The Altright Corporation & the American Deep State

2,291 words

The perfect Deep State mascot: a mushroom cloud with stinging tentacles

On Monday, October 16, Jason Reza Jorjani published an explosive article, “The Coming Persian War,” on his website. It should have been front-page news the next day at The New York Times and The Washington Post, and possibly for weeks to come.

Jorjani’s article focuses on Donald Trump’s ominous Iran speech on Friday, October 13, but I want to focus on some of the truly amazing background details that Jorjani gives linking his work with the Iranian Renaissance movement and the Altright Corporation to a shadowy network of power-brokers and influence agents with connections to business, politics, and secret societies that people today loosely call the “Deep State.” 

Among the figures that Jorjani names are Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who served briefly as President Trump’s National Security Adviser; Walid Phares, a Right-wing Lebanese Maronite Christian who has advised both Mitt Romney and Donald Trump on Middle East affairs; former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon; Michael Bagley, president of Jellyfish, a private intelligence firm, and former intelligence director of the infamous Blackwater/ Xe /Academi mercenary company (founded by ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince, brother of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Secretary of Education); and a mysterious London-based figure Jorjani refers to only as “X,” a fellow based in some sort of secret society with tentacles in many pies, including the White Nationalist London Forum, Iranian exile groups, billion-dollar petroleum deals, and overthrowing the government of Venezuela.

Now, before I go into the details of Jorjani’s story, I need to say a few words about his credibility. At first glance, a lot of his account sounds wild. But I know Jason well enough to think that he is being completely sincere. He’s one of the most earnest, frank, and open-minded people I have ever met. I think that if he were inclined to lie or shade the truth, he would have said half as much, and it would have been twice as convincing. But Jason simply puts everything out there as he sees it, even if some of it seems stranger than fiction. But I am betting that if there is anything false or implausible in Jason’s story, it is not intentional on his part. I think it is quite possible that he has been deceived and manipulated by people spinning tales designed to appeal to his love of grand visions as well as his more offbeat interests, including geopolitics, secret societies, and paranormal research.

Jorjani’s tale begins in the summer of 2016, when he was contacted by X. As Jorjani tells it:

He praised Prometheus and Atlas to high heaven and said some things that I am not going to disclose because you will find them as hard to believe as I did before I was read into certain esoteric projects. Initially, I dismissed X as a nutcase and would rarely respond to him. Then he offered to concretely assist my efforts on the Persian front by putting me in touch with Michael Bagley, the President of Jellyfish, which he described as a private security and intelligence agency working with the Trump Team to prepare a new United States policy regarding Iran and the Islamic world. I was told that General Michael Flynn worked for Jellyfish, clandestinely of course, and I appreciated Flynn’s position on the Islamic threat. I figured that engaging with Michael Bagley would be an easy way to find out whether X was a crank or whether the other things he was telling me might be true.

Whereas some of what I later saw and heard while working with X and his other associates (there was a Y and Z) might have been smoke and mirrors, deliberately tailored to my personality profile and edgy techno-scientific interests, Michael at least turned out to be totally legit. His clients mostly consist of the chief executives of Fortune 500 companies, but I surmised that he had a special rapport with X and that the group X represents had some role in forming Jellyfish and mainly used it for their purposes – with the corporate consulting acting as a cash cow. I met with Michael months before the 2016 Presidential Election, again after Trump’s victory (which I was not surprised to see), as well as in the early days of the new administration. He would see President Trump on a regular basis, and he introduced me to others with even more access, including Walid Phares, who Michael described as the shadow Secretary of State. He said that Rex Tillerson was just supposed to be a front man, and that when I spoke to Walid I should assume that I am essentially speaking directly to President Trump.

To sum up: the London-based X and his associates control (in some shadowy, unofficial way) or at least influence the Blackwater-linked private intelligence firm Jellyfish. General Michael Flynn, who became Trump’s first National Security Adviser, worked unofficially for Jellyfish while crafting Trump’s policies for Iran and the Arab world. Another unofficial Jellyfish associate, Walid Phares, holds no official post in the Trump administration, but he is supposed to be the “shadow” Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson being a mere figurehead. Jorjani and his Iranian Renaissance associates hoped to use these connections to shape Trump’s Iran policy.

Walid Phares with Jason Jorjani

Apparently within the Trump White House, it is a foregone conclusion that there will be regime change in Iran. The only questions are (1) how it is to be brought about and (2) what will come after it. As I understand it, the Flynn-Phares-Jellyfish-X camp supported the idea of encouraging a revolution in Iran that would replace the Islamic Republic with a strong secular, nationalist, pro-Western state, perhaps a restored monarchy. It would, in effect, be a restoration of the Iranian Empire that the Islamic Republic had overthrown. The Iranian Renaissance and other exile groups support this policy. The other camp consists of Jewish-dominated neoconservatives and Saudi influence-peddlers who wish to start a war with the Islamic Republic and replace it with smoking ruins and warring tribes, as they did in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya.

When Flynn was forced out of office in February, followed by Steve Bannon in August, the neocons cemented their control and are now driving this country toward another Israel-engineered war, this time with a country more than twice as populous and more than three times the size of Iraq. (The cost of the Iraq war is more half a million dead and more than $2 trillion and counting.)

Thus it must be borne fully in mind: Jorjani’s group, despite all of their shady connections, are the good guys. And the good guys lost.

