Fraud or Spy? Who Does Eric Weinstein Really Work For? Unmasking A Real Construct

Intellectual cul de sacs, limited hangouts, and information warfare

The dark side of Eric Weinstein, a spy from the pre-Internet age becomes an influencer

A limited hangout is spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further. — Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Victor Marchetti. 

I believe that Eric Weinstein (and perhaps his brother Bret) is one of many spies around us, shaping both our discourse and the information terrain online and in our wider culture. I understand how implausible that sounds. But think about it: does it really? 

Consider that you are currently watching a trial unfold in New York which shows the degree to which conniving spies — Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein — could ingratiate themselves among the most powerful people in the world and that this program took place for decades before it was finally stopped. 

No, the Maxwell trial isn’t really about sex but about extortion, blackmail, and kompromat and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. The narrowness of the claims by the government aren’t about covering things up, no, not exactly. They are about what can quickly be proven in a court of law. The restrictions on the information in the trial are the tell here.

Why pick on Eric? Didn’t he talk about his meeting with Epstein? Sure but he only goes so far. Indeed ironically one of the first people to raise the prospect that Epstein may well been a spy may also be a spy himself. 

I’d contend that Eric Weinstein is aligned with the Netanyahu faction whilst Jeffrey Epstein was with Ehud Barak and the Russian-Israeli faction that’s fallen into disarray since the Magnitsky Act sanctions were passed on the Russians. When Epstein met Weinstein they were spying on one another and Eric’s decision to come public more than a year after the death of Epstein suggests he worried about his reputational downside.

I agree with Whitney Webb. Eric is a limited hangout but for whom is the question.

Look instead at what he pushes online: he cares about UFOs (no doubt to increase funding for the Israeli-compromised Air Force), he talks often about inflation (no doubt to decrease the dollar hegemony) and he calls repeatedly for a Church committee and a weakening of the surveillance state which, in effect, would make it much easier for spies to operate here. He’s been on both sides of the migration issue — writing that illegal immigrants were no big deal in the early 2000s but now claiming that migration is a problem. Which is it?

All of the solutions that Eric proffers for the Epstein affair would ultimately make America and the FBI in particular less secure. 

Whitney Webb @_whitneywebb

Eric Weinstein, who has been a limited hangout on the Epstein-intelligence connections since his 2019 arrest, claims that Edge was just about submitting essays once a year. Here is what he's leaving out and covering up: https://t.co/UIG3SokCZq

Whitney Webb @_whitneywebb

Edge was created by John Brockman, the literary agent who also did “management consulting” gigs for the Pentagon and White House and passed a manuscript to the CIA in the early 1990s.

dazeddigital.comJohn BrockmanSince the mid-60s, whether promoting pop culture happenings, Dada revolutionaries or the leading science writers of the day, John Brockman has been in the vanguard of intellectual fashion. Here he looks back over a life restlessly lived

Whitney Webb @_whitneywebb

Edge for decades was instrumental in bringing together tech executives, scientists that were often Brockman’s clients and Wall St bankers thru its “Millionaires' Dinner”, first held in 1985. In 1999, those dinners rebranded as the “Billionaires’ Dinner”.

Whitney Webb @_whitneywebb

From 2001 to 2017, Epstein funded $638,000 out of a total of $857,000 donations raised by Edge. During this period, there were several years where Epstein was Edge’s only donor. Epstein had had financial links to Brockman since at least 1995.

Whitney Webb @_whitneywebb

Epstein stopped giving in 2015. That was incidentally the same year that Edge decided to discontinue its annual Billionaires’ dinner. The billionaire dinners were essentially influence ops w Silicon Valley and top scientists to benefit Epstein, almost like a personal Bilderberg

Whitney Webb @_whitneywebb

Jeffrey Epstein reached out to Eric in 2004, when he was providing the vast majority of Edge's funding, because of Epstein's interest in his science and foreign exchange trading. While Weinstein has talked about the meeting, he hasn't given any specifics on what they discussed.

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Over the years I’ve bumped into Eric online. You can find Eric on Twitter Spaces or on Clubhouse or on his podcast or other podcasts or any number of locations around the Internet. What does he do all day?

Commentators Robert Wright, Decoding The Gurus, and Tim Nguyen all out Weinstein as a fraud. The podcasters on Decoding The Gurus all note that Eric Weinstein has claimed that he, his brother, and his wife are all producing Nobel Prize winning work. I’m not a math major so I don’t know the statistical odds but that seems particularly unlikely.

