COMMENTARY: By Michael West

We are led by fools and sycophants. The illegal, unprovoked invasion of Iran is not just garden-variety stupidity. This is stupidity on a grandiose, stratospheric scale.

The Israeli propaganda narrative that Iranians would sprinkle rose petals at the feet of their invaders has not come to pass. It has already been demolished in fact.

Instead of bringing freedom and democracy — “regime change” — we have brought chaos, possibly a world war, and definitely the destruction of the Middle East.

The world economy is being hit hard as we write; oil prices spiralling, energy prices about to soar, and the inexorable spectre of inflation and recession.

And it didn’t have to happen.

This was a war of choice. Even without the “Epstein Coalition” — as the Iranian media so aptly dubs their invaders — murdering 165 Iranian school girls on day one, “peace through strength” was never going to happen.

Quite the contrary. The illegal and unprovoked invasion of Iran has hardened the resolve of Iranians, who are massing in their hundreds of thousands across the country to mourn their dead and chant “Death to America”, to back their regime.

Where was the advice?
The Epstein Coalition killed the Ayatollah, who was actually against nuclear power; he was a moderate.

Did Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong not seek advice from Foreign Affairs that attacking Iran was folly, that the anti-regime protesters were a minority, that the pre-invasion protests were a Mossad and CIA psyop, that Iran might attack US proxy states in the region, that invasion would be a Brobigdadgian mistake?

Or did they ignore the advice in favour of a Washington regime compromised by the Epstein pedophile scandal?

And now, we see the feeble, hypocritical whining by Israel and its supporters about Iran attacking the Gulf states. Is that our only moral defence?

Decades of supporting these regimes: Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — US proxy states all — regimes now unravelling, the oil price is soaring, inflation and recession are beckoning globally.

Images are emerging from Bahrain of locals cheering on the Iranian missiles. Were DFAT and our politicians unaware of popular angst in the Gulf states against American imperialism?

And what did they expect Iran to do in the face of this existential threat? Not blow up American bases and infrastructure while the US attacked them; after the US betrayed them at the very negotiating table when they were offering significant concessions on nuclear enrichment, all to avoid war? This war.

War drums over Tehran.             Video: The West Report

Australia, the US flunkies
Yet here was Australia, Saturday night, first out of the blocks worldwide to throw its support behind Donald Trump and his preposterous “Operation Epic Fury”, a probable pedophile being blackmailed and led around by the genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu like a pony at the fairground show.

“Operation Epstein Fury”, it was fast labelled. The soaring, craven stupidity is hard to grasp. Both major parties backing it.

Albo first, then Angus Taylor rushing to tow the Donald’s line. Then, One Nation’s Pauline Hanson, too, who even congratulated and praised Netanyahu. We are led by fools and sycophants.

The flawed defence of atrocity
To address the empty rhetoric of the pro-war lobby, criticism of this war does not equate to support for the regime in Iran. Defenders of the US-Israel atrocity are busy with their swarms of social media bots peddling the argument that “you are an Islamist terror supporter” if you criticise the invasion.

This is the 2026 version of “You are a Hamas supporter” if you argue against genocide in Gaza.

The cold facts of this debacle are that regime change does not work, that Iran did not want this war, that Iran appears to be exceptionally well prepared, that the Epstein Coalition, which Australia supports, is daily backing war crimes: blowing up hospitals, schools and civilian infrastructure.

This is a war which has already been lost.

The obvious reality is that regime change wars are a demonstrable failure. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Iraq — a million dead, irretrievable regional stability. In Afghanistan, 20 years, trillions of dollars spent, four US presidents, six Australian PMs — all to replace the Taliban . . . with the Taliban.

And here we are, the world’s busybodies, doing it again.

Who would ever negotiate with the US in good faith again, or Israel for that matter? Iran did not want this war. Iran has not attacked another country in 300 years.

The US lured them to the negotiating table, then, without warning, murdered their leadership. This echoes last year’s 12-day war, where Israel and the US lured them in on the premise of good faith talks, then murdered them and now play the victim.

What did they expect Iran to do in the face of this existential threat?

