The Wars of the Epstein Class | Dr. Aaron Good

## Drugs crime and state power The conversation with Dr. Aaron Good reframes crime in the United States not as a marginal pathology but as an institutional feature of modern governance. Rather than treating illicit economies as external threats the state must suppress, the exchange suggests they are woven into the mechanisms that project U.S. power domestically and internationally. Drug trafficking, far from being merely a social scourge, becomes a vector through which networks of influence, capital, and covert operations are sustained—and through which corruption is routinely manufactured and managed. What emerges is a picture of symbiosis: law enforcement, intelligence agencies, private oligarchs, and organized crime are not always antagonists but sometimes interdependent actors. The historical examples cited—prohibition-era bootlegging, the laundering of narcotics revenues through emerging financial hubs, and the CIA’s entanglements with traffickers during Cold War operations—illustrate how state objectives and criminal profit can align. Where money, plausible deniability, and tactical advantage are required, illicit markets supply the fuel. This is not to argue that every intelligence or military operation is criminal, but to contend that the system tolerates and even necessitates illegal channels to preserve strategic aims. The policy implications are stark. Public narratives that treat drug epidemics as policy failures miss the structural logic that tolerates, and sometimes cultivates, illicit supply for geopolitical ends. If criminalized economies serve broader state strategies—money laundering to underwrite influence operations, corruption to secure bases of operation, or narcotics distribution to destabilize adversaries—then punishing users and small-time dealers addresses symptoms while the deeper mechanisms remain intact. That insight pushes analysts to expand the frame of inquiry beyond policing and public health to the political and financial ecosystems that allow these flows to persist. ## Capitalism empire and early roots Tracing these dynamics back, the conversation moves to how the early capitalist formations in the United States were already entangled with illicit trade. The opium commerce of the China trade, the wealth that seeded early industrial ventures and educational institutions, and the emergence of political machines during the Gilded Age form a through-line to the contemporary arrangement. The lesson is unsettlingly simple: criminalized profit has been foundational to American capital accumulation and state formation, not a later aberration. Prohibition is a pivotal moment in this genealogy. By turning everyday alcohol consumption into a criminalized market, it massively expanded the opportunities for organized crime to accumulate capital and social control. The state’s attempt to legislate morality produced a shadow economy that hardened into a political and financial force. After repeal, that force did not dissipate; instead, it reconstituted itself around other illicit commodities—narcotics, gambling, and the laundering mechanisms that finance influence. This continuity between legitimate oligarchy and criminal enrichment undermines any neat separation between capitalism as a rule‑governed market and crime as its aberrant counterpart. Wealth built on illicit or semi‑licit foundations enters the realm of high finance and philanthropy, reshaping institutions and ideologies. Universities, urban development projects, and national infrastructure can carry the imprint of that origin, making the moral economy of capitalism more complex than the rhetoric of free markets suggests. ## Israel networks and US power A provocative thread in the conversation links transnational criminal networks to political projects tied to Zionist actors and Israeli intelligence. The suggestion is not of a simple conspiracy but of overlapping networks where illicit financial flows, intelligence cooperation, and partisan projects coalesce. Historical figures and transactions are cited as nodes where criminal syndicates, Zionist financiers, and U.S. state actors intersected—creating dense lattices of influence that have been understudied in mainstream scholarship. This nexus matters because it reframes certain episodes of U.S. foreign and domestic politics. When organized crime and transnational political projects align, they can produce outcomes that evade neat legal or ethical scrutiny: covert operations shielded by plausible deniability, financial channels that bypass oversight, and political leverage that is enforced through nonpublic means. The interaction between these networks and U.S. national security agencies complicates the common reading of bilateral alliances as purely diplomatic or military relationships; they can also be commercial and criminal in character. Critically, the conversation emphasizes scholarship—especially archival and oral-history work—that uncovers these entanglements. That research shows not only isolated incidents but durable institutional habits of cooperation and mutual protection. Recognizing this helps explain why certain scandals or crimes remain partially invisible: they implicate too many powerful actors whose exposure would threaten a political order built, in part, on covert toleration of illicit activity. ## Indonesia coups and resource grabs The analytic lens then turns outward to illuminate how these domestic arrangements are mirrored in foreign interventions. The Indonesian example serves as a case study for how regime change, covert operations, and corporate resource extraction are interwoven. Coup support and the destabilization of governments have frequently accompanied the pursuit of strategic commodities—from oil and minerals to favorable trade alignments—and have often relied on proxy forces, intelligence operations, and illicit finance. What becomes clear is that empire, in this understanding, is less about traditional colonial governance and more about creating conditions favorable to capital accumulation. Covert actions that install pliant regimes or eliminate obstacles to resource access are not anomalies but techniques of modern imperial management. The use of deniable actors and informal networks—political brokers, criminal intermediaries, and corporate interests—makes these operations feasible while keeping culpability diffuse. The Indonesian sketch also highlights how legalistic norms, such as non‑aggression principles embedded in international law, are selectively observed. The U.N. Charter and related frameworks are nominal constraints; when strategic imperatives prevail, actors within the tripartite state recalibrate legality to suit operational needs. That recalibration is easier to execute when the structures of enforcement are themselves fragmented and when covert partnerships render the line between legitimate and illegitimate action porous. ## Elite rule and criminalized empire A unifying theme is the concentration of power in an oligarchic core that can marshal formal institutions, clandestine capabilities, and criminal partnerships to preserve its interests. Described in the conversation as a tripartite arrangement—constitutional politics, the national security apparatus, and a deeper layer of oligarchic‑criminal networks—this formation sustains elite rule by producing both consent and coercion. Elections and civic institutions remain active, but they operate within a context where major strategic decisions are shaped by a much less visible center. This criminalized empire relies on several practical mechanisms: the laundering of illicit funds into legitimate investments, the protection of valuable actors from prosecution when their work is deemed essential, and the co‑option of media and cultural narratives to normalize exceptional measures. These mechanisms allow structural inequalities and risky foreign adventures to be managed rather than legislatively cured.

