By Wayne Allensworth
See my previous articles The Global Elite Unmasked (The Epstein Files) and Eyes Wide Shut (Epstein’s Birthday Book) for background and context. See also The Godfather Tragedy and the Way the World Works.
Vladimir Putin once said that the Western elite’s “Vampire’s ball” was coming to an end. “They have been filling their bellies with human flesh” and stuffing their pockets with money, said Putin. His remarks were regarding the emergence of a multi-polar world and the end of the West’s unipolar dominance, but I wonder whether he didn’t have something else in mind as well.
Sometime in the 1990’s, as I visited post-Communist Russia and tried to make sense of what I was seeing, it dawned on me that our own country was moving in a similar direction, though for different reasons. Bear with me as I backtrack over that ground, review what I learned, and relate how that is relevant for the Epstein scandal.
What I saw in Russia
At the time, I was trying to gauge Russian political stability and figure out how the Russian system actually worked in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. I had heard, for instance, rumors and read stories in Russian tabloids about a group around Russian President Boris Yeltsin dubbed “The Family.” Who was in that group? How were decisions made? What about other groups that were called “clans,” such as the “St. Petersburg Lawyers”? How were they formed? What kind of influence did they wield in Russian politics and economics? What was the relationship between the clans and state institutions? How did organized crime and the oligarchs who had snatched up so much of Russia’s wealth play into this?
It was a chaotic time. The ruble had collapsed, and basic services like heat and water supply were sketchy in many cases. The police, security services, and army weren’t being paid regularly and were moonlighting as hired guns or suppliers of weapons. They played a role in operating protection rackets and in drug trafficking. Assassinations of business rivals were not uncommon. The clans used the legal system to go after rivals in business and politics. And sometimes those rivals died under mysterious circumstances while in police custody, falling from a high window or hanging themselves.
Educated Russians were reduced to selling cheap Chinese produced goods in the metro stations. Young Russian girls came to work in the capital as “escorts” for the rich and famous. The brakes were off. There were few restraints on the rich and powerful. State institutions were weak and ineffectual. Among elites, political and economic, stories of base sexual debauchery were rampant. I heard stories of organ trafficking and elite pedophile rings. A homosexual clan dubbed “the Lavender lobby” was said to operate at the highest levels of the system.
Elites mimicked the old Soviet secret police, the KGB, in gathering compromising material, or kompromat, on one another. Many of them had their own private security services. Kompromat might be leaked, if need be, to smear an opponent. I recall watching a grainy video of Chief Prosecutor Yuri Skuratov cavorting with two prostitutes that turned up on Russian TV. Media were also controlled by opposing clans. As it turns out, Skuratov was investigating The Family on behalf of a rival faction headed by Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. But kompromat was often simply kept in a safe, perhaps never to be used, as a form on insurance. Key players who cooperated in dubious business projects might document the shady deals, protecting themselves with a shared secret. It was a form of mutually assured destruction if either side betrayed the other.
“Liberal” oligarchs might finance radical right-wing groups, partly as insurance, partly to use them as carefully camouflaged enforcers. Newspapers would print “ordered” articles as propaganda for various clans or as a means to sow confusion and cover the tracks of the most prominent players. It was difficult to cut through the rumor mill and the talk of conspiracies to bring into focus what might really be happening, but the perceptions of reality held by the conflicting clans took on a life of their own, as they acted on what might be true.
It turned out that professed ideology was not nearly as important in ties between clan members as personal relationships, shared interests, and shared secrets. President Boris Yeltsin was supposedly a Westernizing “liberal” and “democrat,” yet one of his closest comrades was a “silovik,” a man from the security services, Aleksandr Korzhakov, who acted as Yeltsin’s bodyguard and drinking buddy. The two fell out over political strategy. Korzhakov staged a series of small-scale bombings in the capital in the lead up to the 1996 presidential election, as Yeltsin’s poll numbers were tanking and the Communist candidate, Gennadiy Zyuganov, was gathering support from rival clans. Korzhakov wanted to declare a state of emergency and call off the elections. He was overruled by a faction of St. Petersburg “economists” headed by Anatoliy Chubays, one of the architects of Yeltsin’s privatization schemes. The Yeltsin Family was aided with sacks of cash from certain oligarchs, and Western governments no doubt had a hand in supplying money and know-how. Western intelligence services had been interfering in foreign elections for a long time. In the end, Yeltsin was the unlikely winner.