So, too, do the odds that Eric’s family — his father’s name is never mentioned but I discovered that his name is Les Weinstein — marched alongside Martin Luther King. (You really have to read Eric’s full tweet storm about his family as it’s simply unbelievable.)

There is, however, a photo of Eric’s father with a high ranking Japanese official, said to be connected to Japanese intelligence. (Takashi “Tachi” Kiuchi was a part of the Japan-America Society and later won an award from the Japanese government.)

I also found a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times that Les Weinstein wrote concerning the Senate Intelligence committee. A very normal thing indeed for a mere attorney to do but Les Weinstein is, in fact, a former attorney for the Kennedy Department of Justice, according to his CV. (Eric and Bret were legacy admits at UPenn.)

In his government service Les Weinstein tried to shakedown General Motors with extremely poor results. In private practice Weinstein has extensive experience dealing with “foreign clients,” especially Korea, China, and Japan, and an alleged mobbed up domestic one — Jack Urich. After shaking down American company General Motors Weinstein went to work for the Japanese firm Mitsubishi, naturally.

Eric’s father, Les, and mother, Karen Anne, were married in May 1964 at the home of Melvin C. Garbow in Alexandria, Virginia. Garbow recently passed away. His firm, Arnold & Porter, remains one of the largest American firms to do work for the State of Israel.

But sure, Eric, tell us how you only have one passport.

****

Comedians Joe Rogan and Tim Dillon have pointed out some rather interesting weird behavior by Eric Weinstein. Dillon in particular directed my attention to the Eric Weinstein-Lex Friedman interview and delivered this hilarious discussion that pretty clearly lays out that Weinstein is a fraud.

Weinstein’s fraudulent behavior was noted by Miles Mathis way back in 2013 in a great post called “The Latest Hoax in Physics.” It really is worth reading in its entirety.

The fact that Eric Weinstein is being promoted is also very strange. The worldwide media has published a barrage of extravagant praise of Weinstein recently, culminating in an exclamatory article today in the Guardian newspaper, London, which compared him to Einstein. Who is Eric Weinstein? Weinstein is a hedge fund consultant who also gives talks on math and physics. We are told he works for the Natron Group. Unfortunately, a websearch on the Natron Group yields nothing but a few yellowpages listings. Also curious is the name Natron. Why would a hedge fund company name itself after soda ash or baking soda, an old detergent before the 1950's? It looks like a joke name to me, coined by comedians in the intelligence community. This is a double red flag regardless, since we would expect a real company to be known to a Google search. But even if the company exists as something other than a CIA front, it is still a red flag since WHY WOULD WE TRUST A HEDGE FUND GUY?

Why indeed. Weinstein’s plagiarizing behavior was noted by Robin Hanson back in 2009. If everyone thinks you are a fraud you’re probably a fraud.

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All of that is pretext to the very odd conversation I had with him last week on Twitter spaces.

Eric professes not to know me but his boss Peter Thiel and I do know one another and we are friends. Peter is an investor in several of my companies.  Why would Peter employ a fraud? Is Peter compromised like Bill Gates was by a hostile intelligence? Is Eric Peter’s handler in the same way that Epstein was Gates’s? And if so, what do you do for a friend who has been compromised? 

Take a listen for yourself about my claims and Eric’s refusal to address them. 

Zev Shalev @ZevShalev

Brand New: Charles Johnson (yes, that Charles Johnson) calling out the MD of Thiel Capital and former Jeffrey Epstein associate Eric Weinstein for his alleged ties to Israeli intelligence. Audio originates from Twitter Spaces. https://t.co/iLQXUI0f2W

Peznt Journalist @PezntJournalist

Eric Weinstein being called out by @snowjim029 as working for a foreign power on a twitter space.... 😂He wanted no part of that discussion... https://t.co/J1Nc8wx4MH

In candor I was waiting for this sort of evasion. Eric is well trained so I had something prepared for him.  A friend and I produced another video several months back that I recently put online that explores the relationship between Eric and Jeffrey Epstein, a relationship that has taken on new urgency in light of Russian-Israeli spy Ghislaine Maxwell trial. 

You can watch it here. 

My own research into Eric’s past suggests that he isn’t a hedge fund trader. Nor do I believe that Eric has had a serious job in a very long time though his resume suggests he may well have had a number of postings.

If he were a hedge fund trader why is there no evidence of him being one? Indeed, two other financial wizards — Bernie Madoff and Jeffrey Epstein — also had very little paper trail and appear not to have traded at all. In the 90s and into the financial crisis hedge fund trader was an awfully good cover in much the same way that venture capitalist seems to be today.

