Norman Caruso (Gaming Historian) announced his retirement recently, and as a parting gift he uploaded the files from the Universal v. Nintendo case over Donkey Kong. This had been in the works for many years but now we can finally look at this seminal lawsuit that helped define Nintendo’s future!

While many have been digging into the files after the launch, I was originally working with Norm on a summary of the whole case for his next video. The case is often misreported and slightly misunderstood, so this is a summary of the events as they happened: According to the original files (which I have reuploaded and organized on my Archive page as individual files). Though many files from the original case were destroyed as part of regular court cleaning procedures, we still have a relatively complete view of the narrative of the lawsuit and all its drama!

Universal v. Nintendo

We’ll start after the release of Donkey Kong, first shipped to coin-op game distributors in July or August 1981. The game quickly became incredibly popular in both the United States and Japan – a vital part of the video game boom that flourished in 1982. But even being part of this growing industry, the game would not have been part of anything dramatic had it not been for a routine check done by a lawyer.

MCA/Universal (hereafter, Universal), the major motion picture studio, had been involved in a dispute around the rights to the classic 1933 film King Kong a few years earlier. RKO Pictures – the original distributor of the film – had all but collapsed as a film studio but there was ample interest in the King Kong intellectual property. Universal sought those rights, but RKO granted them to Dino De Laurentiis Corp to create a remake with Paramount Pictures instead. In the subsequent court case, Universal assumed several rights to King Kong from the estate of the original creator and in December 1980 started exploring those license rights more affirmatively.

When Donkey Kong first released, it garnered no notice from Universal. Video games may have been big, but not yet a threat to movie studio cultural dominance. However, with the increasing need for companies to stand out in the market, the potential of attaching a license video games was being explored – which was the spark that brought the two gorillas into conflict.

In August 1981, Universal’s legal department received a letter from Randy Rissman, co-founder of Tiger Electronic Toys. Tiger (later Tiger Electronics) was an Illinois-based company primarily creating handheld electronic games and they were seeking a license for King Kong. As it turned out, Rissman had been early to see Donkey Kong when he was visiting Japan. Predicting its success, he arranged for Tiger to create clones of the game: Both an electronic handheld game as well as an Atari VCS game cartridge.

Universal were a little befuddled at this sudden question about King Kong rights – which had little perceived value. The only current project with the IP was a proposed section of the Universal Studios Tour. With the remake by Paramount some years in the past, there was little reason to license the property. Nevertheless, on September 18, 1981 Universal signed a fairly generous licensing agreement with Tiger for electronic and cartridge games.

In late September 1981, Universal conducted a routine trademark search for King Kong to see if there were any conflicting businesses using the name. While there were a few take-offs on the wording of the name, they did not turn up Donkey Kong, which had been filed in July that year. In December, anticipating the need to establish trademark protection for the Tiger game, Universal licensing expert Loretta Sifuentes procured a Parker Brothers electronic game from the Universal Studios Tour that could be temporarily rebranded with the “King Kong” name for purposes of trademark filing. However, when the lawyers did their search this time in January 1982, they turned up a conflict: Donkey Kong.

Immediately suspecting something, Sifuentes and fellow licensing department employee Steven Adler went to check out Donkey Kong in a nearby arcade. They put two and two together: Tiger was clearly intending to copy Donkey Kong for their King Kong game. Sifuentes later claimed that she alerted Universal’s law department to this forthcoming issue.

A few weeks later in mid-February 1982, Adler and Sifuentes attended the New York Toy Fair to be on the lookout for licensing opportunities. They were approached by a man representing an electronics company who sought permission to create an electronic wrist watch game (a rising category at the time) with the King Kong license. As part of their inquiry, they asked if Universal would shield them from potential litigation by Nintendo. These worries were compounded as they saw that Tiger Electronics had sent out a catalog at the show which advertised their upcoming King Kong game – doing so without even speaking to Universal for permission to use their trademark.

These tensions simmered in the background while the situation became even more complicated. Just before Toy Fair, Coleco Industries had concluded a licensing arrangement with Nintendo Co. Ltd. to produce adaptations of Donkey Kong in cartridge form as well as their tabletop mini-arcade electronic games – plus a separate agreement for Donkey Kong dolls. The cartridge rights had been bargained hard for and they intended to exploit their victory by making Donkey Kong the pack-in with their Colecovision console, forthcoming that June.

Coleco had also been in discussions with Universal over licensing since Fall of the prior year. Their licensing expert Al Kahn (later head of 4Kids Entertainment) had kicked the tires on the movie studio about licensing properties like Smokey the Bandit and Jaws for adaptation to video games. While these talks didn’t amount to anything specific (aside from Coleco later bidding on the video game rights to E.T.) they did turn Universal’s attention more firmly towards the video game market. Universal had to consider who they might partner with and how best to tackle the new commercial opportunity.

Head of Universal Sid Sheinberg very much wanted King Kong to be part of that future. Sheinberg had been gung-ho on Universal’s rights battle for King Kong and he felt there was something to mine out of the old Hollywood icon. He would commission a script for another King Kong remake later that year in hopes of bolstering the property. With all of these business opportunities colliding, it was inevitable that he’d find out about Donkey Kong.

According to the court records, April 1, 1982 is when the head of Universal was first informed about Donkey Kong. He first read about the game in a publication – though what specific profile was never identified. Knowing nothing of the prior investigations, Sheinberg instructed the company’s outside counsel, Robert Hadl, to look into the game and see if it infringed on King Kong. Sheinberg was informed by Hadl that the game did infringe, on the basis of its general premise and name. Convinced of an easy case with the leverage they possessed as major motion picture studio, Sheinberg planned to spring the trap later in the month.

Arnold Greenberg, head of Coleco, met with Sheinberg, Steve Adler, and Universal chairman Lew Wasserman on April 27 to discuss potential deals – including a substantial 20% investment into Coleco. Sheinberg led the conversation to Coleco’s video game business, which Greenberg was more than happy to talk about. When broaching the topic of Donkey Kong, Sheinberg wasted no time in telling Greenberg that Coleco was infringing on Universal’s rights to King Kong by selling the game. Later in the day, when Greenberg showed off one of their upcoming commercials for the game which directly riffed on King Kong, Sheinberg once again agitated for a settlement.

The next day, Universal sprang into action. They sent telegrams to both Coleco and Nintendo of America – being informed of this situation for the first time – to cease their infringement of King Kong. Coleco, anxious over their potential dealings with Universal and the upcoming launch of the Colecovision, was under extreme pressure. They had to consider very carefully what would be the next move for the company in the long term.

Nintendo, meanwhile, caught a sense that something was suspicious. On May 3, their law firm conducted a trademark search for King Kong on a hunch. In their search, they did not find any evidence of consistent, recent uses of the King Kong trademark; their verdict was that no singular entity had expressed its use in a long time, certainly not Universal. This affirmed to Nintendo of America’s chief legal counsel, Howard Lincoln, that they could not rush into a decision.

Coleco, on the other hand, felt they needed to settle quickly. On May 5, the day before a scheduled legal meeting between the parties, Coleco agreed that they would settle with Universal. As part of this preliminary agreement, they also agreed not to tell Nintendo of their decision to settle, and act as a supposedly neutral arbiter to push Nintendo into agreeing to terms.

The parties met at Universal Studios the next day to parlay. Representing Nintendo of America was president Minoru Arakawa, Lincoln, and Jim McCree from the same law firm. Coleco was represented by counsels Michael Schwefel and Fred Yerman. For Universal, Robert Hadl – who had advised Sheinberg to pursue legal action – was on hand, later joined in the second meeting by Loretta Sifuentes. Coleco’s counsel pushed for Nintendo to capitulate to Universal’s terms, but Lincoln advised Arakawa to stand firm. They didn’t believe that Donkey Kong constituted infringement or that it was an open and shut case.

Critically, Lincoln asked for something simple from Universal: A chain of title. They wanted proof that Universal truly owned the rights to King Kong before they would consider any sort of disadvantageous agreement. For a company like Universal and its large legal department, this should have been a simple thing to provide. However, in the days after the meeting, Nintendo received no such evidence of ownership. Their suspicions were thoroughly raised.

Nintendo of America informed their parent company of the forthcoming legal action while Coleco formalized a settlement with Universal. They handed over 3% of all of their royalties from all of their Donkey Kong products. If they convinced Nintendo to settle with Universal though, they would get 2% of all royalties received by Universal from Nintendo. Coleco was safe from potentially crippling litigation at the eve of their new major product launch with the Colecovision.

However, this new agreement presented a difficulty: Tiger Electronic Toys. The licensing agreement signed at the beginning of all of this had granted them exclusive rights to King Kong electronic and video games, which was what Coleco’s agreement now constituted. Knowing that Coleco was going to net them a much bigger dividend, Sifuentes was directed by Universal to nullify the existing contract by any means necessary. As it turned out, Tiger had been rather neglectful in providing any materials for their upcoming games directly to Universal – which gave them an immediate excuse for agitation.

On May 4, Sifuentes wrote an angry letter to Tiger over their neglectful hand in the partnership and demanded that the forthcoming games be furnished to Universal within the next few days. Rissman replied the next day, sending over all of their materials for their King Kong games: The VCS cartridge which was nearing production, a tabletop LCD electronic game, and a handheld version of the game which also had an in-built clock function (like Nintendo’s Game & Watch series). While the latter two were non-functioning mock-ups that only displayed the gameplay, Tiger hoped those would be sufficient to allay any doubts.

Sifuentes raised immediate objections that the games had been advertised without Universal’s approval at the Toy Fair, at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show, and were planned to be shown at the coming Summer CES. She also said that a game-with-a-watch had not been agreed to in the language of the contract. Then, most importantly, she claimed that because Tiger was clearly copying Donkey Kong, that was a potential infringement on another company’s IP and they could not abide it. Sifunetes declared the contract null and void. On top of that, Coleco sent Tiger a letter over objections to the King Kong tabletop game as being overly similar to the Donkey Kong mini-arcade they were about to release.

Tiger, however, did not wilt at this challenge. They did their own examination and concluded that Universal had never properly transferred rights to them to create an authorized King Kong game – nor did they seem to own the trademark for King Kong more generally. Additionally, they claimed that Universal attempted to use a clause in the contract to assume control of Tiger’s patented technology, which they said was a violation of antitrust law. They requested clarification on Universal’s objections such that they might save their forthcoming games from the fate of having no attached license.

Universal attempted to keep their fingers in their ears, considering the contract legally dead, but they likely suspected Tiger could cause issues if they continued to deny the license. Tiger was offered an amendment to the original contract – so long as they added a few elements to differentiate their games from Donkey Kong. The VCS game previously contained slanted platforms which would now be perfectly straight. The barrels as obstacles were changed to bombs. The LCD games already had the conceit of a fireman as the protagonist, but Tiger were instructed to add a hat to the character to make that clear.

The contract signed a few months later had new stipulations. Most importantly, it was non-exclusive and had been approved by Coleco – who Universal saw as the more important partner. The original royalty expected by Universal would be halved for the first year as a concession for the turmoil they’d gone through. Tiger also received protection against Nintendo by Universal, as well as an agreement by Coleco for them to not take legal action – despite the overlap in product categories.

