Meir Kahane, Netanyahu, Trump, and the war beyond Iran.
By Sarah Kendzior | March 6, 2026
In 1989, terrorist rabbi Meir Kahane made a promise.
“A horrible world war is coming,” Kahane told journalist Robert I. Friedman. “Tens of millions will die. It will be the Apocalypse. God will punish us for forsaking him. But we must have faith. The Messiah will come. There will be a resurrection of the dead: all the things that Jews believed in before they got so damn sophisticated. The amount of suffering we endure will depend upon what we do between now and the end.”
Kahane did not live to see his vision realized. In 1990, the year Friedman published The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, From FBI Informant to Knesset Member, the 58-year-old Kahane was shot to death while giving a speech imploring American Jews to move to Israel. The alleged assailant, Egyptian-American El Sayyid Nosair, was acquitted by a jury but sentenced by the judge. In death as in life, the circumstances surrounding Kahane are murky and violent.
Friedman had an eye for figures of the 20th century who would define the 21st. Ten years after The False Prophet, he published Red Mafiya: his investigation of a transnational crime syndicate whose members came from the USSR and spent the 1990s infiltrating governments and corporations worldwide. The head of that syndicate, Semyon Mogilevich, put a contract on Friedman’s life.
Death threats were nothing new for Friedman. He’d been getting them from Israelis ever since he wrote the Kahane biography. Friedman had also angered the FBI by claiming they could have prevented the 1993 World Trade Center attacks and correctly warning, years in advance, that the towers would be attacked again. Wary of institutional constraints, Friedman embraced the freedom of a freelancer. In 2002, Friedman died of cardiac arrest. He was 51.
He never saw the future he worked so hard to stop.
Red Mafiya gained a cult following during Trump’s first term. The book elucidates the structure of Trump’s life and presidency: a merger of organized crime, white-collar crime, and government by criminals who elude, then rewrite, borders and laws. Some blame Russia for the US downfall, some blame Israel, but it was always both — along with American collaborators and assorted global operatives.
Red Mafiya names key villains and locales, including Trump Tower, which functioned as a dormitory for organized crime. Mogilevich became an early investor in Trump Tower after fleeing the USSR by getting an Israeli passport in 1988 from Robert Maxwell, the father of Jeffrey Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine. To say Red Mafiya is timeless is to acknowledge we’ve been frozen in hell for forty years.
The False Prophet, on the other hand, is largely ignored. It is in demand but hard to find: used copies of the out-of-print book sell for over $100. I bought mine before the Kahanists — Kahane’s acolytes — returned to power in Israel.
I’ve been wanting to write about The False Prophet for years. I held back since it scares me more than any other book. If it were only history, I would not be so frightened. But The False Prophet describes current events: the extremism that Kahane espoused, and Friedman documented, now dominates Israel and in turn, the United States.
I was born during the Iranian Revolution. As a result, I’ve spent my entire life listening to US officials call for war with Iran. In Israel, the calls are even louder, drowning out reasonable voices who know such a war would be apocalyptic.
The architects of the Iran War know that too, but do not care. Elderly fanatics — from Netanyahu to Elliott Abrams, an Iran-Contra villain who served in nearly every administration of my life — understand that the time to see their goals reach fruition is running out. Trump is not the architect of the Iran war, only its vehicle.
“This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years,” Netanyahu said as the war began, thanking “the United States, my friend, US President Donald Trump, and the US military.”
Netanyahu now says openly what he said behind closed doors in 2001: “America is a thing you can move very easily.”
On to Epstein! This section of the Q & A is for Michael T, Mark S, Rebecca, Patricia, Frances, John K, Bill C, Barbara, Robert, Leslie, Donna, and anyone whose name I’ve missed. I’ve shortened and simplified your overlapping questions. My answers are briefer than my thoughts, so feel free to discuss more in the comments section.
Will the Epstein files bring accountability?
SK: Yes, some — but not necessarily in the US. We’ve seen predators face arrest in other countries. In the US, we’ve seen them resign from jobs. This gives me little hope since MeToo produced more backlash than justice, and many who lost power later regained it. I do think the release has forced politicians and pundits to finally address the massive criminal conspiracy that was in the public domain for two decades. What’s revealing is that they view redacted emails by predators as more credible than consistent statements by victims. There is something very wrong with the way Americans trust criminal elites to be more reliable sources than the people they hurt.
