. . . and for whom their major takeaway is automatic proof of an amorphous conspiracy by ‘global elites’ and their predatory abuses; they uncover, in plain sight, a global policy making programme – but not one run by elected politicians or the ‘deep state’, but an international association of monied oligarchs enjoying a tax-free, lawless lifestyle in the offshore archipelago of dark money and shadow banking.
A special investigation the UK independent journalistic outfit Byline Times identify four concentric circles of abuse at the heart of the Epstein network: Steve Bannon, the architect of the Alt-Right; Silicon Valley and Epstein’s infiltration of US academia and science – with a particular focus on AI; the disaster capitalism that has roiled the West through the headwinds of Brexit, the chaos of Donald Trump’s first Presidency and the collapse of the rouble after Putin’s fist invasion of Ukraine and Russian aggrandisement.[1] It is the contention of this article that the Epstein Network forms another dimension to the putative techno-fascist order of the Alt-Reich which is the subject of another Byline Times investigative project.[2]
First of all, a brief reprise on the sordid life and times of Jeffrey Esptein who despite the opaqueness surrounding the sources of his wealth, had, as a self-styled ‘financier,’ transformed himself by the early years of the millennium into a permanent fixture of global high society. From the opulent redoubts which his mysteriously acquired wealth enabled him to buy – the Manhattan mansion, the Upper East Side townhouse, the New Mexico hideout, the two private Caribbean islands and the Lolita jet, Epstein was able to construct a world of his own. At its heart was industrialised child rape complete with a bureaucratic edifice of recruiters, handlers, and client lists and with a business culture of silence, loyalty and, for a time, legal immunity. He was a networker par excellence though his modus operandi is not one that would appear on business school curricula. He had fingers in so many pies of elite life. He was, at various junctures, close to the former Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, the successful Northern Ireland peace negotiator Senator George Mitchell and prominent banking figures. He hobnobbed with Silicon Valley bosses Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. He donated to Harvard University and ingratiated with academic figures such as the scientist Stephen Hawking and the linguist Noam Chomsky. He forged relationships in the UK, across Europe, Israel, and the Gulf states. He entertained Woody Allen and met Russian officials. He was interviewed on camera by Donald Trump’s former intellectual muse Steve Bannon in discussion about the future of Western civilisation.[3]
To coin a gory contemporary conspiracy phrase, Epstein knew where the bodies were buried. He knew people and made sure people knew he knew them. Whether through blackmail, flattery, or being powerful networker or fixer, he made himself indispensable to those who moved in his circles. That so many remained in Epstein’s orbit even after his child soliciting conviction in 2008 - such as the sacked UK ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson - speaks volumes more about those circles than about Epstein himself. Despite the welter of revelations about the operation of his sex trafficking network after his death in prison in 2019, very few of Epstein’s associates have since fallen on their swords (his partner in crime Ghislaine Maxwell, Mandelson, and Andrew Mountbatten Windsor). It is truly the modern parable of how systems of power and wealth operate to protect their own.[4]
For Hardeep Matharu, a defining feature of how political and elite power operates is hypernormalisation, and the Epstein scandal is a textbook example of it. He draws upon accounts of daily life and expectations in the former Soviet Union to explain how such perverse normality is reified. Recalling reading during Covid 19 lockdown Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time which is a “mosaic” of voices of those who had lived through the collapse of the USSR. One short account stayed with him while watching a Government daily coronavirus:
First of all, a brief reprise on the sordid life and times of Jeffrey Esptein who despite the opaqueness surrounding the sources of his wealth, had, as a self-styled ‘financier,’ transformed himself by the early years of the millennium into a permanent fixture of global high society. From the opulent redoubts which his mysteriously acquired wealth enabled him to buy – the Manhattan mansion, the Upper East Side townhouse, the New Mexico hideout, the two private Caribbean islands and the Lolita jet, Epstein was able to construct a world of his own. At its heart was industrialised child rape complete with a bureaucratic edifice of recruiters, handlers, and client lists and with a business culture of silence, loyalty and, for a time, legal immunity. He was a networker par excellence though his modus operandi is not one that would appear on business school curricula. He had fingers in so many pies of elite life. He was, at various junctures, close to the former Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, the successful Northern Ireland peace negotiator Senator George Mitchell and prominent banking figures. He hobnobbed with Silicon Valley bosses Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. He donated to Harvard University and ingratiated with academic figures such as the scientist Stephen Hawking and the linguist Noam Chomsky. He forged relationships in the UK, across Europe, Israel, and the Gulf states. He entertained Woody Allen and met Russian officials. He was interviewed on camera by Donald Trump’s former intellectual muse Steve Bannon in discussion about the future of Western civilisation.[3]
To coin a gory contemporary conspiracy phrase, Epstein knew where the bodies were buried. He knew people and made sure people knew he knew them. Whether through blackmail, flattery, or being powerful networker or fixer, he made himself indispensable to those who moved in his circles. That so many remained in Epstein’s orbit even after his child soliciting conviction in 2008 - such as the sacked UK ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson - speaks volumes more about those circles than about Epstein himself. Despite the welter of revelations about the operation of his sex trafficking network after his death in prison in 2019, very few of Epstein’s associates have since fallen on their swords (his partner in crime Ghislaine Maxwell, Mandelson, and Andrew Mountbatten Windsor). It is truly the modern parable of how systems of power and wealth operate to protect their own.[4]
For Hardeep Matharu, a defining feature of how political and elite power operates is hypernormalisation, and the Epstein scandal is a textbook example of it. He draws upon accounts of daily life and expectations in the former Soviet Union to explain how such perverse normality is reified. Recalling reading during Covid 19 lockdown Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time which is a “mosaic” of voices of those who had lived through the collapse of the USSR. One short account stayed with him while watching a Government daily coronavirus:
We lived our Soviet lives by a unified set of rules that applied to everyone. Someone stands at the podium. He lies, everyone applaud, but everyone knows that he is lying and knows that they know he’s lying. Still, he says all that stuff and enjoys the applause. |[5]
Hardeep recalls Dominic Cummings’ notorious rationale in the Rose Garden of 10 Downing Street that he had not broken lockdown rules on the grounds that he had driven to Barnard Castle with his wife and child to test his eyesight and his reactions to this “dehumanising” moment. [6] For such contempt from the elites elicits one of two corrosive reactions from the public: either acceptance or switching off from it altogether almost in a state of learned powerlessness and the paralysis of hope that it creates. The contempt that such dehumanisation engenders inevitably corrodes trust in liberal democracy but also a learned helplessness of our capacity to influence and change things.
Similarly, in his 2005 book on the last generation of the Soviet Union, anthropologist Alexei Yurchak argued that everyone knew the Soviet Union was failing, but no one could imagine an alternative, so ordinary people entered into a ‘play’ with those in power, to maintain a pretence of a normal society. Everyone knew it wasn’t real, but it was accepted as such. Yurchak thus argued that the society was in a state of ‘hypernormalisation’[7] This relationship with truth and power could also be applied to that between Irish people and the Roman Catholic Church before the rupture that look place either side of the millennium. The Church’s flock knew through its grapevine of the huge institutional abuses at the heart of Irish Catholicism. They did not believe most of what was being preached from the pulpit. They knew all the hypocrisies and falsehoods but continued as a critical mass to go along with the functions as it was socially and emotionally convenient to do so until this same mass came to its own collective quasi Soviet “Emperor has no clothes” moment.
So what were the building blocks of the Epstein network and its tentacles? Into the cement mixer went Russia, the opportunities offered by cryptocurrency, Steve Bannon and the Alt-Right and Epstein’s alliance with the tech bros of Silicon Valley. The increasing hegemony of techno-fascism has outlived Epstein and may even be his greatest global legacy (next to the continuing trauma and suffering being endured by the over one thousand victims of his global sex trafficking complex) with the realisation of the Alt-Reich in the Project 2025 agenda of Trump 2.0.