The record speaks for itself. The US is the biggest invader of other countries in history. Israel has, last year alone, attacked Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Palestine, Qatar, Tunisia, Malta, and Greece.

Six illegal attacks of sovereign nations, as well as three illegal attacks in international waters equals nine all up. In one year.

And now they are invading Lebanon again, seizing more territory as their puppets, America, fight their campaign against Iran.

Albo, what are you doing?
We know who the warmongers are. We are the warmongers. Yet, in his bizarre statement of support, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was the fastest out of the blocks of all the allies on the weekend, issuing a false statement.

Australia stands with the brave people of Iran in their struggle against oppression.

For decades, the Iranian regime has been a destabilising force, through its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, support for armed proxies, and brutal acts of violence and intimidation.

Iran…

— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) February 28, 2026

The claim, echoed by the usual warmongers of the Lib-Lab establishment, is that Iran is guilty of attacks on Australian soil, referencing alleged attacks on a deli in Bondi.

Apart from the common sense, why would Iran commit an act of terror on a deli in Bondi? Senior police have conceded that there is no evidence of this.

The nuclear furphy
Then there is the age-old claim that Iran is about to produce nuclear weapons. The US and Israel’s nuclear risk claims have been so roundly discredited it’s a joke.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to instigate a war against Iran for 30 years — claiming Iran is days away, weeks away, months away from nuclear missiles.

And they were at the negotiating table again when the Epstein forces murdered them.

The propaganda
We are now seeing mainstream media decry the “illegal attacks” on Israel and the Gulf states. Yet the ‘victim card” is tapped out.

Around the world, outside the legacy media propaganda, there is little sympathy for Israel having razed Gaza and slaughtered between 72,000 and 700,000 Palestinians while stealing more land in the West Bank daily.

It will continue. The media and political classes have failed so majestically that they can only try to salvage their authority with more propaganda.

The deplorable coverage of the murdered schoolgirls in Iran is a case in point. The “40 beheaded babies” and the “mass rapes” of Hamas filled the headlines in the West on October 8, 2023. Yet real murders — 165 murdered schoolgirls — have hardly rated a mention. Yes, a mention perhaps, but a side story, buried, no headlines of outrage.

Can’t handle the truth?

Is the truth too hard to handle? Is it not evident to everybody except the most brainwashed advocate of the Epstein lobby that Israel — the government, the state — is the problem here?

Netanyahu has won his ambition to drag America into a war against Iran, and if you follow the money, while world stock markets teeter, the stock market in Tel Aviv is surging, replete with weapons companies as it is.

Meanwhile, the ASX is tanking, ergo our savings. Oil prices are surging, ergo higher energy prices and inflation. The Houthis, Iran’s allies, are shooting again in the Red Sea while, on the other side of the Arabian peninsula, Iran has blocked the Straits of Hormuz, choking off a large chunk of the world’s oil supply.

Higher prices in India and China will mean higher prices for imports and inflation around the world.

The lessons of history have not been learnt; in fact, they have been discarded in spectacular fashion.

> 70 years ago, Iran looked just like any Western country.
> Short skirts, rock’n’roll, open universities.
> It’s 1953. Iran elects a secular socialist: Mohammad Mossadegh.
> He nationalizes oil. That pisses off BP.
> Cold War excuse.
> CIA and MI6 stage a coup. Operation Ajax.
>… pic.twitter.com/ZNWaLdBlCN

— Dr. Simon Goddek (@goddek) March 1, 2026

Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Politicians are under fire overseas. But New Zealand should take note too.

The US Justice Department’s release of more than three million Epstein files (including 180,000 images and 2000 videos) has blown the doors off the most protected social network of the late 20th century.

What these documents reveal is not just a catalogue of one man’s depravity. It is, as Helen Rumbelow wrote in The Times, like “taking the back off the world clock”, exposing how power actually works at the top of the Western world.

And the implications reach all the way to New Zealand.

New Zealand media has done useful work tracking the Kiwi names that appear in the files.

Paula Penfold at Stuff searched more than a thousand New Zealand references. Joel MacManus at The Spinoff, Ben Tomsett and Ethan Manera at The New Zealand Herald, and Steve Braunias at Newsroom have reported on the local angles — Peter Thiel’s investment relationship with Epstein, the New Zealand Defence Force couple who managed Epstein’s properties, Auckland academic Brian Boyd, physicist Lawrence Krauss and his pursuit of Epstein money for an Otago University role.

