What Country Did Epstein Answer To? The Answer Might Surprise You.

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A private sniper stands watch at the Davos World Economic Forum summit.

What follows is hypothesis. Not fact. But not fiction. It is my analysis of events.

Jeffrey Epstein is probably the most famous pedophile and child sex trafficker the world has known. He sold and gave thousands of kids to some of the most powerful men in the world, so they could rape them. His source of wealth has never been fully explained. He remained untouchable for decades — across multiple administrations of both major United States political parties, in multiple countries, on multiple continents — until he was arrested in 2019 and died in federal custody that same year under circumstances that remain disputed.

Since his death, millions of pages of FBI documents, flight logs, emails, and financial records have been released to the public. Many millions more remain hidden by the current United States Department of Justice, which is breaking the law to hide them. The pages we can see confirm what many suspected: Epstein’s network included sitting and future American presidents, a British prince, Nobel Prize winners, prime ministers, hedge fund billionaires, tech executives, and heads of state across Europe and the Middle East. His private jet — nicknamed the Lolita Express by his victims — logged thousands of flights. His properties included a Manhattan townhouse, a private Caribbean island, a ranch in New Mexico, and homes in Paris and Palm Beach.

The dominant hypothesis among investigators, journalists, and Epstein’s own accusers for why his houses were filled with hidden cameras is that he was running a blackmail operation — collecting compromising material on the powerful men who participated in his trafficking network, and using it to control those men. When Alex Acosta, the United States prosecutor in Florida who gave Epstein his first sweetheart deal in 2008, was later asked why charges had been so dramatically reduced, Acosta reportedly told Trump transition officials that he had been instructed to back off, that Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” and that the matter was above his pay grade.

The question everyone has been asking since is: to which nation’s intelligence service did Epstein belong?

So I looked into it. I looked at the men we know he put in compromising positions, and I looked at what they did differently in the aftermath. I looked at the policies they enacted and voted for. I looked at the deals they made. And I looked at who stood to benefit the most from them. The answer was clear. But the answer wasn’t a nation.

To ask what country was behind the operation is the wrong question. That we keep asking it is itself evidence of how thoroughly we have been outmaneuvered.

Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t working for any country. But he absolutely was working for an intelligence operation. He was working for an intelligence operation that transcended national borders in service to an economic model and the transnational financial class — big banks, big private equity, oil and gas companies, defense contractors, multinational corporations seeking zero regulation and total freedom of capital movement across borders.

People who study the ruling financial class specifically put the truly governing class at around 0.001 percent globally. That’s roughly 77,000 people out of 8 billion. The number gets even smaller when you break this 77,000 down into the handful who manage the group’s economic vision — you know, the folks of the World Economic Forum who attend the Davos summit each year. That’s only around 2,500 people, or, as I like to call them, the 0.00000031 percent.

Jeffrey Epstein was their instrument. His operation was espionage in service to the 0.00000031 percent, not a nation. To the 0.00000031 percent, there are no nations. Only themselves, and the pesky billions of pointless surplus people whose tedious needs always get in the way.

The Word is Neoliberalism. Here’s What It Is, and Why It Matters

There’s a word for what the 0.00000031 percent believe.

That word is “neoliberalism.”

Most Americans I’ve asked have never heard the word before. When I ask them to guess what it means, they invariably assume it has to do with politics and the Democratic party, because that’s their only association with the word “liberal.”

But neoliberalism is not a political belief.

Neoliberalism is an economic system created by a guy named Milton Friedman. Friedman was a far-right economist at the University of Chicago. He developed neoliberalism in the 1950s and 1960s as an outright rejection of the working-class values of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The “liberal” in the neoliberal economic model means freedom, but not for people. It means “free markets.” Unregulated capitalism. It means letting very rich people do whatever the hell they want — pollute as much as they want, pay as little in wages as they want, charge endless fees as much as they want.

Before the 1980s, the dominant economic consensus in the United States and other Western democracies held that capitalism needed guardrails. Governments regulated banks so they wouldn’t screw over regular working people. Unions negotiated wages so employers couldn’t exploit regular working people. Public utilities stayed public so private companies couldn’t gouge people for services we all need to stay alive. The very wealthy paid high taxes. Trade was managed to protect domestic industries and workers. Despite what modern politicians tell you, these regulations were not socialism — they were American capitalism with a conscience, and for most of the country’s existence, normal.

