Fourth Reich Archaeology

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.