From Iran-Contra to Trump: How Zionism Took Over the Deep State

by Matt Wolfson | Dec 23, 2025

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/from-iran-contra-to-trump-how-zionism-took-over-the-deep-state/

The most politically prescient movie when it comes to the networks infiltrating our government these last forty years must be Power, director Sidney Lumet’s 1986 vehicle for exploring America’s mechanisms of political control, his informal sequel to the much more famous Network. The main characters in Power are portrayed by Richard Gere, as a political campaign consultant, and Denzel Washington, as his client: a lobbyist representing Gulf State sheiks who want to induce America’s government to sponsor coups in Latin American countries. The sheiks’ first step in this direction is using Gere to engineer the election of a dour Midwestern corporatist running to replace an old line WASP senator whose wife, played by the real-life WASP scion Beatrice Straight, committed a financial indiscretion which put her in Denzel Washington’s pocket.

When Gere starts asking questions about who’s paying whom and for what, Washington gets nervous: suddenly Gere’s threatened by mysterious go-betweens, his plane almost crashes, he loses clients, his phone is tapped (and he’s meant to know it). When Gere confronts Washington in the latter’s sleek and immaculate office in the literal shadow of the U.S. capitol, Washington is unrepentant:    

“We hired you to do a job, and it wasn’t to investigate me or my company…We just wanted you to know, if you really did try and screw us, something bad could happen to you. That was the message we were trying to convey. Now the plane, the phones, merely dramatic illustrations…It’s no fucking game. You are deciding who runs this country. Who runs other countries. My clients deal with the consequences.”

What is most interesting about Power, besides its forensic representation of an influence play distinctly exotic to pre-1980s America but inherently familiar to colonial societies, is how neatly it maps on to another play being run in Washington DC before and during Power’s production: Iran-Contra. This was also a play, a real-life one, in which operators with ties to the Middle East and Latin America infiltrated the capital via a pliant “heartland Republican,” Ronald Reagan, to run an agenda foreign to American interests. Iran-Contra was, famously yet confusingly, a covert effort by the Reagan administration to funnel arms shipments to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages; then to use the proceeds from these arms sales to fund the guerrilla Contras, who were fighting the socialist authoritarian regime of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua—all without congressional approval. In the course of this effort by “Reagan’s Junta,” people’s offices were bugged, and strange payoffs and stranger outreaches made. Middlemen like Gere were recruited, then threatened, then frightened, then ostracized, then disposed.

The only Iran-Contra element missing in Power, thanks likely to the Jewish-American Lumet’s well-documented loyalty to Israel, is the people who actually ran it: connected Jewish Zionists for whom Denzel Washington’s character was the stand-in. William Casey, the CIA director who set Iran-Contra in motion, was a product of Wall Street just as Zionists rose to influence there, and it was to a group of these associates including Maurice “Hank” Greenberg and Bruce Rappaport that Casey turned for advice on his White House agenda. He also turned for advice to Zionist fixer Roy Cohn (in 1980, during Reagan’s presidential campaign, which Casey ran, Nancy Reagan said that Casey called Cohn “almost daily”) and it was the Saudi expatriate Adnan Khashoggi, a client of Cohn’s, who ended up running crucial aspects of the Iran-Contra play. Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian expatriate arms dealer who shared top Iran-Contra billing with Khashoggi, was known by Casey to be an Israeli agent. And it was Israel which was the deal’s middleman, sending arms to Iran from America via Ghorbanifar via the ministrations of Michael Ledeen, a Zionist “consultant” with the National Security Council.

Then there were the Zionist-Contra connections. The primary Washington point person for the Contra end of that play was Elliott Abrams, the son-in-law of the late Commentary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz—who, by the 1980s, along with Public Interest editor Irving Kristol, was the most famous Jewish neoconservative in America. The Contra’s primary emissary to Washington was Arturo Cruz, Jr., who got his foot in the White House door by dating Fawn Hall, the famously loyal secretary (and future wife) of NSC official Oliver North, who managed Iran-Contra. Cruz thrived in Washington thanks in part to the support of the magazine The New Republic, which had been founded by Beatrice Straight’s family but, in the 1980s under the ownership of the ardent Zionist Martin Peretz, introduced Zionism to the capital’s media circles. The New Republic backed Cruz to the point where Peretz’s second-in-command, Leon Wieseltier, a “man about town” known for his own dubious sexual power plays, assured The Washington Post for attribution that Cruz’s infiltration of North’s office via his relationship with Fawn Hall was not a play for influence but the product of “real love.”

