The Real Meaning Of The Epstein-Class Files | Evarist Bartolo

## Epstein files and oligarch habitat The Epstein files do more than scandalize; they offer a map of a political ecosystem. What emerges from the conversation is not isolated sleaze or individual moral failure but an organized habitat in which business, technology, media, security establishments and political figures circulate with mutual immunity. This is a habitat that protects and reproduces a small class of hyper‑connected actors: oligarchs, former officials, financiers and media gatekeepers who, through interlocking relationships, shape policy and evade scrutiny. The files, as discussed in the exchange, expose how influence is institutionalized and normalized across the Euro‑Atlantic world rather than confined to a handful of rotten apples. Seen in that light, the Epstein revelations function as a diagnostic. They reveal how public institutions meant to check power—press scrutiny, legal accountability, democratic oversight—have been dulled by proximity and shared interests. Investigative journalism, once its own corrective, often provided a soft landing for elite narratives; media outlets granted access and prestige rather than asking uncomfortable questions. The pattern is systemic: the concentration of wealth translates into a concentration of political voice and a culture of impunity. That is why the conversation reframes the Epstein story as symptomatic of a broader rupture between professed values and lived governance across parts of the West. ## Inequality feeds war state 00:09: 01 Plutocracy and Citizens United fallout The dialogue connects the dots between economic inequality and the expansion of the war state. When money wields unchecked influence over politics, policy priorities tilt toward capital preservation and geopolitical strategies that sustain profitable industries—above all, the military‑industrial‑technological complex. The argument is stark: plutocracy and the wholesale privatization of political influence create incentives to favor rearmament and externalized conflict as solutions to domestic malaise. A turning point highlighted in the conversation is the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates of unlimited political expenditures. Since then, electoral politics increasingly respond to donors rather than voters, producing what Evarist Bartolo terms a drift from democracy toward plutocracy. The result is a feedback loop: elites fund politicians who prioritize defense contracts and geopolitical posturing; those policies in turn bolster the industries and networks that sustain elite wealth. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens, feeling disenfranchised, either withdraw or embrace anti‑institutional figures who promise demolition of the existing order. The depletion of civic trust thus becomes both cause and consequence of a militarized politics that promises security but mainly underwrites profit. ## Empire logic and sovereignty wars The conversation reframes current great‑power tensions as a continuation of an older imperial logic. Rather than a clash of ideologies or a simple balance of power, the antagonism reflects an attempt by a segment of the West to maintain hierarchical control over resource‑rich countries and to prevent the emergence of genuinely sovereign actors. Where decolonization once signaled the spread of national self‑determination, the reaction among certain Western elites has been to reimpose control through interference, economic pressure and regime change. This imperial impulse explains the particular animus directed at Russia and China. As Bartolo points out, what elites fear is not just competition but the possibility that other powers will use their sovereignty to pursue independent models—of economic development, resource management, and geopolitical alignment—that challenge global rules engineered in the West’s favor. The objection is not merely transactional; it is structural. Sovereign states that insist on managing their wealth and political choices independently threaten the very arrangements that deliver disproportionate advantage to a narrow class. Thus, contemporary foreign policy, when driven by that oligarchic habitat, becomes less about mutual security and more about denying true autonomy to others. ## Iran brinkmanship and deterrence trap The Iran case crystallizes the peril of conflating dominance with security. In the discussion, proximity and military posture—naval task forces, punitive rhetoric, and covert actions—create conditions where escalation becomes likely, and yet the calculus of the dominant power is constrained by deterrence. Iran’s asymmetric capabilities and regional reach impose tangible costs on any prospective intervention, which paradoxically may be the only restraint preventing wider conflict. This is the deterrence trap: power projection invites countermeasures, which then justify further projection. Hard‑power reflexes dominate debate, crowding out diplomacy and making restraint politically uncomfortable for actors whose credibility rests on toughness. The transcript underscores that this standoff is not simply about rational security management; it is also a byproduct of the cultural and institutional biases of an elite class that prefers military solutions to the harder, slower work of negotiation and accommodation. In such a climate, the logic of coexistence is dismissed in favor of domination, and the risks of miscalculation—misread signals, tactical errors, or the fog of covert operations—mount dangerously. ## Building an anti-war public If oligarchic interests gravitate toward militarized solutions, the only durable counterweight lies in popular politics: the cultivation of an anti‑war public capable of shifting norms and constraining state behavior. The conversation sketches several dimensions of this project. First, transparency must be restored: without a media and legal architecture willing to investigate elite networks and hold them to account, public opinion cannot form on an informed basis. Second, democratic institutions must be re‑empowered through campaign finance reform, restrictions on revolving doors between public office and private contractor roles, and stronger conflict‑of‑interest rules. But institutional fixes alone will not suffice. The exchange emphasizes civic education and culture: rebuilding a sense of constituency responsibility that prizes shared human security over narrow commercial advantage. Anti‑war movements historically succeed when they link foreign policy to tangible domestic costs—lives lost, public