Jeffrey Epstein and the far-right figures around him wanted to push US war with China. And elitist bigotry was very much part of this.

Today, the US Cold War against China is escalating, particularly in Latin America. But with Donald Trump trying to assert US dominance and reduce Chinese influence in the region, he’s also been showing the world his clear disdain for international law.

And as past chats between Trump associates Jeffrey Epstein and Steve Bannon show, that’s not the only disdain within these circles of power.

From Epstein to Vance — a swamp of racism and classism

The idea that a Global South nation could become an economic superpower within decades clearly causes discomfort among Western white supremacist elites. In particular, it has increasingly exposed US decadence, amid extreme militarisation, growing wealth inequality, and political capture by misanthropic billionaires.

The first Trump administration didn’t just further empower racists. Its public demonisation of China also coincided with increasing hate crimes against Asian communities in the US.

Epstein and Bannon — both millionaires — referred to the Chinese government as “peasants”. And current US vice-president JD Vance has said the same thing. (Vance rose to prominence thanks to billionaire Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who also appears in the Epstein files.)

Interestingly “peasants” to describe the Chinese is the exact same term that JD Vance used 👇🤔pic.twitter.com/Wl0N8CinRJ

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) February 3, 2026

Other messages from Epstein snootily suggested a lack of civilisation and intelligence, while encouraging a “military display” to show China who’s boss.

As Jacobin wrote back in 2019, Epstein’s racism and classism was:

a case study of the abuses and pathologies inherent to extreme wealth

And the hot topic in these circles was clearly China, and how to defeat it. It was the enemy, Epstein said, and he wanted the US to treat it as a “piñata”. He also suggested working with far–right Indian leader Narendra Modi on the “China problem“.

One step China has been taking in Latin America was to build links through investment, which could aid access to resources and markets. And Epstein noted in particular the importance of China’s support in Venezuela, with its massive oil resources.

This is where we come up to the current day, with Epstein’s old friend in the White House taking steps in Venezuela and elsewhere to try and push out Chinese influence.

Trump’s campaign to stop countries dealing with China

The US, under both Republicans and Democrats, didn’t like China — its main global competitor economically — forging links in Latin America. But Trump has gambled that China won’t get into a full-blown war to protect its interests in the region. And in Venezuela, he seemed to be right.

China had invested a lot in Venezuela. But when the US illegally invaded the country in January 2026 to abduct its leader, there was no meaningful response from China. Trump made it clear this military action was to try and replace Chinese influence in Venezuela with US influence. And China may now struggle to recover billions from the country.

Trump has essentially said the same about Cuba. Cutting the island’s access to Venezuelan oil was the first step. But the big picture is to challenge China in the region. Because Cuba has also received Chinese investment, and the ambassador there has even called Cuba:

a model for China’s relations with Latin America and the Caribbean

As with Venezuela, China has expressed its concern about US efforts to strangle Cuba. But the question is, would it actually challenge US military action there?

Elsewhere in Latin America, Trump’s behind-the-scenes pressure has been enough to get what the US wants.

Panama, for example, had also received Chinese investment. But the country has now left China’s Belt and Road Initiative (which also included Venezuela, Cuba, and others) and has just annulled port contracts with a Hong Kong company that has been operating at the Panama Canal for decades.

Could Trump’s bullying backfire, though?

Billionaires, imperialists, colonial war criminals, and the far right have worked hard across the West to develop a powerful, toxic alliance. Trump is part of this, just as Epstein was. But by actually turning on his usually compliant allies, he may actually have weakened their commitment to the project he’s heading.

There are many legitimate criticisms of China’s government, from death penalty numbers to poor treatment of certain groups. And Western propaganda outlets are all too quick to amplify these more than the crimes of Western allies. But in comparison to Trump’s shameless and openly predatory behaviour, China is looking more and more like the ‘adult in the room’.

Trump may plead with allies not to cosy up to China, but even junior partners to US imperialism in Canada and the UK have recently been hedging their bets by improving relations. And as Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has said:

I used to advocate that Western leaders should publicly condemn China on human rights. But today I have completely changed my view. The West is not even qualified to criticise China.

China itself, meanwhile, is presenting itself as a safer pair of hands for the global economy. President Xi Jinping, for example, wants the country’s currency to “become a global reserve currency” and has criticised the greedy disconnection of Western financial markets, calling for an alternative that can:

avoid the Western predicament of financial oligarchs hijacking public policy and deepening social division.