What can we do to help bring justice?
SK: Save documents, curate them, and comment on them thoughtfully and with respect for the victims. The Trump admin has already deleted some documents, is withholding many more, and relies on media to normalize sadism and bury crime in spectacle. Reject that. The breakdown of search engines means we need responsible curation more than ever. This applies not only to Epstein but to ICE or any act of mass abuse. One of the greatest threats we face is the deletion of history. Everyday folks can help preserve it if they organize information together. Nick Bryant and others have been pooling resources on Epstein’s network. I have little faith in our representatives, seeing as they knew about Epstein all along and did nothing, but there is still stigma in being a pedophile protector. Pressure officials for truth and accountability and call them a pedophile protector if they resist.
Will the rest of the files be released?
SK: As I’ve said before, I think they were waiting to release an Epstein trove once: 1) they felt they had consolidated power 2) AI was so ubiquitous that the veracity of the evidence would be questioned. That moment is now. We have seen a lot of emails, though one period of interest — the time around 9/11 — is largely absent. We have not seen much video. I believe the most damaging information is on video. We know Epstein had rooms wired with cameras to film pedophiles assaulting victims. I will not watch that if it comes out. But it may come out, and should that happen, the assaulter will claim it’s fake. This wouldn’t have been a convincing excuse a decade ago, but it will be now due to AI. I’ve wondered if Grok posting child pornography on demand shortly before the Epstein files were released was a trial run for this tactic.
How much was Bill Barr involved?
SK: Probably a lot: he’s been called “The Cover-Up General” since the early 1990s, when he buried Iran-Contra and other crimes as Bush’s AG. Epstein and Maxwell are closely linked to Iran-Contra through a number of vectors, but mainly Maxwell’s family: her father, operative of Israeli espionage Robert Maxwell, and her siblings and their government surveillance tech deals. Barr is the guy you call to bury things.
Barr was likely pulled out of private practice to bury the Epstein evidence for Trump, since emails show increasing worry from Epstein’s cohort when MeToo erupted. Barr became Attorney General in late 2018, right after the Kavanaugh confirmation, when MeToo was at its height. In addition, Bill Barr’s father, Donald Barr, hired Epstein to teach at a private school in the 1970s, which helped facilitate his ties to high finance. Donald Barr also wrote sci-fi fantasies about intergalactic pedophiles. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. (What kind of deranged “coincidence” has all that?!) I cover Barr and Epstein in depth in Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew.
SK: Treat the Rothschild family like you would anyone that is like the Rothschild family: any billionaire, multinational banking family involved in corruption and war for centuries. Their history needs to be meticulously investigated, and that should not be controversial. It does not mean every Rothschild is guilty by default, and illicit activity in the family is not rooted in Judaism. It’s rooted in entrenched power that breeds impunity, much like the British Royals. There are people afraid to examine the Rothschilds for fear of being labeled antisemites, and there are also antisemites hurling baseless accusations. Both approaches are bad and dangerous.
The role of Rothschild family members with ties to Epstein and Maxwell should be examined. Work that the Maxwell and Rothschild families did for foreign states should be scrutinized for overlap. Common ties, like Alan Dershowitz or various banks, should be investigated. It is irresponsible to drop the topic out of fear. But do not lump in all Jewish folks with Epstein and the Rothschilds — and never do it in my newsletter in the centennial year of Mel Brooks! That’s no different than lumping in all Muslims with Al Qaeda or Catholics with predator priests. Or all Americans with Trump! Keep digging, but don’t smack bystanders with your shovel on the way down.
What’s up with Zorro Ranch? And his UK bank statements? And other stuff?
SK: I’m a big picture person: I can only see the forest for the treason. Details are best examined by people living near where the crimes took place, who know the land and institutions. Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez lives in New Mexico and has been tracking ranch activity and recommending local journalists. As for the UK, Carole Cadwalladr knows the Epstein case and might know the answer.
