By Namit Verma, Author and security analyst
The Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) organized an online forum on March 2, 2026, titled “Epstein and the Bottomless Depravity of the Elites – Urgent Need for a Cultural Renaissance!” Namit Verma, author and security analyst, gave a presentation at the forum. Below is the speech of Verma. The title was set by UWI.
Thank you, Dennis. It was very educational listening to this diverse panel, and also as you have positioned the subject today, “Epstein and the Bottomless Depravity of the Elites.” It certainly has something to do with the state of affairs of the world today, but I will address this initial subject briefly and then go on more towards the state of the world today.
The initial subject is important because it is representative of the decline of American governance. It is also connected with the withdrawal of the American government from the ambit of many UN organizations. It is very strange that the United States, which has a legal obligation to provide, let us say, some kind of protection against criminal interference to the United Nations. That is the basis of their hosting the UN at New York. And so, when the charges against Mr. Epstein were primarily that he was interfering with diplomats visiting the General Assembly, this aspect of the subject was initially ignored, and only the pedophilia issue came up. And that was dealt with at the level of a Florida court wherein deal-making took place, and the interference with the United Nations votes, something which Sergei Lavrov has recently exposed at great length of how non-American visitors are targeted and blackmailed through these operations. Now that aspect was ignored in the initial arraignment and his 18-month judicial sentence was also effectively reduced to 13 and he got out. Then after that, a very interesting thing happened in the United Nations.
The UN had three platforms to deal with gender issues. All three, all of a sudden, were merged following Mr. Epstein’s release in 2009. And at that point of time if you recall, the Epstein scandal was primarily, or not primarily, but the big names involved at that point of time in 2009 were Prince Andrew and some others. And these nations, the nations that they represented from the old order, came together to reinvent the UN’s gender participation. And they merged all the three earlier platforms and created something called UN Women. The role of Mr. Epstein in creating this organization has been glossed over, and subsequently for a period of eight years, UN Women was founded and the decision to found it happened immediately after Mr. Epstein was released, with the slightly curtailed imprisonment. And then, eventually a new leadership for gender justice was put in place. That leadership remained for eight years and did not forward any further complaints from the United Nations to the U.S. government. So, Epstein remained at large, renewing his activities for eight years. It was only when that protective umbrella of the leadership within, its tenure was over, that in 2019 he got arrested once again and this time on federal charges, as should have been done on the first occasion.
And once that happened there was no way he could get out, and things started coming out in much greater detail. Eventually he was terminated by a suicide, but still as we have seen, there’s still much more to come out. Even now, the documents we are seeing are largely redacted, and they have implications on the global order. We must contend with how many UN General Assembly votes have been impacted by these details. This issue has just not been addressed. As an Indian I’m a little embarrassed, because there could be some ramifications for Indian participation in this cover-up. But this is, as the subject suggests, the exposure of the depravity of the elite. That moral bankruptcy, as Professor Zhang Weiwei of China had initially mentioned, that moral bankruptcy of the entire global leadership has been brought into focus by the Epstein drama, and the global implications are not being mentioned. The whispered charges, or now more openly speculated charges, of his role as an intelligence asset of Israel, and the recent situation where Israel’s ability to manipulate Washington is being seen by the entire world. I am not making a comment on whether this influence is good or bad for the world.
The fact is that our world is fractured, and even our system is fractured. The problems are because of the West and the UN, which is dominated largely by the West. Of course, now China’s role in the Security Council has helped bring in an oriental representation, and perhaps an oriental point of view, which Professor Deepak was talking about. But the dominant conversation is still rooted in the West’s understanding, possibly limited, of the dichotomies and the contradictions in the global partnership, which have not been addressed.
Helga talked of the Westphalian order of nation-states. But the nation-state, wherein the supremacy of the nation-state is taken as a given, is seriously challenged by new theological orders which have a span far beyond individual nation-states. And that is what Pan-Islamism is all about, various versions of it. Whether the situation in the world which Professor Deepak mentioned, is the opposing world views of the orient, which belief is centered in positivism, and the clash of civilizations suggested by Huntington. There has been a perception that at a strategic level, the Christian West, which again is something beyond the Westphalian concept, felt it was not prepared to take on Pan-Islamism and wanted to weaken the Pan-Islamic movement by initially bringing it to a containment or a conflict which would weaken its power. By sponsoring such a conflict in South Asia, we in India have been paying for this interference of the West for the last hundred years. Fortunately, Indian leaderships have skirted, and in the old days we would skirt it by endorsing a secular plank.
In the recent days, something which has been a subject of great comment in the last week, is that the Israeli attack began immediately after the Indian Prime Minister’s visit to that country. It is reasonable to infer that the Indian Prime Minister might have been taken into confidence about the events that were going to follow. And while that has led to some criticism at home as well, it is very interesting to observe how such an engagement with Israel may have been necessary for India at this point of time, to once again postpone that entrapment of a conflict between two civilizations in this region. What has happened, the way the West has finally played out, there has been a change on the board on which America has played these issues.
The Iran conflagration vis-à-vis Israel has led Iran to attack seven other Islamic nations. So, we at least have evaded becoming the fall guy or the victims of sapping the rising Islamic trend. It’s almost like in the old days, history tells us of how Vlad was thrown in the way of a sweeping Ottoman movement into Europe. India, and the more ancient Sanatani and Buddhists, and other peacenik civilizations would not want to become fodder merely to sap the strength of one, so that it can be weakened and then fought in Europe. These are realities which are often not stated but need to be understood. All this has happened. Today what America is playing, it is using Islam against Islam in the two theaters which it has sparked off in the last one month, in the Middle East and also in the Pakistan-Afghanistan theater. All these fires it is lighting. That then brings us to the issue of why all these fires are being lit. These fires are being lit because the American nation stands over-extended financially, and the nature of the depravity of the elite is primarily about a self-claimed right to consume beyond their means and beyond moral fault lines. The morality of it is what the Epstein thing brings out into the open.
But there is also the fact that the American consumption rate is much higher than the value produced in America. This difference of value is the reason why in economics today we have terms like purchasing power parity. This is an admission of the fact that the value system is spiked. Now coming back to how the value system is spiked, we know that the petrodollar is of course the key. These wars are as much about controlling the pricing of the petrodollar. These sparks which are being lit, which we find very worrying, across the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, everybody is tremendously watchful and must be. India, China and Russia, all three which surround this theater are impacted, and must be watchful not to allow this to spread. This is essentially about threatening us and our economies. The biggest challenge for us is that we have been cornered into a situation where we are not producing our own energy requirement, we are importing it. Thereby our value is being blamed. We have the energy resources, the hydrocarbon resources, but through manipulation—and corruption is the biggest manipulation that the United States has used as a weapon. The CIA has weaponized it worldwide.
There is another fact which came up which I would like to address, about how this is actually a war. It is a war, but President Trump chooses to call it a combat. But therein lies another contradiction. If it is not a war then he is not authorized by American law to authorize a political assassination, something which was underlined by the Frank Church Committee. That is again grounds where the President has violated. Perhaps he is hiding behind the fact that the Israelis did the assassination and not him. That is another part of the new American playbook; get somebody else to do individual acts while you achieve your own agendas.
Thank you, and hopefully we can evaluate some of these issues in greater detail. Thank you.