The central claim of neoliberal economics is that truly representative government is the problem, because regulation is tyranny.

In practice neoliberalism means: break the unions, cut the taxes on the wealthy, deregulate the banks, privatize the public utilities, and open every border to the movement of capital and goods — while keeping the borders that mattered to working people firmly in place. In short, do anything and everything possible to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. But tell the poor that if the rich get to do whatever they want, they’ll make sure they help everyone else out along the way. That has never been true.

The only problem with all of this, for the very wealthy anyway, is that everyone else won’t like what’s happening to them under neoliberalism. The American middle class won’t like extra hidden banking fees, or private companies buying up all the housing to force us to rent forever, or our jobs being shipped to China. They would never vote for candidates who promise to do such things openly. The neoliberal agenda could not survive honest democratic competition in a society with a free press to tell people the truth.

So it needed other mechanisms. It needed voters to believe lies. It needed politicians who’d tell them. More than anything, it needed politicians who would promise to protect the people but in truth only protect the 0.00000031 percent.

And while there are plenty of sociopaths who can be bought off to do exactly this, the 0.00000031 percent needed a guarantee that politicians would never cave into the demands of the populace. They needed mechanisms in place to politicians to do the bidding of neoliberalism, no matter what.

That is what Jeffrey Epstein provided.

Jeffrey Epstein was that mechanism of persuasion.

What Kompromat Is, and What It Was For

Kompromat is a Russian word for compromising material — evidence of wrongdoing, sexual or financial or criminal, held over a person to ensure their cooperation. It is the oldest tool in the intelligence playbook.

Kompromat in the Cold War served nations. The assumption of national backing is still baked into every intelligence framework we have — every congressional investigation, every journalistic inquiry.

The idea that intelligence serves governments is now obsolete. Governments, which used to exist to represent the people, now exist only to serve corporations and the 0.00000031 percent who profit most from them.

So when we look at who Epstein compromised and what they did in the aftermath, it becomes obvious who was benefiting: The 0.00000031 percent.

Let’s look at some of the better-known men who were likely compromised, according to the files and survivors:

Bill Clinton. Tony Blair. Ehud Barak. Peter Mandelson. Larry Summers. The architects of the Oslo Accords. The chairman of the World Economic Forum at Davos. The head of the Nobel Peace Prize committee. Figures connected to Gulf state leadership. All from the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, France, Norway, the Gulf states.

There is only one interest that needs compliance from all of them simultaneously: transnational capital. The class of people for whom national borders are tax inconveniences, for whom democratic elections are business risks, for whom the question of which party governs is irrelevant as long as the governing party remains aligned with deregulation, privatization, and capital mobility.

Look at what the people in Epstein’s network did with their political power.

Clinton signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, eliminating the firewall between commercial and investment banking that had existed since the Great Depression. The banks that benefited most had documented connections to Epstein’s financial operation.

Clinton granted China Most Favored Nation trade status and shepherded its entry into the World Trade Organization — the single legislative act most responsible for the destruction of American manufacturing and the transfer of industrial capacity to low-wage economies.

Larry Summers, as Treasury Secretary, oversaw financial deregulation that made the 2008 crisis not only possible but inevitable. After the crisis, the same institutions whose recklessness caused it were bailed out by governments whose leaders had, in many documented cases, been in Epstein’s orbit.

Peter Mandelson’s case is now among the most thoroughly documented in the files. While serving as a senior minister in the British government, Mandelson called Epstein his “best pal,” advised him to “fight for early release” from his 2008 sex offenses conviction, and passed market-sensitive government information to Epstein — who was operating on behalf of JPMorgan’s efforts to water down financial regulation in the UK and lobby against proposed taxes on bankers’ bonuses. Mandelson reportedly tipped Epstein to a 500-billion-euro European bank bailout before it was publicly announced. He also appears to have informed Epstein of the exact day Gordon Brown would resign as prime minister. Mandelson and his husband received upwards of $75,000 in payments from Epstein, the first made in 2003. By early 2026, the full scope of these revelations had forced Mandelson’s dismissal as UK Ambassador to the United States, his resignation from the Labour Party and the House of Lords, and his arrest by the Metropolitan Police on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The criminal investigation remains open. This is the operation working as designed.

