Researcher REVEALS Secrets of US Deep State Politics | Dr. Aaron Good

## 1. JFK, RFK and the crime network The assassination of John F. Kennedy and the later murder of Robert F. Kennedy sit at the center of any serious inquiry into the hidden wiring of American power. The conversation with Dr. Aaron Good insists that these are not isolated tragedies or the manic imaginings of conspiracy theorists, but evidence—alongside documented links between the Kennedys and organized crime—of a regime with shadowed levers that can, when it chooses, remove elected leaders who stray from the established order. Kennedy’s foreign policy tilt toward détente, his pursuit of nuclear test bans, and his outreach to Cuba and the Soviet Union were not simply policy options; they represented a threat to entrenched interests inside the American political machine. That threat helps explain why these policies met resistance from powerful domestic actors who had both motive and means to respond in extreme ways. This perspective reframes the familiar narrative of U.S. political institutions as self-contained, rule-bound arenas. When the conversation describes the “regime,” it points to the constellation of legal institutions—elections, Congress, courts—and extralegal mechanisms—blackmail, patronage, covert networks—that together determine who can govern and how far they can go. The Kennedys’ experience, according to the account discussed, illustrates a crucial detail: democratic procedures are porous. In certain historical moments, informal networks, criminal alliances, and intelligence assets can override electoral outcomes. The murder of RFK after his decisive California primary victory is read not as an inexplicable madness but as a logical extension of a regime seeking to neutralize a dangerous agent of change. Understanding these assassinations within a broader pattern forces a different kind of historical imagination. It pivots attention from electoral cycles and partisan narratives to the underside of elite politics—where policy battles intersect with personal vulnerabilities, criminal collaboration, and the strategic use of violence. Rather than viewing such events as deviations, this reading treats them as symptoms of a system that tolerates extra-constitutional remedies to settle core conflicts at the apex of state power. ## 2. Epstein, Trump and Watergate The conversation moves from mid-century assassinations to contemporary scandals, arguing that scandals like Jeffrey Epstein, the rise of Donald Trump, and the residual lessons of Watergate belong to the same topology of power. Epstein’s case is useful less for the lurid details than for what it reveals about the mechanics of leverage: private evidence, sexual blackmail, and transnational networks that intersect with elites. Such mechanisms create dependencies and behavioral constraints that are invisible in public records but crucial for understanding elite conduct. Watergate, often taught as a cautionary tale about overreach and the resilience of institutional checks, is reframed as a moment when covert political methods became normalized as a tool for intra-elite struggle. The overlap between political espionage, criminality, and state intelligence activities produces forms of control that are not easily adjudicated in courts or by electoral politics. The account suggests that the Trump era intensified public awareness of how private leverage and public office can interlock: allegations of compromised behavior, media manipulation, and the weaponization of investigations highlight continuity with earlier episodes where personal exposure was a strategic asset. Taken together, Epstein’s networks and the spectacle of Trump indicate a system in which private wrongdoing can translate into political control—either by silencing opponents, shaping narratives, or granting informal access to decision-makers. Watergate is not an anomaly to this view but an earlier illustration of a perennial dynamic: the integration of clandestine tactics into political competition and governance. ## 3. Nixon, CIA and covert crime Richard Nixon’s presidency provides a case study for how domestic politics and clandestine statecraft can be mutually reinforcing. The conversation emphasizes the CIA’s role—not as a detached foreign-policy instrument but as an actor with domestic implications—and traces continuities between covert operations, political sabotage, and sanctioned criminality. Nixon’s use of intelligence tools against political opponents, the tolerance for illegal activities within his administration, and the subsequent limits placed on oversight reveal how the security apparatus can be repurposed for factional advantage. This line of analysis challenges the clean line often drawn between national security and criminality. When intelligence capabilities—surveillance, deniable operations, relationships with informal networks—are mobilized in service of partisan aims, the result is a normalization of extra-legal practices inside the political system. Nixon-era abuses, and the partial reforms that followed, did not eliminate these capacities; they merely drove some practices deeper into opaque networks where legal accountability is difficult to apply. Understanding Nixon in this way reframes Watergate less as a singular moral failing and more as an institutional stress test that revealed how state instruments of secrecy can be enlisted domestically. The implication is disturbing: once clandestine capacities exist, they can be reactivated by future actors, especially when incentives for control and survival are intense. ## 4. Zionism, LBJ and Iran Contra A striking theme in the discussion is the role of ideological and ethnic lobbies—especially pro-Israel networks—in shaping policy outcomes and constraining presidential options. Dr. Aaron Good highlights moments, such as Lyndon B. Johnson’s interactions with Zionist actors and the influence of neoconservative Blueprints like the “Clean Break” policy prescriptions, to show how foreign policy can be driven by dense coalitions of interest: political donors, think tanks, and intelligence-linked actors. The trajectory from LBJ-era politics to the Iran-Contra scandal and the post-9/11 foreign policy realignments reveals how these coalitions can endure and reconstitute themselves. Iran-Contra demonstrated the ability of executive actors and informal networks to pursue policy goals that circumvented Congress and public scrutiny. The policy continuity from the Clean Break document to the Iraq wars, as discussed, exemplifies how doctrinal blueprints produced by ideologically motivated insiders can ascend