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We are back with another installment of our ongoing series Fourth Reich Political Theology with Marcus from the Return of the Repressed podcast. Recall that in our opening salvo of this series, we laid the foundation for our excavation by exploring how the superstitious religious worldview of the feudal world order was superimposed onto the capitalist world order with “The Market” playing the role of God. The same way that serfs and peasants lived their lives in awe and default belief of a vengeful deity, we today implicitly believe in the mysterious market forces we are told move the earthly cosmos beyond the will of man. This episode picks up right where we left off, expanding outwards on what we covered in part 1 to reach beyond the “earthly philosophers” of bourgeois political economy (Smith, Bentham, et al.), to the German Idealists from Kant to the so-called neo-Kantains, to the early sociologists, to the man of the hour himself, Carl Schmitt. In our journey, we draw heavily on Georg Lukacs “The Destruction of Reason” to trace the thread of irrationalism through all liberal political philosophizing.  Lukacs and Schmitt see eye to eye when it comes to the hypocrisy and incoherence of Western bourgeois liberal democracy. After all, rule of by and for the bourgeoisie–and the exploitation and domination of the proletariat that entails–cannot really pursue the objectives of liberté, egalité, and fraternité. That would destroy the special privileges enjoyed by the ruling class. But from the same observation, Schmitt and Lukacs proceed in polar opposite directions. Schmitt would strip back the pretense of institutional norms in favor of the rule of raw power, which he supported in his advocacy for and membership in the Nazi party. Lukacs, good Marxist that he was, would instead expose the exploitive nature of the state and the society and, developing class consciousness through praxis, expropriate the ruling class in favor of the dictatorship of the proletariat.  It’s another incredible conversation with Marcus, and one that has real practical implications for today when we once again find ourselves in what Schmitt called “the state of exception” where the sovereign alone makes the rules… Return of the Repressed Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/TheReturnOfTheRepressed Fourth Reich Archaeology Patreon: patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

This week we have yet another guest with whom to zoom out from the present moment and excavate critical contextual information and insights. This week’s guest is the great journalist Moe Tkacik of the American Prospect, who has brought a much-needed historical materialist perspective to coverage of the government and the laundry-list of crimes that the most powerful people therein are responsible for. Particularly, we dig into the mobbed-up background and low-down gangster tactics of “Little Narco” Marco Rubio. Moe walks us through the ways in which Rubio tanked a proposed prisoner exchange with Venezuela in order to fan the flames of war and pave the way to the regime-change operation he eventually spearheaded. She also discusses her deep research into his background and how it intersects with the OG mafia-state collaborations in the form of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy assassination, and the Iran-Contra drugs for weapons rackets.  We talk a lot on this podcast about the King of Crime, Donald Trump, but as the great bit-character Ciccio testifies before the fictionalized U.S. Senate in the Godfather Part II, “the family’s got a lot of buffers.” And an ambitious up-and-comer like Rubio makes a phenomenal buffer. In the second part of the discussion - currently only available on Patreon - we dig even deeper and explore the Nazi roots of the Mafiocracy and trace the unbroken continuity of mob-state relations in the postwar era.  Music: Songs of Carlos Puebla and Zach de la Rocha feat. Last Emperor and KRS-ONE. Moe’s Article: The Narco-Terrorist Elite (https://prospect.org/2025/12/23/narco-terrorist-elite-rubio-south-america-iran-contra/) Fourth Reich Archaeology Patreon: patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

This week we are joined by a special guest, TrueAnon’s Brace Belden, to take stock of the current and impending crisis and brainstorm ways that we might think creatively to meet the moment and face off against an admittedly much better organized fascist enemy. For those of us on the left seeking to exploit the next crisis to push back against the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of our craven overlords, we must come to grips with the fact that there currently is no organized revolutionary movement; there’s not even a revolutionary working class. But that does not mean that we should give into fatalism. There are plenty signs of hope, and the demand for a unified front against fascism is higher than it has been in generations. We discuss all of this and much more with Brace, including the magnetic pull of the spectacle towards compatible leftism, the prospects for armed struggle (including insights from Brace’s time in Syria), and how we can learn from the past without using history as a costume for revolutionary LARPing. We don’t have the answers, but we do have the will, and we hope you’ll tune in and join us. Links:  https://podcast.trueanon.com/ Brace’s Baffler Article, “The Hatred of Podcasting” https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/the-hatred-of-podcasting-belden Lukacs “History and Class Consciousness” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/Herbert Marcuse’s 1969 Berkeley Speech with Angela Davis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuyWj8BtjKc Fourth Reich Archaeology Patreon: Patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