These stories matter. But the fixation on which Kiwis appear in the files misses the real story. The Epstein scandal is not fundamentally about which individuals had dinner with a monster. It is about what kind of political systems allow monsters to operate at the centre of global power for decades without consequence.

On that score, New Zealand should be paying very close attention, because our systems are weaker than those now failing spectacularly in countries around us.

The Mandelson masterclass
The most instructive case study is not American but British. The fall of Peter Mandelson (the architect of New Labour, the self-described “Prince of Darkness”) is a textbook case of how politics and money have gone rotten in liberal democracies.

The Epstein files revealed that Mandelson, while serving as “Deputy PM” to Gordon Brown, and in the position of Business Secretary, forwarded highly sensitive government tax plans to Jeffrey Epstein.

He told Epstein he was “trying hard to amend” a planned tax on bankers’ bonuses and suggested that JPMorgan’s CEO should “mildly threaten” the Chancellor to water down the policy. He gave Epstein advance notice of a €500 billion EU bailout before public announcement.

On Christmas Day, he wrote to a convicted paedophile: “I do not want to live by salary alone”.

So, a sitting Cabinet minister was leaking government intelligence to a convicted sex offender, lobbying against his own government’s financial regulation on behalf of that offender’s banking contacts, and angling for post-politics employment — all at the same time.

Within weeks of leaving office, his lobbying firm Global Counsel was chasing work with the Russian state investment fund and the state-owned China International Capital Corporation.

The Starmer government is bleeding credibility. Police opened a criminal investigation, Mandelson’s properties were searched, and yesterday Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney resigned, saying the appointment decision “has damaged our party, our country and trust in politics itself”.

The Economist magazine has called it “Britain’s worst political scandal of this century”. UK Labour now trails Reform UK in the polls.

As former Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote in The Guardian last Friday, in a remarkable act of public contrition: “I greatly regret this appointment . . .  He seems to have used market-sensitive inside information to betray the principles in which he said he believed”.

Brown’s piece was not merely an apology. It was a manifesto for integrity reform. Brown called for an independent anti-corruption commission with statutory powers, a fully accountable vetting system for major political appointments, mandatory parliamentary hearings for senior ambassadors and ministers, a five-year cooling-off period for former ministers entering lobbying, and the creation of corruption as a new statutory offence.

Brown argued for nothing less than a “century-defining rebalancing of power and accountability”, and he warned that without fundamental change, the revelations would be “acid in our democracy, corroding trust still further”.

Heather Stewart, writing in The Guardian, drew out the structural lesson: Mandelson’s personal disgrace is “deep and unique, and may yet bring down a prime minister — but by laying bare the dark allure of the filthy rich, it also underlines the need for tougher constraints on money in politics”.

Stewart documented how Epstein’s efforts to influence government policy — working to water down Alistair Darling’s bonus tax at a time when the banks had crashed the economy — “underline the powerful forces with which politicians are faced”.

She noted that Transparency International warned last summer: “We stand at the beginning of a new and dangerous era, where big money dominates in a way that has corroded US politics across the Atlantic”. The campaign group Spotlight on Corruption warned the current system is “full of major loopholes and gaps”.

The real takeaway is this: when it comes to money and politics, whether post-parliamentary employment, lobbying, or party funding, it is unwise to take honesty and decency as a given. As Stewart concluded: “It is not too late to pull up the drawbridge . . .  by introducing stringent new rules to protect British democracy from the malign influence of powerful companies, and dodgy billionaires”.

The global rot at the top
What is striking is the convergence. Left, right, and libertarian commentators from across the ideological spectrum are reaching the same conclusion: the Epstein network was not an aberration. It was a symptom of what happens when wealth, power, and access operate without transparency or accountability.

As Josie Pagani observed in The Post, “there appears to be a high degree of crossover between the sort of people who attend World Economic Forum jamborees at Davos, and the sort of people who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein”. The Economist noted the files read “like a ‘Who’s Who’ which has gathered only a thin layer of dust”.