into state practice when conditions permit. This strand of analysis insists on a more textured view of foreign policy formation—one in which formal institutions are only part of the story. Lobbying groups, ideological cadres, and transnational networks operate through persuasion, funding, and sometimes covert support to shape strategy, especially where the policy payoff aligns with their long-term interests. ## 5. Christian Zionism and elite networks Christian Zionism appears in the conversation as another node within the broader architecture of elite influence. Its rise within certain conservative religious circles has had tangible impacts on U.S. policy, creating alliances between evangelical movements and pro-Israel political organizations. This nexus has produced durable political capital—voter blocs, financial support, and lobbying power—that further institutionalizes a certain foreign policy orientation in Washington. The analytical move here is to treat religious conviction not as marginal piety but as a political resource that integrates seamlessly with other forms of elite influence. When faith-based imperatives align with strategic interests, they augment the social and moral authority of lobbying coalitions. Christian Zionism therefore functions both as an ideological driver and as a legitimizing rhetoric for policies that might otherwise

Researcher REVEALS Secrets of US Deep State Politics | Dr. Aaron Good If you think US politics happens only in the White House and on Capitol Hill, then think again. The US as a political system—the totality of it—is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Luckily, some brave researchers dare going into the deep. Dr. Aaron Good, author of American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, joins me today to challenge simplistic view of the US system. He argues that agency, blackmail, covert crime, and elite networks shape policy, tying together JFK, RFK, Nixon, Watergate, Epstein, Zionism, and Iran Contra as part of the hidden machinery of the American empire. Links: American Exception Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/americanexception /about American Exception book: https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781510769144/american- exception/ Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic) Merch: https://neutralitystudies.com/shop Donation: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Timestamps: 00: 00:00 Hyperstructuralism and the black box state 00:10:27 Agency, Kennedy and the regime 00:17: 46 Blackmail, lobbying and hidden power 00:22:22 JFK, RFK and the crime network 00:27:33 Epstein, Trump and Watergate 00:33:40 Nixon, CIA and covert crime 00:38:59 Zionism, LBJ and Iran Contra 00:48:59 Christian Zionism and elite networks 00:55:00 Vanderpeel, Epstein and Massie #Pascal Welcome back, everybody, to Neutrality Studies, today for the second time with Dr. Aaron Good, the author of *American Exception: Empire and the Deep State.* Aaron, welcome back. Thank you, Pascal. It's great to be here. Great having you again. Can we discuss a little bit something that you reacted to the other day via email? I had a couple of guests on my show, including Professor Radhika Desai and Professor Kees van der Pijl, who do this kind of structural analysis, or they use the structure of the system in order to explain where we are today in world politics. And you pointed out that this type of hyperstructuralism, as you called it, also leaves us with a couple of problems. Can we go into that? #Aaron Good Sure. And I appreciate, actually, both of these commentators that you had on, these two scholars, Radhika Desai and Kees van der Pijl, if I'm saying his name right. But I would have disagreements with each of them. I think that Radhika's conception of the Marxist idea of the state as just sort of the collective monolithic black box that represents the power of the bourgeois state and bourgeois civil society collectively and is basically animated in a sort of autonomous way by the class interests of the capitalist class, that it has its uses in the abstract when you want to understand the behavior -- 1 of 20 -- of empires, I mean, sort of in the same way that the realist abstraction of a monolithic rational actor state has its uses as well when you're thinking about, you know, competitions and politics between states. But it also has its limitations. And as you pointed out in the interview, people like Mearsheimer — Mearsheimer is a realist, but he departs from that realist convention of conceiving of the state as a unitary actor and as a monolithic black box in order to try to understand why the U.S. is not acting in a realist fashion, in terms of pursuing its interests in a rational way. Why has it pursued policies that have been detrimental to its goal of hegemony? And so, therefore, Mearsheimer realizes that these realist conventions do not help him to explain this. And so he and Stephen Walt wrote *The Israel Lobby*, which is a good explanation of how these powerful actors can influence the behavior of the state and U.S. grand strategy in ways that have been really detrimental to the project of hegemony. And in the 21st century, it's been an unbroken, pretty much, procession of disastrous wars that were laid out in the mid-90s, pretty much by the logic of the *Clean Break* report, which was commissioned by Bibi Netanyahu and written by people like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser — super neocons, the people that would become the neocons. And this is rather than the U.S. state acting, you know, in the same way across administrations, across decades. This was a 180 from the previous administration. And I know that Bill Clinton doesn't really start all of these things, but he does sign the Iraq Liberation Act. He does pardon Mark Rich, whose lawyer was Scooter Libby, you know, who was one of Cheney's main people. So these neocons are really significant. And the policy under H.W. Bush was announced very early in his presidency. He sent James Baker to AIPAC in May of 1989. So just a few months into his presidency, James Baker says, "It's time to put aside once and for all the unrealistic dream of Greater Israel." And then, following the advice of conservatives like Barry Goldwater and others, they cut off... They said there will not be loan guarantees made to Israel unless they agree to enter into negotiations over a Palestinian state. And Reagan, when he was out the door — you know, the other president had already been elected — H.W. Bush, one of his last acts in office, if not the last act, was to recognize the PLO, which was done