Drawing an analogy with Sputnik, the first successful space satellite launch by the USSR in 1957, Jeffrey Epstein opined in 2013 in a conversation with a senior Russian official that Russia could make a similarly technological and cultural impact through “taking the lead in finance”. He argued that, instead of merely replicating Silicon Valley and chasing Microsoft, Apple and Google, Russia could “leapfrog the global community by reinventing the financial system of the 21st century” through new kinds of money and securitisation. Epstein reminded this official that he had, helped craft the derivatives markets in the United States in the 1970s, and that this was a prelude to a “more advanced disruptive securitisation that is now made possible by.” technology”. Russia, Epstein asserted, was “unique in its capability to execute on a grand vision” for:
a new form of money on a worldwide basis …much larger than any single project envisioned by any [government] and at its core not really that difficult to bring to fruition.[8]
Epstein had good reason to believe that he would receive an audience and encouragement at the highest levels in the Kremlin. For his Russian interlocutor was Sergey Belyakov, who had been a senior adviser to Oleg Deripaska, one of Vladimir Putin’s most stalwart oligarchs and international operator, Oleg Deripaska, a close associate of Epstein himself and the now disgraced Peter Mandelson. By 2013, Belyakov has become Russia’s Deputy Minister of Economic Development. In response to a letter in January 2014 from Thorbjorn Jagland, then secretary general of the Council of Europe, relaying his intention to meet Putin in Sochi, Epstein told Jagland to “explain to Putin that there should be a sophisticated Russian version of bitcoin” – a decentralised digital currency, launched in 2009, that operates, as digital currencies do, outside of the central banking system. In Epstein’s words, it would be “the most advanced financial instrument available on a global basis.” This ambition is key to understanding the rest of the crypto network built around Epstein: tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel; and Donald Trump’s one-time White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon.[9]
The key figure, along with the now X owner Elon Musk, in the so-called PayPal Mafia was Peter Thiel, co-founder of data surveillance firm Palantir which, in its critics’ eyes has its fingers in too many sensitive state operations from health data to immigration control. From the outset, Thiel was an enthusiastic advocate of cryptocurrency and its ability to furnish an alternative to government-controlled fiat money. After email and personal discussions involving Epstein, Thiel, fintech entrepreneur Ian Osborne, former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, and William Burns, then Deputy Secretary of State in the Obama administration and a subsequent CIA director. Just as Thiel’s interest in cryptocurrencies and data systems like those developed by Palantir, was growing, Epstein joined him with a $40 million investment in Theil’s fintech venture capital firm Valar Ventures – which according to former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, was ‘co-owned’ by Thiel and Epstein as they bought into the Israeli surveillance tech firm Carbyne. A spokesman for Peter Thiel has since denied this, and said Epstein was just a “limited partner.”[10]
Both Epstein’s and Thiel’s political outlooks and strategies also began to synchronise with their financial objectives. Epstein’s correspondence reveals close tracking of Trump-Clinton polling, campaign personnel, and appointments linked to Bitcoin and fintech. In his Republican National Convention speech in 2016, Theil used the platform at the crowning of Trump as Republican Presidential Election candidate to attack “financial bubbles” and praise “new forms of money.” He speculated that Bitcoin could be a “Chinese financial weapon” or a hedge against the US dollar’s reserve status.[11] A more glaring example of monetary and fiscal treason can scarcely be imagined.