Ultimately, the rigmarole may not have been worth the hassle. By the end of 1982, Tiger had sold 55,215 of the VCS cartridge, 9,299 of their tabletop games, 15,264 of the LCD games with a clock, and 673 of the standard LCD games which netted Universal a few thousand dollars in royalties. As a small company that may have been decent, but it paled in comparison to Coleco shipping almost 6 million Donkey Kong cartridges by April of the following year with royalties exceeding $2 million. Universal obviously made the better choice for their business.

Nintendo had to make their own resolution. On May 21, 1982, Sheinberg and Hadl met with Arakawa and Lincoln with hopes that settlement was on the table. Both partners were hopeful that they could work together on future projects, as Nintendo already was with the licensing of Popeye from King Features. However, Lincoln asserted that the claims of Universal had no merit. Having gone through the evidence, he doubted Universal’s claim to King Kong and had no intention of diminishing the success of their breakthrough product by admitting an infringement.

Sheinberg was incensed. His anger came out with threats and hard-talk: A true movie mogul’s personality. He claimed that he would do to Nintendo what they had done to Sony in the famous Betamax case – leveraging their power as a major film studio and as a center of strong litigation. In his retort, Sheinberg boasted that “[Universal’s] litigation department even turned a profit” (this was rendered in the book Game Over as Sheinberg viewing “litigation as a profit center” – but the testimony of both Lincoln and Hadl say otherwise). A former lawyer himself, Sheinberg knew the power of legal threats. They gave Nintendo until the upcoming Summer Consumer Electronics Show to settle or else the suit was forthcoming.

Arakawa was understandably unsure about holding his ground, but Lincoln reassured him that they could win this fight. Both sides readied for battle, with Nintendo selecting the firm to represent them in court – as Lincoln was not a trial lawyer. They selected the Seattle firm Mudge Rose Guthrie & Alexander + Sax and MacIver who assigned the tenacious John Kirby to this complicated rights dispute. Kirby, a former civil rights lawyer who’d turned to corporate cases, was fierce on the stand and would leave no stone unturned.

On June 29, 1982, Universal filed suit against Nintendo Co. Ltd. and Nintendo of America in the Southern District of New York state, asking for a preliminary injunction over Nintendo’s alleged violation of the story of King Kong as well as its trademark. Coleco issued a press statement in support of Universal, having failed to push Nintendo towards capitulation. Many headlines about “ten ton gorillas” followed.

Kirby took his time in examining the facts before any evidence was collected. He and his team were digging into Lincoln’s suspicions about Universal’s ownership of the King Kong rights while also asserting that the claim against Donkey Kong was bogus. Nintendo’s first countermeasure claimed they had suffered at the hands of Universal’s dealings with Coleco and Tiger. Before long, this started to affect their bottom line.

Nintendo had courted offers of licensing beyond the agreements they signed with Coleco since April 1982. The first wave of Donkey Kong merchandise sat alongside that of Pac-Man in this period of the arcade boom, with the characters adorning shirts, lunchboxes, cereal, board games, and even getting a dedicated slot on the Saturday Supercade cartoon show. By early 1983, Nintendo of America had signed 40 licensees to their Donkey Kong product – the beginning of an empire that is among the most lucrative licensing enterprises on the planet today.

Universal, seeing these exploitations of the property as further infringement, started going after these third-party licensees in January 1983 with legal threats. Many of these companies were unwilling to fully stand with Nintendo. The likes of Atari (creating the computer versions of Donkey Kong) and Ruby-Spears (producing Saturday Supercade) caved into the royalty demands. Other companies either demanded Nintendo to return their royalty advances, held their royalties in escrow pending the judgment of the case, or canceled their agreements with Nintendo to get Universal off their back.

Nintendo was also moving into damage control to prevent any further confusion regarding Donkey Kong and King Kong. Anytime a magazine or newspaper drew a comparison between the two properties, Nintendo of America’s PR head Susan Schoenecker would send them a letter to clarify the difference and request a printed retraction. The lawsuit was going to be long and complex, and Donkey Kong wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon – they didn’t want to stoke the fire of Universal’s claim of trademark infringement.

On May 10, 1983, Nintendo’s law firm finally submitted their argument: And it was a big one. They had determined in their research that Universal had no right to express ownership of King Kong. Universal had previously argued in court that not only was the King Kong trademark uncertain, but the actual status of the original work was in public domain. They could not assert a right to something which they did not legally possess.

So what was this about?

In intellectual property law, any singular work can have many different parts of law which govern its application. When we are talking about “King Kong“, we are talking about several different things that overlap. There is the 1933 RKO Pictures release King Kong, which most film buffs are familiar with. There is the character within the film, King Kong, which has specific attributes but different expressions of appearance and personality depending on the setting. Then there is King Kong, the story concept dreamed up by Merian C. Cooper.

Cooper came to RKO Pictures in the 1930s with the idea for King Kong in hand to be made into a movie. He had developed the idea some years earlier and pitched it to RKO for development. For the film, he served as co-director, a producer, and received a story credit. With the film in development, he also commissioned a friend of his to create a novelization based on the screenplay – a common Hollywood practice even today. The novel was bundled as a paperback book and then abridged in two issues of the sci-fi pulp publication Mystery Magazine, both prior to the film’s release.

In the following years, Cooper had many rights disputes with RKO over the King Kong character – which he asserted ownership of as an independent contractor and not as a work wholly owned by RKO. These particulars are not overly relevant to our story, up until the point that Universal enters the picture. As previously mentioned, in 1975 Universal sued Paramount over their forthcoming remake of King Kong with Dino de Laurentiis Corp. Universal asserted that a verbal agreement with RKO to make the remake had been broken and therefore sought to challenge the right of Laurentiis to claim exclusive rights to a remake. Roped into this was Merian’s son, Richard Cooper, who still fought for his father’s rights to the property as part of his estate.

Universal’s assertion was that RKO did not have the right to declare exclusive ownership over King Kong. The novelization had never had its copyright renewed – a familiar story to anyone who knows the tale behind the publications of H. P. Lovecraft and other pulp writers. As this was the earliest work formally published, that meant that the King Kong story as presented in the novelization was in the public domain.

Paramount argued that since the novel was based on the screenplay, the movie was the original work. The difference in copyright terms would be that the shared elements of the film and the novel would either be part of or excluded from the public domain, with the unique elements between them given the opposite fate. If Universal won, that meant the character of King Kong, the premise of King Kong, plus any other particulars shared between the film and the book were free for anybody to use. If Paramount won, only the things in the written work which were distinct from the film were in the public domain.

In the verdict on the case, the judge sided with Universal: The only rights RKO possessed regarding King Kong were the elements specific to the original film, plus its sequel Son of Kong. Everything else as presented in the novel was fair game. However, in a follow-up verdict, the judge also declared that Merian Cooper’s estate possessed unique rights to the character of King Kong, as well as the story and the name – what’s come to be known as the “Cooper Judgment”. These carved-out rights, primarily regarding merchandising, were then sold by Richard Cooper to Universal – save for the right of his company to create King Kong-based Halloween costumes for four years afterwards. Universal profited nicely from the case by taking a percentage of income from the 1976 remake and reserved the right to create a King Kong remake of their own sometime in the future.

This state of affairs is a bit confusing. While the Cooper estate had always claimed publication rights to the character of King Kong, how did ownership of the character and story square with the fact that all the critical elements of the narrative were in the public domain? One thing was very clear in this transfer though: Universal possessed no rights to the trademark “King Kong”. Whatever else they owned, they could not assert sole ownership of King Kong as a name for goods, just as they had argued the same against RKO. The argument that Donkey Kong violated their trademarks carried no weight.

Universal thought they had covered their bases, as they had attained legal permission from RKO to assume rights from the original film solely for the purposes of this case. In all other ways, they had tread carefully around those rights in their further exploitation of the brand: Both the teams creating the King Kong-themed Universal Studios Tour addon and the people working on the proposed new remake were specifically instructed to avoid referencing the RKO film or the remake. But in asserting a sole right of ownership to the King Kong property, they had overplayed their hand.

Even with this revelation, Universal attempted to bolster the claim that Donkey Kong‘s success was ultimately derived from its association with King Kong. An independent market research group called coin-op machine operators and asked them questions about the game, as well as the name. Out of the 150 people surveyed, only 21% actually considered that the Donkey Kong name was derived from King Kong – hardly a strong result in favor of Universal.

At the end of 1983, Judge D. J. Sweet made his ruling. He found that Universal had presented no evidence that they owned the King Kong trademark, and that said trademark had no “singular meaning” – essentially concluding it had been diluted beyond sole ownership, much like the brand Kleenex. As such, their brandishing of the trademark was a wonton violation of trademark law and Universal had no standing in the case.

The world was a bit stunned when small Nintendo – who’d not ever since had a hit the size of Donkey Kong stateside – were declared winners on January 4, 1984. Universal, aghast at this judgment, immediately filed for appeal. Unusually, they also had the original case reopened, adding more to the record as they challenged the conduct of the trial for a separate judgment.

The most significant addition to the reopened case was the deposition of Loretta Sifuentes – who had moved from Universal to Coleco. Having been there to observe the earliest conflict of the video game rights, her testimony added much clarity to the reasoning behind Universal’s actions regarding the King Kong IP. When questioned by John Kirby, Sifuentes provided a major revelation about Universal’s knowledge of their rights – or lack thereof.

After the 1982 New York Toy Fair, Sifuentes said she’d spoken with Universal’s legal department about the conflict vis a vis Tiger’s King Kong game and Donkey Kong. Universal legal counsel Joseph Di Muro then confided in her that he’d previously determined that Universal had no actual rights to King Kong and suggested that they cancel any contract with Tiger. As supporting evidence, Sifuentes claimed that Universal’s licensing catalog – which showcased all the intellectual properties that were available for use by third parties – dropped King Kong not long after this conversation.

When Di Muro was called for a deposition, he categorically denied that this conversation had taken place. Universal’s also attempted to cast shade on Sifuentes as an unreliable witness, claiming she had not done her due diligence to inform those within Universal of the negotiations regarding King Kong, including the Tiger deal which had not been worth their while. However, as the person most intimately involved in the negotiations over the video game rights and having many supporting documents to that fact, Sifuentes appears to have mostly told the truth regarding this manic cluster of priorities at Universal.

Supporting this fact was Sid Sheinberg’s own deposition. Despite having a direct, personal interest in King Kong, he avoided the subject of what rights to the property he believed the company owned with a lawyerly agility. John Kirby spared no mercy in his questioning of the executive, but Sheinberg’s obstinance seemed to prove the point: Universal could not clearly state its rights to King Kong. Their inability to provide a chain of title back from the first meeting with Nintendo of America was borne out.

At the end of 1984, the appeals court found that the original summary judgment had been correct. Universal’s flagrant abuse of the legal system to control the rights to King Kong which they knew they did not legally possess was unacceptable. Additionally, using that false claim to bully Nintendo of America’s third-party licensees was unlawful – opening the door for those companies to sue for damages. Nintendo itself was awarded $1.6 million in damages at the end of the following year – right at the time they were launching the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America.