spending diverted, civic liberties curtailed. Mobilizing broad coalitions across social groups and political persuasions will be essential to counter the normalization of permanent preparedness and perpetual conflict. To shrink the space that oligarchic networks exploit, public mobilization must make war expensive in political terms, not merely in dollars. ## Uncolonizing the West and migration Migration and the legacy of colonialism sit at the center of the wider reckoning the conversation envisions. The Western refusal to share—whether access to resources, technological benefits, or political respect—has produced displacement, economic dependency and cultural resentment that manifest both at borders and within societies. Uncolonizing the West, as Bartolo frames it, requires both policy shifts and a deeper change in collective self‑understanding: recognizing other civilizations as legitimate equals rather than as pools of resources or laboratories for governance experiments. Practically, this means revisiting trade regimes, development policy, and immigration frameworks through a lens of reciprocity and reparation. It also means reforming the governance of global institutions to reduce structural biases that privilege a narrow coalition of countries and private interests. Migration, in that sense, is not merely a humanitarian challenge; it is a symptom of a system where wealth and political agency are u

The Real Meaning Of The Epstein-Class Files | Evarist Bartolo The rupture of the West with its "values" runs much deeper than we thought. An entire elite habitat of unaccountable psychopaths is running the largest military power in human history and is intent on destroying its enemies within and without. Former Maltese foreign minister Evarist Bartolo joins me to discuss. Links: Evarist Bartolo website: https://evaristbartolo.mt Times of Malta: https://timesofmalta.com Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic) Merch & Donations: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 Opening and rupture debate 00:00:44 Epstein files and oligarch habitat 00:04:48 Inequality feeds war state 00:09: 01 Plutocracy and Citizens United fallout 00:13:05 Empire logic and sovereignty wars 00:20:32 Iran brinkmanship and deterrence trap 00:34:11 Building an anti-war public 00:37:02 Uncolonizing the West and migration 00:47:08 Shared destiny and closing notes #Pascal Today, it is my pleasure to be joined again by my friend and colleague, Evarist Bartolo, one of the former foreign ministers of the wonderful island nation of Malta. Evarist, welcome back. Thank you. Thank you for this conversation. It's great having you back because you also wrote this article here— let me see if I can show it—about some of the fantastic revelations from the Epstein files, right? And it's entitled *“The Rupture Is Much Deeper: Unless Oligarchs Are Banished from Our Political Systems, They Will Continue to Corrode Our Democracies and Harm the Rest of the World. They Want to Subordinate,”* says Evarist Bartolo. I mean, this is the opening of your article. Can you maybe just lay out for us a bit what your argument in this piece is? #Evarist Bartolo Well, I refer to Mark Carney’s speech—the Canadian former central banker—when he talked about the rupture. For Carney, it seems that the rupture is where it hits the part of the West dominated by the United States. But so far, it has managed to get along very well. As he himself said, the so‑called rules‑based order—he at least had the intellectual honesty to admit that part of it was false. I would say that more than part of it was false, because it worked for those who designed it, and those who designed it were the United States. As long as it worked for the collective West—what, 12 or 14 percent of the world—then it was okay. When it didn’t work for them anymore, then it’s a rupture. I say the rupture is deeper because when we look at the Epstein files, it’s not a matter of a few rotten apples here and there—you know, some in the States, some in Scandinavian countries, in the UK. The orchard itself is rotten. It’s not just a -- 1 of 15 -- few apples or even a few trees. And if you look at the network that emerges in those files, in that information—bringing together business interests, technology, the military, security, the media—it’s a whole ecosystem. I call it a habitat that allows this to happen. Because even until a few months ago, for example, let’s just take the case of Peter Mandelson. And you know, over the years, the media in the UK—and as a former British colony, I can tell you as a journalist—we were brought up to think about how important investigative journalism is: that you hold power to account, that you ask difficult, uncomfortable questions. And this wasn’t the case. These people—whether they were former presidents of the United States, former ministers, big oligarchs—the media gave them a very, very easy ride. No uncomfortable questions were asked. So this is a system. And I wonder, Pascal, because both of us—you obviously much more than me— coming from the academic world, when we teach geopolitics, are we sticking too much to abstract theories and not showing our students how the real world works? Because the real world works more like what we find in the Epstein files than in the theories of geopolitics. So I think it would make sense for us to really try to understand what this network is—of very powerful people coming together to make the system work, and to make the system work for them. When we talk about the post–World War II world, and the financial and business setup that was brought into reality after the Second World War, it also created the conditions for a network of corruption—a network of very strong business interests that generate not only inequality and social injustice, but also war. #Pascal Hey, very brief intermission because I was recently banned from YouTube. And although I'm back, this could happen again at any time. So please consider subscribing not only here but also to my mailing list on Substack—that’s pascallottaz.substack.com. The link’s in the description below. And now, back to the video. I mean, I had this discussion just this morning—you know, that the social injustice and all the violence happening, for instance, inside the United States, clearly also manifests outside of it, right? And that social injustice is actually important for the war state, because somehow you need to recruit all the cannon fodder you need—all the recruits—to go out and project force. And what’s easier than drawing from a mass of impoverished people? What the Epstein files