The Countries That Were Absent

Here is the analytical move that clinches the argument.

Consider who was absent from Epstein’s network.

There are no Chinese political leaders. No Iranian officials. No Cuban leadership. No heads of state from the Global South, from Latin America, from Africa, from Southeast Asia — except as occasional peripheral contacts.

The network maps almost perfectly onto the countries whose political leadership needed to remain compliant with dollar-denominated financial systems, NATO security architecture, and the specific trade and regulatory frameworks that served transnational capital.

Consider the Israeli frame. If this were an Israeli operation, you would expect Israeli interests to dominate the policy outcomes. They do not — the Oslo Accords architects were in the network, and Oslo ultimately failed to produce the Palestinian settlement Israel claimed to want.

Consider the Russian frame. If this were a Russian operation, you would expect Russian foreign policy interests to dominate. They do not — NATO expanded throughout the entire period Epstein’s network was most active.

Apply the transnational capital frame, and something entirely different emerges: consistent policy outcomes favoring deregulation, privatization, and capital mobility across every jurisdiction represented — regardless of which party held power.

That is exactly what you find.

The Davos Proof

Every January, the world’s most powerful people gather in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum — the annual convening of the transnational elite where global policy gets coordinated before it gets presented to democratic publics as inevitable.

During the early days of Covid, when governments across the Western world were telling their populations that masks were a matter of personal choice, that lockdowns were economically unsustainable, that individual responsibility was the appropriate response to a global pandemic — the people delivering that message were meeting privately in Davos under some of the most stringent Covid protocols ever deployed. Rapid testing for every attendee. Medical staff on site. Upgraded ventilation. They knew the risk. They protected themselves. They shaped policy that left everyone else exposed.

This is the revealed preference of the class. One set of rules for themselves. Another for everyone else. And the political leaders who might have challenged that arrangement — who might have said, out loud, that the people coordinating global economic policy in secret while their own populations suffered were engaged in something that democracy cannot tolerate — those political leaders were, in many documented cases, known to Jeffrey Epstein.

The proof arrived in full in early 2026. Børge Brende, the head of Davos itself — president and CEO of the World Economic Forum since 2017 — was named in the DOJ’s massive release of Epstein files. The files showed Brende had attended multiple business dinners with Epstein and maintained email and text communications with him, including correspondence in which the two men discussed replacing the United Nations with private elite coordination. A 2019 meeting took place on the very day Brende had signed a formal cooperation agreement between the WEF and the United Nations. When the WEF launched an internal investigation, Brende resigned on February 26, 2026. It was the second consecutive WEF chief forced out by scandal — the organization’s founder Klaus Schwab had stepped down under a cloud of whistleblower allegations the previous year. The institution that presents itself as the steward of global governance was, in both its leader and its predecessor, compromised by the same network.

Norway’s former prime minister and former Secretary-General of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland — previously chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the body that awards the Nobel Peace Prize — was charged with aggravated corruption in 2026 following a police investigation into his ties to Epstein. Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen and his wife Mona Juul were also charged. The peace institutions of the Western order, top to bottom.

Why We Keep Getting This Wrong

Americans are trained to think about enemies as countries, or ethnicities, or races, or political parties, because that’s a safe framing for transnational financial interests.

The transnational financial class does not have a country. Its members hold passports from multiple nations, park their wealth in jurisdictions chosen for tax convenience, move between properties on multiple continents, and owe their primary loyalty to capital itself. They are the first true citizens of the neoliberal order they built.

When we ask “which country ran Epstein,” we hand them their most effective defense. Because the real answer — no country, just Neoliberal capitalism — sounds like exoneration. It is a description of something more dangerous than any nation-state: a class of people with the resources of nations, the mobility of stateless actors, and the political reach of an empire — accountable to no electorate, no constitution, no border.

We have no word (yet) in American political vocabulary for this economic enemy. We have no institution (yet) designed to counter it. We have no legal framework (yet) adequate to prosecute it.