With only one legal recourse, Universal attempted to appeal to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to rule on the conduct of the trial. However, the claims stood, and on July 15, 1986 over four years of legal turmoil came to an end when the 2nd Circuit judges affirmed the lower court judgment. Nintendo was no longer a middling arcade game company – they were a force to be reckoned with in the new entertainment landscape.

Legacy

In recent times, copyright automation systems have been flagrantly abused to assert rights that the claimants may not possess. Universal v. Nintendo proves that even the most powerful business entities are not immune to abusing the copyright system, and how vital a chain of title is for legal recourse.

It is also an unfortunate truth that after Nintendo had firmly established that Universal had no rights to the King Kong trademark, they still had to go through several months of legal proceedings for the case to be rendered – then several more years as Universal fought back on a bogus claim. Individual creators asserting their rights simply do not have the wherewithal to hold out for so long.

This story also highlights the complicated status of the public domain. While the particular status of King Kong has been used to create original works without the need for approvals, the difficulty of avoiding copyright pitfalls remains a sticky issue. Whether it’s Popeye with no spinach or Winnie the Pooh with no shirt, these issues are hard to reconcile with the idea of a character being truly free to use. The original King Kong film will be entering the public domain in 2029, which will undoubtedly bring with it much renewed interest in the character that created the kaiju genre.

Of course, we can’t deny the great irony that Universal Pictures and Nintendo have had several collaborations since then: Such as The Wizard film in 1989 (which features the King Kong Encounter) and being the company that produces the Mario animated films. Neither company is quite the same as it was – in Universal’s case having gone through many ownership changes – but it’s an amusing capstone to the story that it would be under the Universal banner that Donkey Kong received his most successful on-screen appearance.

As it comes to video games, this trial also has its legacy. While the specific aspects of law at play didn’t have much to do with electronic entertainment, the judgment was a huge moment for the legitimacy of video games vis a vis film in the sense of corporate power.

One of the often missed legacies was how this trial factored into Nintendo’s business dealings. Nintendo of America saw the capitulation of both Coleco and Atari as black marks on their relationship. Both companies had to pay a higher royalty for their rights to Donkey Kong Jr., which is attributed in the trial to be due to their capitulation to Universal – also resulting in Nintendo suing Atari for the unpaid royalties. According to Howard Lincoln, after that license Coleco was essentially barred from receiving any further licenses from Nintendo.

These bad feelings also seem to have played a role in Nintendo’s decision to go it alone in the U.S. market. In the book Game Over, it’s reported that Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi had an animated confrontation with Arnold Greenberg of Coleco over a dispute related to Atari’s computer rights to Donkey Kong. However, according to Lincoln’s testimony, this confrontation largely had to do with Yamauchi’s displeasure over their stance in the lawsuit. Coleco did later sue Universal for damages related to the case, but no further dealings were ever made with Nintendo. What this reframing of events means for the scuttled Atari deal for the Famicom is still an open question.

Of course, for Nintendo, this was their establishment as a legal force to be reckoned with. Having never been a particularly litigious company in Japan, Nintendo of America would be reinforced by its legal authority. Over the course of the suit, Howard Lincoln moved from a legal consultant to vice president of Nintendo of America as Minoru Arakawa’s right hand man. His legal acumen helped the company navigate the complicated waters of enormous success – as often in defense as on the attack – which reshaped the landscape of video games in the United States.

Then there’s John Kirby. He continued to serve as Nintendo’s chief trial attorney in their subsequent legal battles: Defending themselves against Atari Games, Atari Corp, Magnavox, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission as well as suing the likes of Lewis-Galoob and others. As a result of this case, Kirby was given an exclusive right to the name “Donkey Kong” for sailboats, and was later immortalized as the inspiration for the name of the character Kirby.

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Though we can squeeze much out of the remaining case files, the original trial no longer exists. In the process of legal clean-up in the past few decades, many original court records have been destroyed. Accessibility remains an issue for many court records, usually requiring physical proximity to a National Archives office and sometimes with the requirement of purchasing printed copies rather than being able to photograph originals. In some cases – like Atari Corp v. Nintendo – companies have even been able to seal off access to these records.

Many of these cases provide incredibly valuable bastions of information for historical purposes. I’ve previously written on how the Magnavox court files fundamentally reshape the Ralph Baer-centric narrative of the Odyssey. The Video Game History Foundation recently put together a video about new revelations around the launch of the NES, partially drawn from legal papers. Dungeons & Dragons researchers were recently blessed with access to an original draft of the game preserved in court records. These dusty legal papers have preserved many facts, contemporaneous opinions, and stories that enrich our understanding of this history – despite their often dry presentation. Should you be one who wants to find out even more about the case, check all the files out on the Internet Archive.

If you want to help in these efforts of preserving legal documents, read this article I wrote on the subject – and of course join us at Gaming Alexandria! Thanks so much to Norm for taking the time over 6 years ago(!) to scan these materials while they still exist. We hope this story is as exciting to you as it is to us!

Join me for a live discussion on World Cup 2026: Geopolitics and the Beautiful Game, with Gazan journalist Abubaker Abed, Latin American historian Alex Aviña, and host Adnan Husain today.

(June 9th) at 14:00 EST, 21:30 IST.
Or whenever, the link will still work.

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The United States (along with Canada and Mexico) was chosen to host the FIFA World Cup in 2018, at which point it was already an obviously bad idea. By 2018, Donald Trump A) existed and B) had already signed a ‘Muslim Ban’, approved by the US Supreme Court about the same time as the World Cup bid. The signs were already there that this was a bad idea, but FIFA went ahead anyways and here we are. The 2026 World Cup is an offensive debacle before it’s even started.

In the lead-up, the United States has bombed Iran’s Azadi Stadium, where the national team trained. They have banned the Iranian team from staying overnight in ‘America’, and banned many Iranian staff members and journalists entirely. The animus doesn’t apply just to Iran, many fans from qualifying countries are banned from the relevant visas entirely, and many from all over are getting rejected. Not only fans but also team members, staff, and referees. This is not a World Cup, nor even really a North American Cup, it is an ‘American’ Cup, meaning draconian, hostile, and extortionate.

I must add that on top of this, America is conducting a genocide in Palestine, imposing starvation sieges on Cuba, has murdered schoolchildren in Iran, kidnapped the President of Venezuela, installed an Al-Qaeda regime in Syria, and any countless other outrages. At stolen home, the ‘Americans’ are rounding up North American natives (called illegal immigrants now) and placing them in concentration camps. They have the largest prison population on a good day and Kansas (City) was building a ‘World Cup Jail’ for some reason. They repress their own people’s speech and impose those restrictions on people visiting. The United States of today has committed and is committing far more violations than the Nazis did when they hosted their 1936 Olympics, but where’s the outrage?

Well, here’s the outrage.

Not a Fan of Fans

The World Cup is supposed to be, as it says on the tin, a moment when the world gathers for something besides war. But war is all ‘America’ is doing now, and the World Cup is no exception. Now the World Cup has become a site of ritual humiliation, a dying empire lashing out against a world it can no longer control. None of this is normal. Indeed, it violates norms going back to time immemorial.

When Brazil hosted the World Cup in 2014, they passed a 900-page General Law of the World Cup “covering everything from visa and work permits to social campaigns to criminal provisions.” When Russia hosted the 2018 World Cup, their Parliament gave visa-free entry to FAN ID holders for the rest of the year. Qatar (2022) is easy enough to access normally, and they offered their Hayya Card to people with match tickets or just proof of accommodation. This included public transportation.

Going further back, when the United Kingdom considered refusing visas to the North Korean team in 1966, but an internal memo said “Apparently FIFA has made it very plain to the FA (Football Association) that if any team [that] has won its way through to the finals is denied visas then the finals will take place elsewhere.” More recently, when Indonesia refused to grant the ‘Israeli’ under-17s visas in 2023, FIFA moved the U-20 World Cup entirely, despite the fact that ‘Israel’ had killed members of the Palestinian team and Indonesia was doing the right thing. There was the principle of the thing, but now we discover that the principle is just White Supremacy.

‘America’ never relaxed its draconian visa regulations (on stolen land) and has never stopped its Gestapo roundups of natives. Even the Nazis toned it down during their games but not the Nazis that won, the ‘Americans’. Again, Trump’s ‘America’ was awarded the games during the furor over his Muslim Ban and, predictably, many Moroccans, have had their visas rejected. But it’s not just Muslims. Many British (Scottish) fans have had approval withdrawn as well. Now that ‘America’ requires social media screening before entry, who can tell?

Of course, as a matter of course, fans from Haiti, Iran, Senegal, and Ivory Coast are banned from the recommended visitor visas categorically. And until May, fans from Algeria, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Tunisia had to pay a $15,000 deposit. Many countries that qualified have a visa rejection rate of over 40% normally. Meanwhile, the 8% ticket allocation due to Iran (under FIFA rules!) has simply been revoked by ‘America’ entirely.

When FIFA’s craven (bald) head Gianni Infantino said, in 2017 before awarding the bid, “Teams who qualify for a World Cup need to have access to the country, otherwise there is no World Cup. That is obvious,” he missed his own point.

These are things FIFA should have a problem with, but they are, of course, part of the problem. FIFA, like every other supposedly international institution, has been revealed as just another part of the White Empire. They gave Trump a FIFA Peace Prize while he was conducting a genocide, including the murder of many Palestinian sportspeople and destruction of all facilities in Gaza. Play Nazi games, win Nazi prizes. This is the worst World Cup ever, and should honestly be boycotted in solidarity with all the people kept out. It’s not just fans, ‘America’ is attacking the players, referees, everybody in the world is fair game in this unfair cup.

Anti-Competitive to Teams, Referees, Everybody

It’s not just fans that can’t access the World Cup. It’s teams. Switzerland’s star striker Breel Embolo was denied a visa and unable to travel with the team (he is, not coincidentally, colored). His visa was just approved after much uproar, but this has an anti-competitive effect already. The entire South Africa team’s departure was delayed because of ‘visa issues’, which also again disadvantages them from the beginning. The same thing happened to Moroccan player Zakaria El Ouahdi. Iraqi striker Aymen Hussein was detained and questioned for seven hours. These egregious examples have been ‘sorted out’ but they have an anti-competitive effect already.

As further examples, the Senegal team was singled out for body searches on the tarmac when they arrived. The Uzbekistan team was strictly searched, body by body, when they got off the bus, having already cleared immigration before. There is a clear racist dimension to this intimidation that would make Hitler proud, though even he was too ashamed to do it in 1936. Oh, how the Whitey have fallen.

The Iranian team, of course, is the most egregious example. Not only did ‘America’ bomb one of their training facilities, they are also denying them the right to even sleep after their games. As Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said, “The United States doesn’t want the Iranian national team to stay overnight in the United States.” FIFA is in on this, even after Trump said he could not guarantee the “life and safety” of Iranian players (seems important!), they still refused their request to move their matches to Mexico. So instead the team must fly in and out of the country entirely before and after games, putting them at a real disadvantage physically. Not to mention in physical danger from their hosts, admittedly. Meanwhile Iranian staff, including coaches, have been denied visas, as have journalists.