My work on Russia culminated in a paper explaining how the clan system operated and how the clans were formed. I also mapped out the major clans, while pointing out that the central clans were mirrored at every level of Russian society, by regional and local groups, by smaller groups within institutions at every level, embedded one in the other like a series of Russian nesting dolls. A “knot” or hub might form around a key player who had ties to a number of clans. That hub figure could act to balance the influence of the clans or link them in a web of relations. Vladimir Putin emerged as a key player in part because he acted as a bridge among several major clan groups, including The Family, the St. Petersburg Lawyers, the St. Petersburg economists, siloviky in the security services, liberals such as his law school mentor, St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoliy Sobchak, and organized crime figures from St. Petersburg. The various strands of the clan web melded into one another.
On a practical level, clans formed around what I called a “horizontal” axis and a “vertical” axis. In a low trust environment, the courts, the police, and the political system could not be counted on and law was pro forma. A multi-tiered justice system counted some as more equal than others, and judges could be bought and sold. Contracts would have to be backed up by threats of kompromat and violence. Trust was a valued commodity. I found that the core of a clan was formed on a horizontal axis: that is, with a nucleus based on family ties, old friendships dating from school days, military service, or hometown friends. “Dynastic marriages” sometimes helped cement personal ties. Along the “vertical” axis, it was “just business” as Michael Corleone might say. Business associates, co-workers, or shared political and business interests would play a role in extending ties beyond a core clan nucleus. But in a crunch, the horizontal ties were the ones the players counted on most. Betrayal in an extended clan network was just business. The passing of a personal friend or mentor might release a player from previous obligations. The lines were not hard and fast, but I think there was great explanatory power in the axis model.
It became evident to me that the usual approach of outsiders observing Russia was all wrong: They paid too much attention to ideology in judging the players, and did not fully realize that elections, political parties, and state institutions such as the Russian parliament counted far less in the grand scheme of power relations than the informal networks that operated both inside and outside those institutions. The institutions were weak. Clan relations mattered more than position. A key position in an institution mattered far more if the office holder was also a strong player in the clan game. Without that, a judge or parliamentarian, or even a premier or president, was more a placeholder than a wielder of real power. Success in business depended in large part on clan ties. Shared crimes and shared secrets could act as ties that bound players together.
Putin became a strong president because he slowly built his own counter elite from his personal clan ties and weakened, even drove off, major players from the Yeltsin era. He was a hub in a network of clan relationships and was known to be trustworthy in keeping informal contracts or “understandings.” He remained personally beholden and quite loyal to the man who had elevated him to power, Boris Yeltsin, and protected him after his retirement from public life. To his credit, as oil prices rose and replenished the Russian budget, he did not allow his cronies to pillage the country in the way the Yeltsin era oligarchs had raped an already bankrupt Russia. Putin’s friends got rich, of course, yet the lives of ordinary people improved. But that’s a story for another time.
A key point here is that the players all came from the same milieu. Whether nominally a liberal and democrat, or a silovik and statist. Whether a Westernizer or a hard-core Russophile, they all knew the rules of the game. The lines between them could be quite clear at first glance and quite blurry on a closer inspection.
The Epstein Scandal and the Way the World Works
Which brings us to the horror story unfolding after the limited, heavily redacted partial release of the Epstein files. In the 90s, I was alarmed by the realization that the US was steadily evolving toward something a bit closer to the clan model. The circumstances were different, but the real system of power relations was moving in a similar direction. The differences between neo-conservatives and neo-liberals, which seemed significant when packaged for public consumption, on closer inspection were quite narrow. The Republicans mostly acted as a controlled opposition: the impeachment of Bill Clinton was a distraction aimed at the GOP base. No one really thought Clinton would be removed from office. Globalization and the advent of the world wide web acted as a solvent that wore away old national ties, expanding the horizons of and opportunities for elites. Easy worldwide travel and high-speed communications made the age-old dream of One World look possible. And in the unipolar period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western elites were gripped by hubris.
Our ruling class, whether nominal liberals or conservatives, emerged from the same milieu of elite law schools, Wall Street, and trans-national business. Many had ties to what came to be called the “deep state” or the military-industrial complex and security services. A new trans-national or supranational elite was emerging that shared more in common with one another than with the nations that produced them. The old right-wing nightmare of a developing world government was actually taking place, not only in the form of institutions like the WTO or WHO, but more importantly, informally among key players.
Both right and left were thoroughly modern or post-modern in viewing the world through a lens of abstraction and theory. “Nationalists” didn’t really conceive of the nation as an extended family. Citizenship in their eyes was like a Sam’s Club membership, which made them little different from internationalist liberals. Personal ties and intermarriage tightened the boundaries around our elites who were increasingly distant from the masses they despised. Bill and Hillary were the nucleus of their team, which extended as a network. The Bushes comprised a family dynasty and eventually formed personal ties and friendships with the Obamas. Professed ideologies didn’t mean as much as membership in the Club, a Club that was now a supranational elite.