And with the rule of racist, classist sex-offenders in the West becoming more and more obvious, that argument certainly sounds appealing.

Featured image via the Canary

Keir Starmer’s Number 10 is refusing to say whether new peer — and ‘Labour Friend of Israel’ member — Matthew Doyle ended his friendship with paedophile former ‘Labour rising star‘ Sean Morton after Morton’s conviction. The PM’s office is also refusing to say what Starmer knew about the status of the pair’s friendship before Doyle was made a peer last month.

The 2018 conviction

Morton is a Scottish former Labour councillor convicted in 2018 of counts of possessing serious child sexual abuse images and extreme pornography. He was placed on the sex offenders register and, in another example of light sentencing of Labour paedophiles, made to do 140 hours of community service.

The questions come as Starmer admitted this week to knowing about Peter Mandelson’s ongoing, ardent relationship with serial child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer knew about it when he appointed Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US. He must also have known about Mandelson’s insider-trading with Epstein.

It’s already a matter of record that Starmer gave Doyle the peerage despite knowing Doyle campaigned for Morton’s election after Morton had been charged. The refusal to deny it also strongly suggests that Doyle continued the friendship after conviction — and that Starmer knew. It suggests it so strongly that even liberal Zionist Gabriel Pogrund finds the silence “weird”. Pogrund said that:

This is getting weird now

In response to @TomTugendhat, Darren Jones doesn’t even acknowledge question re Lord Doyle

PM/McSweeney warned about his links to paedophile Sean Morton, so ordered investigation before peerage approved

Yet zero info on what it found, inc when… https://t.co/lNmsewhBbb pic.twitter.com/x6iGMC4a3c

— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) February 3, 2026

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As well as being another example of Starmer appointing friends of paedophiles, the Doyle-Morton case is the latest in Labour’s long list of Zionist child abusers. Former Blair and Starmer adviser Doyle is a member of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), the Israel lobby group connected with Israeli embassy cash and anti-Palestinian racism. He has also been a listed speaker at events held by notorious lobby group BICOM.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar is under pressure to kick MSP Pam Duncan-Glancy out of the party altogether for her friendship with Sean Morton. Duncan-Glancy resigned her front-bench position and said she will not seek re-election, calling the friendship a “serious lapse in professional judgment”. Right. Sarwar appears no better than Starmer, but Duncan-Glancy at least fell on her sword.

But all this is just the tip of a very large nonceberg of the overlap between paedophilia and ‘Labour’ support for Israel.

Starmer about to hit the Nonceberg

Starmeroid MP Dan Norris’s recent arrest for rape was his second on suspicion of sex offences. The first, in 2025, was for alleged rape and paedophilia and is still under investigation. As we’ve seen, Starmer’s mentor and chief adviser Peter Mandelson resigned over his notorious links with serial child rapist and Israeli agent Jeffrey Epstein. In early January, Israel fanatic Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) organiser Liron Velleman admitted child sex offences.

We’re just getting started.

In January last year, former Blair minister Ivor Caplin was arrested in a sting operation as he allegedly attempted to meet a 15-year-old boy for sex. Local police went after local left-winger Greg Hadfield for exposing the explicit content Caplin posted on his X feed – Hadfield defeated the ‘vexatious’ charge in November 2025. However, no charges have yet been brought against Caplin and a court did not impose bail conditions after his initial bail expired. Despite the ongoing police investigation, Caplin was recently invited to speak on LBC about Keir Starmer’s move to block Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham’s bid to stand in a parliamentary election.

There’s more

Hackney councillor Tom Dewey, an organiser in pro-Israel group ‘Labour First’, admitted possession of the most serious category of child rape images in 2023. The party knew of his arrest when it allowed him to stand for election. After his conviction, it blocked local women members from its systems to prevent them discussing the case.

And in March 2025 Sam Gould, who worked for Starmer’s health secretary Wes Streeting, quit as a Redbridge councillor after being convicted on two separate counts of indecent exposure to a 13-year-old girl.

The LFI/JLM paedophile issue mirrors the even wider issue in Israel itself. The regime is currently ignoring well over 2,000 extradition requests for alleged and convicted paedophiles. In April 2025, Shoshana Strook, the daughter of Israel’s far-right settlements minister fled to police and asked them to protect her, accusing both her parents and one of her brothers of raping her as a child, over a period of years, and filming the rapes.