And the outrages don’t stop there. ‘America’ has even rejected FIFA referees! Somalian referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan was denied entry at the Miami airport. FIFA issued a craven statement saying “FIFA is not involved in host country immigration processes, including visa adjudications,” which is a lie, they often get legislation changed beforehand, but not for ‘America’. There is also no report of them simply moving this ref to games in Mexico or Canada. FIFA doesn’t even take care of their own people.

The State of the Games

This Cup is already a shambles before the first ball has been kicked. There has been a school shooting near the England camp, because of course, ‘America’ has a shooting almost every day, it would be an anomaly if they didn’t. The Swiss camp was beset by snakes, the Senegalese training pitch didn’t bounce, Japan had to change venues due to terrible facilities.

‘America’ is not a safe or decent place to travel to and the world knows it. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “The World Cup starts later this week. U.S. hotels are already in last place. Hotel bookings in Canada and Mexico are outpacing all but one American city [San Francisco].” ‘America’ as a colony is just a pyramid scheme nearing its end, the whole thing is a con, including the World Cup. Tickets are selling for more than $20,000 (some upwards of a million), but who wants them? And even if you can buy them, can you attend?

As part of the con, FIFA set up its own scalping platform, but that’s not going well. After the 26% ‘resale fee’ the median ticket for the US/Paraguay match (for example) costs $800, and 4,400 are still available because who is buying this? In contrast, tickets for Mexico at home have only 300 tickets available. As the FT reports, “Fan groups estimate the cost of following a team at this summer’s World Cup will be five times higher than four years ago.” For all their greed, this World Cup may see empty seats. Indeed, should. The whole thing stinks to high heaven. This World Cup is already a hotbed of corruption, racism, and greed. Hardly a hot ticket.

Showcase: Shows Over

Sanctimonious nations like Norway (which said they’d skip the Qatar World Cup despite not qualifying) and Germany (which posed hands over mouths and wore rainbow Rolexes) made a huge fuss about Qatar, but they’re saying nothing now. About a Cup where even teams and referees can’t travel freely and everybody gets their social media scanned to see if they’re suitably quiet about the genocide currently going on. And the same journalists and officials who protested about Qatar are quiet because that was, in hindsight, just racism. These fake nations, fake institutions, fake journalists; they’re all part of the White Empire. All a bunch of false flags to match the false internationalism of FIFA. This event, like so many events this century, reveals the White Empire behind the scenes, and it’s obscene.

A World Cup is supposed to be showcase for the host nation and the 2026 Cup is. This is an awful World Cup hosted in an evil nation. As Maya Angelou said, “When someone tells you who and what they are. Believe them the first time.” FIFA should have known from the time of the ‘Muslim Ban’ that ‘America’ was a wildly unsuitable candidate to host a World Cup, but they went ahead anyways because the leadership of FIFA is wildly unsuitable themselves.

FIFA is obviously craven and corrupt, no countries have the guts to speak up, and White journalists treat these things as an anomaly rather than a host nation worse than the Nazis, historically. ‘America’ is showing the world who they are with the World Cup, which is hostile to the world. And this will have consequences. Like China’s Olympics was a ‘coming out’ party to the world, this is a ‘party’s over’ message from ‘America’. They’re really trying to take their ball and go home. And the funny thing is, ‘Americans’ don’t even like football and it shows.

I’ll be (Internet connection down south allowing) on a livestream with Adnan Husain, Abubaker Abed (recently out of Gaza), and Alex Avina on the World Cup. Should be available via Adnan’s link or @indications, which should be unbanned by then.

Tuesday, June 9th at 19:00 Dublin (GMT+1) / 14:00 PM EDT / 11:00 PT / 21:00 PM Kazan / 23:30 PM Sri Lanka.

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This is shaping up to be the worst World Cup in history because the worst people in history are hosting it. Ze ‘Americans’.

The entire (re: all) Iranian team has been denied stays in ‘America’ and has to ‘commute’ from Mexico. Their physical safety is not assured. Switzerland striker Breel Embolo has had his visa withdrawn, hours before he was due to travel. South Africa’s entire team had to delay travel until their visa issues were resolved. Moroccan Zakaria El Ouahdi was unable to join the team until his visa was finally approved. None of this is their fault. This is racist ‘American’ policy gone to the races.

As Mother Jones reports, “The Trump administration has a record of denying international athletes visas, including members of an Ethiopian delegation to the World Athletics Cross Country Championships, whose 44-year medal streak was broken by a mass visa denial in January. Multiple Cuban sports delegations have also been locked out of sports competitions since 2025 by the US’ refusal to grant them visas—including Olympic qualification events.” 

This hostile policy extends to fans, with the US (until so recently that it was too late) requiring people from 50 ‘developing’ (re: colonized/colored) countries to post $5,000–15,000 bonds for a visa. The countries include Algeria, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Tunisia. Haitian and Iranian fans are effectively banned from the competition. Meanwhile everyone else has to submit their social media records to a nation committing genocide, to see if they’re too vocal about it.

Other World Cups have not been like this. For Russia (2018), your spectator card (obtained via a ticket) was your visa. Qatar had visa-on-arrival for 95 countries, and fans got a Hayya card that gave them free public transportation. In ‘America’ they’re charging $150 to get to the stadium (which you cannot walk to because dangerous) and you’re not even allowed to bring water bottles, you have to pay for that also. That isn’t even getting into accommodation and travel between cities and all the other price gouging. It is wild how vile this World Cup is.

This is in many ways worse than the 1936 Nazi Olympics where Blacks and Jews that Hitler obviously hated were able to compete and overt displays of racism were toned down in front of visitors. The Nazis suppressed Jews and Roma within the German team, but did not ban visas for athletes from other countries, like America is doing. Nor were they, at the time, actively invading or besieging other countries. The ‘Americans’ are, of course, worse than the Nazis because the Nazis at least fizzled out after 12 years. ‘America’ has been at this for centuries.

The corruption of already corrupt football extends to FIFA. ‘Israel’ has killed over 1,000 Palestinian athletes and staff and murdered dozens of footballers, including Suleiman Obeid (the Palestinian Pele). As I write, ‘Israel’ has just arrested Natalie Abu Dayyeh and Rand Al Halawini of the Palestinian women’s national team. This is obscene, yet ‘Israel’ is still allowed in FIFA competitions. Even after Jews rioted in the streets of the Netherlands, the ‘Israeli’ ghetto (where Europeans deported their Jews to) is still allowed in these competitions. If we’re being honest, all the false flags of the White Empire should be banned, ‘Israel’ is just the most egregious example.

Yet that’s not how the bans work because every international organization, including FIFA, is under the Empire’s thumb. Daring to be independent Russia is still banned despite that country fighting ‘American’ proxies in a relatively restrained fashion. Even the Federation of International Football Associations—which ‘Americans’ do not even acknowledge the proper name of, calling it soccer—is an ‘American’ proxy for some reason. The ‘Americans’ have no real interest in the game and are literally just playing spoiler.

At the end of last year I decided to take a break from writing, burned out from my routine of crawling out of bed at 5 a.m., commuting for forty-five minutes, spending six hours performing menial tasks — cleaning floors, emptying trash cans, unclogging drain pipes, all in a day’s work — heading back home, and spending the rest of the day trying to extract words from my brain. The groove that had given me a lot of stability ever since I decided to settle here in Hamburg was finally turning on me, wearing me down little by little until the simple act of changing out of my work clothes became almost unmanageable.

When your body speaks, it’s important to listen. I’ve had to learn this through three decades of trial and error, failed relationships, prematurely quit jobs — I’ve somehow managed to never get fired — and countless missed opportunities at making a better life for myself. In August 2025 my body was more or less screaming at me, begging me to take a break but it still took me another six months to start listening. Given my financial situation as well as the fact that I had just started my current job, putting my writing on hold seemed like the only sound course of action so that ended up being the choice I made.

Writing has come to occupy a strange position in my life because it is essentially a compulsion for which I also happen to get paid occasionally. For a variety of reasons, most writers prefer not to discuss their economic circumstances, the ways in which they navigate their lives in order to make room for writing. A lot of it, I assume, has to do with shame; shame at one’s privilege, the rich, well-connected parents that paid for a liberal arts degree and subsequently made some calls to secure their kid a cushy job (or at least an interview) that affords them enough free time for a not-so-lucrative writing career or shame at one’s lack of such resources, shame at having to get one’s hands and knees and face dirty, shame at having to bend over toilets every day, shame at not advancing in life all because one refuses to give up this low-paying, time-consuming side hustle.

It’s worth noting that the tide is changing somewhat. The Baffler published a piece in April wherein seven writers talk about the challenges they face while trying to eke out a living. The piece opens like this:

In the fall of 1971, Wallace Stegner, who was running his eponymous fellowship at Stanford, offered the writers in his program some financial advice. The Stegner Fellowship, which included a $3,500 annual stipend—the equivalent today of about $28,000—was one of the most prestigious an early-career writer could receive. […] Now, the fellows—looking forward to completing the program, publishing their novels, and maybe even earning a bit more money—asked Stegner what to expect. In the twenty years the program had been operating, one fellow asked, how many were now making a living as writers? “Young man,” Stegner replied, “you don’t understand. You’ve chosen a profession that doesn’t exist.”

Back in 2022 I did not understand that last part. I wasn’t blind, things were very clearly in decline but I foolishly believed that there was a way for me to bootstrap and elbow-grease myself into a life mostly occupied and paid for by writing. Writing can of course mean many things and for a while my compromise was freelance copywriting with the occasional spell of window-cleaning thrown in for extra cash. As time wore on, however, I realized that working ten-hour days, six days a week for what amounted to peanuts wasn’t sustainable so when I moved to Germany, I decided a regular, low-pressure day job would be the best way forward. And well…

Anyway, what I really ended up taking a break from wasn’t writing but rather writing for money as I still scribbled in my journal (only once or twice but still) and fed my Letterboxd diary film reviews on a regular basis. In February I decided to work my way through Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s filmography, a project I only recently completed (he has made a lot of pictures) and wrote a few hundred words on most of them. (Not to get ahead of myself but I have also begun writing an essay on his work which will most likely end up on here as well.) I even ended up saying yes to one paid gig: writing the booklet essay for an upcoming Blu-ray release of a widely-panned, barely-seen film from one of America’s finest genre filmmakers.

What my time away from writing was really marked by though, was a slow slide into depression. The new job which was supposed to provide me with more money and more flexibility to structure my life around turned out to be even more rigid and demanding. I showed up every morning and poured whatever energy I had into making it through the workday. Coming home I would usually either fall asleep or just sit at the kitchen table for hours, staring out the balcony door, wondering how I was going to get through the next day. Writing became a struggle, reading became a struggle, watching movies became a struggle, listening to music, meeting friends, going to the store, the museum, a show, all of it. I felt like giving up and sometimes I still do.

In March I saw that Arte, the French-German public service channel, added all three seasons of Twin Peaks to their media library. On a lazy afternoon I was tempted to watch the pilot again but I knew — I said it out loud, in fact — that if I started I’d feel compelled to watch the entire thing. I sat down to watch it anyway and, predictably, ended up watching all of it. (Yes, this was a big reason for why it took me so long to watch all of Kurosawa’s films.)