In geopolitical context, these insider operations make sense. The ultimate aim of Iran-Contra was solidifying American military corporate networks in the Middle East—put formally, to “establish a new US relationship with Iran, thus strengthening the US strategic posture throughout the Persian Gulf region”—to the benefit of Israel, already these networks’ most reliable client. Like Denzel Washington’s play in Power, Iran-Contra failed. But its key project, the “usurpation of power by a small, strategically placed group” of seeming renegades, has succeeded over the last forty years in far more dramatic fashion. During this time, Zionist networks run largely though not exclusively by connected American Jews have made themselves into arbiters of America’s military corporate complex. Recently, they have brought new groups of authoritarians and supremacists into that complex, and they have elevated politicians to defend their authority to the highest positions in our government.

Some of this play was well underway when Power was produced and Iran Contra underwritten. Starting in the 1970s and continuing into the 1980s, Zionists came not just to Washington DC but to New York, as I have reported for the Libertarian Institute, and, less publicly, to Harvard. Just as old-line WASP financial networks headed by operators like the Rockefellers ceded influence to Zionist ones headed by Michael Steinhardt and the Tisch Family, old-line WASP academics made a similar arrangement. Indeed, as Martin Peretz and Elliott Abrams made Washington hospitable to Zionism, Peretz’s close ally Henry Rosovsky, a Zionist whose wife’s family was a staple of Israeli society, was making Harvard into a Zionist-influenced institution. He did this via his position as Dean of the Faculty under Harvard’s old-line WASP president, Derek Bok.

One culmination of Rosovsky’s work came in the 1990s and 2000s, via major donations from his Zionist allies Les Wexner and Rosovsky’s close friend Jeffrey Epstein. Another came with the accession to the Harvard presidency in 2001 of Epstein confidante Lawrence Summers, an intimate of Peretz, who also taught at Harvard. After Summers flamed out spectacularly with what Harvard professors described as his imperialist designs on the institution as well as his derogatory remarks about women’s intelligence, Zionist influence receded for ten years, but then returned. It did this via Lawrence Bacow, who served as president from 2018 to 2023, and Alan Garber, Harvard’s current president who was installed after Peretz’s former student Bill Ackman helped engineer President Claudine Gay’s defenestration over what he deemed her insufficient Zionism. Garber is cooperating with Zionist billionaire Robert Kraft’s AI-driven surveillance scheme in Foxborough, Massachusetts to detect and police what Kraft calls anti-semitic content online. Supporting Garber in his presidency is a gallery of Zionist academics, many of them quietly influential in the defenestration of Gay. (Until recently, they have included Summers, still a professor at Harvard until November, when he was forced to step back from teaching after emails came to light showing him, as a married man, soliciting Jeffrey Epstein in 2018 for advice about “getting horizontal” with a junior female colleague.)

Harvard is not unique in this regard. In 2020, as Peretz himself stated, five out of the eight Ivy league universities were led by Jews, all of whom identified as Zionists, and, as I have reported for the Libertarian Institute, donations from Zionist financiers have flowed accordingly. Thanks to the Michael Milken, the “junk bond” king of 1980s Wall Street until his prosecution, George Washington University (GW) in Washington DC received the largest philanthropic gift in its history. Thanks to Black Rock’s Steven Schwarzman and Jeffrey Epstein, MIT has spent two decades awash in Zionist funds—the same MIT that counts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a distinguished graduate and where Bill Ackman’s wife, an Israeli Zionist, made her career in a department floating off Epstein’s donations. Ackman, who was not only mentored by Peretz at Harvard but co-owned The New Republic with Peretz at the end of its Zionist run, has also poured his financial gains back into the university. Nor were knowledge-producing institutions the only sites of Zionist takeover. As I have also reported for the Libertarian Institute, artistic philanthropy, too, was an area of these operators’ largesse. The Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Botanic Gardens, the Tisch School of the Arts: all of these flowed from funding of Zionist financiers, among them the Tisches and Michael Steinhardt.

