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.