I assume most people reading this have at least a passing familiarity with both Twin Peaks and David Lynch, who co-created the series with writer Mark Frost, but in case you aren’t, here’s the premise in brief: in 1989, the body of a young woman, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), is found on a river bank just outside the fictional town of Twin Peaks, Washington. FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) is called in to head the investigation, aided by local law enforcement. It sounds simple enough but there is a lot more to the end result that this premise lets on.

It’s a show you will often hear described as “weird,” “quirky,” and “scary” and those descriptors are unquestionably accurate. However, it is the interplay between those tones that make it so unique and frankly inimitable. What Twin Peaks did was take elements of police procedurals and fuse them with comedy, drama, and horror. It wasn’t uncommon for a scene of characters killing time by engaging in small-town gossip to be followed by a character having terrifying visions of bloodstained carpets or being attacked by a supernatural nighttime intruder. Even the happy-go-lucky Cooper is regularly beset by bizarre nightmares that take place in what is later revealed to be a place called the Red Room, dreams he believes will help him solve the case of the murdered homecoming queen.

I have seen the entirety of Twin Peaks a few times throughout my life. There aren’t a great many TV shows I’ve watched and even fewer I’ve actually enjoyed but as far as the realm of television is concerned, Lynch and Frost’s creation forms a kind of best case scenario, one where even the format’s ostensible weaknesses are transformed into strengths by twisting the whole into something even more unwieldy and complicated.

Initially the show was built around the question of “Who killed Laura Palmer?” and this gave the (often digressive) series its dramatic momentum. When the series answers this question halfway through the second season, there is a noticeable dip in quality as well as a tangible feeling of aimlessness as the people behind it scrambled to find their footing again after losing both its central mystery and one of its main creative forces (Lynch stepped back from the show during its second season, unhappy about having been pressured by the network to reveal the killer’s identity and the direction the show took after the reveal, though he did return to direct the season’s finale.)

Twin Peaks_, for all its eccentric charm and soap opera intrigue, can be harrowing: “Episode 14” (also referred to as “Lonely Souls”) culminates with not only the revelation that Leland Palmer (Ray Wise), Laura’s grief-stricken father, has been inhabited by the demonic entity BOB (Frank Silva) but also a long, drawn-out scene of him brutally murdering Laura’s cousin Maddy (also played by Sheryl Lee). What at first glance feels like a jarring reminder of just how high the stakes are turns out to be as emotionally overwhelming and upsetting as it is precisely because of the series’ general inclination toward the heightened, hysterical emotional register of melodrama.

In Twin Peaks, good cherry pie and a cup of coffee can turn a bad day great, an encounter with a beautiful woman can return a man’s hearing, and a single heartfelt speech can mend a broken father–son relationship. But if the beauty and love in Twin Peaks seem capable of moving mountains, the same is true of their opposites. Leland talks about BOB “visiting” him as a child and that trauma turns him into a vessel which in turn allows BOB to perpetuate abuse against Leland’s own daughter and niece. When Cooper gets trapped in the Black Lodge during the season two finale, his evil doppelgänger — a shadow-self that sprung from the Black Lodge, itself a shadow of the White Lodge — wreaks havoc on the world for the next twenty-five years.

The show never shied away from confronting the evil that humans and men in particular are capable of but there was a sense of cosmic balance when the series was first unveiled to the world at the beginning of the 1990s. The forces of evil were real and they sat smack-dab in the middle of our cities, towns, and homes but so were the forces of good, always busy and self-less in their pursuit of justice and the righting of wrongs. However, Cooper’s doppelgänger and Leland are the foremost examples of how those lines regularly got blurred as well: both the scene of Leland gleefully assaulting and murdering Maddy and the scene of him raping Laura in the 1992 film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me cut back and forth between him and BOB committing these heinous acts, resisting easy interpretations of either demonic possession or a psychopathic male desire to exert dominance over women.

Even thornier is the case of Cooper’s doppelgänger. Whereas Special Agent Cooper came to represent the show’s light, my latest rewatch revealed something a little thoughtless and cruel about him as well. Think of how easily he slips into the role of drug financier in “Episode 7,” big wiry glasses magnifying his giddy and hungry eyes. The same goes for his relationship to 18-year-old Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn); although he rejects her advances, he does so in the name of propriety rather than a genuine lack of attraction. Subsequently, the show’s third season, commonly referred to as Twing Peaks: The Return (2017), shows us that his doppelgänger has become a major figure in the world of organized crime and also raped and impregnated a comatose Audrey.

For me, every Twin Peaks rewatch is an inevitable journey toward The Return, the finest work of American television that I’m aware of and a massive feat of filmmaking. (I’d rather not rehash the tedious “television vs. film” debate here.) It explodes the established scale of the first two seasons which took place exclusively in and around Twin Peaks by ping-ponging between Twin Peaks, South Dakota, Las Vegas, New York, Philadelphia, and even Buenos Aires.

In “Episode 3” Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean) says this to Cooper:

“There’s a sort of evil out there. Something very, very strange in these old woods. Call it what you want. A darkness, a presence. It takes many forms but… it’s been out there for as long as anyone can remember and we’ve always been here to fight it.”

But by the third season this darkness has spread far beyond the appropriately named Ghostwood National Forest that surrounds Twin Peaks. What felt very of-the-moment almost a decade ago — an uglier, more violent show for uglier, more violent times — felt concussive in its naked emotional barbarism in 2026. The uneasy equilibrium of the first two seasons has all but broken down in The Return and the world it presents is cold, barren, unpleasant, and brutal. The third season is full of bashed faces, exploded and severed heads, open sores, gunshot wounds, drug abuse, suicide, and all manner of moaning, screaming, crying, and agony.

In a piece for n+1, film critic A. S. Hamrah wrote that “Twin Peaks foregrounds a kind of American emptiness of the soul that is filled by violence,” something that’s easy to agree with — the 2017 piece was mostly concerned with the Trump presidency, something that just so happens to also be a reality in 2026 — but has also begun to feel somewhat incomplete. If the last few years have shown anything, it’s that this emptiness sits at the heart of the entire world order. And as this order crumbles and deteriorates, the violence must be ramped up.

It’s a logic The Return follows as well, perhaps best illustrated by Cooper’s doppelgänger having apparently lived a life of luxury — the show offers a quick glimpse of a rather ridiculous photograph of him in front of a large mansion in Buenos Aires that his criminal activities have afforded him — but nonetheless spending the majority of the show either dealing with and occasionally disposing of small-time crooks (he even arm wrestles the leader of a gang before viciously killing him), covered in dust, dirt, and blood, or violently vomiting. The image of him in Buenos Aires is not only ridiculous for how obviously photoshopped it is — something The Return does throughout, one can assume intentionally — but also for how far removed the person in the photo, dressed in a slick white suit, is from the sweaty, dirty, black leather-clad goon we follow.

In reality, the world, like the show, wasn’t any more brutal than it had been in the past, certainly not more so than the blood-soaked twentieth century. What had changed was its visibility. The first Trump term wasn’t a break with the political order or with what Trump himself referred to as the deep state but rather a shift in rhetoric and decorum, a shift that exposed the violence, greed, and arrogance that was always at the heart of postwar liberal consensus and its institutions. The rest of the Western world was scandalized by his election victory, conveniently ignoring its own thriving right-wing populist parties and leaders and its role in maintaining (or at least playing lapdog to) the United States’ role as global hegemon.

Regardless of how much Trump’s first presidency shattered any delusions regarding the West’s civility or superiority, it was nothing compared to what his second term has done. When Hamrah wrote that “[Trump] has grafted his head onto our collective body,” he meant the American collective but again this specification feels too narrow. The collective body of the world has had several heads grafted on it shoulders, sewn on its arms, stapled to its back. A massive, hideous shambling god of death, a vulgar counterfeit of the Hindu goddess Kali in her cosmic Mahakali form, bearing the faces of Donald Trump, JD Vance, Benjamin Netanyahu, Friedrich Merz, Giorgia Meloni, Keir Starmer, Ursula von der Leyen, Mark Rutte, Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and countless others; dozens of lolling tongues, hundreds of thousands of severed heads and arms dangling from its pale, decaying body.

Cooper’s doppelgänger fits this new world perfectly, for his extraordinary cruelty and disregard for the people around him but also because he is simultaneously a product of this world as well as one of its architects. He, like the multi-headed god turning entire societies into what political theorist Achille Mbembe calls “deathworlds,” moves through the world while leaving a trail of death and misery in his wake. His black eyes are the eyes we all stare into when we get out of bed, unlock our phones, read newspaper headlines, turn on our TVs, open our laptops, talk to digital assistants, apply for job openings that turn out to not be real, and subject ourselves to five rounds of interviews for the ones that are.

His eyes are also what we stare into when we’re depressed. While going through depression it can feel like all life, goodness, and color has been drained from our existence, that we’re nothing more than empty husks, vulnerable to be overtaken by our darkest impulses. But is there a difference between being depressed and merely being alive in 2026? Life, goodness, and color are being drained from our existence because the people in charge, the people whose heads are grafted on our collective body, detest life and worship death. In his 1973 book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm used the term “necrophilia” and defined it as the “passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical.”

Long before Israel began its genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian territory was already a laboratory for Israel-aligned governments, weapons manufacturers, and tech companies to test and develop tools for human surveillance and annihilation. To the people involved this was never just about foreign policy; the end goal is not only mass death but the replacement of all that is human with its mechanical shadow, one that doesn’t feel, doesn’t celebrate, doesn’t oversleep, doesn’t struggle, doesn’t complain, doesn’t dream. (Note how eerily this description fits Keir Starmer.)

This mechanical shadow is incapable of reading a book or listening to a song. When prompted, it will no doubt call the final lines of The Great Gatsby “beautiful” and “deeply moving” but it can’t find consolation in Fitzgerald’s words. It can’t think about the “the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us” as it grows older. If I had asked ChatGPT to generate an essay about me resuming work on the newsletter, would it have thought to talk about depression and what it felt like to rewatch three seasons and a film about a murder in a fictional small town while going through it? Had Neil Young been in a position to let an LLM write “Cortez the Killer,” a track about Hernán Cortés’ battles with the Aztecs, would it have thought to include a verse that makes reference to his then-recent breakup with Carrie Snodgress? Would it have included lines about brains falling out through teeth in a song about Anne Frank and her family hiding in an attic in the 1940s the way Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Two-Headed Boy, Pt. Two” does?

Twin Peaks and its convoluted plot, clash of tones, contradictory emotions, deliberate pace, occasionally messy production history, and frequently contentious relationship with critics and the viewing public is the kind of thing that has no place in this new world. Engaging with it requires more than solving a puzzle or looking for simple life lessons — the show isn’t “about” one thing, characters and places don’t “represent” the picayune concepts and ideas so popular in the age of the ideas industry. Like its characters, Twin Peaks is interesting because it manages to be two or more things at once, a trademark of Lynch’s oeuvre. This tendency reaches its apex with The Return, a work that thrives on contradiction, duality, and ambiguity.