Jewish anti-Zionist academic Norman Finkelstein says Israeli society is “rotten to the core”. That sickness doesn’t stop at the border.

Featured image via the Canary

Mass arrests by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are overwhelming the US court system in Minnesota.

The Trump administration’s massive deportation spree in Minnesota – pompously titled ‘Operation Metro Surge’ – created a corresponding surge in emergency legal cases. This left courts so short-staffed that several top lawyers quit outright. Still others have voiced their intention to follow suit in recent weeks.

The Minnesota US attorney’s office stated that:

The Civil Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in this district has been utterly overwhelmed by the number of recent habeas petitions in Minnesota, during a time when the Office is short staffed.

ICE flouting orders

Justice Department records show massive numbers of legal violations by ICE, including violations of judges’ orders, illegal arrests, and botched court filings.

Minnesota judges are particularly alarmed at defiance from Homeland Security and their Justice Department counterparts in Washington. In particular, ICE is regularly flouting orders to bring their detainees before a judge when ordered – a legal right and duty known as habeas corpus.

Politico described one situation in which:

In one recent case, ICE arrested a man with no criminal record who was residing legally in Minnesota on a rare “T” visa, meant for victims of a severe form of human trafficking or who aided law enforcement in a trafficking investigation. A day after a magistrate judge inquired about the case, the Justice Department said it should be dismissed because the man had been released. Four days later, however, DOJ sent a cryptic filing misidentifying the man as “she” and suggesting he had been relocated to a detention facility in El Paso.

DOJ then blew off the deadline to clarify what had occurred, leading the judge to conclude that “ICE transferred Petitioner from Minnesota to Texas without notice and indeed, from this record it appears that even [DOJ] may not have known about the transfer.”

‘Broken system’

Underscoring the depths of the crisis, on Tuesday 2 February, a judge asked prosecutor Julie Le why his federal court orders were being ignored by ICE. Le, in apparent distress, said:

The system sucks. This job sucks. And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need.

She went on to add that:

Sometime I wish you would just hold me in contempt, your honor, so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep.

Le argued that ICE officials simply ignore her and other Justice Department lawyers when they tell them to obey the courts. Even simple inquiries went completely unanswered, and Le’s threats of legal repercussions made no impact.

The prosecutor branded the situation a “broken system”, and even revealed that she’d tried to quit – but there was no-one ready to replace her.

Open authoritarianism

However, Trump’s team are denying their responsibility for the situation. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), tried to blame the judges themselves for the crisis:

The Trump administration is more than prepared to handle the legal caseload necessary to deliver President Trump’s deportation agenda for the American people. It should come as no surprise that more habeas petitions are being filed by illegal aliens — especially after many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate for mass deportations.

This line of reasoning is severely faulty. It is a court’s role, when necessary, to determine the legality of an individual’s actions. If the state could ignore a habeas petition on the grounds of an individual being “illegal”, it could simply declare anybody illegal without trial.

This is both clearly a monstrous abuse of power, and precisely what the Trump administration is doing.

A Justice Department spokesperson likewise blamed “rogue judges” for the massive increase in detention cases. They argued that without the judges rulings, there wouldn’t be any “concern over DHS following orders.”

That is to say, if the judges didn’t demand that ICE follows the law, there would be no issue. Again, an openly authoritarian proclamation.

Shock and awe

The fact that Minnesota’s courts are overwhelmed is not a glitch in the system. It’s not a result of the Justice Department being understaffed, or – God forbid – ICE being under-resourced. Rather, this overwhelm is part of the plan.

Trump has always relied on shock and awe tactics. He perpetrates as many open crimes and heinous violations of basic human decency as quickly as possible, such that his opponents barely have time to muster a reaction before the next onslaught.

Because the courts are overwhelmed, ICE and the Trump administration can act with impunity. The administration has said outright that if it’s allowed to break the law, then there won’t be any issues. It intends to break the law; it intends to ignore basic legal rights; it intends to deport anyone it sees fit. This was always the plan.

Featured image via the Canary

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The Trump administration has returned $500 million in oil money from previous oil transactions with Venezuela. A US official said it was to keep the country’s services running. The US kidnapped Venezuela president Nicolas Maduro on 3 January. In his place, former oil minister deputy Delcy Rodriguez is running the oil-rich nation.