In Side A (listen if you haven't already!), we went all the way back to the country’s entree into modernity and its role as a nominally independent nation amidst and between competing empires in The Great Game. We also go a bit deeper into the political forces that gave rise to the first Shah of Iran, which is a real Fourth Reich fairytale involving Nazis, Brits, and of course that black gold, oil.  You know we dug into the rise and fall of the great lost hope for democracy, Mohammed Mossadegh. All he wanted was for Iran to get half the profits from his country’s oil, and instead he got ousted and replaced by a 26-year long dictatorship, replaced by the Islamic Republic in 1979. Basically we cover about 250 years of Iranian history and tell a story that we just have not been hearing in the news these days. In Side B, we take it to the present day and give our analysis on the current protests and the factional formations popping up to prepare a hostile takeover of the roiling nation. It is a time for clear thinking, for historical understanding, for only through consciousness of our role in reality can we act in history. And act we must.

This week we dig deep into Iran. We go all the way back to the country’s entree into modernity and its role as a nominally independent nation amidst and between competing empires in The Great Game. We also go a bit deeper into the political forces that gave rise to the first Shah of Iran, which is a real Fourth Reich fairytale involving Nazis, Brits, and of course that black gold, oil.  You know we dig into the rise and fall of the great lost hope for democracy, Mohammed Mossadegh. All he wanted was for Iran to get half the profits from his country’s oil, and instead he got ousted and replaced by a 26-year long dictatorship, replaced by the Islamic Republic in 1979. Basically we cover about 250 years of Iranian history and tell a story that we just have not been hearing in the news these days. In Side B, we will take it to the present day and give our analysis on the current protests and the factional formations popping up to prepare a hostile takeover of the roiling nation. It is a time for clear thinking, for historical understanding, for only through consciousness of our role in reality can we act in history. And act we must.

This week we are dropping our episode early because there is just too much going on for us to sit on the sidelines until Friday.  Recorded on Sunday, January 4th, 2026, in this episode we weigh in on the outright violation of international law that occurred in the dead of night on Saturday, January 3rd in Caracas, Venezuela, when Nicolas Maduro and his wife were kidnapped by the United States Military Industrial Complex and brought to the center of empire to answer to federal charges of narcoterrorism.  Even though we (and the rest of the world) knew this was a long time coming - and we predicted it in our Geopolitik 7 episode - the actual event was still a shock when it happened. Whatever happens next, this invasion marks the entry into a new era of U.S. world policing, one in which the United States will straight up go out and bag any head of state it dislikes, under cover of darkness, in order to get what it wants.  This is a violation of international law. It is a violation of domestic law. And beyond strongly worded letters and statements, the international community seems to be okay with letting it go unanswered.  At least for now, it seems like the United States’ policy of “might makes right” is going to carry the day.  Meanwhile, the U.S. mafia-state under the helm of King of K-K-Krime Donald Trump is wearing its criminality like a mink coat. U.S. friendly drug dealers like the recently pardoned ex-Honduran kingpin/president Juan Orlando Hernandez, Ecuadoran billionaire/president Daniel Noboa, and crypto fraudster/torture-dungeon-master Nayib Bukele laugh their way to the bank. The empire’s reasons for flouting the law are beyond transparent, they are blatant and brazen. Under the laughable pretext of curbing drug trafficking into the United States, the Trump administration has openly asserted that the reason they took Maduro was to open up the Venezuelan oil and mineral market to multinational corporations.  It’s all so basic. It’s all so annoying. We have come back to the 19th Century policy of going out and taking control over places and peoples simply so that we can extract their resources to enrich our psychotic rulers. And at this point, the default is that the billionaire class, the powers that be, and whatever hangers on who worship that group are just going to keep doing mafia shit to consolidate capital as long as everyone else goes along with the shakedown racket. Let’s get digging. 