And what to make of Weinstein’s Harvard PhD? I’ve interviewed fellow graduate students from Harvard at the same time that Eric attended. None recall him being offered a tenure track job. Nor do any recall him being all that impressive as a student. Weinstein suggests powerful, malevolent forces conspired to stop his career. Perhaps. But I’ve been told it was a security review.

After the Pollard Israeli spy scandal the National Science Foundation and the Navy — where Eric had fellowships — began doing a review of Israeli intelligence assets in the United States.

Eric’s time over in Israel doing God knows what would have made him subject to further review, perhaps by the FbI itself. Eric’s antipathy to the FBI could well stem from this period. Of course Eric could clear this up by requesting the files on him be released. Or he could point to trades he made or investments he made but I suspect that much like his revolutionary theories the evidence for those things may well be lacking.

Now let’s be clear here. The claims I am making are very intense — I am accusing Eric of being a traitor to the United States of America. This is not something I do idly. Nor is it something I do without a degree of fear. After all, if Eric is a belonging to a foreign power, he (or more likely his masters) might well decide to have me taken out.

I welcome making these claims in a public venue. They are, if not true, certainly libelous but yet somehow I doubt very much that Eric will sue me. Why is that?

Because Eric works as a media manipulator. In my conversations with the intelligence community there’s a lot of discussion around how you might defeat “ubiquitous technical surveillance.” This is naturally the wrong way to think about it. There’s a proliferation of sensor technology and the likelihood you won’t get dinged on one of the many sensors in one of the many countries is approaching nil. This makes for a golden age of spy hunting and a very, very bad time for in person informants.

Given the nature of the work I do and its importance to the national interest I simply won’t meet with someone who has no online presence barring a warm introduction from a mutual friend whose intelligence and due diligence I trust. My LinkedIn messages are filled with spies and wannabes trying to get at what I’m working on. It’s not fun but it’s real life. I manage as I must.

I say this not to boast but to be honest. This is what real work looks like. Why hasn’t Eric done any real work?

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What our adversaries have done is realize the importance of building influencers. So, too, has the CIA itself. The efforts to get Scott Adams — who has hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers — to work with the Israeli intelligence against Congressman Matt Gaetz are illustrative of this point.

Every intelligence agency wants to control the discourse. What you really want to do is shape the information terrain by leading people, preferably young men, down paths that are intellectual cul de sacs — which is to say a dead end. This is how a limited hangout operates and this is exactly what Eric Weinstein spends his time doing.

Others have pointed out some of the odd behavior Eric seems to engage in.

He claims that he speaks or has attempted to learn Russian — his great grandmother traces to the current Ukrainian border with Belarus. He also has tried to learn Turkish, Thai, Vietnamese & Indonesian. Weird, right? Weirder still he rarely talks about the years he spent in Israel.

When asked why he has a particular interest in languages which seemingly have little to do with his stated occupation he offers a lyrical off the cuff account of his interest in linguistic structures, their relation to musical theory, and the academic theories of language evolution of Noam Chomsky.

Earlier I mentioned the interview that Eric did with Lex Fridman. If you have the time it’s worth watching.

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Weinstein and Fridman discuss “Free Speech,” Trump, Parler, Epstein, scientific espionage, and the need for someone to to “blow the lid off” / break into the FBI and discover who or what lay beneath Epstein. And naturally, Weinstein talks about he and his family were being “smeared” early in his career by government services unnamed. 

That such a conversation exists between Fridman — friendly to the Russians — and Weinstein — friendly to the Israelis — in a public forum is in itself quite interesting. Might this be a confab of the constructs? I wonder.

Friedman expresses concern at the censoring of Trump (which occurred long before this recording) and the off-lining of Parler as attacks on “free speech.” This “muh free speech” argues the default complaint of Russia/China when agents/platforms of disinformation are shuttered.

Fridman paints Epstein as a lone agent originator of evil — with nothing behind him. This is somewhat surprising given Epstein’s travels to Russia and to the Sakharov house with 23andme investor Esther Dyson.

Weinstein, for his part, differed and has a backstory which traces Weinstein to intelligence but not just Israeli intelligence but the FBI itself. Whenever Eric is asked about Epstein’s ties to intelligence he’s careful to mention both the ties to the FBI but also Israel. Why is that?