But how is this related to the Alt Right? Jorjani continues:

. . . Michael [Bagley]’s interest in me was not limited to what we called “the Iran project.” At a meeting we had in Washington just before the Trump Administration came to power, Michael proposed to “take Richard [Spencer] out” and install me as the leader of the Alt-Right. By then, I had met Richard [Spencer] during NPI 2016 and, as someone whose fatal flaw is always wanting to see the best in people, I counter-proposed that Spencer was a reasonable guy who would accept direction from above if it meant that, through a figurehead other than himself, he could have access to the President. Steve Bannon was known to be a reader of Arktos books, and Michael’s plan was to send me into the White House to cultivate a relationship with Bannon, and through him, to influence President Trump. My main reason for wanting to have such influence was to help determine Iran policy. Michael got at least one of my letters on this subject into the hands of the President. In it, on behalf of the Persian Renaissance, I explicitly warned Trump not to pursue a pro-Saudi or generally pro-Arab strategy for regime change in Iran. In retrospect, I suppose that through that letter the President and his policymakers also acquired some fairly substantive intelligence on our outlook, intentions, and capabilities.

Together with X and Michael, a plan was hammered out to secure my position as the leader of the Alt-Right by creating a corporate structure that unified the major institutions of the movement, in both North America and Europe, bringing Richard’s National Policy Institute think tank together with Daniel Friberg’s European Arktos publishing house, and the Red Ice Radio and Television network founded by Henrik Palmgren. A major investment would allow me to become a majority shareholder both in this new Alt-Right Corporation, and in its would-be subsidiary, Arktos Media, replacing Daniel Friberg as its CEO. . . .

The funds for this investment into the Alt-Right Corporation, through yours truly, were going to be secured through a multi-billion dollar black budget for a classified project to be implemented by the Trump Administration. That project involved the construction of a vast constellation of “micro cities” in North Africa and Western Anatolia to contain the flow of migrants from the Islamic world into Europe, and to act as resettlement areas for illegal immigrants expelled from European countries. . . .

There you have it. Jason Jorjani created the Altright Corporation, which aimed to somehow consolidate three of the most important Alt Right entities — Richard Spencer’s operations (Radix, NPI, Washington Summit Publishers), Arktos Media, and Red Ice — under a single corporate structure. He created it at the urging of a Deep State duo, Jellyfish president Michael Bagley and X, an international man of mystery. This corporation was going to be funded by transfers from a Deep State black ops budget for building totally-not-concentration camps for the African and Muslim migrants besieging Europe.

This is remarkable for two reasons. First, it is tremendously heartening that a plan was even being discussed to decisively halt — and reverse — the European migrant crisis. Second, it is frankly astonishing that money was to be siphoned from the same Deep State black op budget to fund the Altright Corporation.

But is any of it true?

Again, I am convinced that Jason Jorjani believes it is all true. And he was sufficiently persuasive to get Richard Spencer, Daniel Friberg, and Red Ice on board. But I am skeptical for two reasons.

First, none of the money came through. Of course Flynn was deposed, and apparently the plan to halt the migrant crisis never materialized. But if Bagley and X were sincere about their desire to support the Altright Corporation, they could have found funding elsewhere. People who have their tentacles in billion-dollar oil deals and the pockets of Fortune 500 CEOs could fund the Alt Right for a year with the change under their seat cushions.

Second, why would anyone in the Deep State want to actually help the Alt Right? Nobody invests in or makes alliances with people who have no power.

But the Alt Right does have one power: the power to destroy. The establishment brandishes Alt Right like a swastika or a flaming cross to scare the public and to stigmatize any force that might challenge the current power structure.

Here’s my hypothesis: If I wanted to harm the Iranian Renaissance movement and promote the neocon Iran agenda, I would try to destroy the Iranian Renaissance’s credibility by connecting it to something marginal and highly stigmatized like the Alt Right. What better way to do that than encourage Jason Jorjani, who spans both camps, to create a corporation consolidating important Alt Right operations? Such an operation would cost nothing but a few dinners, since it was motivation enough simply to dangle the prospect of a large investment. Jorjani himself suspects some sort of double-dealing, because he mentions that Bagley encouraged the Iranian Renaissance to advocate pan-Iranism, knowing all the while that the idea was opposed within the Trump administration.

I frankly do not think that these Deep State operators had any other interest in the Alt Right than smearing the Iranian Renaissance. Simply creating the Altright Corporation does not harm the movement in any discernible way. If someone really wanted to coopt and subvert the Alt Right, the money would have come through. They could have bought the movement for practically nothing, given how cash-strapped it is. Perhaps, though, they took a look at the Alt Right and decided that it was doing just fine on its own: it is just self-subverting enough never to threaten the people in power, just self-marginalizing and scary enough to help the establishment stigmatize any new challengers that might emerge. But, then again, there has probably never been a successful social movement that was not underestimated at one time or another by the guardians of the order they eventually overthrew.

In closing, I must stress two things.

First, I am simply offering a hypothesis that makes sense of the statements revealed so far. I actually hope I am wrong. I actually hope, for example, that Bagley and the mysterious Mr. X really are on the right side, not promoting another catastrophic war in the Middle East, in which Americans and Iranians both will suffer and die for the benefit of Israel and the Saudi monarchy. Right now, we have nothing but a few astonishing statements, a lot of questions, and a little guesswork.

Which leads us to point two: we need more facts. Indeed, there is enough in this story to keep a team of investigative reporters following leads, digging up information, and dominating headlines for weeks. For starters, all of Jorjani’s statements need to be corroborated. It seems, however, that our “serious” journalists are more interested in combing Harvey Weinstein’s fat folds for missing starlets — which just presents the alternative media with one more enormous opportunity to scoop the mainstream.