That’s the gist of the Epstein questions! He lurks throughout the rest of the Q & A as he does in real life. But on to other topics:
Sylvia: I have heard you speak about the dangers and terrible influences of AI. Yet I find myself reading the simple comparisons of products that pop up when I look for info on something like how to keep squirrels from eating tulip bulbs. Whatever AI search that comes up has a lot of useful suggestions I can follow up on and products I’ve never heard of, and I can then ask for a comparison list. Can you say anything about AI uses for helping us sort through huge masses of information?
SK: I don’t trust AI for answers on anything. Here is an example of why:
SK: Malachai and Isaac are not my children — they are the main characters of the 1984 horror movie Children of the Corn! Children of the Corn is hilarious; I watch it every Halloween and have talked about it online. As a result, AI says I live in a cornfield with my demon spawn. I’ve decided AI is the real “He Who Walks Behind the Rows”: no one knows why it’s there, but [ . . . ]
There is a shipwreck at the end of Zombie Road. I walked miles to see it: past moss-covered cliffs and century-old railroad tracks half-buried in the earth. I hadn’t hiked Zombie Road since 2022, when an elderly woman I used to pass on the trail disappeared. I didn’t know her name, but I knew her smile. When she went missing, I checked the news round the clock, hoping she would be found. Her face is on a memorial bench now. I put a flower there.
I finally felt ready to return to Zombie Road. 2026 leaves you ready for everything and nothing. I live in a nightmare echo chamber where topics I covered for over a decade in my books and articles — autocracy, institutional complicity, extremely specific details of the Epstein/Maxwell case — are now repeated by the same pundits and officials who dismissed them when it mattered most. They buried crimes in silence, then noise, and now spectacle.
The lack of accountability stays the same.
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People ask if I feel vindicated. It’s an evil question. I wanted justice, not approval. No one needed to vindicate me. I knew I was right: I wanted the world to make me wrong. Facts are facts, and cowards are cowards, and belated recognition of obvious crimes does not negate the harm done to victims.
What the truth can do is shine a light to a better future. But officials behave as if the future is foreclosed. They rush toward evil in every form: genocide, eugenics, the replacement of humanity with artificial intelligence. They are part and parcel with the predators they were supposed to expose and condemn and prosecute.
They always were.
* * *
I go to Zombie Road because it doesn’t lie, no matter how it changes. The haunted path winds between hulking hills that were once Native American burial mounds. I pass a signpost that says “Zombie West, Zombie East” with mileage markers for trails.
Over the past decade, Zombie Road got gentrified. One of St. Louis’s most notorious sites — where locals claim to see the reanimated corpses of train robbers and Civil War soldiers and “a shadow nest of children” on the cliffs at night — now boasts mountain biking and hilltop McMansions. County officials decided to lean into the zombie lore instead of feigning respectability. It was the right move.
“Zombie West, Zombie East.” That’s how it feels to live in the middle of a technofascist criminal syndicate spanning the globe.
We no longer watch the news: the news watches us. Stories written by robots are posted on websites that suck personal information from our phones and hand it to data miners controlled by oligarchs. “Journalists” brag that they rely on AI to map the child rape networks that they once denied existed; the networks that include the very oligarchs breeding the AI. They dig humanity’s grave and stagger back out of it.
“Fake news” used to mean propaganda or inconvenient truths that Trump deemed lies. Now fake news is news written by non-human entities hallucinating a counterfeit reality. It is fake without motive, fake for the sake of being fake and making you lose confidence that anything can be real. It is zombie news for zombie consumption.
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,” St. Louis native Maya Angelou famously said.
When people refuse to admit that a conspiracy of wealthy predators is real — even though it has been documented publicly since Epstein was first indicted in 2006, confirmed by dozens of victims over decades, and investigated by journalists who were threatened by the perpetrators and their lawyers — believe that these denialists were acting as enablers the first time, and never grant them your trust.
They are zombies. They eat pain and spit it out as content in an attempt to inure you to the depths of depravity. They want voyeurism, not accountability. If they wanted justice, they would have believed the trafficked child rape victims the first time. If they had integrity, they would have not only surrendered their access to criminal elites when the story broke years ago but been ashamed that they ever coveted it.
I believe in redemption, but not for this. Not for the predators, not for the enablers. This has always been a clearcut case. This has always been a spiritual war.
