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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   29361 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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Given that nobody was brave enough to submit a top level comment, I figured I would start off the games this week.

I'd like to talk about the Epstein files, and general pedophilic corruption amongst the world's elite. I wasn't that surprised that Trump didn't end up releasing the full document, given his history of promising things will be declassified (like the JFK files) and then failing to deliver. (I still want to see those JFK files dangit.)

I have to admit though, I have trouble understanding exactly how this conspiracy works. I would imagine if there were a genuine sort of sex cult with underaged teenagers, demon worship, etc going on amongst the world's elite, we would have at least some hard evidence, some video footage, or some audio recording to point at, no? Common wisdom about conspiracies in rationalist circles is that it's too difficult to cover up a leak, especially over decades and with thousands of people. When the stakes get this high I would imagine it's even harder.

Then again, if the files aren't all that bad, why the heck aren't the files released? Why hasn't anything changed after the investigations? I've always been skeptical of the 'kookier' conspiracy theories about Freemason Illuminati cults ruling the world, but I have to admit after this, the UFO kerfuffle in Congress, and just general seemingly bonkers decisions about classified info, I am quite confused as to what a reasonable explanation is.

Anyway, what are your thoughts Mottizens?

some hard evidence, some video footage, or some audio recording to point at

Well the arch-paedophile (or some high-ranking member) somehow managed to kill himself despite being on suicide watch, before trial. And somehow the camera footage of this anomaly disappeared. What's the simplest explanation?

It's like the Wuhan lab losing all their documents in September 2019, how their 'let's put furin cleavage sites in a bat coronavirus' research proposal was rather similar to the bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site that emerged near Wuhan lab!

How the conspiracy works is still unclear but it's pretty visible that there was some kind of conspiracy. We don't need hard evidence to know that something was happening, especially when there are incentives to prevent any hard evidence coming to light.

My favoured conspiracy theory is that the main utility of this is somewhat similar to mafia initiation rituals: the participants know that everyone gets a nuclear level of dirt on everyone else, which establishes a level of trust that would otherwise be impossible among the powerful and eccentric crowd that is the Who's Who. Every member of the group is incentivised to cooperate with every other member of the group, at least to an extent that nobody feels sufficient spite and desperation to trigger MAD. (Imagine an Epstein Islander were to go to jail for the rest of their life for securities fraud, and felt that the others could have pulled strings to prevent this.) That most men would not exactly be repelled by sexual attention from 16 year olds is just a nice plus that makes recruitment go more smoothly (and perhaps allows participants to deceive themselves that they are just reaping the fruits of power, rather than entering a death pact). On top of that, shared experience of transgression probably builds a feeling of camaraderie.

It's worth noting that corresponding rumours from Europe (the Dutroux case) involves girls that are much younger, corresponding to Europe's lower social and legal age of consent (as American national politics operate according to California rules). This is also consistent with the illegality being the point. (Perhaps Europe's patronage networks are less effective than American ones because fewer men are actually into sexual attention from 8 year olds, creating a recruitment problem for the web of trust!)

The association with, and cultural memory of, secret satanic rituals might just be a holdover from when those were similarly grounds for automatic cancellation no matter how powerful the person engaging in them. The weakening of cultural Christianity, under that theory, necessitated switching from Satanism to underage sex. If the rise of Social Justice had not been halted, we could one day have lived in a utopia where the rich and powerful could just go to some island to hold secret blackface parties, instead of having to diddle kids.

If the rise of Social Justice had not been halted, we could one day have lived in a utopia where the rich and powerful could just go to some island to hold secret blackface parties, instead of having to diddle kids.

Thus, Trudeau.

True. I can also think of other factors. As far as I know, it has traditionally been normal for elite Western European families to send their sons off to expensive private boys’ boarding schools, where many of them got groomed by older pederasts in positions of authority and subsequently became pederasts themselves. In general, one trait that sets elites apart from the plebs is that they’re relatively isolated in their youths from normal rites of hetero sex. Also, I suspect there’s a strong correlation between the inherent traits that make one an ambitious, unscrupulous member of the elite and the usual traits of pedophiles, which means that kid touchers will always be overrepresented among the elite.