Happy New Year! This week we are releasing Side B of “Fourth Reich Political Theology,” which is our interview/collaboration with Marcus from the Return of the Repressed Podcast.  In it, Don and Marcus examine how “The Market” and people’s fealty to its bizarre logic has come into actual existence, almost alchemically, or religiously.  To put it bluntly, The Market today fills the role of God in our society. It is beyond human control, beyond reproach, and exercises an omniscient, omnipotent power over human affairs. To capitalists, The Market’s pure rationality also bestows it with benevolence. Don and Marcus explore the historical and theoretical bases for the development of this phenomenon, by examining the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the adaptation of religion to the economic mode of production and vice versa.  And don’t forget to check out Marcus’s stuff over on P@treon! You can find the Return of the Repressed at: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/TheReturnOfTheRepressed⁠

It’s Christmas, 2025 is almost over, and the insanity of the world - the seemingly unaccountable criminality of our rulers - is on full display. Scan any newspaper, scroll the feed of your “favorite” social media app, and it’s hard not to feel an all-encompassing sense of dread and doom, and of powerlessness. Enter Dick and Don with some holiday “cheer.” Or, more than cheer, analysis and righteous indignation - our specialty. In this episode, we take a look at the headlines from hell that have marked the past weeks to reiterate what our longtime listeners already know all too well: we ARE living in the Fourth Reich. Down South America way, yet another actual Nazi scion has been elected president of a whole-ass country, namely José Antonio Kast in Chile, son of a dyed in the wool ratline escapee with big plans to revive and resurrect the legacy of the cruel Pinochet dictatorship. That’s another domino felled by the AmerIsraeli empire in what we’re calling “Operation Condor 2.0.” Meanwhile, plans continue apace for the imperial conquest of Venezuela and the seizure of its oil, including a bill introduced by Bernie Sanders’s “good friend” Mike Lee (R-UT) to authorize the president to issue letters of marque, empowering Amerikan pirates to prowl the Caribbean once more. Speaking of the Caribbean, we look at the latest Epstein document dumps and assess whether anything will happen in response. Seems unlikely, even though the pedophile government is more unpopular than ever. Like, who is still supporting these utterly degenerate freaks? TPUSA - that’s who. And that’s where we end our episode, discussing the WWE style griftfest of Erika Kirk and friends. That’s also where we try to draw some hope for the future: the depravity, the artificiality, the totally vacuous performance that the Amerika-firsters put on display (not to mention the “night of the long knives” circular firing squad taking shape among the fascist ranks over support for Israel) is doomed to fail. But rather than let the craven democrats pick up the pieces of the wreckage, we need to build our own power base for humanity. And with that in mind, let’s onto 2026!!

Here it is folks! Side B of the first episode in our brand new series, “Down by Law.” In this one, we continue our dig into immigration and the modern legal regime for asylum. We start off by taking a good hard look at the history of asylum law in the United States.  Even though you’d never guess it by the federal government’s utter lack of regard for human rights in the administration of the immigration system, the USA is a party to the 1967 protocol to the treaty on the rights of refugees. That means it is “the supreme law of the land” - with which even the federal government must comply as with the Constitution itself - to afford broad rights to asylum-seekers in danger of death or serious harm in their home countries.  After completing a historical survey, we then turn to some current events and examine how the Trump administration has weaponized the asylum regime in the United States to push immigrants out of the country.  As a reminder, we recorded this before the DC National Guard shooting put asylum into the headlines, but the issue is more salient than ever. As Trump essentially seeks to end asylum as we know it, we trace the bipartisan roots of the whittling-away of immigrant rights, especially under the Obama administration. Put on your lawyer hats, it’s once again time to get down by law.

We are coming in hot this week with a very special episode and a very special guest.  We are calling it Fourth Reich Political Theology, and we are absolutely honored to have Marcus from the Return of the Repressed podcast joining Don to do some serious digging.   In this one, Don and Marcus examine how “The Market” and people’s fealty to its bizarre logic has come into actual existence, almost alchemically, or religiously.  To put it bluntly, The Market today fills the role of God in our society. It is beyond human control, beyond reproach, and exercises an omniscient, omnipotent power over human affairs. To capitalists, The Market’s pure rationality also bestows it with benevolence. Don and Marcus explore the historical and theoretical bases for the development of this phenomenon, by examining the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the adaptation of religion to the economic mode of production and vice versa.  We think that this one will be the start of an epic run of episodes with Marcus. The first hour is available for free, and the full nearly-three-hour-long episode is available today on P@treon: https://www.patreon.com/c/FourthReichArchaeology  And be sure to check out Marcus’s stuff over on P@treon too! You can find the Return of the Repressed at: https://www.patreon.com/TheReturnOfTheRepressed