We have, instead, congressional hearings asking which country ran Jeffrey Epstein. Hearings conducted by the same Congress whose members, both Republicans and Democrats, continue to pass neoliberalist policies that are destroying the American dream, then blame each other for its failures.

The People Already Fighting Back

The 0.00000031 percent are not unopposed. Around the world, leaders have looked at the neoliberal machine, named it plainly, and built something different. Their success stories are real, documented, and almost entirely absent from American corporate media. That absence is not an accident.

The clearest current example is Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum, elected in 2024 with 59 percent of the vote — the largest electoral margin in Mexican history. She is a climate scientist and the direct political heir of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose government spent six years dismantling the neoliberal architecture that had governed Mexico since the 1980s. Under their movement, called the Fourth Transformation, Mexico renationalized its lithium reserves, expanded public pensions, raised the minimum wage dramatically, and refused to hand its energy infrastructure to foreign private capital. The transnational financial press called it populism. The Mexican people called it governance.

Bolivia under Evo Morales nationalized its natural gas industry and used the revenues to cut extreme poverty in half. Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, a former urban guerrilla and the country’s first left-wing president, has pushed to end coal extraction, tax the wealthy, and rebuild a social safety net gutted by decades of IMF-directed austerity. Brazil’s Lula da Silva returned to the presidency in 2022 explicitly on a platform of reversing the privatization and deregulation his predecessor had accelerated on behalf of transnational capital.

In Europe the resistance looks different but points the same direction. Portugal’s left coalition government, which governed from 2015 to 2022, rejected austerity, raised wages, and restored public services — and outperformed its austerity-following neighbors economically. Spain under Pedro Sánchez has governed since 2018 in coalition with the left-wing Sumar party, passing a landmark labor reform that reversed decades of neoliberal work law and made temporary contracts dramatically harder to abuse. Spain raised its minimum wage by 47 percent over five years, the largest increase of any major European economy in that period, and introduced windfall profit taxes on energy companies and banks that had gorged on the crises ordinary people were suffering through. Scotland’s independence movement is substantially driven by rejection of Westminster’s four-decade neoliberal consensus. Ireland has seen surging support for Sinn Féin, whose platform centers on public housing, nationalized utilities, and corporate tax reform.

In the United States the resistance has not yet reached the presidency, but it is more organized than the neoliberal consensus wants to admit. Bernie Sanders has spent decades naming the billionaire class itself as the problem — not foreign enemies, not cultural grievances — and built the largest small-donor fundraising operation in American political history. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has explained repeatedly and clearly how financial deregulation, private equity, and the capture of democratic institutions by capital are not separate scandals but one system. Ro Khanna has pushed for industrial policy that rebuilds domestic manufacturing rather than surrendering it to global capital mobility. Rashida Tlaib has connected the financialization of housing to the same class whose money funds the think tanks that write the policies that keep it legal.

In New York City — the financial capital of the neoliberal world, the city where Jeffrey Epstein kept his townhouse — Zohran Mamdani, democratic socialist son of the scholar Mahmood Mamdani and the filmmaker Mira Nair, was sworn in as the 112th mayor on January 1, 2026, becoming the city’s first Muslim and first South Asian mayor. He took the oath on his grandfather’s Quran, in a decommissioned subway station beneath City Hall, inaugurated by Bernie Sanders. His platform: public housing, fare-free transit, city-owned grocery stores, and taxes on the wealthy. The neoliberal press called his budget the most destructive in city history. He is governing anyway. At the local level, cities like Seattle, Minneapolis, and Chicago have passed minimum wage laws, renter protections, and public banking initiatives that directly challenge the neoliberal consensus their state and federal representatives still enforce.

These politicians and movements are called radical by the media the neoliberalists own. But they are not radical for anyone but the 0.00000031 percent. They are fairness, freedom and a decent life for the rest of us.

Jeffrey Epstein is dead. But the neoliberalist system he served is not. It is operating right now, and not just in kompromat operations. It operates in the halls of Congress, in the IMF, in the private equity firms buying your hospital and your apartment building and your local newspaper. It operates in your retirement fund that invests in the private prisons the neoliberal media tells you we need for all the immigrants. It operates in every trade agreement negotiated in secret and presented to the public as inevitable.

