Martin Jay – Strategic Culture Sept 9, 2025

The Epstein case, the Trump assassination and Russian double agents being poisoned in the UK are all stories which read like spy novels. How much of these stories which we read about are actually true?

With the recent interview by prosecutors of Ghislaine Maxwell shocking some with its whitewash of Donald Trump with regards to the Epstein saga, one truth rings out for those who worry about the West’s democratic legitimacy. Fake news is unquestionably on the rise. For Maxwell to have struck a deal with Trump there must have been a media mind-set there all along which could distort a narrative so much that it makes Trump come out of the Epstein saga as innocent, despite the proven close proximity of these two men for decades.

It is believed that it was Maxwell who revealed details of a letter or note written to Epstein by Trump which included a drawing of a naked women. Trump, stupidly denied this and claimed he never did ‘doodles’ which only pushed a number of amateur hacks to dig up further examples of his doodles. But the jab at Trump was well thought out. It hit home as she was soon transferred to a lower security jail with better privileges and swiftly, it would seem, is being processed so that Trump can pardon her and she can leave the U.S.

The U.S. media, in reporting on the hours of interviews and the tome of a transcript which was leaked to them, are simply unable to do the most elementary thing that all journalists should do naturally when being offered information: be sceptical.

There is no trace of any scepticism though whatsoever which gives a clue just how journalists have sunk in the west as a profession which it was believed, once upon a time, was supposed to hold elites to account. What we are witnessing with the Maxwell interview is the most disingenuous pack of lies crafted specifically to clear Trump, Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton being packaged by journalists who know they are playing a nefarious role in re-writing the whole Epstein story. A whitewash on a grand scale which will probably work to get Trump, Clinton and Prince Andrew off the hook as it will be the media itself which repeats and endorses it over a longer period. It will stick.

Yet in recent times, such a scandal as Maxwell’s stunt, hardly stands alone. There have been a number of major media distortions to serve as a convenient support mechanism for elites both in the U.S. and in the UK.

Just recently in the US, fringe media outlets and their social media accounts have been looking at the so-called Trump assassination attempt in July 2024, questioning whether the President was actually shot at all or faked it using a trick mastered by Hollywood actors.

A retired police detective lieutenant named Duane Lee Proctor alleged U.S. President Donald Trump applied fake blood from a “blood capsule” during the assassination attempt that famously bloodied his ear at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

It’s hardly surprising the shooting has stirred such conspiracy theories though given the sheer level of media manipulation Trump is capable of and, perhaps also importantly, the willingness for big media to comply with the narrative offered.

Perhaps even more surprising, however, is the role of major news wire services who, over the decades have shamefully become voice pieces for western leaders and governments, abandoning their once revered role of holding the same to account in preference to being part of their PR apparatus. Associated Press, a major U.S. newswire which is so bad that it literally begs for money on its website homepage, last year was very quick to dismiss speculation and “false claims” just 4 days after the shooting yet oddly was unable to ask any questions that the most amateur sleuth might be tempted to ask about the whole incident, like, why was the shooter killed and not wounded by FBI snipers? Or even why FBI snipers already had their rifle crosshairs already on Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old nursing-home employee from suburban Pittsburgh and were apparently waiting for him to shoot first before they opened up?

The once credible AP news agency has fallen so much, that it’s hardly a shadow of its former self. A similar story can be told for two other global news wholesalers it competes with – Agence France Press (which is actually owned by the French state) and the once legendary Reuters.

Reuters recently made the news for its alarming and abysmal servitude to Israel when the IDF just recently shot one of its cameramen. Yet rather than actually report the basic facts, Reuters preferred to report directly from IDF media handlers replicating the fake news that they had prepared which claimed that it was a “Hamas camera” they had hit. This shameful example of supporting Israel and its fake news campaign was noted by many around the world leading even some journalists who had worked for Reuters to resign in protest, like Canadian Valerie Zink who actually went further and accused the news agency of actually assisting the IDF to murder well over 200 Gaza journalists.

Big media simply cannot be trusted to report the truth any more as they have sold their soul to huge institutions which can pay their bills and keep them in the game. Reuters, AFP and AP are no longer doing journalism by any stretch of the imagination and are desperate to take cash from anywhere they can find it to survive. Outfits like AP have downsized their international bureaus so much in recent years and brought in a new generation of younger, cheaper journalists to cope with lost subscriptions from clients who no longer rate them and want their dispatches. AP’s bureau in Beirut in recent years has shrunk so much in size that it can no longer even hold its archive of video tapes while a younger, cheaper ‘bureau chief’ was brought in whose journalistic credentials included sunbathing on a roof in northern Syria during the war and being a closet Hezbollah sympathiser.

In some cases, it is the newswires whose role seems to be to echo the narrative already provided by larger, local news outlets who know they are complicit in manufactured consent when reporting in a big story, which has numerous political dimensions.

AP is so bad, that in huge stories around the world it appears at best to simply copy/paste the narrative of national newspapers, perhaps explaining why the news organisation has had to downsize so dramatically. In May 2018, it would appear that it did precisely this in how it reported on the story of two Russian spies who had defected to the UK and were, so the story goes, poisoned by President Putin of Russia, red in tooth and claw over their betrayal.

The truth is even more sensational. According to a recent in-depth report by an American academic, the British public have been deceived entirely in how the case of Sergei and Yulia Skripal was reported. Jeremy Kuzmarov PhD, a respected academic well connected to the U.S. intelligence community, claims that the entire Skripal story is a major hoax, assisted by big media. The claim that the Skripals were poisoned by Putin’s agents, says Kuzmarov, is entirely false given that Sergei Skripal was too low a grade intelligence officer and only had a decade-old spy telephone directory to offer the British when he defected. Even reports of the Russian nerve agent Novichok being used is hilariously erroneous given that it normally kills people outright within minutes.

What AP, Reuters, AFP and all of the British press failed to notice was the somewhat oddly placed location of where the Skripals had been relocated to – Salisbury, a town in the west of England which just so happened to also have a British secret nerve agent laboratory just down the road to where they lived. Kuzmarov claims that in fact, it was the British themselves who tried to murder the Skripals using their own nerve agent, after they discovered that Skripal was actually a triple agent, feeding Russia with scraps of intel from the UK. The deception almost reads like a spy novel but its genius was its simplicity and the reprehensible role of press of course. His death from poisoning they could effortlessly blame on the Russians while a phalanx of British journalists working for the nationals would happily conspire to get the story straight – an operation the author claims was designed to shore up anti-Russian hate, four years before Putin ‘invaded’ Ukraine after NATO and the EU made it their puppet state on Russia’s border.

Whether it’s Trump’s links to the Epstein honey trap blackmail racket or his assassination, the Ukraine war or Putin’s agents’ attempted murder, big media has proved that it has no connection any more with facts as its business model has changed so dramatically and new people have been shipped in to work a different angle. The decline in governance and the inevitable fall of western economies can only mean more fake news is on the way.

But we can also be hugely sceptical about intelligence agencies whose trade is their treachery and who have a neat way of dealing with assets that have become liabilities

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