A big part of watching the third season is waiting for the inevitable (and perhaps titular) return of Dale Cooper and though Cooper escapes the Black Lodge early on, he isn’t all there and spends the overwhelming majority of the season as the bumbling, barely-verbal Dougie Jones. Jones is Cooper stripped of his competence and wit, a toddler in a man’s body who can only repeat other people’s words back at them and occasionally mutter his own name. He’s a hero with next to no agency who still somehow stumbles into heroics, constantly praised for turning people’s lives around, for the kindness of his heart, as he himself stares into the middle distance, unable to comprehend his circumstances.

It’s a rejection of people’s conception of Cooper’s character as a beacon of puppy-dog goodness, a Boy Scout simply trying to do right in a corrupted world. But even this rejection comes with its own duality for the simple fact that Dougie is, in fact, exceptionally likable. His movements echo those of another pitiful Lynch dope, Eraserhead Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), as well as silent-era legends like Buster Keaton. As is the case with those two, there is a melancholic quality to Dougie’s character as well, one that comes through when we see him staring at the bronze statue of a cowboy outside of his office building, completely transfixed as day slowly turns into night and even more so when he sheds a tear while looking at his son, Sonny Jim (Pierce Gagnon).

Lynch has always had a penchant for slapstick but it it particularly pronounced during Dougie’s scenes. As film critic Lawrence Garcia put it in his 2021 piece on The Return, slapstick comedy is “a genre explicitly based on assaulting the hero’s dignity […] Charted out over the course of roughly 14 episodes, the Dougie Jones scenes constitute nothing less than a protracted assault on Cooper’s heroic dignity.” Assaulting his most beloved character’s dignity in this way is perhaps the ultimate gesture of anti-nostalgia in a show that, at the very least, has conflicting feelings toward it.

When Cooper’s memory is restored in “Part 16” and he leaves Las Vegas for Twin Peaks, there is a sense that all the disparate plot threads strewn throughout the previous fifteen episodes will finally converge, for a coherent whole to emerge, for every question to be answered, for all the pieces to fall into place at last. Indeed there is a big, hokey final showdown in the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department between the forces of good and the forces of evil that involves Cooper’s doppelgänger being shot by the station’s ditsy receptionist Lucy Brennan (Kimmy Robertson) and an orb containing BOB being smashed to pieces by Freddie Sykes (Jake Wardle) with his gardening glove-covered right hand.

But as things play out and the characters begin their post-battle celebration there is a sense that things aren’t quite right, something seemingly confirmed when Cooper’s blank face appears superimposed over the scene, saying nothing aside from one line: “We live inside a dream.” Lynch has said that “endings are terrible things,” a quote that perhaps explains his career-long (and often thankless) fascination with television and The Return is, in part, about his, and indeed our complicated relationship to them. The Return came after not one but two endings — Twin Peaks in 1991, Fire Walk with Me a year later — and the rupture of “Part 17,” one of a great many Lynchian ruptures, answers the question of what lies beyond by throwing the narrative into the realm of dreams for good; “the other side of the mirror,” as Chris Marker described the second half of Vertigo (1958) in his 1994 essay on the film.

“See you at the curtain call,” says Cooper as he leaves the sheriff’s station, his boyish charm momentarily allowing him to travel back in time and offer a glimpse of the young man he was during the events of the first two seasons. It’s a very small bit of audience reassurance; before long he does actually end up traveling in time to prevent Laura’s murder by leading her through the woods and away from the cabin where she will meet her grisly fate. It’s hard to think of a more definite end to the Twin Peaks mythos than the prevention of the inciting incident — the episode even replays the series’ famous first scene of Pete Martell (Jack Nance) discovering Laura’s body, only this time there is no body to be found and he ends up fishing in peace — but of course the question of what comes after inevitably arises once more.

What’s most tragic is that for all of his illusions of being in control and doing good, Cooper is trapped within the confines of what is ultimately a television program, continually succumbing to the exact way of thinking that keeps the audience coming back time and time again: there must always be more, one more case to solve, one more mystery to unravel, one more beautiful woman to be yearned for, to be lusted after, one more helpless girl in need of saving, one more girl to be victimized. It’s a logic we’ve become so intimately familiar with that we don’t even bother asking ourselves what actually happens to the women Cooper becomes fixated on or infatuated with, why they all end up dead, comatose, or traumatized.

“Cooper’s great crime is [his] refusal to notice, to acknowledge,” writes Garcia. “It is a refusal born of an infantile fantasy of omnipotence, the idea that one can master time and space, and bend it to one’s will.” But Cooper’s failure is also a failure of imagination; he does the same things again and again hoping for a different result because he can’t fathom that things could ever be different. In his mind, cycles can never be broken. He believes the world needs and always will need him or at least people like him. When the tulpa of Dougie he has MIKE (Al Strobel) create finally unites with Jayne-E (Naomi Watts) and Sonny Jim in “Part 18,” the moment is less heart-warming than it is revealing of Cooper’s pathology, one of his endless attempts to solve problems with the same thinking that caused them in the first place.

“Part 18,” the show’s final episode, has been noted for its opacity but it is actually the one that fully lays bare The Return’s underlying belief that the old ways and its figureheads can’t save us. As we slide further into dystopia it can be tempting to look to the past, ignoring the ugly realities that nostalgia has a way of concealing. This tendency toward collective amnesia finds its clearest (and most troubling) expression in the continued whitewashing and rehabilitation of rancid political actors like Henry Kissinger or George W. Bush by the media apparatus but also comes through in our culture’s general refusal to let go of the past, to finally let the old ways die. Until we do, we will be stuck in an endless loop, doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

There is something profoundly sad and mournful about The Return. Many prominent characters have disappeared completely (Pete, Joan Chen’s Josie Packard), have been relegated to off-screen appearances (Ontkean’s Sheriff Truman), appear only through archival footage (BOB, Don Davis’ Major Garland Briggs), or in some kind of altered or “evolved” form (David Bowie’s Special Agent Phillip Jeffries, Michael J. Anderson’s Man from Another Place). The reason behind many of these decisions was the death of the actors, something that puts the passage of time in perspective in an unflinching way.

But there is real sadness in the return of familiar faces as well. Everyone we see has aged visibly since their last appearance but the first sight of Laura in the Red Room, wearing her black dress, her face older, wrinklier, and wearier is particularly overwhelming. The person whose angelic face hid so many dark secrets, the abuse victim whose likeness dangles from keychains and is emblazoned on t-shirts and stickers and glows on countless computer screens from digital pinboards, looking back at us, still sitting in the same chair in the same room, talking to the man she first saw in her dreams twenty-five years ago, only allowed to grow old in her role as the eternal murder victim.

Throughout The Return, Deputy Chief Hawk (Michael Horse) receives regular phone calls from Margaret Lanterman (Catherine E. Coulson), better known as the Log Lady, relaying messages from her log. Coulson, like her character, was dying of lung cancer when she shot these scenes and they are among some of the show’s most devastating. Lanterman is old and frail, hooked to an oxygen tank and has lost most of her hair. During her last conversation with Hawk she faces her fate head-on, tearfully telling him, “You know about death, that it’s just a change not an end. Hawk, it’s time. There is some fear. Fear in letting go […] I’m dying,” before bidding farewell one last time. “Good night, Hawk.”

Lanterman’s popularity was such that when the first two seasons of Twin Peaks were picked up to be rebroadcast by Bravo in 1993, Lynch shot brief monologues with Coulson, in character as Lanterman, to introduce each episode. For the most part they are classic Lynch nonsense clues — remember the insert that came with the Mulholland Drive (2001) DVD release? — but her introduction for “Episode 3” has resonated with me as I struggle to come to terms with the world and my place in it, with the fact that depression always lurks around the corner, the fact that everything we do and work for, life itself, seems so incredibly fragile: “We ask, ‘Will the sadness which makes me cry, will the sadness that makes me cry my heart out, will it ever end?’ The answer, of course, is yes. One day, the sadness will end.”

Max Blumenthal The Grayzone

A mastermind of Trump’s hardline Latin American policies, Mauricio Claver-Carone no longer serves in the administration. But according to well-placed sources, he’s “picking who can operate” in Venezuela, controlling access to the government, and creating conflicts of interest.

Speaking with reporters on May 21, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez was on her way to New Delhi to discuss energy issues, and that he would be in India as well.

“This is an important trip, I’m glad we’re able to do it,” Rubio chirped after explaining the trio of nations would discuss how to increase Venezuelan oil sales to India.

His statement — and his announcement of Rodriguez’s trip before she had — perfectly illustrated Washington’s newfound dynamic with the Venezuelan government. Following over twenty years of hostile relations with Venezuela’s socialist-oriented leadership, the US Secretary of State was apparently so intimately involved with day to day affairs in Caracas that he was claiming responsibility for Rodriguez’s international itinerary.

In fact, according to an insider who enjoys close contacts within both the Venezuelan and US governments, Rubio’s influence over Rodriguez is said to be traced to one “gatekeeper”: former Trump Latin America envoy Mauricio Claver-Carone. “Mauricio [Claver-Carone] is picking who can operate and Delcy [Rodriguez] is taking instructions,” the source told The Grayzone. 

A former senior US official with access to leadership in both Caracas and Washington offered the same assessment, remarking to The Grayzone, “Mauricio’s calling the shots on private sector economic positions, and if anyone wants in, they have to go to him.”

Hand-selected by former National Security Advisor John Bolton to serve as his Latin America charge during Trump’s first term, Claver-Carone no longer occupies an official governmental role. Instead, he has leveraged his legacy in the public sector to establish a Miami-based investment firm called the Lara Fund which could become a key player in the MAGA financial feeding frenzy in Caracas.

Described by the New York Times as the “architect of Trump’s tough Latin America policies,” Claver-Carone is a Cuban-American regime change zealot who once engaged in fisticuffs with Cuban diplomats as a young man. During Trump’s first term, he unleashed a financial “flamethrower” on Cuba, issuing scores of new sanctions that unraveled the Obama-era normalization policy and plunged the island back into economic misery. 

Claver-Carone has similarly masterminded many of the policies that define Trump’s relationship with Venezuela, from its recognition of the previously unknown Juan Guaido as the country’s “interim president” to the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelan migrants from the US to El Salvador’s maximum security CECOT prison. Many of those migrants had been prompted to journey to the US by the economically crushing sanctions unleashed at Claver-Carone’s direction. 

The Grayzone’s sources described the Trump veteran as the architect of the military invasion that saw Maduro spirited away to a federal penitentiary and installed Rodriguez as president following a stand-down by Venezuelan security forces.

“If he was in charge of implementing the kinetic side, maybe [Rodriguez] thinks she has to listen to him on finance,” the Venezuela insider said of Claver-Carone.

A report this January by investigative journalist Aram Roston described Claver-Carone as a “key backer” of Rodriguez following Maduro’s abduction, and cited sources who claimed he exercised decisive influence over Venezuela policy despite having left the administration.

Claver-Carone is now said to be at the heart of the most sensitive and consequential task Venezuela faces: the restructuring of its $170 billion in defaulted sovereign debt. Forced from several previous positions by corruption scandals and rancorous clashes, an operative with no official governmental position appears to be shaping the economic contours of Project Venezuela. 

“He’s got a lock on everything”

This May, the US Treasury Department authorized Caracas to hire a financial advisor to assist with the herculean task of restructuring its debt. The Venezuelan government selected Centerview Partners, a top-drawer investment and financial advisory firm based in New York City.

