When the latest tranche of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails surfaced in early 2025, few expected them to read less like a sex-trafficking ledger and more like the minutes of a particularly sinister geopolitical start-up. Yet there they were: detailed exchanges between Epstein and Trump-MAGA ideologue and booster Steve Bannon in 2018-19 about funding models, contact lists for European far right leaders, cryptocurrency pipelines to avoid banking oversight, and even a direct claim that “DT is aware” of the project.

Donald Trump, then president, may or may not have been fully briefed, but the broader picture is now unmistakable. A loose but highly effective transnational network – which some call a Reactionary International – has spent the better part of a decade stitching together American MAGA money, European ethnonationalist parties, street-fighting militias and Silicon Valley billionaires. Its aim is simple: to replace the liberal international order with something harder, whiter and far less accountable.

"Reactionary International" is a loose, transnational network of far-right, populist, and authoritarian actors, think tanks, funders, and media outlets working to undermine liberal democratic institutions, promote nationalism, and advance cultural conservatism. It's not a formal organisation like the historic Communist International but a decentralised web of alliances that spans Europe, the Americas, and beyond.

Coined in analyses around 2024–2025, it describes how figures like Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Giorgia Meloni (Italy), Marine Le Pen (France), Javier Milei (Argentina), and Donald Trump (U.S.) coordinate through shared events, funding, and ideology to challenge globalism, "wokeness," and multilateral bodies like the European Union (EU).

Key hubs include CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), the Madrid Forum (hosted by Spain's Vox party), and the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 blueprint, which has influenced policies from the U.S. to Brazil.

This network thrives on anti-progressive themes: opposition to immigration, LGBTQ rights, climate action, and "globalist" elites. It's funded by opaque sources like U.S. billionaires (e.g., the Mercer family) and European foundations, with events like "Europa Viva 24" in Madrid

This is not a behind-the-scenes conspiracy. It is a conspiracy in plain sight, documented in court filings, campaign-finance disclosures, leaked messages and the boastful podcasts of its own architects.

The architect and the fixer

Steve Bannon never hid his ambition. After leaving the White House in 2017 he declared that his real work was only beginning: to build a global far right populist revolt against the “party of Davos”. In 2018 he set up an organisation in Brussels grandly named “The Movement”, designed as a one-stop shop for Europe’s anti-immigrant parties. Matteo Salvini in Italy, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Marine Le Pen in France, Nigel Farage in Britain – all were courted with polling, messaging and promises of transatlantic cash. Bannon’s pitch was blunt: what Trump did to the Republican Party, they could do to the European Union.

But the net of The Movement spread further still including to Brazil via Eduardo Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro’s son, who would its representative in South America.

What has only recently become clear is how useful Jeffrey Epstein was to this project. Epstein was not an ideologue; he was a network node with resources – private jets, Palm Beach guest lists and a desperate desire to rehabilitate his reputation after his 2008 plea deal. In the emails, he offers Bannon speech coaching for British appearances, draft donor lists, proposes blockchain wallets to move money without leaving footprints, and even volunteers to put Bannon in touch with the sitting president of the UN General Assembly for advice on “the EU project”.

The tone is casual, almost collegiate. Two men who understood that power is not about ideology alone; it is about access, logistics and deniability.

Epstein’s value was precisely that he was radioactive. By associating with him, Bannon could test which politicians and donors were willing to ignore reputational risk for the sake of the cause. Those who stayed in the room were the ones who mattered.

The money

No international network runs on enthusiasm alone. The American donor class that bankrolled Trump’s return in 2024 turned out to be the same pool Bannon had been cultivating for Europe.

Elon Musk gave at least $291 million in the 2024 cycle, much of it through his America PAC. Some of that money paid for advertisements that could have been written by Giorgia Meloni or Geert Wilders: endless caravans, “replacement” demographics, collapsing civilisations. Musk did not need to be told what to do; he had spent years saturated in the same X/Twitter echo chambers that Bannon helped create.

Peter Thiel, quieter but no less decisive, bankrolled JD Vance and a web of dark-money groups that served as bridges between Palo Alto and the European New Right. Miriam Adelson wrote nine-figure cheques whose only ideological consistency was a hard line on borders – whether in the Negev or on the Rio Grande. Crypto barons, newly flush and newly paranoid about regulation, rounded out the list. Their names now adorn the donor plaques for Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom renovation, a fitting metaphor: gaudy, over-leveraged and built on foundations no one is allowed to inspect too closely.