The Wars of the Epstein Class | Dr. Aaron Good Crime in the united states is not a bug, it’s a feature. That explains actually a lot also about its illegal foreign policies. The US as a political entity is deeply intertwined with crime syndicates and explicitly illegal acts under international and local law. Epstein was not at all an exception. These shady dealers are part and parcel of how US politics works. Luckily, there are great academics who work on the hidden power structures. One of them is with me today. Dr. Aaron Good, author of American Exception: Empire and the Deep State. Links: [Book] American Exception: https://www.amazon.com /American-Exception-Empire-Deep-State/dp/1510769137 Aaron Good on Patreon: https://www. patreon.com/americanexception Aaron Good on Substack: https://americanexception.substack.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 Tripartite state and deep state 00:11:14 Drugs crime and state power 00:19:00 Capitalism empire and early roots 00:31:22 Israel networks and US power 00:38:13 Indonesia coups and resource grabs 00:43:00 Elite rule and criminalized empire 00:46:34 Blackmail lobbies and covert control 01:08:20 Closing and where to follow Aaron #Pascal Welcome back, everybody, to Neutrality Studies. I’m Pascal Lottaz, and I’m joined today by Dr. Aaron Good, the author of the wonderful work *American Exception: Empire and the Deep State.* Aaron, welcome. #Aaron Good Thank you, Pascal. It’s great to be here. #Pascal It's wonderful having you. I want to start by talking a little bit about your book, which you told me is going to come out in Japanese pretty soon. So if you're listening to this podcast in Japanese, please stay tuned for the release of the book in your language. In this book, you're making a very fundamental claim—or observation—about the American system, describing it as working through a tripartite distribution of labor, or basically of power, within the system. Could you explain that framework? #Aaron Good -- 1 of 23 -- Sure. So, it’s understood by people who take civics classes in the U.S., or who grew up in the United States, that we live in a liberal democracy where the public is sovereign because they get to choose the leaders themselves when they vote in free and fair elections. There’s supposed to be some sort of pluralism, where different groups have power but nobody can be totally in control because of these democratic and liberal institutions that allow for self-governance and so on. But this elides so much about the way the U.S. actually functions. Throughout its history, it’s been kind of an imperialist and gangsterish enterprise with, you know, genocide, slavery, westward expansion, wars against Mexico, and whatnot—so on and so forth. But it's really after World War II that the character of the U.S. regime changes—it becomes an empire built on global dominance, aiming for global dominance of the capitalist system. And to maintain this empire, there are big changes to American institutions and governance. You get the creation of this national security state, and it doesn’t operate through debate, transparency, or lawfulness. It has a long history of lawbreaking—CIA operations to, like, steal people’s mail when they’re not even supposed to be operating domestically at all. They’re doing all these things, carrying out all kinds of operations we likely only know half of—MKUltra programs, drug tests, mind control tests on unwitting Americans. All sorts of horrible things—assassination plots overseas, alliances with drug traffickers, and so on— protecting organized crime in the United States. Just a whole level of statecraft that’s supposedly plausibly deniable, but enough of it comes out that we have a big historical record to look at, to understand the ways the U.S. really operates, like Carl Schmitt suggested, in a state of exception. The U.S. regime has actually been covertly exceptionalist since the end of World War II. It keeps posing different emergencies without end—basically, the global communist conspiracy, or after 9/11, the global war on terror, which is this sort of terrorist Islamist conspiracy that we’re organized against. So there’s a lot of lawbreaking that’s institutionalized. So that’s like a kind of duality of the state. This is something people who studied the Nazi regime talked about—it being a dual state. There was the normative state, where things functioned normally under the Weimar Republic and so on. But then there was the Nazi regime, which claimed it could break whatever laws it wanted because there was an emergency and they had to protect the state. Well, that kind of logic gets built into the U.S. regime in the national security state, and it gives it a kind of duality. You have the politicians saying what they say, and then the national security people— spooks and so on—breaking the law whenever they see fit and lying about it. And this is a common thing. #Pascal -- 2 of 23 -- And you’re not even talking just about international law, right? You’re talking about U.S. domestic law and even the constitutional requirements that are regularly broken by something that’s not just a crime syndicate, but an integral part of the state, funded by Congress and so on, right? That’s what we’re talking about. #Aaron Good Yes, the criminalization of the state in the U.S. was the main force behind creating the United Nations and the U.N. Charter, drafting it, and ratifying it. It was ratified by Congress, and thus it is a treaty—an international treaty—which, according to the Constitution, makes it the supreme law of the land. And the U.N. Charter states that the U.S. cannot act aggressively, commit aggression against another country, or even threaten aggression against