Having gone to an expensive private boys' boarding school, the rumours are greatly exaggerated. There was much to dislike about them but the kind of thing that CS Lewis wrote about isn't common.

Jason Kessler wrote:

Lets start with the assumption that everyone who broke the law with Epstein should be prosecuted.

The call to "release the Epstein files!" is basically a desire to second guess prosecutors and form vigilante lynch mobs to do an "independent investigation."

Every innocent person unfortunate enough to have made contact with Epstein would have their lives ruined. Deranged gunmen like the Comet Pizza shooter would be showing up at their homes and harassing their families.

That is why they will never release those files unredacted.

https://x.com/TheMadDimension/status/1895492017708319017

The call to "release the Epstein files!" is basically a desire to second guess prosecutors and form vigilante lynch mobs to do an "independent investigation."

And these people are absolutely correct to second guess the prosecutors - we're expected to believe that Epstein and Maxwell's blackmail operation, which made a substantial amount of money and had detailed customer records had no clients whatsoever. As one twitter use put it, Ghislaine Maxwell was thrown in jail for trafficking children to ...nobody, apparently.

If you don't want people second-guessing prosecutors, the prosecutors should actually prosecute people who commit incredibly serious crimes with extremely dangerous consequences (i.e. acquiring illegal leverage over influential figures in business and politics). The real reason why they won't release those files is twofold - there are too many powerful people who would be taken down, and the damage to Israel's reputation would be far too great.

we're expected to believe that Epstein and Maxwell's blackmail operation

What blackmail operation? Your theories are not facts.

Are you serious? Blackmail is the most logical motivation behind having a media room which records powerful people having sex with children (which we know was happening), and the most likely reason for the government to refuse to release the incredibly well documented evidence that Epstein kept of what went down with all the other travelers on the "Lolita Express". But if you are really allergic to logical inference you can just replace "blackmail operation" with "child sex procurement operation" and the question still stands.

Are you serious? Blackmail is the most logical motivation behind having a media room which records powerful people having sex with children (which we know was happening)

How do "we" "know" this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Giuffre

Nice dodge on the other points though.

I cannot recommend highly enough the very in depth podcast series that Darryl Cooper (aka Martyrmade) did on this topic a few years ago.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=yrm8aOmQg-o

The only caution here is that this is a bit radicalizing, it seems very well sourced, and does not paint a pretty picture of the way that sex-blackmail has been used for the last 50 years in the west.

For something briefer (50 minutes) I'd recommend Flesh Simulator's video "SERIAL KILLING FOR FUN AND PROFIT."

Discussed @ timestamp 11:21 "2. The Dirty Old Man": In 1973, Dallas police raided the apartment of pedophile and sex trafficker John Norman, uncovering a client list in a filing cabinet with 30,000 index cards, containing between 50,000 and 100,000 entries of names/contact information. These records were turned over to Kissinger's state department and promptly burned.

Quoth a youtube rando:

You know it's bad when the amount of CSAM being confiscated is so massive in each of these instances that it's being measured by weight.

Two more relevant vids by fleshman:

"Lt. Col Michael Aquino: Scandals, Satanists, and Psychological Warfare"

"What was the deal with DC's most infamous restaurant?"

It bears quoting this particular sentence from the Wikipedia article:

Dallas Police Lt. Harold Hancock told the Chicago Tribune in May 1977 that prominent public figures and federal employees were among the names found in Norman's client list.

The series is worth it alone for the part where Darryl describes his experience with woke counterintelligence training.

That said, I kept waiting for another shoe to drop, and it never did. “Powerful people use their power to have sex with teenage girls,” isn’t exactly the jaw-dropping beyond-the-pale perversion it’s presented as.

Girls who, by all reports, were claiming to be perfectly willing, it's worth noting. 'That overeager girl is actually underaged, cooperate or we call the cops' is a well known scam.