* * *
The shipwreck lies on a sandbar off deep blue water where icebergs drift like silver rafts. This stretch of the Meramec River is isolated and idyllic, an oasis of driftwood and birdsong. Locals nicknamed it the River of Death for all the people who drowned here. Euphemisms do no good in a dystopia.
I’d seen the shipwreck when the water was high enough to form a barrier around it. Now the river ran low, and a brush trail led to a steep incline where I could climb down to the ruins. I could see the hull and a rusted red entryway shaped like a shack. A tree grew in the midsection. It had been there a long time.
I’ve been told this is not really a shipwreck, but the remains of a gravel barge that crashed some fifty years ago. I still call it a shipwreck, because you still call this a government, and that crashed some fifty years ago too.
I was a woman alone on the river of death in winter. This adventure was unwise, but no more unwise than investigating an international crime syndicate of wealthy pedophiles for ten years, so I decided to explore.
I slid to the ground and peered into the barge. Rotting equipment lay by a pile of tires. Someone else had been here. Iron hooks lined a concrete outer wall where the boat used to dock. I wondered why no one bothered to fix the ship or remove it. I don’t want them to do that: the wreck is too interesting. It made me feel like a child again, a child unbothered, a child unaware of how her country treats children.
I felt safe in my shipwreck because I was far from the men with the yachts.
* * *
I hopped over ice puddles and climbed back to Zombie Road. I followed the train tracks into the woods and walked past the skeleton of an animal, hollowed out so only its head and spinal cord remained, and wondered what picked it clean.
I thought of all the people who had walked this trail for centuries, and the terrible things they had witnessed, and how nothing seemed to match the horrors in my 21st-century mind. The patterns of elite criminality and complicity, the patterns I can’t comprehend why others refused for so long to see.
I sat on a bench and closed my eyes and mourned the unbelieved.
When I looked up, two trees were hugging. One stretched out its branches in a warm embrace and the other leaned in. They were in love and they didn’t care who knew it.
I felt grateful that whatever part of me let me see the dystopia coming let me see that too.
* * *
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“They’re jackhammering into the sewer and the whole house is shaking,” I texted my husband.
I was sitting on a window seat watching a construction crew drill into the sidewalk below. I didn’t want to stand on a floor that trembled. Everything valuable threatened to fall. A photo of my children flipped over like a memory I couldn’t trust.
Outside, a stream of liquid coated the road. The workers gathered in a circle and looked down at something terrible. One picked up the jackhammer again and drilled deep and hard. The rest stood back and watched while he did it. I closed the windows, but I could not block out the sound or the feeling of earth giving way.
When will this stop, how can I make it stop I started to write, then deleted it. I saw my original text. I wrote instead:
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to accidentally summarize the state of the nation.”
* * *
Two weeks later, the DOJ released the Epstein files. The first people I looked up were the ones who tried to prevent my two books on Jeffrey Epstein, Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew, from being published. The next were the people who threatened to kill me for writing them. The ones whose names I know, anyway.
Looking through the files, I felt an old familiar sensation: this was the first time in years I got search results without an AI summary. I try to configure search engines to avoid AI, but Big Tech learned to override tricks like writing “-AI” or “-fuck”. The new robot overlords stole my old hobby of researching the technofascists who birthed them. The public domain that made it possible for me to write my books is gone.
I remembered when I found documentation of Trump and Epstein’s rape cases over a decade ago, and wrote about them, and thought people would care. When a timeline was a chronology on a social media site and not an alternate reality about which you fantasize: an alternative reality in which predators face consequences.
Then I felt another familiar sensation: I was jackhammering into the sewer now too.
When you jackhammer into the sewer, you get covered in shit. That’s what the Epstein Files are: shit. Unredacted to antagonize the victims; redacted to protect the perpetrators; released in a slow drip to acclimatize people to horror; released in an enormous drop to overwhelm people with fear.
They transform pain into social media content. They turn pain into predator contentment. The pursuit of truth is always noble: but not the sluggish or careless release of a partial reveal. Not when it’s about a pedophile rape cabal of ethno-supremacist billionaires and their enablers.
Not when that cabal holds power and we are left navigating a world we would have avoided had more people told the truth — and believed the truth-tellers.
This story could have been told in real time: and if it had been, it wouldn’t be this story. If people had believed the Epstein victims when they first came forward, the next wave of horrors would not have happened. If careerists had not been so easy to bribe and blackmail, ordinary people would not have to suffer under this group of sadistic oligarchs and politicians. Our era is the culmination of complicity.