These are not fringe figures being exposed. These are the people who run things.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a political theorist at Princeton, described the files as “a sobering x-ray of some of America’s elites — immature, full of impunity, corrupt, venal, venial, and venereal all at once”. He warned that “an elite so needy, greedy, and now so vulnerable can hardly be trusted to exercise good judgment”.

Owen Jones put it bluntly: Mandelson is “the logical culmination of the career politician, attracted to government office not because of any commitment to a set of values or public service, but simply for power, position, and profit”. Jones asked the question that should haunt every democracy: “What is being done now by ministers and politicians to secure preferment and nice jobs later?”

The Economist observed on the Epstein-Mandelson scandal that “a weakened elite is also more vulnerable to populism” and that “public opinion is less tolerant of hypocrisy than of sex scandals or corruption”. A record 43 percent of Americans surveyed by Gallup now say they have “very little faith” in big business.

The political lesson people take from the documents is broader: elites protect elites. And once voters accept that as a general pattern, they start to look at their own politics differently. They see the local versions: the donor dinners, the quietly arranged appointments, the lobbyists writing submissions, the ministers lining up post-parliament careers. They start to interpret routine insider politics as corruption-by-another-name.

So what does this mean for New Zealand?
It’s easy to shrug this off as a foreign horror story. That shrug is the vulnerability.
New Zealand has no lobbying regulations. None. No register, no code of conduct, no cooling-off period for ministers who walk out of the Beehive and into lobbying firms or corporate boardrooms.

We rank 42nd out of 48 OECD countries on lobbying transparency. NZ is ahead of only Slovakia, Luxembourg, and Turkey. Yet Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has said lobbying reform “is not a priority”.

As The NZ Herald editorial argued on the Epstein scandal, “what this all reveals . . .  is how utterly certain those in power are that they will be protected”. That certainty, and that sense of impunity, is not confined to Manhattan townhouses and Caribbean islands. It operates wherever wealth and politics intersect without adequate transparency.

Our own political history provides uncomfortable parallels. Minister Stuart Nash was sacked in 2023 for emailing confidential Cabinet information to wealthy donors, a mini-parallel to Mandelson’s alleged leaking of market-sensitive information to Epstein.

But in Nash’s case, he lost his ministerial role without ever facing a police investigation. The structural failure is the same: the revolving door, the undisclosed lobbying, the donation loopholes, the absence of any meaningful cooling-off period.

If the Mandelson affair teaches one lesson, it is this: weak integrity systems do not just allow bad behaviour, they incentivise it. New Zealand has all of these mechanisms for embedding soft corruption, in weaker form than the UK. We rely on a “she’ll be right” attitude in place of the institutional safeguards that comparable democracies take for granted.

The example of Peter Thiel sharpens this further. Thiel is a New Zealand citizen. He is also a billionaire power broker in Silicon Valley and a funder of rightwing politics who appears prominently in the Epstein files.

That is a reminder: New Zealand has granted citizenship, and effectively social legitimacy, to a man who sits inside the very global plutocratic networks now being publicly scrutinised for moral collapse and elite impunity. Thiel is symbolic because he represents something New Zealand has not seriously confronted: the country’s relationship with the global super-rich, and the way money can smooth entry into our political community.

Meanwhile, public trust in New Zealand’s institutions has collapsed. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer showed New Zealand’s trust index falling below the global average for the first time: 47 percent compared to 56 percent globally. Political parties are the least trusted institution, at just 32 percent according to the OECD’s 2024 survey. And the anti-politics mood is deepening.

The recent McSkimming police corruption scandal, where a Deputy Commissioner’s misconduct was systematically covered up, has already forced a national debate about the “C-word”. The ground was prepared before the Epstein files even arrived.

An election-year wake-up call
So what happens when this mood hits an election year? November 7 is nine months away, and the Epstein scandal feeds directly into a public mood that was already getting toxic.
The danger here is not that the public demands accountability. The danger is that the public concludes accountability is impossible, because the system is so captured by insiders and vested interests that reform cannot come from within.

Scandals like this feed anti-politics. People conclude that “they’re all the same,” that it’s a rigged game, that power protects itself. But the same disgust can create reform pressure. When trust collapses, political promises about integrity stop being an optional add-on.