The enemy is not Russia. The enemy is not Israel. The enemy is not the United States.

The enemy is not any country.

The enemy is neoliberalism, the sociopathic, predatory economic system and the enemy of humankind.

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Sources

Al Jazeera: “World Economic Forum head Borge Brende quits after Epstein links revealed.” February 26, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/26/world-economic-forum-head-borge-brende-quits-after-epstein-links-revealed

CNN Business: “WEF CEO Børge Brende steps down as the Epstein files claim another top executive.” February 26, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/26/business/borge-brende-wef-epstein-files-intl

Euronews: “Davos forum chief Brende steps down after WEF probes Epstein links.” February 26, 2026. https://www.euronews.com/2026/02/26/davos-forum-chief-brende-steps-down-after-wef-probes-epstein-links

Semafor: “World Economic Forum head Børge Brende resigns over Epstein ties.” February 26, 2026. https://www.semafor.com/article/02/26/2026/world-economic-forum-head-brge-brende-resigns-over-epstein-ties

Bloomberg: “World Economic Forum Chief Brende Steps Down Amid Epstein Links.” February 26, 2026. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-26/world-economic-forum-chief-brende-steps-down-amid-epstein-links

Wikipedia: “Børge Brende.” Updated February 28, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B8rge_Brende

Wikipedia: “Relationship of Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein.” Updated March 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Peter_Mandelson_and_Jeffrey_Epstein

CNN: “British PM was warned of ‘reputational risk’ over Mandelson’s ties to Epstein, files show.” March 11, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/11/uk/starmer-warned-mandelson-epstein-files-intl

PBS NewsHour: “British police arrest former ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson in probe into Epstein ties.” February 23, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/british-police-arrest-former-ambassador-to-the-u-s-peter-mandelson-in-probe-into-epstein-ties

Tax Policy Associates: “Mandelson leaked No 10 documents to Epstein; sought $4m job.” February 2, 2026. https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/02/02/mandelson-epstein-no10-documents-4m-job/

Al Jazeera: “How Epstein-Mandelson files rocked the UK government.” February 5, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/5/how-epstein-mandelson-files-rocked-the-uk-government

UK Parliament Hansard: “US Department of Justice Release of Files.” February 2, 2026. https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-02-02/debates/10A2B314-165E-4992-A7BF-0F30739D7BBD/USDepartmentOfJusticeReleaseOfFiles

New Statesman: “The Jeffrey Epstein files expose the rot of Peter Mandelson’s Britain.” February 3, 2026. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2026/02/the-epstein-files-expose-the-rot-of-mandelsons-britain

The Hill / AP: “UK will publish files about appointment of Jeffrey Epstein friend Peter Mandelson.” March 2026. https://thehill.com/homenews/ap/ap-international/uk-files-jeffrey-epstein-peter-mandelson/

Al Jazeera: “World Economic Forum head Borge Brende quits after Epstein links revealed” (includes Jagland charges). February 26, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/26/world-economic-forum-head-borge-brende-quits-after-epstein-links-revealed

Axios: “Epstein files: World Economic Forum CEO Brende resigns” (includes full fallout list). February 26, 2026. https://www.axios.com/2026/02/26/wef-ceo-resigns-epstein-files-fallout-brende

NYC Mayor’s Office: “Mayor Zohran Mamdani Inaugural Address.” January 1, 2026. https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-zohran-mamdani-inaugural-address

NPR: “Zohran Mamdani sworn in as New York City mayor, capping historic rise.” January 1, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/01/nx-s1-5663372/zohran-mamdani-sworn-in-as-new-york-city-mayor-capping-historic-rise

CNN Politics: “Zohran Mamdani is sworn in as mayor of New York City.” January 1, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/01/politics/nyc-mayor-oath-zohran-mamdani-inauguration

Wikipedia: “Zohran Mamdani.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zohran_Mamdani

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I offer these posts freely, but your support is necessary and appreciated. Please subscribe, paid if you are able, and share my work if it moves you. You may also leave a one-time or ongoing donation in any amount. Just four $25 donations a day keep me writing full-time. Thank you. A.