We are excited to announce that we are launching a brand new series called “Down by Law.” In it, we are going to talk about how laws and legal systems that create and enforce them are put in place to serve the ruling class, while producing a spectacle of “justice” to distract and pacify the masses. We believe that, despite the law’s ultimate impotence to bring about the type of revolutionary change needed to ensure collective survival for humanity, it is important to understand how the law functions in society. This series is our attempt at political/legal education, jumping between various areas of law that purport to regulate behavior in “civilized nations.” It is certainly true that the legal system - from statutory legislation to the vast regulatory state to the judiciary - does impose restrictions on actors at all levels of the socioeconomic pyramid. We are not implying that the wealthy and powerful are entirely unfettered by the law. That would be an overstatement and would not reflect reality. But the law, too, operates as spectacle. And to a larger degree than most lawyers, government bureaucrats, and policy wonks would like to admit, the real function of the law is spectacular. It serves to inflate the illusion of justice. In reality, the legal system plays referee between factions of the ruling class, while ensuring that overall control of the systems of power remain in the hands of that same class.  We start our legal dig site with a dig into immigration and the modern legal regime for asylum. Even though you’d never guess it by the federal government’s utter lack of regard for human rights in the administration of the immigration system, the USA is a party to the 1967 protocol to the treaty on the rights of refugees. That means it is “the supreme law of the land” - with which even the federal government must comply as with the Constitution itself - to afford broad rights to asylum-seekers in danger of death or serious harm in their home countries. We recorded this before the DC National Guard shooting put asylum into the headlines, but the issue is more salient than ever. As Trump essentially seeks to end asylum as we know it, we trace the bipartisan roots of the whittling-away of immigrant rights, spiking especially under the Obama administration. Put on your lawyer hats, it’s time to get down by law. If you want to hear the full episode, head over to Patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology and sign up today!

This week, we are getting back to the real roots of our project, which was initially conceived from Dick and Don's long phone conversations about current events. And that's largely what this episode is: we're out of the studio and back on the phone, real low-fi style. But the substance of the conversation, we hope, will not disappoint. We cover the reasons why we're not releasing a full on polished episode like we usually do, and dive right into the hellscape that surrounds us this holiday season, focusing on the latest deep event: the shooting of two national guardsmen in Washington, D.C., by a CIA-trained Afghan national. It's Programmed to Kill all over again. We hope you enjoy, that you stay sane this Thanksgiving and beyond, and that maybe - just maybe - you can use some of what we're putting down to break your friends and loved ones out of the haze of propaganda that has us all sleepwalking into yet another hot war on the flimsiest of pretenses to steal and exploit another country's national resources. We're thankful for you, and we wish you all the best.

We are back with another installment of “She Harvey Oswald,” our ongoing miniseries about the two women who pointed a gun at President Gerald Ford in the fateful month of September 1975.  This week we continue our exploration into the life and times of the first of these two, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme.  This episode is “Side B” to part 2 of this miniseries, which covers Squeaky’s origins and which was only available to our P@treon community until today.  Recall that in Side A, we started at the beginning, with Squeaky’s upbringing in the contradictory world of Westchester Los Angeles where the barbecues and manicured lawns were financed by the barbecuing of human flesh by the warplanes and munitions fabricated by southern California's booming aerospace industry.  It was against this backdrop that Squeaky developed a rebellious streak while in the custody of an overbearing and mentally unstable father.  As Squeaky entered her teenage years, the tensions at home escalated and she ultimately moved out of the house entirely.  In Side B, we pick things up with Squeaky just as she is first approached by Mr. Helter Skelter himself, Charles Manson.  Manson clocked Squeaky on a bench at the beach, crying and distraught over her blowout fight with her dad.  From here, Squeaky would go on to join Manson and his growing “family” of girls, on a trip up to the Bay Area and the redwoods of Mendocino in the summer of love, 1967. Throughout their trippy times in the North, Charlie and the girls frequented the infamous Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which the likes of Dr. Jolly West had turned into a recruitment center for test subjects; a laboratory for human experimentation on unwitting, disposable hippies. Squeaky’s coming of age under the wing of Charlie Manson gives us yet another sharpened lens through which to view the consolidation of the fourth reich, the integration of the spectacle, and the preemptive destruction of the burgeoning movement for radical social change that characterized the 1960s and 70s. Let’s get digging.