show to me, though, is that the elite class—the top one percent, the people with a lot of money—that money automatically seems to translate into political influence among themselves. What’s so surprising is how large and widespread it was. And what’s also surprising to me is that it seems to be a phenomenon of the collective West. Maybe I shouldn’t generalize too much here, because as far as I know, we don’t even have Japanese names in those files. Maybe we do, but not many—not on the level of Mendelssohn and so on. This is a transatlantic network, first and foremost, of elite circles that among themselves create these systems of bribery and, I mean, whatever Epstein was building with his kompromat—whether for Israel, for his own purposes, or whatever. But it’s a Euro-Atlantic, Euro-American kind of project. -- 2 of 15 -- #Evarist Bartolo Yeah, Pascal, I think it reminds me a lot of the Trilateral Commission. But start from below—think from below—because the Trilateral Commission, you know, sounds so good and produces studies and reflections on where the world is going. But then you see the other side, the side they don’t want us to see. Now, I think if we know a bit of history, we know that elites have behaved like that for centuries. So, to a certain extent, we shouldn’t be surprised, you know, whatever, because it reminds me of a Latin proverb that says there’s one law for the gods and another for the animals. The law for the gods is, you know, for the privileged—the rules they set up. And again, I go back to the rules-based order that Carney refers to. So there are the rules for the gods, who designed and created those rules, and then there are the rules for the colonized—for the 88% of the world. And they are the animals. No, they’re the ordinary human beings, for whom the privileged laws, which only serve to protect the interests of the top one percent, do not apply. So when Carney sort of lamented that it doesn’t seem to work for us anymore—well, it hadn’t worked for the majority of people living on this planet. #Pascal But doesn’t that also just reflect that, as much as we’d like to believe in the West that we are democracies where the people rule—and yes, the system is imperfect, and yes, sometimes you have bribery—but overall, we go to the polls, we go to the polling stations, we vote, we cast our opinions, and people’s power, at the end of the day, will succeed? It’s a charade. It’s a charade. It’s a make- believe version of actual political incorporation, when in fact there’s this oligarchic class that rules these countries like fiefdoms. And they think about it in those ways, in those terms. That’s nothing new. It’s not the 2010s that brought this about. That’s how the system was. #Evarist Bartolo But that’s why, Pascal, let’s go back to the Greek classics, no? The ones we say our democracy is built on. Even in my article, I quote Aristotle, who said that in our Greek democracy—which also had, obviously, very severe limitations, leaving out women, leaving out the ordinary human beings and the slaves—they had a mechanism to control oligarchs, which they called ostracism. Whenever they had a very powerful individual, often because of his money, they would actually banish him from the system because he corrupted it. Now, in our case, what’s happened in the last few decades is that we’ve allowed oligarchs—not only have we not banished them from the political system, we’ ve allowed them to take it over. And this brings us back to what happened with the Supreme Court ruling in 2010, when the Court in the United States allowed the unlimited use of money to fund candidates and political parties. Since then, I think what happened in the United States has spread in different ways. Though there are -- 3 of 15 -- frameworks to control the flow of money supporting candidates and parties, our democracies have become plutocracies. They’ve become systems run by people with money and in their interest. And that’s why, again, one of the points I make—which I think is painful—is that people are sort of preferring demolitionists like Trump to fake builders, because they come in to demolish. I’m definitely not proposing that we should have that kind of solution for the problems in our political systems. But people have lost trust in our parties and politicians because they see that the system works for the powerful and the wealthy, where donors count much more than voters. So the agendas being drawn up in our so-called democracies are the agendas of the powerful, the wealthy, the people with money, rather than what we actually need. And tied into this is the military-industrial complex, which today is not just military and industrial—it’s technological, it’s business. So, you know, instead of building, for example, take Europe: instead of addressing our problems, we think the shortcut is to rearm, and we think that’s going to solve our problems. #Pascal But there’s this one kind of riddle to me. If we look at the Western states as being run by oligarchs and moneyed interests—which I think is true—then that gives outsized influence to the policy preferences of this group of people. And this group of people, as we saw in Munich and also in Davos and so on, they’re kind of in an epistemic bubble, right? They have a very specific outlook on the world, and then they try to push that onto all the countries and build a foreign policy around it, especially in Europe. But why this animosity from that group, this transatlantic, Epstein-esque network of elites? Why the animosity toward Russia and toward China? And why this drive for constant dominance by this group? Because this moneyed elite could just as well be in cahoots with the moneyed elite in Russia, in China, and in the rest of the world, right? And in cahoots with them, they could create a much bigger bubble and be much more successful at repressing their own poor people, right? Why is that not happening? #Evarist Bartolo It can be explained by the simple fact that the kind of Russia and the kind of China these people want would have politicians and oligarchs who are not sovereign, who don’t work in the interests of Russia or China. We’ve seen this before. Let’s move to another speech—away from Carney and over to Marco Rubio’s speech, just three weeks after Carney’s, in Munich. In that speech, he referred to what happened in 1945, when countries began gaining their national independence, as something to lament rather than to celebrate. For the majority of the world, gaining independence and sovereignty was a cause for celebration. Finally, we started to gain some control over our