Everyone likes to look at the dots. But when I connect them, people scream. Often because when I’m done connecting the dots, they are looking at a portrait of someone they know.
In the Epstein files, I found primary source documents related to events I described in my books: email invites to pedophile parties, open and cavalier. The brazenness stemmed from a lifetime of elite criminal impunity. I lost track of the Biden and Trump administration members I found in the files, along with their family members and friends and lawyers, who often overlap.
They like their worlds small, like the children they rape.
* * *
In 2021, I read the personal archives of Danny Casolaro, a journalist who had covered many of the same criminal networks as me. I wrote about him in They Knew as an example of a journalist murdered for going down this road, but he was more than that. He was a lyrical writer, a tenacious researcher, and a poetic soul. I felt invasive looking through his unpublished work. This is not how it was meant to be seen: by a stranger nearly the same age as he was when he was killed. Casolaro was 44 when he was found dead in a West Virginia hotel on August 10, 1991.
I remember shaking when I found a paper with Robert Maxwell’s name and address on it. “The European,” Casolaro called him. I took photos of the documents. After I did that, my phone was hacked and died. I had to go back and do it again, this time with different precautions.
Robert Maxwell was an espionage operative who procured Israeli passports for mobsters in the USSR so they could expand their criminal network worldwide. After he died falling (or being pushed) off a yacht in 1991, he was given an elaborate hero’s funeral by the Israeli government. Ghislaine Maxwell, along with Epstein, continued her father’s criminal operations, which included human trafficking.
Everyone I’ve just mentioned died in a suicide called a murder or a murder called a suicide, except Ghislaine, who is benefiting from the largesse extended by Trump and his Kushner-affiliated backer, the Aleph Institute.
I don’t want to write this article. Can you tell? I did not want to write books about crimes this depraved either. But it felt like the right thing to do: maybe exposure would bring consequences. Casolaro expressed hesitation, too, due to the enormity and danger of the topic. But he knew he had something, and he put his heart into his work.
That’s the irony: this work can only be done well by people with a heart, and you have to resign yourself to letting it break again and again. Or you will lose yourself, and you’ve lost too much already to let them take that too.
* * *
Two years after They Knew, a documentary about Casolaro came out. I couldn’t watch it. When you spend a lot of time with someone’s unpublished writing, it feels both intimate and exploitative. I didn’t want to feel the latter.
I had also recently watched The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness, a documentary about journalist Maury Terry and his struggle to prove a satanic group was involved in the murders committed by David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam. Terry was traumatized by his search. Desperation for clarity on the case consumed his life.
The documentary was released in May 2021. This was when Google still worked and most news sites were not paywalled. After watching, I read Terry’s 1987 book, The Ultimate Evil, and began looking up the officials he described as blocking his inquiry.
Once again, I found pedophiles in positions of power. For example, Eugene Gold, the Son of Sam prosecutor, admitted to assaulting a 10-year-old girl in Tennessee, a crime that would normally get a man life in prison, but in 1983, the judge let it slide. Gold had announced in 1981 that he was resigning as an attorney and would devote his life to serving Jewish causes. He moved to Israel in 1982. As CBS reported, Israel allows American pedophiles to become Israeli citizens. (You should print this report, as ultra-Zionist Bari Weiss now runs CBS.) Gold never faced punishment for sexually assaulting a child. He returned to the US and lived to be 100 years old.
I’m telling this story now because it’s hardly unique. I’m telling this story because it may disappear with the rest of the public domain into AI controlled by oligarchs. I’m telling this story for that 10-year-old girl in Tennessee.
The Trump administration is releasing a selective cache of Epstein documents because they believe their network has consolidated power. But as they release them, they take over media — Twitter, Tik-Tok, CBS, the endless outlets they bully into compliance — and rewrite history.
They want a world where people know the worst truths but are prohibited from discussing them.
* * *
Across my street is a barricaded sidewalk where the construction workers were jackhammering into the sewer. A loose plank of wood lies on top. Hole, it says. Underneath, a sea of shit, barely covered. It’s Groundhog Day and the second Trump administration is one year old.
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Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
