We are coming in hot this week to give you our take on the “war” with Iran. We cover the Official Narrative (inasmuch as there even is one—and if there is it’s utterly incoherent), and a number of the alternative narratives. We call out the criminality and cruelty of the murderous plot against the Iranian people, and detangle the respective roles of Israel and the U.S. ruling class.

While many critical discourses around the war against Iran pay lip service to the condemnation of Ayatollah Khamenei, and even celebration or mockery of his death, we consider the actual consequences of this sort of dehumanization. The propaganda machine—the spectacle—is operating on all cylinders to cook up new ways to blame the cravenness and psychopathy of the ruling class on the patsy-du-jour. Will the mainstream, or even a major presidential candidate, follow Tuckkker Carlson’s lead in blaming “the joos” for controlling Trump and the American government like puppets? Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes have, as are increasing numbers of observers justifiably biased against the genocidal Israeli state. Of course blaming Jews for the crimes of the ruling class is a psyop that dates back to Tsarist Russia, and was detailed in depth by Lenin.

Here on Fourth Reich Archaeology, we always seek to analyze events through the lens of the immortal science of historical materialism. Dig in and shovel up: this is no joke.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/FourthReichArchaeology

This week marks our penultimate episode about the first of the two would-be assassins who, in September 1975, pointed a gun at President Gerald R. Ford and pulled the trigger.  That’s right, folks, we are nearing the end of the line for Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. In this episode, we focus on the lead-up to the day that changed Squeaky’s life forever. 

We start off by returning to our dig site in the early 1970s, with Squeaky and her Manson sister, Sandra Good, living in Sacramento, California.  Shacked up in a Victorian era mansion-turned tenement, Squeaky and Sandy find themselves in the closest they've had to a routine in a long time. They take classes at the local community college, dumpster dive for food, and sew clothes with their landlord.  The two were also working on their next big scheme for Charlie, for Air Trees, Water, and Animals.  Squeaky also continued to work full-time on her book and to secure visitation rights for Charlie. 

At the time, the city of Sacramento was experiencing conditions similar to those of many cities in the 1970s.  Between the national spike in crime and the great suburban migration, Sacramento was turning into a bit of a ghost town. The perfect environment for the fringes of society to prosper, including the likes of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, who were very much in Squeaky’s orbit during this time. 

We then turn to President Gerald Ford and his trip to Sacramento in September 1975. Ford’s trip to Sac Town was part of his tour of the West Coast’s more provincial cities, including Portland and Seattle. The intended purpose of the trip was little more than a charm offensive to bring the country together and get everyone amped for the bicentennial.  What was meant to be a series of layups turned into a series of disasters, culminating in a near-catastrophic trip to Sacramento. 

We end this episode on the day that changed Squeaky’s life forever: September 5, 1975. Next week we will take on the trial and aftermath as we chart our path towards the next would-be assassin in this tale, Sara Jane Moore.

We are working our way back from a lengthy hiatus to Jerryworld, and our ongoing series within a series, She Harvey Oswald. Yer boys are back in the studio prepping the next installments, so as an on-ramp to that triumphant return, we’re releasing the long-awaited Side B of our last installment on would-be Gerald Ford assassin, 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, Fromme, Manson Girls  Sandra Good and Brenda (who were not connected to the Tate and Labianca murders) had shaved her heads in solidarity, etched Xs 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…

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.  

Be sure to listen to the end for a big reveal of an underrated reichsman.

First things first: ¡Viva Cuba! Y viva la revolución y el pueblo cubano. ¡Hasta la victoria siempre! Down with the demonic imperialism of the yankqui vampire. 

Amidst the emergency conditions of the American strangulation of the Cuban people, we begin this episode with a discussion of the Trump administration’s criminal aggression against the island and its revolution. We cover the King of Crime’s recent executive order premised on the absurd notion that Cuba poses a threat to the national security of the United States. Every accusation is an admission, as they say. The latest Trump/Rubio gambit to lay siege to the island is collective punishment for the crime of daring to exercise sovereignty. All eyes on Cuba, break the blockade.

From that intro, we zoom out from the present moment with the second half of Don’s discussion with 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. 

We pick up where we left off with the mobbed-up background and low-down gangster tactics of “Little Narco” Marco Rubio, and examine how his backstory 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. 

In this second part of the discussion, 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. As long as a so-called “democracy” like the U.S. needs to maintain the spectacle of legitimacy, it needs to carry out its dirtiest work off the books and out of sight. That was the case with the Nazi/ClA Gehlen Org, it was the case with the anti-Castro Cubans employed as state terrorists and assassins, and it remains the case today in the Time for Crime in which we live. 

Music: Songs of Carlos Puebla.

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

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.