Belgian politicians and social elites were raping and murdering girls for fun. Then they openly murdered dozens of police officers and judges to cover it up. They basically got away with it. And it was all very overt, much more overt than anything to do with the American pizza-gate.

The brief summary is that many of the people who run your government and dictate the shape of your life are very bad people who do not share your values or care about your life or the life of your children.

My intuition has always been that the Epstein scheme was far less elaborate than is often claimed online for several reasons.

  1. The most incriminating quote is the alleged suggestion by Acosta that Epstein “belonged to intelligence”, meaning the CIA or some allied intelligence agency doing business with the CIA (implicitly Mossad). But is that actually the case? There are countless powerful or semi-influential figures who exist in the gray area where they sell intelligence or have a business relationship with the agencies without their operation being “an intelligence operation”. My own interpretation of that quote is that it meant Epstein was powerful enough that someone brought his name up with someone senior enough to hint that the investigation should be light-touch. That might be because he was an asset, or it might be because Epstein had collaborated with intelligence on occasion or knew powerful people, which we know he did.

  2. All the evidence we have suggests that the scheme was primarily for Epstein’s own sexual gratification. He had a penchant for schoolgirls going back to at least his time teaching at Dalton. All of the victims were primarily victimized by him. An industrial-level scheme built around selective extortion of super rich men to whom Epstein pimped out his child prostitutes might see a dealer dabble (as most pimps do) in his own product, but they’re never the primary consumer. No drug dealer consumes the majority of their own supply.

  3. Maxwell’s Mossad connections are overstated. Maxwell was a rich half-Jewish British girl (her mother was a Huguenot Protestant) and dilettante whose father bought her into Oxford and who had by all accounts little ambition. Her father, as a publisher, con artist and Labour MP, used his connections to expedite arms deliveries to Israel during the critical period in the Cold War where it transferred its primary allegiance during from the Soviets to the West. This made him a hero among some in that generation at Mossad, but a purported connection with his daughter’s on-again-off-again boyfriend’s involvement in a sex-trafficking scandal thirty years later is relatively spurious; there is no good evidence Maxwell senior ever met Epstein. Epstein himself was born to an American Jewish family with zero Israeli connections whose own charitable instincts were much less Israel-centric than peers of his generation. If the Mossad was organizing a sex trafficking scheme to target American billionaires from the ground up, why not pick a substantially more loyal and equally well connected rich person?

  4. You don’t need to blackmail rich American Jews into supporting Israel. This, to me, is the single most obvious argument against the entire alleged scheme as a Mossad project. The absolute majority of the important alleged co-accused were Jewish. For every Clinton (who was post-office at the critical time), Trump (random real estate developer at that time) and Prince Andrew (powerless) were at least as many Blacks, Dubins, Dershowitzes and so on, if not many more. Wexner himself (the source of pretty much all Epstein’s wealth) was and is a Jew and a Zionist. If you’re Mossad, you really don’t need to blackmail these people with videos of them fucking 16 year olds to get them to support Israel; they’ll do it for free. The whole point of blackmailing someone is to get them to do something they don’t want to do.

  5. Epstein killing himself doesn’t mean anything. Many people would kill themselves in a similar position. That the prison was supposed to prevent suicide doesn’t change anything either; many people kill themselves while on suicide watch; he may well have paid his lawyers to smuggle something in. He was going to jail forever, had lost everything, would be in solitary confinement for the rest of his life (and/or get stabbed like Chauvin) and was never going to touch a woman ever again. Why wouldn’t he kill himself?