How Peter Thiel Met Eric Weinstein

Eric Weinstein and Peter Thiel met at The “Being Human” Conference on March 24, 2012.  Weinstein’s account avers that he was a reluctant participant at this event, having little interest in something so airy and Californian, but was “forced” by friends who remain unnamed to attend. Who are those friends?

At the event Weinstein ended up in a circle chatting with Peter Thiel. Weinstein mentions to Thiel that he just happens to have derived a Theory of Everything (TOE) that he feels he should “probably publish.” Per Weinstein, Thiel seems (as is reasonable) to somewhat discount Weinstein’s claim “but then I [Weinstein] was invited to give these lectures (plural) at Oxford..”

In fact Weinstein was invited to give just one lecture at Oxford University’s main Physics lecture hall. The lecture took place on May 23, 2013. 

The lecture backstory is worth considering. The genesis of this event appears to have been Weinstein’s active approach to an old friend of his Marcus du Sautoy, the Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. Sautoy is notably not a physicist but it was Sautoy who both organized EW’s TOE physics lecture on May 23, 2013 and planted not one, but two largely hagiographic Weinstein focused op-eds, one of which penned by Sautoy himself.

Both op-eds were published in The Guardian, which is generally agreed to have the best science coverage of any UK newspaper, on the very same day as Eric gave his two hour Oxford lecture, one article linking to the other.

Both op-eds highlighted the potential promise, elegance and predictive power of EW’s TOE— a view that almost no one now seems to hold.

Sautoy implausibly lauds Weinstein’s supposed intellectual gifts, the impressiveness of his CV and how, according to Sautoy, Weinstein’s heterodox approach to eschewing academia and likewise peer review itself—or indeed publication of any kind — was both admirable and spoke to the potential future of science itself. (Or perhaps, as is my view, that it speaks to the end of scientific rigor altogether.)

Interestingly neither of the articles feature any pictures of Weinstein, opting instead for a single picture of Einstein, who is numerously proffered as both a referent and comparator to Weinstein. Not least in the second article’s hyperbolic title: “Roll over Einstein: meet Weinstein.” (You are supposed to rhyme them. Get it?)

Oxford is a locale, which having both extraordinary prestige (and given his relationship with Sautoy, offering perhaps undue favor and potential control over attendees) and likewise remoteness from the US, its physics community and likely anyone (much less an actual attendee) that Thiel might easily have been able to poll for a meaningful sniff test.

Weinstein says that a “story or two came out” about his Oxford talk and that he guesses Thiel probably saw these stories and so invited Weinstein to a small gathering/conference soon thereafter in the South of France. Whereupon at some point Thiel told Weinstein that he “had to move to SF” to work for him.

Weinstein’s “guessing” that Thiel might have seen a “piece or two [that] came out”.. seems a little strenuously vague. Is Peter a regular reader of the Guardian? I think not.

The idea that how and why Thiel decided to invite Weinstein to meet in France shortly after Weinstein’s lecture at Oxford, did not at any point include reference to Weinstein’s recent glowing UK press and too ostensibly lofty academic endorsement.

Weinstein years later merely “guesses” that Thiel saw “a piece or two that came out”. Note: in fact precisely two pieces, one linking directly to the other in which EW himself very likely had a hand or at least full knowledge in advance of publication.

Weinstein'’s most ardent scientific champion—exceeding even Sautoy— in the second Guardian piece is Edward Frenkel. “Edward Frenkel, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, has been discussing Weinstein's ideas with him for the past year. ‘I think that both mathematicians and physicists should take Eric's ideas very seriously,’ he says, but who should do that?

The second Guardian piece features more commentary from Frenkel than any other figure. All of it unequivocally endorsing Weinstein’s ideas and artfully framing him as a paragon of what vaulting achievements can be made by prodigious intellects, working ex-academia — a sentiment to which Thiel is particularly amenable.

Frenkel as it turns out is a Russian-American, Jewish mathematician who was an invited professor at Harvard—visiting it seems from Russia who then enrolled as a PhD. 1989-1994. Frankel was at the same University, in the same department’s (Mathematics) sub-department (Mathematical physics) as Weinstein for three years (1989-1992).

Frenkel appears to have been one of those Refusenik Jews who escaped the Soviet Union. Weinstein pays homage and has declared himself an intellectual refusenik. We have elsewhere explored the ties of the Refusenik Jewry to our current maladies.

In Weinstein’s first episode of “The Portal” Weinstein and Thiel agreed that “all systems have been corrupted.” Perhaps Weinstein knew of what he spoke because he had done the corrupting.

Special thanks to DD and KK.