Meanwhile, the high public trust that America had drawn on for so long was rapidly eroding as the shenanigans of the elites of both parties bred distrust: the lies that brought us ever deeper into the Vietnam war, the revelations about the Deep State’s lawlessness from “regime change operations,” and assassinations, to mind control experiments, Watergate, and rapid displacement of the core population by mass immigration undermined trust not only in institutions, but among the increasingly “diverse” population. In such an environment, conspiracy stories exploded—and too often, have proven to have at least a grain of truth behind them. The Iraq War debacle, predicated on the most cynical lies, the lies about an eventual “victory” in Afghanistan, Edward Snowden revelations about government spying on the American people, endless warfare, and eroding opportunity as the American Heartland was gutted by de-industrialization all destroyed the general public’s sense that “the system” worked. Institutions seemed unresponsive, even moribund. Then came the pandemic, or “Plandemic,” as the powers-that-be leveraged that event to vastly increase their own power over us.
The Failure of “MAGA”
Donald Trump was the reaction to distrust of elites and of our institutions. The fact that elites from both wings of the ruling class opposed him vociferously was a plus for him. Trump wasn’t a managerial technocrat and was uncouth enough to attack elites by name. But here we are ten years later and MAGA has been swallowed whole by the globalist Blob. Trump’s blustery style and crassness set him apart, but we didn’t pay close enough attention to where he came from, who paid for his political career, and, above all, who his friends were. The Trumps themselves are a clan-like entity comprised of the core family and his crew of loyalists. He has proved to be an easy mark for the real power structures that are informal, extra-judicial, beyond institutions, and supranational. He was a member of the “Epstein class,” and shared its lifestyle and secrets. Coming from that milieu, he, like presidents before him, Democrats and Republicans, protected the informal network which acted outside channels as a conduit for power. The difference between the Russian informal power structures of the 90s and these is primarily one of scale. The Russian clans were national, a microcosm. The global elite clans developed and co-existed on a vast scale, a scale to match their demonic dreams.
Jeffery Epstein was one of those hub figures whose path intersected and intertwined with global elites from many countries. His influence and power were based on that. Republican or Democrat, American or foreigner, his web extended widely. He was surely a Mossad asset as well as a freelancer doing work for the CIA, the Saudis, and many others. The network intertwined and overlapped with arms dealers, secret services, organized crime, and trans-national business. The mortar that held it together was money and sex, and the allure of membership in a a secret society of overlords.
The corruption in that secret society dwarfs that of 90’s Russia in scale and reach, but the similarities are evident. What Epstein built was an informal power elite that superseded parliaments and electoral politics, a structure that went beyond professed ideologies giving us a new picture of what the real deep state is like. It’s deep, but very wide. That informal structure erases all the civics class boiler plate we learned in school. Procedure and law, elections and campaigns matter less than the unseen system. It operates within institutions yet supersedes them. It’s one built on personal ties and business interests. On shared secrets and crimes. On leverage, the threat of blackmail, and kompromat. On access to the people who matter. On big money and above all, a shared sense that the elites are above it all. That they make their own rules and anyone outside the club is disposable. It’s based on a demonic desire to play God or simply replace Him. Epstein, for instance, was interested in eugenics, transhumanism, and AI, the nightmare dreams and devilish tools of the global elite. When he overplayed his hand, he was sacrificed. Just business, I’m sure.
The Epstein nightmare story is the story of the globalist dream coming true and self-destructing. But he was just one hub in a network. I suspect there are a number of others. An unelected, unaccountable supranational power network has been operating as a power structure outside and over the official system. The Epstein scandal is one of seismic proportions, one that undercuts everything that most of us thought we knew about how the world worked. It is abundantly clear that, as I’ve stated previously, we can’t vote our way out of this.
The Vampire’s Ball
Human Trafficking
Cannibalism?
Epstein and Pizzagate
Child victims
The Subject is Torture
Billionaire co-conspirators
Wall Street big shot Leon Black accused of raping a young girl, among other things: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2012/EFTA02731488.pdf
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
Please consider supporting American Remnant: A green “Donate Today” button has been added at the end of each article (see below) appearing on the website. If you value what AR is doing, please consider supporting the website financially. $5, $10, or any amount that you can afford. Regular donations would especially be appreciated. Thank you!