They become central. Voters start demanding answers: who is lobbying whom? Who is funding whom? Why do politicians leave office and immediately cash in? Why are conflicts of interest treated as personal errors rather than structural failures?

No party in New Zealand “owns” the anti-corruption space. That’s also both a vulnerability and an opening. The party or leader who takes integrity reform seriously in 2026 — who makes the lobbying register, the donation caps, the Integrity Commission a genuine campaign commitment rather than a footnote — will be tapping into something powerful and real.

The party that ignores it will be betting that public anger stays diffuse. That would be a bad bet.

The global mood of elite scepticism will shape this election whether our politicians like it or not. Voters are more suspicious than ever of cosy relationships between politicians and the wealthy. They are less willing to accept opacity, conflicts of interest, and the revolving door as the price of doing business.

Chris Trotter, writing today in The Interest, argues there are “heaps of lessons New Zealanders can learn from what is unfolding in the United Kingdom”. He is right. New Zealand has an opportunity to get ahead of the global backlash. We can build the transparency infrastructure — the lobbying register, the Integrity Commission, the cooling-off rules — that most comparable democracies already have.

Or we can keep pretending that we are too small and too decent for this kind of corruption, and wait for the next scandal to prove us wrong.

Starmer’s warning to his own cabinet, that “the public don’t really see individuals in this scandal, they see politicians”, applies here too. New Zealanders are watching the Mandelson affair, they’re reading the files, and they’re drawing the obvious conclusion: that the people who run the world are not to be trusted, and the systems meant to hold them accountable are broken.

A country can’t keep shrugging at unregulated influence while telling voters to trust the system. If New Zealand’s political class wants to avoid the kind of legitimacy collapse now unfolding overseas, the time to act is now. Not after the next (inevitable) scandal.

An immediate test
And here is the immediate test. Transparency International is releasing its annual Corruption Perceptions Index. For the last couple of decades, New Zealand’s showing in the index has been in decline. Our score has slipped from the mid-90s to 83, and our ranking has dropped to fourth globally, now seven points behind Denmark.

Will this decline continue? If it does, it will be one more data point confirming what voters already sense: that the gap between New Zealand’s self-image as a clean, transparent democracy and the reality of our thin integrity architecture is growing wider.

The Epstein files have taken the back off the world clock. New Zealanders can see the mechanism now. The question is what do we do about it?

Dr Bryce Edwards is a political commentator and analyst. He is director of the Democracy Project, focused on scrutinising and challenging the role of vested interests in the political process. Republished with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The Epstein Files were never just about one man.

Jeffrey Epstein didn’t operate in a vacuum. His crimes were grotesque, systematic, and, crucially, protected for decades. That alone should unsettle anyone who believes power is held accountable.

What’s disturbing isn’t only what he did, but what didn’t happen afterwards.

How does a trafficker move across borders, fly politicians and royalty, launder wealth, avoid serious prosecution for years, and then conveniently die in a high-security facility with cameras malfunctioning and guards “asleep”?

That’s not a coincidence. That’s institutional failure at best, complicity at worst.

The real scandal is the silence.

Names were known. Networks were hinted at. Evidence existed. Yet accountability stopped at Epstein himself, the perfect firewall.

How power protects itself
Once he was gone, so was the urgency. Files sealed. Investigations stalled. Media interest redirected.

This is how power protects itself.

Whether you call it the Deep State, the ruling class, elite immunity, or simply entrenched systems of power, the pattern is familiar:

The powerful are insulated, the truth is managed, and justice is selective.

Epstein wasn’t an anomaly. He was a symptom.

And until transparency replaces secrecy, and accountability reaches upward instead of downward, the question will remain:

Who was Epstein really working for?

And who benefited most from him never speaking?

Maher Khalil Nazzal is a Muslim Palestinian refugee living in Auckland and co-chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Jonathan Cook

If you struggle to cope with the endless pressure to communicate in an ever-more connected world, spare a thought for the late serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

The flood of three million documents released by the US Department of Justice last weekend confirm that Epstein spent an inordinate amount of time corresponding with the huge network of powerful acquaintances he had developed.