As Russia’s interference in that year’s Presidential Election steadily cranked up, Epstein was also arranging lunches at his New York townhouse between Thiel, another Trump backer, Tom Barrack, and Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, a veteran Kremlin operator. Turning his attention to the UK where he was a regular visitor, Jeffrey Epstein, according to the recently released messages and emails, saw the UK’’s vote to leave the European Union in June 2016 as a moment of political alignment and a trading opportunity. “Brexit, just the beginning.” he wrote to Peter Thiel; the chaos and uncertainty unleashed by this seismic moment in British politics was something to be sorted financially and leveraged politically.[12]
The next stage in Epstein and his associates’ nefarious project was the funding of and the provision of intellectual heft to the pan-European populist far right. Behind the scenes, Epstein emerged as Steve Bannon’s patron and strategist for the latter’s latest venture ‘Movement’ founded in 2017 by Nigel Farage’s partner, Laure Ferrari (whose name cropped up a few months ago in relation to the purchase of an expensive house in Farage’s Clacton-on-Sea constituency) and allies such as Belgian People’s Party leader Mischael Modrikamen. Its mission was to unite ‘populist and conservative movements in Europe,” defending “national sovereignty” and “effective national borders.” During the turmoil of Theresa May’s government from 2016-19, when she struggled to find an acceptable form of Brexit to the Eurosceptics who had gone from being the minority of obstructive “bastards” in John Major’s premiership to being the kingmakers in a sundered Conservative party, Bannon told Epstein in 2018 that he was meeting then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and the Conservatives’ European Research Group, MP Jacob Rees-Mogg to urge them to topple May. When this objective was duly achieved in 2019 when Theresa May was replaced by Johnston as PM, Bannon exultantly proclaimed “May gone… We really did crush them … We’re rolling.”[13]
Not content with his foray into Britain’s Uncivil Brexit wars, Bannon was also texting Epstein about his wider European ambitions claiming that he was now advisor to the French Front National; Mathew Silvini’s Legia Nord in Italy; the German AfD; the Swiss People’s Party; Hungarian PM Victor Orban; Land and Freedom and Nigel Farage. He was expressing optimism that in the European Parliament elections scheduled for May 2019, “we [the pan European populist front] can go from 92 seats to 200 – shut down any crypto legislation or anything else we want”. Bannon was certainly quite the evangelist for crypto, agreeing that “crypto is the currency, blockchain is the equivalent of internet 2.0.”[14]
In the aftermath of Epstein’s conviction and death; the UK’s Hard Brexit departure from the EU and the emergence of yet another political vehicle for Nigel Farage in the shape of Reform UK, Russia’s cultivation of right-wing populist parties in Europe continued and cryptocurrencies continued to be a covert way of funding them, with Reform UK deeply enmeshed in the swirl of controversy around this subversion of the global financial system. Nathan Gill, former MEP, and leader of Reform in Wales who was sent to prison for twelve years for taking pro-Russian bribes to make Kremlin favoured speeches in the European Parliament was en route, at the time of his arrest in September 2021, to speak at a Kremlin-backed forum on Russia’s DEG e-voting system. He was scheduled to give a presentation entitled “The Same Technology That Gives Us Crypto Currencies Also Will Change The Way Vote,” explicitly harnessing blockchain to election infrastructure. [15]A more blatant attempt to subvert the machinery of liberal democracy can scarcely be comprehended.
Reform’s predilection for this mode of financing has recently risen high on the political agenda with the decision by Keir Starmer this month to announce a temporary moratorium on crypto donation after an investigation by a senior civil servant. This action has been taken in response to two major donations in crypto to the coffers of Reform by the Thailand-based British investor Christopher Harborne; the first worth £12 million in May 2025 and another amounting to £3 million in November 2025. These transactions occur outside of full Financial Conduct Authority - just the type of opaque funding stream anti-corruption experts have warned about.
In his analysis of the rise of the Alt-Reich, Nafeez Ahmed reveals how the far right has grown since the 1930s from a fringe pariah into a mainstream force operating in the heartlands of Western power, where it is poised to subvert liberal democracy from within.[16] The diverse strands within this modern manifestation of the far right coalesce around two key narratives: The Great Replacement Theory and Cultural Marxism; both rooted in antisemitic conspiracy theories that directly descend from Nazism. They now increasingly animate even mainstream political leaders (think of the shifts in the Overton Window around immigration, social cohesion, and integration) and as they intertwine with technology, they are spawning new and bizarre authoritarian visions, which refract the fascist ideologies of the 1930s in a new ‘postmodern’ light.[17]
