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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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Did they turn on him, or weren't able to bail him out this time? The material he gathered is probably more valuable than his life, so why waste it to save him?

I don’t think the idea that the FBI said “fuck you” to the CIA is unreasonable, it’s happened before. But there’s no evidence for the centrality of the CIA or Mossad to Epstein’s trafficking scheme other than the throwaway comment that he “belonged” to intelligence.

For example, imagine this (in my view much more likely) scenario. Epstein had longstanding connections to Western intelligence because he was tangentially a bit-player in the Khashoggi arms sale game in the 1980s (as has been relatively widely reported). He always had a thing for teen girls (going back at least to his time as a prep school teacher) and indulged increasingly in sexual trafficking and coercion as he got richer after he cut (again) a deal over the Towers financial scheme. While he was seducing notoriously confirmed bachelor Les Wexner to the tune of billions of dollars, he then set about becoming a socialite because social recognition and society status was his other great love, and relentlessly climbed the manhattan and then greater American social scene. All the while, he was increasingly procuring girls for himselves and his friends, since that is a great way to ingratiate oneself with powerful and famous men. At times (again, as Epstein himself said in life) he brokered intelligence and other under the table deals between agencies as a side hustle and to protect himself. His additional interest, though, was being seen as a really smart guy, which is why he did things like hang around with physics professors and philosophers with no real hard power as well as the Clintons and Gateses of the world.

Eventually, public pressure and endless Reddit posting about the 2005 deal he had cut with friendly local Florida officials led to the FBI reopening the investigation and the subsequent arrest. The CIA is the senior agency and could certainly have shut it down if it perceived him as actually vital to national security, but the reality is that billionaires fucking 17 year old teen prostitutes really isn’t very exciting to them, Epstein’s support had been situational at best (ie he wasn’t a plant or an agent, just a broker), and so there was no reason to stop them.

billionaires fucking 17 year old teen prostitutes really isn’t very exciting to them

It seems like theyd have use for that, but then again it also seems to me that theres way less blackmail then there should be in general. Surely most politicians have a skeleton in their closet that someone motivated (domestic, or e.g. china) could dig up? But even with the Trump prosecution, they didnt bring up some corruption he almost certainly committed in the course of working real estate. It seems like with the power of the state investigating domestically, and pardons to informers, they should have been able to dig that up. Instead they went with a dubiously illegal campaign finace thingy.