Emailing alone looks to have been almost a full-time job for him — and in a real sense, it was.

The personal attention he devoted to billionaires, royalty, political leaders, statesmen, celebrities, academics and media elites was how he kept himself at the heart of this vast network of power.

His address book was a who’s who of those who shape our sense of how the world ought to be run. But it was also critical to how he drew some of these same powerful figures deeper into his orbit, and into a world of debauched and exploitative private parties in New York and on his Caribbean island.

Apparently there are another three million documents still being withheld. Their contents, we must presume, are even more damning to the global elite cultivated by Epstein.

The more documents that come to light, the more a picture emerges of how Epstein was shielded from the consequences of his own depravity by this network of allies who either indulged his crimes, or actively participated in them.

Epstein’s modus operandi looked suspiciously like that of a gangland boss, who requires initiates to take part in a hit before they become fully fledged members of the mob. Complicity is the safest way to guarantee a conspiracy of silence.

Network of power
It is not just that the late paedophile financier was for decades hiding in plain sight. His network of friends and acquaintances were hiding with him, all assuming they were untouchable.

His abuse of young women and girls was not just a personal crime. After all, for whom were he and his procurer-in-chief, Ghislaine Maxwell, doing all this sex trafficking?

This is precisely why so many of the millions of documents released have been carefully redacted — not chiefly to protect his victims, who are apparently too often identified, but to protect the predatory circles he serviced.

What is notable about the latest tranche of Epstein files is how suggestive they are of a worldview associated with “conspiracy theorists”. Epstein was at the centre of a global network of powerful figures from both sides of a supposed — but in reality, largely performative — political divide between the left and right.

The same elite that once prized Epstein as its ringmaster is now trying to draw our attention away from its complicity in his crimes

The glue that appears to have bound many of these figures together was their abusive treatment of vulnerable young women and girls.

Similarly, the photos of rich men with young women suggest that Epstein accumulated, either formally or informally, kompromat — incriminating evidence — that presumably served as potential leverage over them.

In true Masonic style, his circle of peers appear to have protected each other. Epstein himself certainly benefited from a “sweetheart deal” in Florida in 2008. He ended up being jailed on only two charges of soliciting prostitution — the least serious among a raft of sex trafficking charges — and served a short term, much of it on work release.

And the mystery of how Epstein, a glorified accountant, financed his fantastically lavish lifestyle — when his schedule seems to have been dominated by emailing chores and hosting sex parties — grows a little less mysterious with every fresh disclosure.

His cultivation of the super-wealthy and their hangers-on, and the invitations to come to his island to spend time with young women, all smack of the traditional honeytrap famously employed by spy agencies.

Most likely, Epstein wasn’t financing all of this himself.

Israel’s fingerprints
That should be no surprise. Once again, the fingerprints of intelligence services — particularly Israel’s — are to be found in the latest dump of files. But the clues were there long before.

There was, of course, his intimate, preternatural bond with Maxwell, whose media tycoon father was exposed after his death as an Israeli agent. And Epstein’s long-standing best buddy, Ehud Barak, a former head of Israeli military intelligence who later served as prime minister, should have been another red flag.

That partnership featured prominently in a flurry of stories published by Drop Site News last autumn, from an earlier release of the Epstein files. They showed Epstein helping Israel to broker security deals with countries such as Mongolia, Cote d’Ivoire and Russia.

An active Israeli military intelligence officer, Yoni Koren, was a repeated houseguest at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment between 2013 and 2015. An email also shows Barak asking Epstein to wire funds to Koren’s account.

But the latest release offers additional clues. A declassified FBI document quotes a confidential source as saying Epstein was “close” to Barak and “trained as a spy under him”.

In an email exchange between the pair in 2018, ahead of a meeting with a Qatari investment fund, Epstein asks Barak to allay potential concerns about their relationship: “you should make clear that i dont work for mossad (sic).”

And in newly released, undated audio, Epstein advises Barak to find out more about US data analysis firm Palantir and meet its founder, Peter Thiel. In 2024, Israel signed a deal with Palantir for AI services to help the Israeli military select targets in Gaza.

