they were engaged in basically ritual genocide, where on like an annual basis, they would invade their neighbors, kidnap people and do ritual sacrifices.
They would never actually conquer their neighbors.
They wouldn't integrate them into the empire.
They would just go and kidnap them and sacrifice them.
And so when you look at these early battles of the Spanish conquest, it's not 500 Spaniards facing 30,000 Aztec warriors.
No, it's 500 Spaniards with 20,000 disaffected allies, non-Aztec outlying tribes, and then against the Aztecs.
And so it's really not a race war between black and or excuse me, between natives and whites.
It's an internessine civil war.
It's a Nahuan, the Nahuans were the principal enemies of the Aztecs.
It's a kind of Nahuan revolutionary war, where these Nahuans, and similar to you could draw parallels to Haiti and Rhodesia and other examples, South Africa, where the supposed war that's going on in the surface or these narratives that we have of this kind of black and white, it's actually more of an internal dispute.
And I think that's what's going on with Trump is he's like Cortez.
He's a leader.
He's a symbol.
He's inspiring the disaffected, the people who are outside of the center.
They're not coastal elites or they're angry with the coastal elites.
Internessine Civil War 00:05:36
They're disappointed.
And so they're all going to coalesce.
People who in themselves don't actually have the gumption to create a central state.
They don't actually have any central ideology, but they're willing to rally around this figurehead to destroy the empire.
Now, in the case of the Aztecs, of course, there was this plague going around, which wasn't intentional, but that's what happens when you have isolated continents and then you bring the plague over.
And so that certainly contributed to their fall.
You know, what is going to happen now with this Trump coalition?
Are they, and there are many different factions within it, but again, I come back to Musk and Teal, I think, have a very clear incentive to destroy democratic institutions so that they can buy everything up.
Are they going to be successful?
And by the way, here's the succeeding question is even if they are, let's say we get President Musk or whatever the hell he calls himself.
He's going to be the Redditor-in-Chief.
Girls for the win.
You know, that was a funny email from Musk to Epstein.
So even if he achieves his hopes and dreams and he becomes Redditor-in-Chief, how long is that going to last?
Because he's going to have a mercenary empire.
And we saw this in Rome, right?
When the emperors started to be delegitimized by Christianity, you had all of these civil wars.
And that's why Constantine converted to Christianity is because he was trying to mobilize the soldiers to his side.
He was trying to say, no, this isn't just another internecine mercenary war between random warlords in Rome.
No, we're on the side of Christ.
And so there's something substantive to this.
And that's why he converted.
So I think even if Musk, quote, wins, I don't think it'll, I mean, Crassus didn't have a very long run either.
So these people, these mercenary empires, Machiavelli writes about this, if you don't have a central religious theocratic principle undergirding the state, and it's just a mercenary state and you're just paying soldiers to fight for you, well, they will fight so long as they, in their head, they're doing a calculation of like, okay, there's a 10% risk I'm going to die, but there's this percent chance I'm going to get my money.
And so that's worth it.
But if it's a, if it's a kind of, you know, last stand at Thermopylae, no, they're just going to run away.
You know, mercenaries don't actually have what it takes to fight balls to the wall.
They'll fight when it's convenient.
They'll fight when the odds are in their favor.
But when it seems like they're probably going to die, they'll just run away.
They'll abandon the field.
Or they'll turn around and do a bane from the Dark Knight.
They'll go around and they'll actually attack their master.
It's what the Praetorian Guard was assassinating.
And that's why they brought in a Germanic guard to guard the emperor because the Germans were considered less political than the Praetorian Guard.
So, this is how these mercenary empires work.
And that's my prediction: if Musk ends up winning in all of this, his reign is probably going to be short-lived.
You know, he might be assassinated.
There might be some kind of civil war of mercenaries, but it's going to be very unstable.
And I don't think it's good for America or the world.
Musk thinks it's good.
He's blinded by ambition.
He wants to be at the top.
But I don't think, even if he does win, I don't think he's going to be remembered as this great man as a founder of new empires in the way that Caesar was.
I think he thinks of himself as Caesar, but I think he's more of a Crassus.
And, you know, if there is to be a Caesar figure who ultimately can overcome these mercenary forces and actually reconstitute an American republic into a formalized empire, you know, that's a bit, you know, there's no figure that you can look at and identify and say that's the guy, but there is that historical archetype.
So I have that kind of long-term hope that even if these dissident forces overwhelm our existing institutions, that there is always a there's always kind of a Napoleonic figure who can emerge out of that revolution, out of that chaos, and reconstitute things.
So it's not totally, it's not totally over.
And I'm giving that.
I think such a person has to be a liberal almost by necessity, actually, because a lot of people would talk this way about Trumpian Caesarism, but Trump is just clearly on the side of Russianism.
And I don't necessarily mean supporting Putin in Ukraine, although that is part of it.
He's on the side of dividing up the empire into fiefdoms of these shitty billionaires, basically.
So he's not a Caesar-like figure.
I think that person has to come from the liberals because the liberals have maybe weirdly and ironically established themselves as the party of the government.
Like we are defending democracy from itself in a way.
We are defending the state.
We're conservatives on some level.
We've developed this sort of woke liberal ideology as a management strategy for a multiracial country.
And so I think if there is a truly Caesar Caesarean figure, someone who's going to defend the state, this person is going to come from the left.
Defending Democracy From Itself 00:00:24
And I'm not sure most people are ready to hear that.
But let me go to a couple of questions.
And then I want to go press after we take the questions.
I want to press a little bit harder on the Russian angle.
And then I want to press also on the alt-right Brexit Christopher Poole 4chan angle, which is fascinating, but then I don't want us to get out over our skis on this.
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