  6. The fascinating thing about Epstein isn’t his fall, it’s his rise. This is the curiosity, and it’s something that will always fascinate those who are interested in this story. He was a real life Gatsby, he truly did come out of nowhere, he parlayed seducing a student into getting a job with her father on a trading desk, parlayed that into doing business in London at the height of the first Arab oil boom with Khashoggi, parlayed that into ripping investors off in a Ponzi scheme that he escaped by tattling on everyone else, then seduced a closeted billionaire clothing tycoon into letting him manage his money, skimming off hundreds of millions plus a mansion on the upper east side and rinsing him for the best part of a billion dollars. Then he set out to become a socialite and a friend to the super rich, indulged his philia for teenage girls by funding a couple of seedier modeling agencies, and merged the two in a wide-ranging pimping operation with his brother that nevertheless had him at the center, because even the richest men in the world will be friends with you to fuck hot teenagers. Did he do a little business with intelligence on the side, when he had something to trade for his continued liberty? I’m sure of it. But that’s not the heart of the story, which is one man’s almost unimaginable audacity and determination to gain wealth and power by any means necessary.

"Belonged to intelligence" relies on Vicky Ward's reporting that an un-named former senior White House official told her he said that. Ward is not exactly a credible source.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/47815/was-the-prosecutor-in-the-first-epstein-trial-told-that-epstein-is-an-intelligen

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/why-didnt-vanity-fair-break-the-jeffrey-epstein-story

It's the unnamed source shit that makes this claim suspect imo though, what's wrong with Ward? Acosta putting the blame on some unknown official and then denying it seems more parsimonious to me than that Ward made it up.

The rise of Epstein's wealth and influence is extremely mysterious and not explained by your theory. Keith Woods put together a list of circumstantial bullet points:

  • Former Israeli Intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe alleges Epstein ran a honeypot for Mossad after being recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell
  • Maria Farmer, the first victim to report Epstein to the FBI, said everyone involved in the operation was a Jewish supremacist who racially abused her as a non-Jew - she claimed the operation was led by the Mega group
  • Mega group is an organisation of exclusively Jewish billionaires set up to fund Jewish and pro-Israel causes
  • One of the co-founders of Mega was Victora' Secret owner Les Wexner, who provided Epstein with his $77 million house in Manhattan which he used for his blackmail ring
  • NY Times article from the 1990s reported on the apartment when Wexner owned it, describing it as reminiscent of James Bond movies
  • Wexner was the only client of Epstein's mysterious hedge fund and the apparent source of his wealth
  • Epstein was hired to work for Bear Stearns in 1970 by Alan Greenberg, another member of Mega group. Prior to this Epstein was just a school teacher
  • Mega group member Ronald Lauder is president of the World Jewish Congress and has been a big donor to Netanyahu's Likud party
  • Epstein's associate Ghislaine Maxwell is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a top Mossad spy.
  • Robert Maxwell's business partner was Charles Bronfman, a co-founder of the Mega group
  • Epstein's lawyer and long-time friend Alan Dershowitz is an ultra-Zionist, author of The Case for Israel, and was considered by Israel to represent them at the ICJ
  • Epstein had multiple meetings with former Israeli PM Ehud Barak in his New York apartment
  • Les Wexner's Wexner Foundation gave Barak $2 million in 2004 for still unspecified research
  • Barak says he was first introduced to Epstein by former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who gave a eulogy at Robert Maxwells funeral
  • Epstein and Barak were business partners in a tech company - the company’s executive team were all former members of Israeli intelligence

Details of the story, like Epstein being given a $77 million house for free by Les Wexner, make no sense unless we assume it's part of an intelligence op. I haven't dug too deeply into the story myself, it's pretty obvious Epstein is related to Israeli intelligence (not necessarily Mossad) and that's why the Epstein documents will never be released.

I did watch the documentary and was struck by the interview of Maria Farmer in which she related strong Jewish supremacism within the group, which is something you would not expect a Gentile sexual abuse victim to make up out of the blue so it seems credible to me:

“When I called Ghislaine [Maxwell] and asked why I couldn’t eat there [at a private and exclusive country club] she said, ‘It’s a Jewish country club, you’re not Jewish, they’re not going to serve you.’ This is how this woman spoke to me, yeah. This is how these people think, Whitney. They, honest to God, think their DNA is better than everybody else’s, I swear to you. It was a theme all the time with them. With Eileen Guggenheim, with Jeffrey Epstein, with Ghislaine. It was a theme.”