Predictably, these revelations are gaining almost no traction in the establishment media — the very same media whose billionaire owners and career-minded editors once courted Epstein.

Instead, the media seem much more engrossed by weaker leads that suggest Epstein might have also had connections with Russian security services.

Faustian pact
There is a reason why the demand for the Epstein files has been so clamorous that even US President Donald Trump had to give in, despite embarrassing revelations for him too. Much of what we see happening in our ever-more debased, corrupt politics appears to defy rational, let alone moral, explanation.

Western elites have spent two years actively colluding in mass slaughter in Gaza — widely identified by experts as a genocide — and then labelling any opposition to it as antisemitism or terrorism.

Those same elites twiddle their thumbs as the planet burns, refusing to give up their enriching addiction to fossil fuels, even as survey after survey shows global temperatures relentlessly climbing to the point where climate breakdown is inevitable.

A series of reckless, illegal Western wars of aggression in the Middle East, as well as Nato’s long-term goading of Russia into invading Ukraine, have not only destabilised the world, but risk provoking nuclear conflagration.

And despite expert warnings, artificial intelligence is being rushed out with apparently barely a thought given to the unpredictable and likely massive costs to our societies, from eviscerating much of the job market to upending our ability to assess truth.

The Epstein files proffer an answer. What feels like a conspiracy, they suggest, is indeed a conspiracy — one driven by greed.

What was always staring us in the face might actually be correct: there is a steep entry price for being accepted into the West’s tiny power elite, and it involves putting to one side any sense of morality. It requires discarding empathy for anyone outside the in-group.

Maybe a soulless, flesh-eating elite in charge of our societies is less of a caricature than it appears. Maybe the Epstein files have such purchase on our imaginations because they teach us a lesson we already knew, confirming a cautionary tale that predates even the West’s literary canon.

More than 400 years ago, English writer Christopher Marlowe — a contemporary of William Shakespeare — drew on German folk stories to write his play Doctor Faustus, about a scholar who, through the intermediary Mephistopheles, agrees to sell his soul to the devil in return for magical powers.

Thus was born the Faustian pact, mediated by the Epstein-like figure of Mephistopheles. The great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would revisit this tale 200 years later in his two-part masterwork Faust.

Degenerate logic
Perhaps not surprisingly, however, the media noise over the Epstein files is serving chiefly to drown out a more truthful story struggling to emerge.

The same elite that once prized Epstein as its ringmaster is now trying to draw our attention away from its complicity in his crimes, to direct it to a few select individuals — notably in the UK, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson.

The pair hardly count as sacrificial lambs. Nonetheless, they serve the same purpose: to satiate the growing public appetite for retribution.

Meanwhile, the rest of his circle either deny the well-established evidence of their friendships with Epstein or, if cornered, hastily apologise for a brief lapse in judgment — before scurrying for cover.

Seen in this larger frame, what does it matter if children suffer, either in Gaza or in the mansions of a billionaire?

This is a false reckoning. The Epstein files don’t just show us the dark choices of a few powerful individuals. More significantly, they highlight the degenerate logic of the power structures behind these individuals.

The powerful figures who took Epstein’s Lolita Express to his island; who got “massages” from young, trafficked women and girls; and who casually joked about the abuse these youngsters suffered, are the very same people who quietly helped Israel commit mass slaughter in Gaza — and in some cases, noisily defended its right to do so.

Are we surprised that those who raised not a whisper of opposition to the murder and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children, and the starvation of hundreds of thousands more, were also those who connived in rituals of abuse against children — or condoned such rituals — far closer to home?

These are the people who required anyone hoping to raise their voice in defence of Gaza’s children to spend their time instead condemning Hamas. These are the people who sought at every turn to discredit the mounting death toll of children by attributing it to Gaza’s “Hamas-run Health Ministry”.

These are the people who denied Israel’s targeting of hospitals needed to treat Gaza’s wounded and sick children — and ignored Israel’s mass starvation of the entire population. And these are the people now pretending that Israel’s continuing murder and torture of Gaza’s children amounts to a “peace plan”.

Neoliberalism and Zionism
Set aside his paedophilia for a moment. Epstein was the ultimate personification of the twin corrupting ideologies of neoliberalism and Zionism, which dominate Western societies. That is reason enough why he excelled for so long in their upper reaches.