This week, we return with another installment of “Fourth Reich Geopolitik,” our ongoing survey of the modern geopolitical landscape. In this one we unpack the United States’ recent military aggression against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.  As of this writing, the U.S. War Machine has killed no less than 76 people on the high seas off the coast of Venezuela and it has unilaterally–and with no apparent proof–designated these victims as “narco-terrorists.”  The stated goal of this military operation is to stop drug traffickers.  The actual goals appear to be regime change, sending messages to various audiences both foreign and domestic, and flouting the law as only the King of Crime knows how. To be honest, we did not want to do a Venezuela episode at risk of stating the obvious (i.e., that the powers that be are yet again up to their same bag of dirty tricks to personally profit from unspeakable violence around the world). But then we spent some time digesting the mainstream media and academic analysis about the situation, heard some of the most outrageous propaganda imaginable, and realized, yet again, that perhaps it is important for us to discuss this stuff even if it seems obvious.  In this episode, we first turn back the clock and lay a little historical foundation of the Monroe Doctrine, President James Monroe’s 19th Century declaration to the empires of Europe that the western hemisphere was off limits–to them, at least.  We thought we’d start off with a short primer on the Monroe Doctrine because it seems like anyone talking about Venezuela is invoking it, and it seems to us that most don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.  Next, we speed-run the history of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, and the long and storied U.S. tradition of destabilizing economies, overthrowing democratically elected leaders, and exploiting the land and its people to enrich the capitalist ruling class. We then focus specifically on the Spanish-American War at the turn of the 20th century, which really locked in the U.S. as the new kid on the block for the imperial powers, and use that as our jump off point to the modern day to talk about American Imperialism today.   And this latest phase of American imperialism is goofy as hell.  In the age of purportedly “ending the forever wars” and putting “America first,” the Trump administration is going full on Leeroy Jenkins into Venezuela.  Nevermind that the stated purpose of combating drug traffickers is BS, the fact that the Trump administration is deploying the full force of the U.S. Navy to do so shows that the United States has no qualms about going head first into another military quagmire as though the only lesson from the Iraq War was “we can get away with this and nobody will stop us.” (Shoutout to the USS Gerald R. Ford.)  As we said in our first episode, and as we’ve been saying it regularly ever since, it is as if we are all suffering from some collective, mass psychosis.  Those in charge say one thing, but do another.  But you know things are getting schizophrenic as hell when with each day that passes, Amerikkka’s fringe reactionary kooks—the likes of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens—are the only ones in the media that dare to call this out.  We are not here to praise these kooks for calling out the U.S. war machine for its hypocrisy. To the contrary, we fully reject their kind.  But that they have identified the problem while, say, the New York Times merely parrots the official narrative, tells you everything you need to know about the sad state of affairs today.

We are back with another installment of our ongoing series about the two women who were convicted of attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford in September 1975.  Picking things up where we left off, we continue our focus on the first of these two ladies who shot their shot at Jerry, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme.  You will recall that Fromme emerged from the hippie counterculture of the 1960s, and more specifically, the so-called “Manson family.” As we’ve laid it out, it’s less of a cult than a criminal enterprise with hippie branding. And like any good American criminal enterprise, it has its ties to the intelligence services as well. When we last left off Charlie Manson and several of his “Manson Girls” had been sentenced to death (of course, none of them were ever executed due to an intervening Supreme Court decision placing a moratorium on the death penalty).  Fromme and the Manson Girls who were not connected to the Tate and Labianca murders had shaved her heads in solidarity, etched Xs in their forheads, and were doing all they could to further Charlie’s message and help Charlie from the outside. Including by “taking care” of the Aryan Brotherhood members who agreed to protect Charlie in prison… We will pick things up in the early days of the 1970s, with Fromme still living in L.A. alongside some of the other free Manson Girls. Meanwhile, Charlie, ever the schemer, was doing everything he could to get himself out of jail, and that included making a pact with the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang.  What this meant for Fromme was that she and the other Manson Girls were left to bunk with the Aryan Brotherhood gang members who were on the outside while the whole group planned and attempted several botched prison escapes for Charlie.   What it also meant is that Fromme had effectively swapped out the hippie free love vibes that she was immersed in the late 1960s for a much more brutish and violent culture espoused by the white supremecist Aryan Brotherhood.  And so we spend much of this episode examining whether Fromme, who willingly shacked up and rubbed elbows with the Aryan Brothers, was going along with them wholly ignorant of the violence the Aryan Brotherhood left in its wake, or if she was much more attuned to what was going on than she would have you believe?  Beyond the facts, we spend a good deal of time discussing the white apologetics of Americans of the baby boom generation and how well buried is the bloody and disgusting history of the highest echelons of power adopting essentially Nazi views on race and White Supremacy.   There is a lot of content in this one, so we are splitting it up into two parter.  Catch Side A for free, and subscribe to Patreon today to listen to the whole thing now!