Although loose and uncoordinated, the proliferating ties between these different political groups and networks across the US, Europe and the UK, are being supercharged through social media and the ‘dark web’ through masculinist personalities like Andrew Tate and Jordan Petersen, and legitimised through respected academic institutions and opaque think tanks. Ahmed traces a network of lobby groups – funded by elites who have accumulated their wealth from extractive industries, finance and technology and explores how that wealth has been channelled to a core transatlantic network of movers and shakers who, by weaponising data and information have created the Alt-Reich.[18]
The rise of the techno-authoritarian far right is not the product of a unified, single plan, but has emerged from multiple converging plans being promulgated by overlapping interests: the political party flank consisting of far right and right wing parties in different nations and regions; the technology oligarchy flank encompassing tech investors, entrepreneurs and platforms; the secretive eugenics intelligentsia flank and the public intellectual flank normalising hard-line attitudes towards ethnic, religious and gender minorities.[19]. The ultimate vision, according to Ahmed, of the Alt-Reich, is the destruction of the entire liberal project and its replacement by new authoritarian, command-and-control political structures modelled on Silicon Valley conglomerates to maintain and perpetuate elite power.[20]
So how does the Epstein network fit into the Alt-Reich set up bearing in mind that the first releases of the Epstein Files post date the book by Hafeez Ahmed of that name? The central figure in the developing techno autocracy that is the USA looks to be Vice President JD Vance. His Ohio Senate run was heavily bankrolled by Peter Thiel who echoes his grievances about the ‘deep state.’ He is the most articulate advocate of national conservatism inside Trump’s second administration and gives the MAGA movement considerable intellectual muscle. [21] In Ahmed’s unravelling of the creeping techno authoritarianism enveloping the US, he sees the boosting of crypto as a tool to devalue major currencies like the dollar, euro and sterling and as part of the vision of dismantling the so-called liberal administrative state and empowering unhindered techno-capital.[22] Vance’s ascent solidifies Thiel’s worldview in America’s executive branch: a political model that treats technology, from surveillance companies such as Palantir, to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, as instruments of state power and civilisational competition rather than neutral infrastructure that serves the public.[23]
Future release of the Epstein data trove may shed future light on the obscene nexus between his global sex trafficking operation and his undermining of global democratic order by his financing of bad actors and his contribution to the authoritarian, anti-democratic technocracy whose creeping totalitarianism threatens humanity. The ideological aversion to regulation in Silicon Valley and the dark, unaccountable influence of crypto-politics in our democratic processes stand out as one of his most damaging legacies.
References
[1] Peter Jukes, The Sleep of Reason; The Lightbulb of Brutal Clarity. Byline Times, Darkness Visible March 2026 pp.30-231
[2] Nafeez Ahmed (2025) Alt Reich. London: Byline Times
[3] James Bloodworth, Who Was Jeffrey Epstein. The Epstein Files lay bare how power always protects its own. Byline Times Darkness Visible March 2026 pp32-33
[4] Ibid
[5] Hardeep Mathuru, Power Protects Itself Through Powerlessness Byline Times Darkness Visible March 2026 pp.34-35.
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid, p.35
[1] Peter Jukes, The Sleep of Reason; The Lightbulb of Brutal Clarity. Byline Times, Darkness Visible March 2026 pp.30-231
[2] Nafeez Ahmed (2025) Alt Reich. London: Byline Times
[3] James Bloodworth, Who Was Jeffrey Epstein. The Epstein Files lay bare how power always protects its own. Byline Times Darkness Visible March 2026 pp32-33
[4] Ibid
[5] Hardeep Mathuru, Power Protects Itself Through Powerlessness Byline Times Darkness Visible March 2026 pp.34-35.
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid, p.35
[8] Peter Jukes ‘Brexit, Just the Beginning.’ Jeffrey Epstein’s Crypto-Politics of Disruption Byline Times pp. 43-45
[9] Ibid, pp.43-44
[10] Ibid, p.44
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid, pp.44-45
[13] Ibid, p.45
[14] Ibid
[15] Ibid
[16] Ahmed, p.3
[17] Ibid, p.10
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid, pp.416-17
[20] Ibid, p.418
[21] Jukes, p.45
[22] Ahmed, pp. 353-54
[23] Jukes, p.45
[9] Ibid, pp.43-44
[10] Ibid, p.44
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid, pp.44-45
[13] Ibid, p.45
[14] Ibid
[15] Ibid
[16] Ahmed, p.3
[17] Ibid, p.10
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid, pp.416-17
[20] Ibid, p.418
[21] Jukes, p.45
[22] Ahmed, pp. 353-54
[23] Jukes, p.45
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