The ultimate destinations of those ideologies were always going to lead to a genocide in Gaza, and in the years or decades ahead — unless stopped — to a planet-wide nuclear holocaust or climate collapse.

Ordinary men, women and children must be left on the sinking ship, while the billionaires requisition the lifeboats

Epstein could serve as a salutary warning of what is so deeply amiss with the West’s political and financial culture. But the wake-up call he represents is now being smothered in his absence as much as it was in his lifetime.

Neoliberalism is the pursuit of money and power for its own sake, divorced from any higher purpose or social good. Over the last half century, Western societies have been encouraged to venerate the billionaire — soon to be trillionaire — class as the ultimate signifier of economic growth and progress, rather than the ultimate marker of a system that has rotted from within.

Predictably, the super-rich and their hangers-on have been drawn to the advocates of “longtermism”, a movement that justifies the world’s current gross inequalities and injustices — and is resigned to a coming climate and environmental apocalypse as the world’s resources are used up.

Longtermism argues that humanity’s salvation lies not with reorganising our societies politically and economically in the here and now, but with intensifying those inequalities to achieve longer-term success via a class of Nietzschean Ubermensch, or superior beings.

A tiny financial elite needs absolute freedom to amass more wealth in search of the solutions — via tech innovations, of course — to overcome the difficulties of surviving on our fragile planet. The rest of us are an impediment to the super-rich’s ability to steer a course to safety.

Ordinary men, women and children must be left on the sinking ship, while the billionaires requisition the lifeboats. In the words of one of longtermism’s gurus, Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher, what lies ahead is “a giant massacre for man, a small misstep for mankind”.

To borrow a term from video-gaming, members of the neoliberal elite view the rest of us as non-player characters, or NPCs — the filler characters generated in a game to serve as the background for the actual players. Seen in this larger frame, what does it matter if children suffer, either in Gaza or in the mansions of a billionaire?

No moral outlier
If this sounds a lot like traditional, “white man’s burden” colonialism, updated for a supposedly post-colonial era, that’s because it is. This helps to explain why neoliberalism pairs so comfortably with another depraved colonial ideology, Zionism.

Zionism gained ever-more legitimacy in the aftermath of the Second World War, even as it brashly preserved through the postwar era the depraved logic of the very European ethnic nationalisms that had earlier culminated in Nazism.

Israel, Zionism’s bastard child, not only mirrored Aryan supremacy, but made its own version — Jewish supremacy — respectable. Zionism, like other ugly ethnic nationalisms, demands tribal unity against the Other, values militarism above all else, and constantly seeks territorial expansion, or Lebensraum.

Is it any surprise that it was Israel that, over many decades, reversed the advances of an international legal system set up precisely to prevent a return to the horrors of the Second World War?

Is it any surprise that it was Israel that carried out a genocide in full view of the world — and that the West not only failed to stop it, but actively colluded in the mass slaughter?

Is it any surprise that, as Israel has found it harder to conceal the criminal nature of its enterprise, the West has grown more repressive, more authoritarian in crushing opposition to its project?

Is it any surprise that the weapons systems, surveillance innovations and population-control mechanisms that Israel developed and refined for use against Palestinians make it such a prized ally for a Western billionaire class looking to use the same technological innovations at home?

That is why the Home Secretary of a UK government that threw its weight behind the genocide in Gaza, and defined opposition to it as terrorism, now wants to revive the 18th-century idea of the Panopticon prison, an all-seeing form of incarceration, but in an AI version.

In Shabana Mahmood’s words, her Panopticon would ensure that “the eyes of the state can be on you at all times”.

Nearly two decades ago, it became clear that Jeffrey Epstein was a predator. In recent years, it has become impossible to maintain the idea that he was a moral outlier. He distilled and channelled — through depraved forms of sexual gratification — a wider corrupt culture that believes rules don’t apply to special people, to the chosen, to the Ubermensch.

A handful of his most disposable allies will now be sacrificed to satisfy our hunger for accountability. But don’t be fooled: the Epstein culture is still going strong.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the Middle East Eye with the author’s permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.