A US official told The New Arab on 4 February:

Venezuela has officially received all $500 million from the first Venezuelan oil sale.

The unnamed individual said the money would be:

disbursed for the benefit of the Venezuelan people at the discretion of the US government.

The cash seems to have been from an oil deal struck in January:

So in essence, we allowed Venezuela to use their own oil to generate revenue to pay teachers and firefighters and police officers and keep the function of government operating so we didn’t have systemic collapse.

The official said the money, which had been held in Qatar, was a:

temporary, short-term account to ensure Venezuela received the funds needed to operate.

Venezuela: agreed-upon procedures

The official even explained there were plans to move money from future oil sales:

into a fund located in the US and to authorise expenditures for any obligation or expense of the government of Venezuela or its agencies and instrumentalities upon instructions that are consistent with agreed-upon procedures. 

The New Arab also reported pro-Maduro street protests. Maduro’s son Nicolasito was in attendance. He told reporters of the demonstrators:

These people are not American.  We have achieved a profound anti-imperialist consciousness.

Maduro is in a New York jail. He claims he is a prisoner of war. The US has indicted him for drugs and weapon possession charges Yet whatever the balance of power in Venezuela is now – and whatever the anti-imperialist rhetoric on display – this seems to suggest that the Venezuelan government is not calling the shots any more.

Trump’s massive military build-up and eventual special forces raid on Venezuela seems to have done the job. The US seeks to dominate the Western hemisphere entirely. Trump has now moved onto bullying Iran. The Venezuelan revolution, whatever its merits and shortcomings, seems to have stalled for now.

Time will tell if it becomes another footnote in US imperial history.

Featured image via the Canary

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At a press conference on Thursday, Farage unveiled former Conservative councillor Dan Thomas as Reform’s new leader in Wales, making him the latest Tory to make the switch.

Fellow defectors Laura Anne Jones and James Evans were in the audience in Newport’s International Convention Centre. The recent flow of defections, which includes former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi and ex-shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, is seen by Reform figures as helping maintain the party’s momentum heading into the May elections.

Reform is expected to make significant gains at the Senedd elections, with recent polling putting the party far ahead of Labour, which has dominated politics in Wales since its devolved institutions were established at the turn of the century, as well as the Tories. The contest to lead Wales is seen as a two-horse race between Reform and Plaid Cymru.

Thomas, a former council leader in north London, said he had “fond memories” of growing up in south Wales, where his grandfather and great-grandfather were miners.

It is not the first time that Farage has been on the cusp of an electoral breakthrough in Wales, though.

In 2016, his former party, the UK Independence Party (UKIP), won 13 per cent of the popular vote to return seven Senedd seats. By the end of that parliament in 2021, however, after a period of splits and infighting, just one of those seven sought re-election.

Last year, UKIP’s former leader in Wales, who went on to lead Reform in Cardiff, Nathan Gill, was sentenced to prison for taking pro-Russia bribes.

Asked by PoliticsHome how his current party would avoid the mistakes of UKIP in Wales, Farage said that candidate vetting would be “absolutely key”. The party, which continues to lead UK-wide opinion polls, though there are some signs that its support has dipped in recent weeks, is asking candidates to go through media training led by TV personality Jeremy Kyle and ex-LBC presenter Colin Brazier in Reform HQ.

“The choice of candidates in some cases that were picked to stand for UKIP at that moment in time were completely against my [vision] as leader of the party,” Farage told PoliticsHome.

Farage added: “Two or three of them were wholly unsuitable in every way. But leaders don’t always get their way… and quite shortly thereafter, after [a] quarter of a century, I left [UKIP] believing it was going in the wrong direction.”

Llyr Powell, who was the Reform candidate at last year’s Caerphilly by-election and who worked in the UKIP press team during the 2016 Senedd election, suggested that her former party was destined to fall away in Wales, having achieved its aim of successfully campaigning for Brexit.

“Nigel’s goal in UKIP was always to win an in-out referendum,” she said.

“We’re all united behind the fact we want to see Nigel Farage in Number 10 now.”

While Farage said he wants tighter control of candidate selection, he also conceded that Thomas and any newly elected Reform Senedd members must be given space by Reform’s Westminster operation to make their own decisions.

“When it comes to devolved matters, it’s up to Reform UK in Wales to make those decisions,” he told PoliticsHome.

He added: “I wouldn’t even pretend that I knew what needs to happen within the failing NHS in Wales.”