But Harvard was and is the center of this East Coast institutional power play, and it’s from Harvard that Zionists came to Silicon Valley to colonize the new wing of the American military corporate state, defense technology. They did this in the person of Harvard graduate and Peretz mentee Al Gore—the favorite son of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the decisive backer of Bill Clinton in 1992 which was founded by the Zionist Al From and had as its biggest donor the Zionist (and Peretz’s later co-owner of The New Republic) Michael Steinhardt. It was Gore who, as U.S. Senator from Tennessee, sponsored the 1991 High-Performance Computing Act, which funded the infrastructure to make a worldwide commercial venture, the worldwide web, out of a small group of networked computers. It was Gore who, as Clinton’s vice president, liaised for the administration with Silicon Valley at gatherings nicknamed “Gore-Techs.” It was largesse from Washington via interventions like Gore’s that helped make Silicon Valley’s boom. And it was this boom that effectively turbocharged the careers of Valley titans, roughly half of whom are Jews who identify as Zionists: Bill Gates of Microsoft, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Irwin Jacobs of Qualcomm, Peter Thiel of Oracle, Steve Jobs of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz of Andreesen Horowitz, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Jensen Huang of Nvidia.

Thanks to their proportionally high concentration, their White House connections, and their connections to Israel’s tech boom partly funded by the largesse of American private equity players benefiting from the Clinton White House’s generous, Zionist-influenced policies toward Wall Street, Zionists hold the keys to Silicon Valley. (To use one example of their influence, Peter Thiel, who is a German Protestant, had as his early backers or allies the Zionists Irving Kristol, at Stanford, and Max Levchin, at PayPal.) They have used this power, in turn, to solidify their influence over elite education, as I have reported for the Libertarian Institute in August and November. Irwin and Joan Jacobs founded, in 2016, the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York, a joint partnership between Israel’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Cornell University which “marks the first time an international university has granted an accredited degree on U.S. soil.” Larry Ellison is singlehandedly funding, to the tune of more than $1.3 billion, the Ellison Institute of Technology at Oxford University in Great Britain, aiming “to tackle issues ranging from food security and healthcare to artificial intelligence and robotics, operating as a sustainable private business powered by Oracle technology.” Mark Zuckerberg, a Zionist graduate of Harvard whose Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, later purchased Peretz’s The New Republic, has donated between $800 million and $1 billion to “a biomedical research consortium of The University of California (UC), Berkeley, Stanford University, and UC San Francisco” and $500 million “to launch the Kempner Institute for Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard.” According to one report:

“Critics say Zuckerberg’s and Meta’s tech equipment donations ensure universities continually rely, and come back, for more products.

‘…It’s really a way for the tech companies to indoctrinate their technology that they profit from into these ecosystems,’ said Tech Transparency Project director Katie Paul, speaking to the Marketplace Tech podcast. ‘We’ve seen similar efforts more broadly with, for instance, Google Chromebooks in classrooms across the United States,’ she added.”

Google Chromebooks are, of course, the products of Google, which was founded and is run by Zionists Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Today, elite Zionist operators are increasingly opening these defense-technology and philanthropic power structures to other foreign operators like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, both authoritarian regimes with accelerating human rights abuses to their names. Also included are operators from Southeast or East Asia, most specifically Hindutvas, who come from a supremacist nationalist tradition very similar to Zionism.

Since the inception of the second Trump administration, at Donald Trump’s hands, Nvidia, Google, Facebook, Quaalcom, and Oracle have benefited from major agreements over AI with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Thanks to Trump’s dubious reliance on AI to power America’s economy, these two authoritarian regimes are on their way to becoming necessary power players in America’s defense-tech state flowing from Silicon Valley. And the new alliances have also extended to philanthropy. The Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center, which is intimately tied to connected Zionists via donations as well as family connections and also intimately tied to Lincoln Center, which is heavily influenced by prominent Zionists and their allies, just this year announced:

“…a lucrative agreement with the kingdom [of Saudi Arabia] that calls for it to perform there for three weeks each winter…[and is] expected to bring the Met more than $100 million. The Met hopes the agreement will help it emerge from a period of acute financial woes.”

The Met, it is worth noting, has not always been so attuned to protecting its financial status at all costs—not even when it’s jettisoning box office draws like Russia’s Anna Netrebko over human rights’ concerns. But Saudi Arabia, an inveterate human rights’ abuser, is different than Russia in one crucial way; as Zionists put it, “the world’s only Jewish state wants—needs—an alliance with Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia.”

