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4/6/2026 What is Preventing Americans from Overthrowing the Epstein Regime? By: Carlos L. GarridoRead Now Art by @PUNlSHEDJesus Many people are asking themselves how much more the American people can take. After being consciously awakened about the imperial status of their homeland, the crimes committed around the world – most principally the genocide in Palestine and the bombing of Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, etc., orchestrated through the US’s colonial proxy in West Asia, the Zionist entity – and, the dominance of a demonic and cannibalistic Epstein regime over their lives, how much longer can these people take before they throw off the yoke of these forces which rule over them? After all, as everyone knows at this point, the same Epstein regime which bombs Iran today has kept the American people poor, indebted, and desperate for decades now, with these conditions continuously getting worse. And so the central question here becomes: what is it that makes people act in a revolutionary fashion? What is it that prevents it? The first thing which must be addressed is that this isn’t simply a problem, as the vulgar Marxists we have in the West say, of ‘false consciousness.’ It isn’t the case that the American people are just too stupid, uneducated, and ignorant to rebel. Such a framing of the problem completely ignores the total crisis of legitimacy that we have today, and precisely what is implied in such a crisis. The American people are already at a state of cynical distance with regard to the narratives of the regime. No American in their right mind believes they live in a democracy or that foreign wars are to defend freedom and human rights. What this means is the following: seeing the problem as rooted at the level of ideas, of the conscious thoughts and explicit beliefs of the American people, is a grave error. At that level they are already dissidents, they have already broken with the regime. After all, roughly 90% distrust the media (one of the central apparatuses of narrative construction and manipulation) and around 80% feel as though their representatives do not represent them. What this means is that the American people aren’t just a bunch of ignorant peasants who blindly accept the narratives of the regime. The opposite is the case. If we come to frame the problem simply as one of accepting the ideas of the regime – that is, simply as a problem of ‘false consciousness,’ – we would be faced with a conundrum: all signs point to the people not having that faith in the reasons provided by society for the actions taken by it, so why are they still going along with it? Why isn’t there material dissidence? The left in the U.S. has never broken with the harmful frame of Cartesianism, which is foundational for bourgeois individualism. They still operate with an understanding of the individual human subject as a ‘thinking substance,’ a cogito reducible to their conscious thoughts and beliefs. They therefore frame the problem of an absence of dissidence in terms of an absence of knowledge, in terms of illusions at the level of ideas. But when people develop a cynical distance and distrust of official narratives, as they have today, this framework collapses under the weight that reality exerts over its erroneous premises. It is here where philosophy must make an intervention, where the common, inherited Cartesian sense shows itself to be insufficient. In his 1989 text, The Sublime Object of Ideology, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek addresses this problematic directly. He argued that most ‘Marxists’ had understood the question of ideology all wrong. They conceived of ideology as the illusions operative at the level of people’s ideas. And if such was the case, in an era of cynical reason — as Peter Sloterdijk calls it — the ‘Marxists’ would be forced to accept the neoliberal proclamation of a post-ideological society. Instead, Žižek argues, ideology is operative in our practices, habits, rituals. It is at this level where the illusion is present, such that no cynical distance at the level of explicit conscious thought can spare us from being within the grips of ideology, from reproducing – through our actions – the dominant state of affairs. For Žižek, one sustains a cynical distance from official narratives, but in one’s actions, still acts as if the narratives were true. The illusion, therefore, is in the act, not just the thought. To put it in the terms employed by Martin Heidegger – whose central philosophical undertaking was challenging the Cartesian understanding of the subject, which in different forms has infected all philosophy – the human person is a being-in-the-world. They comprehensively inhabit worlds. They are not simply their ideas, but the practices, rituals, and ways of being-in-the-world they enact. The ideological illusion we are talking about – that is, the mechanisms through which the dominant order is reproduced even through a period of crisis of legitimacy – is comprehensive, it constitutes our ‘world’ as such, it invents, as the late Michael Parenti called it, reality itself for us. This isn’t just a reality we ‘think’ about, but one we inhabit, one which dictates everything as small as the habits of spatial distance we sustain when talking to others in public, to the habits we sustain in the face of the Epstein state’s involvement in another criminal war that runs contrary to the desire of regular Americans. It is, in part, thanks to this orientation to the praxiological core of human experience that the philosopher Haz Al-Din considered Heidegger, quite scandalously for Western Marxists, an indispensable thinker for renewing Marxism in the so-called west. The question of why the American people haven’t rebelled in the face of such scandalous revelations (Epstein files), which were preceded by an already comprehensive crisis of legitimacy, must therefore operate not within the terrain simply of people’s explicitly enumerated ideas and beliefs, but of their habits and practices, both of which are situated within various different state apparatuses, which function as the setting for their actions. Here the Althusserian project of studying these apparatuses which structure the actions of people and reproduce the existing order regains its long-ignored relevance for the dissident left. At its core is the fact that power, as Michel Foucault was correct to point out, isn’t simply a negative force. The function of power isn’t simply repression. Power has a positive function, and a productive potential. Power constitutes subjects as subjects. Power makes the modern individual. It pervades the discursive formations of the institutions/apparatuses we participate in and constructs the regimes of truth society holds. This positive function of power cannot simply be dealt with by the same mediums of resisting its negative, repressive functions. Or else you will be reproducing the same subject, with its baggage of habits, practices, rituals, etc., except marching once a month with the flags of whatever countries the U.S. has criminally bombed. What is required, then, is to combat the positive dimension of power: the ways in which it structures the praxical life of the humans which inhabit it, such that even when there is cynical distance and they consciously don’t believe in official narratives, they nonetheless still act as if they do. What is required, therefore, is to build alternative institutions which can be the locus or nodes for the formation of a new revolutionary subjectivity, that is, which can structure the actions, not just ideas, of masses of people in a revolutionary manner. Counter hegemony (a helpful concept Gramsci never used but which scholars of Gramsci developed later on) isn’t just about changing ideas, it is about building what the Marxist-Leninist tradition has always called dual power. Dual power, that is, the production of our own revolutionary institutions independent of the state, is precisely the material foundation through which a revolutionary party can create the sort of revolutionary subjectivity that could actually change the dominant state of affairs, not just keep a praxically safe cynical distance at the level of ideas. To put it in even simpler terms, this requires community building freed from the tentacles of the dominant hegemonic order, which is a master in producing and co-opting forms of dissidence into forms of what I’ve called controlled counter hegemony. Such a community-building task of dual power, which holds as a central purpose carrying out what in good Chinese fashion could be called a cultural revolution, is what the American Communist Party is trying to construct. Only through building dual power of this kind could the American people move beyond a shallow and safe form of dissidence to one which actually enlists them as protagonists in advancing history. Only by building dual power, that is, the material institutions which can form a new revolutionary subjectivity that functions as the yeast which lifts the great masses of people from their slumber, can the conditions be created for the American people overthrowing the yoke of the Epstein regime. Author Dr. Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American Professor of Philosophy who received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He serves as the Secretary of Education for the American Communist Party and as a Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist-Leninist think-tank in the United States. Dr. Garrido has authored a few books, including Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), and the two forthcoming texts, Domenico Losurdo and the Marxist-Leninist Critique of Western Marxism (2026) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2026-7). Dr. Garrido has published over a dozen scholarly articles and over a hundred articles in popular settings across the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Iran, China, Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, Peru, Canada, etc. His writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He also writes short form articles for his Substack, @philosophyincrisis, and does regular YouTube programs for the Midwestern Marx Institute channel. He is on Instagram @carlos.l.garrido Art/photo credit: Jesus Motorcycle (@PUNlSHEDJesus on X) Archives March 2026
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