with great objection from the Zionist lobby, who wanted to say, "No, no, no, you can't negotiate with them because they're terrorists." But of course, we know now that they don't want to negotiate with anyone; they'll kill people who are negotiating. So that's very dubious. But we can see why they wouldn't have wanted Reagan to recognize the PLO, because they don't want— right. #Aaron Good And so there's a 180 in the way that the state behaves, the policy of the U.S., which really gets consolidated with 9/11 and then launches off two and two and a half decades of wars that follow the Clean Break script. But you have to be able to explore—well, you don't have to, but I would be -- 2 of 20 -- interested in explaining how you go from H.W. Bush saying "no Greater Israel" to the Clean Break report becoming orthodoxy in just a few years. And if you're going to try to explain that question, if you think it's a question worth trying to find the answer to, the realist idea or even the Western Marxist radical idea of the state as a monolithic, unitary actor is inadequate. And so there are other traditions that try to look at state behavior. Some of them are considered liberalism in international relations, which I'm sure you know pretty well, right? But there's also a small group of scholars whose politics are to the left of center, but they're not all the same. People like C. Wright Mills. C. Wright Mills wrote that there are two flawed traditions, ideal types of history philosophy. One of them is history as drift or fate, as history being overdetermined by structural factors to the point that whatever people do, it doesn't really matter very much. And then on the other side, there's history as conspiracy, where everything is really about conspiratorial groups who are either good or bad, but they're very powerful. It's sort of like the great man theory of history is kind of compatible with this, too. But it's the idea of agency and groups and conspirators perhaps being able to impact history through their own human agency. So, you know, in a way, this is a question of two ideal types of bad history that are related to the general social science argument of structure versus agency. And I think that what you get with the realists or some of these Marxists in the West is what I would call hyperstructuralism, which is that everything is kind of overdetermined by the structure of the system, the class structure. For the Marxists, it's the class structure that is overdetermining in terms of the behavior of the state. And for the realists, it's the structure of the international system, the anarchy of the international system, which forces states to act in a predictable, rational, self-maximizing utility sort of way, like, you know, if you teach IR. So I think this is kind of the heart of the problem or the question here. And to my mind, you need to look, you need to open up the black box. You need to look inside the black box of the regime, the state, if you want to understand certain questions, because there are some things that you cannot answer if you just ignore this whole inquiry of the politics at the apex of the regime. #Pascal Hey, very brief intermission because I was recently banned from YouTube. And although I'm back, this can happen anytime again. So please consider subscribing not only here, but to my mailing list on Substack. That's pascallottaz.substack.com. The link's going to be in the description below. And now, back to the video. These are very, very good observations. And, you know, they go also for other branches of academia or scholarly inquiry, of course, right? I like this metaphor, and it's an old metaphor, I think a Chinese one, of the elephant. If you want to see the entire elephant, then you have all of these blind experts, and one touches the trunk, the other one the tail, and the third one the foot. They will all describe the elephant, but in completely different ways, right? And if you try to see the whole thing, even if you completely zoom out, you will never see more than one half of it. -- 3 of 20 -- And if you go even further, I literally have colleagues who study elephants. They tell me that within their field, some people study the entire ecosystem, and other people actually study the footprints, because footprints of elephants create many ecosystems for amoebas and whatnot. And you can study all of those, right? And you still study these related phenomena. But the question that we then have with international relations is, of course, which one is most productive in order to help us wrap our minds around what's going on? Now, when we use this structural approach—and I would actually also put Brian Berletic clearly into that tradition—he keeps saying, like, look, it's the way that the U.S. war machine is designed that then outputs on the other end this destruction and warfare. It doesn't really matter who is president. It doesn't really matter what kind of speech acts the Democrats or the Republicans use. The fact that they're all integrated into the larger structure then means that nothing else can be produced. And that, of course, always diminishes agency. In your research, you looked very much at the agency of these individual actors, which is also why in your explanations you're able to go from one to the other and explain how they interact with each other. What do you find, though? I mean... the structure does determine to some extent who can sit in what place, right? And then there's also the outcome of Chomsky and Herman's critique of how propaganda in liberal societies functions. On the other hand, it's weird to say that individuals have zero agency, actually. How do you square that circle? #Aaron Good Well, I think even Marx said something to the effect of, you know, men make history, but history determines the options available to the man in this specific circumstance. Right? That's not exactly how he said it—it was more clever the way that he phrased it—but that's basically the idea. Even Marx wasn't really a hyper-structuralist if you look at that statement. So how do you determine this? I think it involves having a certain understanding of the sociological setting of the elites at the time, and the political spectrum as it exists, and what sort of interests might lie behind it or animate them. I find the Kennedy presidency to be fascinating because he pursued policies that had antecedents with Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy or Wallace's idea for a Century of the Common Man. He wanted to move the U.S. towards lawful, peaceful internationalism. And yet he's the president and the chief executor of thi