Then, more concerningly, there are the Hindutvas. As Andrew Cockburn reported in a groundbreaking story for Harper’s Magazine last year, since the 1990s:

“…the Indian-American community has…has flourished economically, notably in the tech industry, where Indian-American CEOs proliferate, including the current bosses of Microsoft, Google, and IBM…”

Many of these powerful Indians are Hindus who allied with a supremacist version of Hinduism, now dominant in India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which relies heavily on caste. One of their more recent contributions to American political life was to successfully lobby against a California bill “banning discrimination on the grounds of caste.” This measure:

“…had been championed by California’s Dalit community. Once known as ‘untouchables,’ Dalits occupy the bottommost rung of the Hindu hierarchy, and they have traditionally been confined to menial occupations on the fringes of Indian society, purely by virtue of their birth.”

So caste has, at the hands of Hindutvas backed by Zionists, come to California to stay.

Not surprisingly, as I have reported for the Libertarian Institute in the past, Zionists and Hindus whose focus is on what they see as Hindu superiority see themselves as allies. Only last year, the Zionist magazine Sapir Journal ran a proposal for a “Jewish-Hindu” alliance based on using AI technology to patrol “discrimination” against both groups based, purportedly, on their success in America’s military corporate complex. This proposal sounds a good deal like the anti-semitism patrolling algorithm recently pioneered by Robert Kraft and pioneered by Alan Garber at Harvard.

So far, this letting-in-of-others to Zionist spheres of influence represents the institutionalization of the Iran-Contra play distilled in Power. But Zionists are doing something else: putting Zionist operators in play in American politics at the highest level. Indeed, elite Zionist influence, direct and indirect, is a defining feature of the careers of our current Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio; our current Vice President J.D. Vance; and our current President Donald Trump.

First is Rubio, the Cuban-American son of anti-Castro exiles, two of whose top five donors cumulatively since his first run for the Florida legislature in 2009 are financial firms led by Zionists Steven Schwarzmann and Paul Singer. One of his most ardent backers in his failed 2016 run for the Republican presidential nomination was Elliott Abrams. Relatedly, until recently Rubio had been the most popular champion within the Republican Party of neoconservative foreign policies pioneered in the 1980s at The New Republic and continued by such Zionist operators as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Today Rubio and Stephen Miller, President Trump’s senior policy adviser who is also a Jewish Zionist, are leading the push for the defenestration of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, an anti-Zionist. The clear beneficiary of this push, should it succeed, will be Marina Corina Machado, the leader of the “liberal opposition” in Venezuela who has deep ties to Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu. There is precedent for alliances like these. It was Cuban exiles, who saw the anti-communist fight in Nicaragua as an extension of their fight against Castro, who were the main intermediaries between the Contras and their Zionist Washington backers forty years ago in Latin America.

Then there is Vance, who is, famously, an Appalachian American from an impoverished background taken up by powerful academic networks at Yale: namely, the East Asian cultural supremacist Amy Chua and her Zionist husband Jed Rubenfeld. These networkers propelled Vance to prominence via his book Hillbilly Elegy; and almost certainly propelled Vance’s wife Usha, who is a Hindu-American, to success via federal judicial clerkships through their connections to Brett Kavanaugh. (Chua, it’s worth noting, also provided career help to Vivek Ramaswamy, another former pupil and a Hindu-American who appears to share a version of Chua’s cultural supremacist stance.) From there, Vance went to Silicon Valley, where he was picked up by Peter Thiel; and, from there, back to Washington. From Washington, his wife is forging ties with Bari Weiss: an ally of Rubenfeld and Chua’s, and now, famously, the editor-in-chief of CBS News since its purchase by the Ellisons. Vance is, when it comes to policy preferences, an anti-interventionist suspicious of Israel’s influence and looking to rebalance our foreign commitments. But, as the almost astonishing aggression of connected Zionist operators these past ten months has shown, one side is playing not for balance but for keeps. There is serious question over whether a vice president who owes much of his career to their networks will be able to resist their aggressive plays.