another country. Yet it does this all the time, which is categorically a violation of the U.S. Constitution. But because the state operates in an exceptionalist way, there’s no institution or legal mechanism to challenge the criminality of the United States unless there’s a critical mass of people in power who decide they feel like doing it. And this is a problem if you believe in lawfulness and so on. But it would be impossible to run an empire the way the U.S. has—protecting invested capital all over the world, even if it means screwing over local populations. You really couldn’t do this lawfully. So we have a system to manage it. But even beyond that, there’s what I call a “deep state,” a term I borrow from other people. It really comes from Turkey—the Turkish system and observers of Turkey. But even before that, I think the real antecedent to this is Peter Dale Scott’s “deep political system,” which he wrote about for the first time in the early ’90s. This is a kind of governance that isn’t defined by constitutional or legal terms—it’s a sort of lawless system where enforcement happens both inside and outside official channels. I think this idea eventually evolves into what we call the deep state. Ola Tunander, a Swedish peace studies scholar, wrote a really great article on this in the early 2000s. #Pascal I was on his channel, yeah. A wonderful, wonderful scholar. #Aaron Good Yeah, absolutely. And I'm doing a big series with him on the podcast now about the Olof Palme assassination, because I think he's probably the top expert on this—he knows the geopolitical context so well. There were a few people writing about this deep state phenomenon, and Peter is a good friend of mine. I did a big oral history series with him on the podcast as well. But the innovation of the tripartite state, which I describe in *American Exception*, is that beyond the formal bureaucracy of the national security agencies—the FBI, CIA, NSA, the Pentagon, and so on— -- 3 of 23 -- and of course way beyond democratic politics, you know, the constitutional politics of how Congress, the presidency, and the judiciary are supposed to function... There's an even deeper layer, for lack of a better word, that we could call the deep state, as I define it. I use the term in a couple of ways. One of them is to talk about the most sensitive, even criminal, institutions and practices of the national security state and its relationship—especially with organized crime—which really doesn’t have a clear bureaucratic rationale. It’s something deeper and more oligarchic. So in that sense, that could be the deep state. The clandestine state is one way to talk about the deep state. But in a broader sense, we could call it the deep state in a systemic sense, or we could call it the deep regime. It’s all of those institutions that collectively allow for top-down governance in a nominal democracy. And that’s another way to describe the deep state—or, again, the deep regime. #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. So, in your framework, we’ve got the official U.S. government with its branches and all the constitutional structure. Then we’ve got the CIA—kind of the, what did you call it? The security state. And lastly, there’s the deep state. The deep state is different from the security state because it’s where everything that’s basically not funded by Congress happens. Is that a fair way to understand it? #Aaron Good Beyond that, I mean, there’s overlap here with this oligarchic state, which we could call the deep state, because it dominates democratic politics through the funding of politicians. And it’s not something that’s explained in the Constitution—as if oligarchs should be able to dominate the system with money. But it also has a lot of power over the grand strategy and the tactics of the national security state. It’s also intertwined with organized crime, especially the drug trade, which is extremely lucrative. My understanding is that the three most lucrative international commodities are oil, weapons, and narcotics. And the deep state, through its partnership with the National Crime Syndicate and its offshoots, has allowed the U.S. and the U.S. empire to instrumentalize and profit from drugs—the international drug trade—which has uses beyond the money it generates for different oligarchs once you launder it and put it back into the financial system. But it also creates the kind of corruption, in the U.S. and around the world, that you need. So some of the best friends of the national security state are these deep political alliances between the security state... #Aaron Good -- 4 of 23 -- And the underworld of organized crime connects to the overworld—the oligarchy of private wealth— which is really, collectively, the formation that controls the U.S. regime. #Pascal Yeah, so I think this is really important. I mean, under this view, the drug crisis—or the fentanyl crisis—in the United States is not the government failing, you know, like “we just can’t catch the baddies.” No, it’s about the built‑in workings of the system—how the entire system produces wealth on the one hand for a few, misery on the other, and war abroad. So it’s part and parcel of the entire system in that framework, right? #Aaron Good Yes. And I know less about the dynamics of the fentanyl problems in the United States and that sort of drug traffic, and who exactly is behind it. But it’s easier to understand how the heroin and cocaine trade evolved in the United States and how it was protected by various CIA operations and law enforcement entities. I mean, the most spectacular—or sort of jaw‑dropping—example of this is Meyer Lansky, who was used by the U.S. in World War II. They said, “We want you to help us p