All of those things either back me up, are addressed in my comment, or are irrelevant.

Taking them one by one:

Former Israeli Intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe alleges Epstein ran a honeypot for Mossad after being recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell

Epstein’s wealth, influence, connections and likely even the trafficking scheme (given his history with the seedier side of French modeling agencies) all predate his ever meeting Ghislaine Maxwell in the early 1990s, making this extremely unlikely.

Mega group is an organisation of exclusively Jewish billionaires set up to fund Jewish and pro-Israel causes

So again, this is a blackmail scheme by rich Zionist Jews to blackmail…each other…into supporting Israel?

Wexner was the only client of Epstein's mysterious hedge fund and the apparent source of his wealth

Wexner was a notorious ‘confirmed bachelor’ with no interest in women or girls until he married late in life to a woman in her late thirties to have some heirs. Epstein also never procured boys (not because there are no gay billionaires who would bite, but because he wasn’t interested in them, lending still further credence to my theory) His friends and close business associates in NYC spent the 1980s believing that Epstein was Wexner’s boyfriend, and there is every evidence he was, and that it was likely on this basis (a mentor-mentee relationship between an older and younger man that spans business and pleasure being not uncommon, historically or at the present, for gay/bi men) that Epstein was given control over Wexner’s money (skimming hundreds of millions in fees off the 1980s/90s equity booms) and then given his mansion when he moved back to the Midwest to settle down.

Epstein's associate Ghislaine Maxwell is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a top Mossad spy.

There is no evidence that Robert Maxwell ever met Epstein, even though they would both have been in the UK in the late 1970s. In addition, none of Maxwell’s close business partners remembered any involvement with Epstein. Lastly, Maxwell liked Ghislaine but trusted her little with his actual interests, which he left to his sons, neither of whom liked Epstein and who regarded him as a cad who had seduced their sister (as told by their friends and themselves).

Epstein's lawyer and long-time friend Alan Dershowitz is an ultra-Zionist, author of The Case for Israel, and was considered by Israel to represent them at the ICJ

Yes, indeed. So The Mossad, which has a long-standing policy of not targeting Zionist Jews, embarks on a colossal and expensive operation to blackmail its greatest supporters in America, people who support Israel for free, in order to gain unspecific blackmail material against them for no particular reason. (Why? Traditionally kompromat exists to prevent defection for selfish reasons; unless you believe Jewish in-group loyalty is so weak that even Dershowitz would sell out Israel at the drop of a hat, this is ridiculously unnecessary in this case).

“When I called Ghislaine [Maxwell] and asked why I couldn’t eat there [at a private and exclusive country club] she said, ‘It’s a Jewish country club, you’re not Jewish, they’re not going to serve you.’

Ghislaine Maxwell is not Jewish according to Jewish law.

Lastly, Maxwell liked Ghislaine but trusted her little with his actual interests, which he left to his sons

This reminds me of the banger that KulakRevolt (RIP) posted on X:

Dad? Are you part of the international Zionist Occupational Government?

But there is no Mafia right? "Oh he didn't trust his daughter with his interests, she's definitely not a spy like her father!" Uh-huh.

Yes on the one hand you have this constellation of circumstantial evidence, and on the other hand denials and cover stories which you would completely expect even if it were an intelligence operation. I do not find the Epstein/Wexner love story a better explanation of Epstein's wealth which came out of nowhere or of his connections with Maxwell, Israeli politicians etc. You also downplay Acosta claimed he was told Epstein "belonged to intelligence" in receiving an unprecedented plea deal and getting the FBI investigation essentially covered up. And now the FBI cites National Security interests in not releasing the Epstein files. Embarrassing billionaires wouldn't be a national security issue, exposing foreign intelligence operations would be.

The other thing is that "Israeli intelligence" is not only Mossad.

Ghislaine Maxwell is not Jewish according to Jewish law.

Maxwell is identified as Jewish in Florida prison, where she is entitled to a Kosher meal that is 6x more expensive than those given to incarcerated second-class citizens. Among other perks.