According to the former US senior official, Claver-Carone’s romantic partner and business colleague, Jessica Bedoya, boarded a private jet to Caracas soon after the big announcement, arriving with a top advisor from Centerview. It was her second trip to the Venezuelan capital, they said, after visiting in February to discuss financial matters. 

Claver-Carone did not respond to calls to his personal phone from The Grayzone, or to detailed questions sent by text and email. 

His partner, Bedoya, is the founder of the Lara Fund investment firm where he serves as managing partner. Her bio notes that she has also worked in the CIA and National Security Council.

Some insiders worry that her reported presence in the Venezuelan capital, together with Claver-Carone’s outsized influence, could represent a conflict of interest, allowing them to steer debt restructuring agreements to their own personal benefit.

“Now he’s got a lock on everything,” the Venezuela insider said of Claver-Carone. “He could say to anyone who wants to work in Venezuela, I’m the guy. I have the keys. If you want to play ball, invest with me.”

The former US official said Claver-Carone was raising capital for his Lara Fund while he served as a special government employee at the State Department. While Bedoya was running the firm, they said Claver-Carone was leveraging his position inside the Trump administration to pitch potential investors.

“Arbitrary and authoritarian actions that showed him to be a real thug”

When Trump appointed Claver-Carone to serve as the first American president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in 2020, he hired Bedoya as his chief-of-staff. The couple’s secret romance at the bank triggered an embarrassing ethics investigation after a hand-written contract was discovered showing they had agreed to pursue “absolute happiness,” and included a clause with punishments including “candle wax and a naughty box” if either party breached the deal. 

An independent probe ordered by the IDB discovered that Claver-Carone had increased his paramour’s salary by 40% – a $133,000 reward in less than a year. Investigators also found that the couple had racked up expenses on an IDB credit card during romantic getaways. 

Claver-Carone refused to participate in the investigation while accusing its authors of “fabrications.” In the end, IDB governors voted unanimously in favor of his firing. The US government endorsed their decision.

“President Claver-Carone’s refusal to fully cooperate with the investigation, and his creation of a climate of fear of retaliation among staff and borrowing countries, has forfeited the confidence of the bank’s staff and shareholders and necessitates a change in leadership,” they wrote.

The Argentine governor of IDB, Guillermo Francos, delivered a similarly harsh assessment of Claver-Carone’s tenure. “Claver was a disaster for several reasons,” Francos remarked in 2022. “For having an inappropriate relationship, for having disproportionately increased the salary of this inappropriate relationship, for having lied, and for these arbitrary and authoritarian actions that showed him to be a real thug.”

When Claver-Carone returned to the second Trump administration, it was not long before his proclivity for conflict jeopardized his position.

Throughout 2025, Claver-Carone’s spiteful attitude reportedly complicated Trump administration attempts to prop up a key right-wing ally in South America, Argentine President Javier Milei. Milei’s chief of staff happened to be Guillermo Francos – the former IDB governor whom Claver-Carone held personally responsible for outing his secret relationship with Bedoya. According to the Argentine paper Clarin, Claver-Carone attempted to retaliate by unsuccessfully pressuring Milei to fire Francos. He then attempted to undermine a major IMF loan package to Argentina by demanding the country first sever its credit line from China. This was met with an apparent rebuke from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who visited Buenos Aires to express confidence in the IMF loan just weeks after Argentina’s central bank extended its credit line from Beijing.

The following month, in May 2025, Claver-Carone announced he was leaving the State Department to return to his Lara Fund. His departure gave the appearance that he had been forced out of his job, however, he maintained his clout through his direct line to Rubio.

The former US official told The Grayzone that Claver-Carone is now angling to become a Cuban American version of Jared Kushner, the Trump son-in-law who has leveraged his proximity to the president and role as Middle East negotiator to rake in billions from Israel and several Gulf monarchies despite having no official government title. To do so, he has allegedly inserted himself into the byzantine process of restructuring Venezuela’s debt.

When the Trump administration announced that Venezuela could hire a financial advisor to assist with its sovereign debt, Rodriguez initially planned a public bidding process for the coveted position. But then, according to the ex-US official, Claver-Carone issued support for Centerview, leading to the firm’s selection. (Opposition bloggers have speculated that Centerview was chosen because one of its partners, Matthieu Pigasse, is a self-described “pro-market socialist” who previously worked on deals with Maduro and Venezuela’s state owned PDVSA oil company.)

In recent weeks, according to sources, Claver-Carone has attempted to undermine financial advisors who had been working with the Venezuelan government to restructure its debt since 2014. 

They said that when Claver-Carone’s partner, Bedoya, arrived in Caracas this month, allegedly on a private jet with Pigasse, she began pushing to remove the advisory mandate from David Syed, a seasoned French lawyer who had advised Caracas on debt-related issues for over a decade, and is considered incorruptible. 

“The effort to push [Syed] out created a lot of tension,” remarked the Venezuela insider. “You can’t understand debt restructuring by parachuting in without his knowledge.”

Syed did not respond to The Grayzone’s request for comment. Hamouda Chekir, another Centerview partner who works on Venezuela’s debt, did not respond to calls and text messages sent to his personal phone.

Scandal-stained firms as vehicles for extracting profit from Venezuela

Just before leaving the State Department in May 2025, Claver-Carone convinced Rubio not to renew a sanctions waiver that allowed Chevron to sell Venezuelan oil in the US market. In doing so, he eliminated a mechanism which was explicitly designed to promote transparency and prevent local officials from skimming cash. 

This January, after abducting Maduro, the Trump administration granted confidential licenses to a pair of notoriously corrupt trading houses, Vitol and Trafigura, to export Venezuelan oil. The deal came months after Trump’s re-election campaign received a whopping $6 million donation from a senior trader at Vitol. 

Robert Bachmann, an analyst at the Swiss watchdog Public Eye, told the Washington Post at the time, “Trump is taking advantage of firms that know how to circumvent regulation.”

Both companies had been caught engaging in a series of elaborate bribery schemes across Latin America and Africa. In 2020, the Department of Justice (DOJ) forced Vitol to pay a $135 million penalty for bribing officials for licenses in Mexico, Ecuador and Brazil. Trafigura paid a similarly staggering fine in 2024 for a lucrative bribery scheme in Brazil. In the US, Vitol was rung up by the California Attorney General for manipulating spot market prices of oil.

But almost as soon as the Trump administration entered office, it neutered the DOJ corrupt foreign practices division charged with enforcing the judgments against Trafigura and Vitol on the grounds that it was “impeding America’s national security objectives.” 

Now, the profits these scandal-stained firms generate through oil sales abroad – including to Israel – are channeled back into a US-run account with little public oversight. A percentage of sales is then delivered back to the Venezuelan government. Where the rest goes is anybody’s guess. 

“The Venezuelans are the owners of the oil, and we know nothing. There is no transparency,” said José Guerra, an economist aligned with the Venezuelan opposition, complained to the Washington Post about the Trafigura and Vitol licensing agreements.

Trump, for his part, has essentially admitted Venezuelan oil profits are channeled into a slush fund for his international rampage. “We’ve taken out so much oil in Venezuela, we’ve paid for the cost of the war [with Iran] about 25 times over,” the president boasted during a May 23 campaign rally. While the president’s claim was absurd, as Venezuela is currently exporting only about one million barrels of oil a month – hardly enough to cover a full day of warfare – it revealed his avaricious attitude toward the entire operation.

Among certain Venezuelan opposition activists, Claver-Carone has become a figure of contempt who is partially blamed for Trump’s declaration that their de facto leader, the coup plotter and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, “doesn’t have the support within, or the respect within, the country.”

The Trump administration’s embrace of Delcy Rodriguez, and the Venezuelan president’s faithful compliance with Washington’s financial schemes, have prompted some top Democrats to adopt Machado as a partisan cudgel. This January, Chris Murphy, a ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, praised the opposition leader as “impressive” following a meeting on Capitol Hill, while taking a nasty swipe at Rodriguez. Machado “reminded us that Trump replaced Maduro with Maduro’s head of torture,” Murphy proclaimed.

We held a bipartisan meeting with Maria Corina Machado, the opposition leader in Venezuela.

Machado is impressive, and is walking a fine line – standing up for her country while trying to placate Trump. She reminded us that Trump replaced Maduro with Maduro's head of torture. pic.twitter.com/WsamMv5eG7

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) January 16, 2026

If the Democrats take Congress after this year’s midterm elections, the Trump administration’s dealings in Venezuela will face intense scrutiny from the House Oversight Committee. Bipartisan pressure will then build for fresh elections to usher in a new government. “Delcy Rodríguez is a terrible person,” the regime change-obsessed Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott told the Wall Street Journal this month. “We’ve got to have an election soon.”

In the meantime, a flock of MAGA-aligned financial vultures has swooped into Caracas to feast on the petro-state’s post-Maduro carcass. Donald Trump Jr. is said to be hunting for opportunities in the capital for his 1789 Capital fund, while a startup backed by pro-Trump tech oligarchs Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey, Erebor Bank, just struck a lucrative deal to reconnect Venezuela’s central bank to the global economy. In the midst of this frenzy, a figure with no government title, Claver-Carone, appears to be establishing the new pecking order.

The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

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‘Israel’ is the last ghetto Europeans deported their Jews too. They got them as far from Europe as they could, and all their ‘support’ for ‘Israel’ doesn’t extend to giving the property back they took. No, ‘after’ World War II, the Whites dusted off the Nazi/Zionist Haavara Plan and deported the Jews out of Europe entirely.

This is the most ‘antisemitic’ idea imaginable (go back to where you came from!) but if you complain you get called ‘antisemitic’ now. While the Jews slaughter actual Semitic peoples in front of you. Like everything else in the White Empire, they massacre language and logic first.

But just look at it on a map, if you dare. ‘After’ World War II, were Jews given their land back in Europe? No, they’re not there. Like Frankfurt pushing their Jews across the moat, Europeans pushed their Jews across the Mediterranean by boat. You can see ‘Israel’ at the very edges of the ‘Eurovision’, where Europeans don’t really have to see them (except during that dreadful song competition).

Compare this to a map of Frankfurt in 1458, where you can see the same phenomenon in microcosm. Frederick III pushed the Jews outside the city moat into a narrow Judengasse. Within this ghetto, Jews could govern themselves (just as ‘Israelis’ can now), but they still depended on imperial protection (just as ‘Israel’ does). Jews were eventually given permission to build on the other side of the moat, until they were pushed completely out, across the Mediterranean Sea into ‘Israel’. I put it in quotes because this was not the promised land, Eretz Israel, which only the messiah can command. No, this Ersatz Israel was just another ghetto, a poisoned deal with the White Devils, now reaching its 80-year foreclosure.

You can bring all the Biblical stuff into it, and the fact that Zionist really believe in this ‘Israel’, but Zionism was a fringe belief at the time. It’s only recently that the death cult has corrupted the entire religion. Some Torah Jews still shout about the fact that Palestine was created not by the messiah but by the British incarnation of White Empire, which is as close to Satan as you get. Britain, much more than functionally illiterate ‘America’, specialized in bamboozling the natives using their own mythology.