This was never charity. It was an investment in a world where nation-states reclaim control from supranational institutions, where tech platforms police speech according to the owner’s politics, and where immigration is the all-purpose scapegoat for every unresolved grievance of the twenty-first century.

The street muscle

Ideas need enforcers. In the United States the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and assorted Three-Percenter militias filled that role. They provided security at Trump rallies when official protection looked shaky, they intimidated election officials, and on January 6, 2021 they tried to keep Trump in power by force. Many of their leaders were imprisoned after January 6 but pardoned by Trump in early 2025. In 2024–25 their members rebranded as “poll watchers” and “inauguration security volunteers”, buoyed by promises – some explicit, some whispered – of pardons and patronage.

QAnon served a different function. Where the Proud Boys brought muscle, QAnon brought mythology. By folding real Epstein crimes into a baroque fantasy of Satanic cabals, it neutralised the very scandals that should have destroyed the network. Trump reposted QAnon accounts throughout his second campaign; his new Justice Department showed no appetite for releasing the full Epstein files. For true believers, that is proof the plan is working.

Both currents – the brawlers and the conspiracists – were useful abroad. Bannon openly talked about “franchising” the MAGA model. Tommy Robinson in Britain, the Alternative for Germany (AfD)’s more militant factions in Germany, the convoy protesters in Canada – all borrowed tactics, memes and sometimes money from the American original.

The respectable facade

What makes this network durable is the layer of elected officials who know exactly what is happening and choose to look away, or to help.

In Washington, senators and congressmen who once kept the Proud Boys at arm’s length now attend their fundraisers. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar and others have turned conspiracy-mongering from a liability into a brand. J.D. Vance, once a Never-Trumper, now parrots Bannon’s talking points on European soil, praising Orbán’s Hungary as a model for America.

In Europe, the process is further along. Giorgia Meloni governs Italy with a party whose roots are unambiguously fascist. Poland’s new president, elected in 2025 on a narrow but decisive margin, ran on the same anti-refugee platform that Bannon helped design a decade earlier. Even in countries where the hard right remains in opposition – France, Germany, Spain – it sets the terms of debate. Centrist parties adopt ever-tighter migration rules just to stay electable.

The New International

This, then, is the new far-right international. It has no headquarters, no formal membership list, no annual congress in Vienna. It has podcasts, private jets, encrypted wallets, offshore LLCs and a shared enemy list: the EU, the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), “globalists”, migrants, critical-race theorists, climate activists, and anyone who still believes in the post-1945 order.

In essence, the Epstein-Bannon axis operationalised the Reactionary International's vision: turning ideological affinity into concrete alliances that erode democracy through coordinated disruption. While Epstein's death severed some threads, the network's resilience – evident in ongoing U.S.-EU far-right coordination – shows its lasting impact.

Its ideology is not coherent in the old sense. It contains monarchist Catholics and atheist libertarians, Zionist hardliners and soft Holocaust deniers, Russian apologists and Ukrainian ultras. What unites them is a belief that liberal democracy has failed, that the future belongs to strong nations led by strongmen, and that the hour is late.

Jeffrey Epstein is dead. Steve Bannon is in and out of courtrooms. Trump is back in the White House. Yet the network they helped assemble is larger than any one of them. It stretches from Mar-a-Lago to Budapest, from the X algorithm to the streets of Chemnitz, from Silicon Valley balance sheets to the prison yards where Proud Boy chapters still recruit.

It is not invincible. It is riven by egos, legal jeopardy and the ordinary contradictions of trying to run a global movement on resentment and WhatsApp. But it no longer needs perfect coordination to keep moving forward. The money, the street fighters and the elected officials are there. And the old guard – the ones who still believe in rules-based order, in multilateral institutions have not yet found an answer. Indeed, they’re leaning into the far right themselves.

That is the real legacy of those emails: not the sordid details most headlines chased, but the casual revelation of how far the work of a far right international had already progressed, and how little it still needs any single villain to keep going.

Inderjeet Parmar is a professor of international politics and associate dean of research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City St George’s, University of London, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and writes the American Imperium column at The Wire. He is an International Fellow at the ROADS Initiative think tank, Islamabad, on the board of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, USA, and on the advisory board of INCT-INEU, Brazil, its leading association for study of the United States. Author of several books including Foundations of the American Century, he is currently writing a book on the history, politics, and crises of the US foreign policy establishment.

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