And, finally, there is Trump, who rose in the 1980s in the same milieu as New York and Washington Zionist operators. He’s a regular walk-on, notable mainly for his bombast and vulgarity, in the diary-memoir of Tina Brown, the editor in the 1980s of Vanity Fair, whose owners since that decade are the Zionist Newhouse Family. He has a cameo from the same period in the memoir of Martin Peretz, who also marvels at his vulgarity and derides Mar-A-Lago. He is everywhere in biographies and documentaries and “biopics” of Roy Cohn, the Zionist fixer; and he was the buyer of Adnan Khashoggi’s yacht just after Khashoggi sold it to the Sultan of Brunei, who was also, along with Khashoggi, a major player in Iran-Contra. He was also adjacent to certain players who have run Zionist plays abroad and at home under both Trump presidencies: the William F. Buckley–L. Brent Bozell Family; the Kushner Family; the Ackman Family; and the Norman Podhoretz-Elliott Abrams Family. His daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, grew up in New York, and Trump recently said that Ivanka was a “good friend” of the “really good, really competent” Jessica Tisch, the current police commissioner and third-generation scion of the Tisch Family. Most famously, of course, Jeffrey Epstein’s network—from Larry Summers and Tony Blair to Bill Clinton and Marc Rich—was Trump’s network, too.

Trump’s political persona seems, to all intents and purposes, indigenous to Trump: an old line real estate developer from the outer boroughs, heavy with hand and mouth and slur. But in fact one reason it seems indigenous to Trump is that the notion of Trump-as-an-outer-borough-vulgarity, “Donny from Queens,” has been pushed assiduously on the public by Zionist operators or allies like the journalist James Kirchick, a mentee of Martin Peretz, and Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels: a Jewish-Canadian who does not identify as a Zionist but is closely tied to prominent Zionists and has been throughout his career. In reality, “Donny from Queens” never aspired to Queens, he aspired to Manhattan. He grafted his Queens background onto a Manhattan style, which he has perfected today. It appears when he’s brinkmanshipping tariff rates with Canada or threatening Iran and Venezuela or intimidating American law firms.

What is this style? It is exactly what Denzel Washington described in Power: making “dramatic illustrations” that “if you really did try and screw us, something bad could happen to you” and waiting for the other side to capitulate. (As, in the movie, Gere does, by walking off the campaign but keeping his discoveries to himself.) It’s what Jon Stewart at Comedy Central and Nathan Heller at The New Yorker have referred to as Trump’s “Flood the Zone” strategy—and it has a very particular lineage. Reportage and memoirs of the period when Trump rose show that this was the style of the crowd, fast rising in both New York and Los Angeles, that he wanted “in” with: Zionist elites. Their style was the style of colonizers, a version of British and WASP imperialisms they presented, falsely, as indigenously or ethnically Jewish (specifically Yiddish) to stave off critiques of their actions with the specter of anti-semitism. In reality, what Roy Cohn was practicing was what David Rockefeller and Cecil Rhodes and Theodor Herzl (an admirer of Rhodes) had practiced before him. Trump has made that style, bullying colonialism based on dubious finance, into faux-populist art. But Trump is not a populist, he’s a colonizer—and he always has been.

And so it’s not a coincidence that Wall Street and Silicon Valley, corridors of power where Zionists hold decisive influence when they choose to, turned, arguably decisively, to Trump in summer of 2024, just after the first surge of anti-Israel campus protests backed by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and that Trump softened his populist tone to embrace corporate priorities at just that time. It’s not a coincidence that the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post and The Atlantic, all closely linked to Zionist interests, suddenly started condemning protests of the type they had encouraged only a few years before when Israel was not the target. It’s not a coincidence that among the main financial players in Trump’s campaign and administration are the Zionists Howard Lutnick, Bill Ackman, Miriam Adelson, and Jared Kushner. It’s not a coincidence that the Abraham Accords, instituted by Trump via Kushner in 2020, are being expanded by the Trump administration in conjunction with Israel. It’s not a coincidence that the ultimate aim of expanding the Accords is including Iran, a repeat in different form of the ultimate aim of Iran-Contra: to “establish a new US relationship with Iran, thus strengthening the US strategic posture throughout the Persian Gulf region.” It’s not a coincidence that this essentially colonial play—defanging Iran for the benefit of an American empire hinging on Israel—is being expanded, via the Isaac Accords, to Latin America at Israel’s hands. Finally, it’s not a coincidence that Trump financial supporters Adelson, Paul Singer and John Paulson are working overtime to use their wealth to silence political criticism of Israel.

They aren’t wrong to worry about public opinion shifts. Should America yank support from Israel, these types will, as Denzel Washington said of his clients in Power, pay the price. But, until that happens, the rest of us are paying for their ardor.