As the ersatz ‘Israeli’ Yuval Noah Hariri said in his execrable book Sapiens, “The European conquerors knew their empires very well. Far better, indeed, than any previous conquerors, or even than the native population itself.” In his Jewish supremacy, Hariri couldn’t see that ‘Israel’ itself was conquered territory, not by the Jews, but by the Europeans, and used to deport Jews to.

The Jews actually think they’ve joined the White club now, but they haven’t. They’re still in the ghetto, serving as kapos over the real semites, slowly discovering that they lack the final, most vital White privilege, committing a genocide and getting away with it.

‘Israel’ was thus the post war act of pushing European Jews almost completely out of Europe, using the fringe belief of Zionism as a carrot and Hitler as a stick. But Hitler was kindling at this point, Jews could have (and should have) been given their European homes back and reparations, or encouraged to join relatives in ‘America’ at the least. But that didn’t happen. Which tells you what really happened. The Jews were not supported. They were deported instead.

Ghetto Fabulous

This much was obvious to many of the Jewish refugees landing in occupied Palestine. As David Nasby said in The Last Million, “For many of the Jewish displaced persons who immigrated to Israel, the exhilaration of leaving Germany and arriving in their new homes was followed rather quickly by disappointment, approaching desperation. They had miraculously survived one war in Europe. They were now entering another war zone.”

This ghettoization seems less obvious now that ‘Israel’ is relatively rich, but they’re just ghetto fabulous. The constant shooting has never stopped, and Jews are increasingly ostracized from the White spaces they crave inclusion in. In sports, music, and commerce they face increasing boycotts and open derision. Not because of ‘antisemitism’, but because of what they’ve actually done to actual Semites. ‘Israel’ is thus an increasingly distant ghetto to Europe and an absolutely hated (albeit rich) ghetto wedged into West Asia.

It also seems less obvious that ‘Israel’ is a ghetto if you see all the rich Jews, but ghettos have rich people too! These are in fact the most conspicious rich people, which can skew your view. The Jewish ghettos in Europe always had rich, ‘court’ Jews, many of whom rose to great power under various White princes. However, the bulk of Jews then, as now, were wedged into ghettos while a few rich Jews gallivanted around, indulging in corruption that eventually brought it all down. History rhyming, can you not hear the sound?

Like in other ghettos, many Jews moving, primarily, outside ‘Israel’ have risen to great power, but ask Chinese eunuchs how such proximity to princes goes. You’re still not whole. Again, Jews are testing if they have the ultimate White privilege—committing genocide and getting away with it—and they don’t. ‘Israel’ is not a place of their own, it has no power to stand on its own. It’s just another ghetto.

I’ll return to history in a way that might be repetitive, but history repeats, deal with it. I repeat the historical fact that European Jews did not get their European homes back after World War II. They were kicked out to clear the way for American/Nazi collaboration. As survivor Samuel Gringauz explained in Commentary (1948, via The Last Million), “Germany is to be transformed from a defeated enemy into the guardian of our European front line. The Jewish survivors in the occupied zone of Western Germany are an obstacle to this development.”

The other historical fact is that World War II was never about the Holocaust (which killed more Slavs and communists, but nevermind that, as the White history does). ‘America’ pushed boats of Jews back into the concentration camps and did not want to take in Jews after the war either. As American Senator James Eastland said (ibid), “We are getting away from American ideals when we admit to this country from eastern Europe people with an Oriental philosophy, a philosophy not compatible with that of the people of the United States.” This is literally the same logic that Hitler had for exterminating the Jews (his main enemy was communism), taken to a penultimate solution that the Nazis were also cool with. Deportation out of Europe.

‘Israel’ is the very racist idea that Jews should ‘go back to where they came from’. This was an idea that then fringe Zionists collaborated with Nazis on, in the Haavara Plan, as mentioned. Zionists were pulled from the fringes in order to singe an entire region and smoke the oil, or at least the spoils, out. And what happened to the Jews, in the main? They were moved from the concentration camp of the Nazis that lost to a conscript colony for the Nazis that won. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, I guess.

Zionists collaborated with Whites that still hated the Jews and this wacky, self-reinforcing, self-deporting Jewish extremism has become mainstream now, corrupting the whole crew. Judaism is a rare religion that went from a cult to a religion and back to a cult again. Now most Jews think they’re going to hurry God and bring the end times on, when God will roast the Christians. Meanwhile Christian Zionists think God will roast the Jews instead. It’s a really perverse alliance, where each side actually wants the other dead. That’s the eschatology of the matter, but historically, it’s not that complicated.

The Messiah obviously isn’t here yet, and if they were, they’d be horrified at what the Jews are doing right before judgment day, when you should be on your best behavior. If you look at the mess they’ve made, here, it’s clear that ‘Israel’ is just a ghetto to keep Jews away from White people that didn’t like them, and at the throats of Muslims the White Empire likes even less. This obviously wasn’t a deal with the Messiah but the Great Satan.

All the Jews have done—and I say Jews because they’re completely corrupted now—is become the worst version of themselves in the European imagination, which is just normal Europeans to everybody under colonization. They thought they’d get acceptance from White people from this, but instead they get only condemnation, for doing the same stuff Australians and Canadians did, just in the wrong century, and without enough time to get away with it. Thus the Jews find themselves in the same situation as time immemorial, a few of them collaborating with fickle princes and living royal, while the bulk are stuck in a ghetto near the oil. In this way, the Jews are screwed. They might be ghetto fabulous, but they’re still ghetto.

Jacob & Esau (Rothschild & Balfour)

Another clue as to the ghetto status of ‘Israel’ is in its founding document. I used to wonder about the Balfour Declaration. Why was the creation of ‘Israel’ declared by Britain (which didn’t own Palestine) to Lord Rothschild (who was just a private citizen)? In ghettonomics, however, this makes sense. Rothschild was, in fact, receiving the deed for a new ghetto, evidenced by the fact that he never moved to ‘Israel’ himself.

In Europe, court Jews like the Rothschilds mediated (often mendaciously) between the court and the ghetto. The court Jews got some concessions for their people, while their people took the blame for the rich Jews’ evil. The Rothschild’s personal history is instructive here, and we can get it from a book they co-sponsored, From Court Jews to the Rothschilds. That book describes 1807, saying, “Salomon Rothschild came to feel the impact of the provisions of the new Stättigkeit, as the town council forbade him to rent an apartment for himself and his wife outside the ghetto.” As you can see, even the Rothschilds were once stuck in the Frankfurt ghetto themselves. But not since.

The European Rothschilds had a ‘meteoric rise’ and then, from the outside, never stopped “using their influence to act as champions for the Emancipation of the Jews in those countries in which they themselves lived.” But you can see the problem with Lord (Lionel Walter) Rothschild little deal here, because he himself lived and died in England. So what exactly was he championing in ‘Israel’? It wasn’t a ‘country in which he himself lived.’ The Rothchilds remained, almost to a man (minus Bethsabée de Rothschild) in Europe or America. So what had Lord Rothschild won? Just a further deportation of the Jews, from across the moat of Frankfurt to across the entire Mediterranean. Where he did not follow them.

Today the surviving French and British branches of the Rothschilds live, primarily, inside the core White Empire, not the ‘Israeli’ ghetto on its fringes. They are ‘the known benefactors’ of ‘Israel’ but they don’t stay there, because ‘Israel’ is a ghetto and the Rothschilds are rich Jews, in that order. What Lord Rothschild, fencing stolen goods, accomplished was not “the Emancipation of the Jews in those countries in which they themselves lived,” but ghettoization somewhere new, disguised as somewhere old for fundamentalist rubes.

This is an age-old story, elite Jews serving European princes as courtiers (corrupting them quite consensually) while the Jewish masses live in a ghetto themselves (bearing the consequences). Jewish rabbis likened the relationship (between Jews and Christians) to that between the biblical Jacob & Esau. As the book of the same name by Malachi Haim Hacohen tells the tale,

With the help of his mother, Rebecca, he deceived his father, Isaac, by wearing Esau’s clothes and received the firstborn’s blessing. A furious Esau conspired to kill him, and Jacob escaped abroad, returning, after two decades, wealthy and mature, and with a large family. He feared that Esau would still seek revenge and decimate his family, but when they met, they fell on each other’s shoulders and cried. The Genesis story ends in reconciliation.

This story intersects with Christianity in the sayings, “the elder shall serve the younger” (Genesis 25:23). [And that] “The older people of the Jews,” said Augustine,“was destined to serve the younger people, the Christians,” (ibid). The point is that this a tale as old as time, this abusive relationship between Europeans and Jews. And the story doesn’t end in reconcilation like the Biblical version, but repetition.

Jews are constantly ‘dressing up’ as White men, getting chased out, taken back because (some of them) are prosperous, and then starting the cycle all over again. This has happened all over the fake continent of Europe and now it happens globally via the fake country of ‘Israel’.

The bulk of Jews are isolated in ‘Israel’, in constant danger, while their elites move across the imperial courts, doing well. In this way, some Jews can rise to great power but they do not have power. ‘Israel’ is not their country, won by their own arms and held by their own diplomatic charms (lol). No, ‘Israel’ is ghetto of the White Empire, protected from the furious masses surrounding them by imperial force, only sold to imperial dumbasses through massive propaganda and now censorship, and only held in place by imperial diktat, overriding all ‘international’ institutions.

People say Jews run the Empire, and it certainly looks like it, but war is the art of deception, as Master Sun said, and this is an old trick. Again, ask the Chinese Eunuchs or any class placed in front of the emperor to take the heat. The very fact that we see Jews out in front of every evil and horrific imperial decision protects the Whites (just soulless stand-ins for Capital) equally in on it. This is an old European trick, such that when Selma Stern describes it historically (in The Court Jew) she’s really describing the current predicament. Stern said,

The masses knew little about the intrigues, hatreds, setbacks and discouragements to which the war contractor was subjected. They saw only despised Jews, who only a short time before had been expelled from the country, now returning as distinguished gentlemen, speaking the language of the country, wearing the clothes of the time, dealing with ministers, politicians and generals, living in beautiful homes in which they imagined there must be fabulous treasures. They themselves were burdened with heavy taxes and duties, their business had declined to the vanishing point, their fields lay waste, their houses had been destroyed by the weapons of the enemy, their soldiers suffered hunger and cold, went without uniforms and were seldom paid.

Can you not see it happening this way? The dumbasses in the imperial core know little about the intrigues involving a disproportionate amount of Jews, but also a bunch of White people as well, as well as ‘colored’ people applying whitening cream. All they see is their costs going up, their businesses shuttering, and the soldiers eating shoe leather, dying for their Jew betters. Meanwhile they see Jews crying wolf on the news about ‘antisemitism’, openly calling for genocide and the right to rape in ‘Israel’, and openly committing every atrocity they were every accused of, like corrupting governments and raping children. It’s not a conspiracy theory if it’s in front of you and proven, is it?

Jews are just a part of the problem (the whole White Empire is rotten), but they’re a big part of the problem, and now the most prominent. This is not, historically, a good place for Jews to be, in between corrupt princes and angry masses as the visible face of corruption. But those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and so here we go again, with the ghetto a flight away from Europe instead of walking distance.

The Jewish Problems

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