Maxwell is identified as Jewish in Florida prison, where she is entitled to a Kosher meal that is 6x more expensive than those given to incarcerated second-class citizens. Among other perks.

That would be a result of self-identification, no? There are “messianic Jews”, Christians who keep kosher, who would be entitled to the same. Many states have already replaced kosher and halal meals in both state and federal prisons (which seem to handle catering on a state level) with vegan ones (that cost the same $2ish as regular meals in Arizona, for example). Online, the only discussion I can find that is Florida specific for federal prison meal costs suggests that (1) most of those requesting kosher meals are Muslim, as what is kosher is necessarily halal and (2) that it was roughly $4.50 a day for the kosher meal versus $3 for the regular meal, a difference of 50% rather than 600% and likely explained entirely by economies of scale.

You don’t have any actual counter arguments to any of my points. There is no logical reason for Israel to blackmail its staunchest supporters at no benefit to itself.

You don’t need to blackmail rich American Jews into supporting Israel. This, to me, is the single most obvious argument against the entire alleged scheme as a Mossad project. The absolute majority of the important alleged co-accused were Jewish. For every Clinton (who was post-office at the critical time), Trump (random real estate developer at that time) and Prince Andrew (powerless) were at least as many Blacks, Dubins, Dershowitzes and so on, if not many more. Wexner himself (the source of pretty much all Epstein’s wealth) was and is a Jew and a Zionist. If you’re Mossad, you really don’t need to blackmail these people with videos of them fucking 16 year olds to get them to support Israel; they’ll do it for free. The whole point of blackmailing someone is to get them to do something they don’t want to do.

Other arguments are valid, but I'm not sure if this is a particularly good argument on its own. Sure, rich Jewish Americans (and a lot of other Americans besides) will revert to supporting Israel even without blackmail, but there's levels of support; someone who will offer Israel basic support might still balk at giving considerable proportions of their property, offering support in any and all cases including Israel committing a genocide (exceeding current actions at Gaza) or nuking something, committing potentially criminal acts etc.

Also, someone being powerless or low-powered now does not mean they'll be so in the future, at the alleged time of the acts Trump had already expressed interest in presidency, Bill Clinton was a very potential first husband of a future president, and Prince Andrew was a plane crash away from the throne. If you WERE an intelligence agency amassing a blackmail file, of course you'd benefit from a wide trawl among the elite class in general.

Someone who will offer Israel basic support might still balk at giving considerable proportions of their property, offering support in any and all cases including Israel committing a genocide (exceeding current actions at Gaza) or nuking something, committing potentially criminal acts etc.

None of them gave the majority of their property to Israel, Mossad is broadly aligned with less extreme factions in the Knesset (certainly compared to the most extremist religious zionists), and if anything the kind of existential threat that would prompt Israel to use nukes would supercharge Jewish-American support for it in financial and political terms. Lastly, blackmailing your biggest supporters is also liable to backfire when it comes to their support, word still travels, and Mossad has a general and only occasionally and carefully violated policy of not targeting Jews to preserve broad Jewish support for Israel, and even when it does usually only committed anti-Zionist activists, not people who mostly support them.

I accept this take, except point 5. While a fit of depression could explain suicide--- and that wouldn't necessarily be surprising--Epstein had (cough) gotten off before, and with considerable leniency.He couldn't expect the same freedom this time, obviously due to the high profile nature of his case, but the whole nature of the "Epstein didn't kill himself" bit isn't that depression is impossible, but that he was capable of naming names and thus too inconvenient to allow to live. Until that is put to rest the suspicion that he was eliminated will persist. And I'm not sure exactly how it could ever be put to rest.

but that he was capable of naming names and thus too inconvenient to allow to live

Naming names is only worth something to you if it gets you off the charge or at least a much reduced sentence. It was clear at that point on the strength of the reporting and with the number of victims that had come forward that he wasn’t getting out of jail alive even if he lived a long life. His own lawyers, indeed any lawyers, would have told him that. He was almost 70; there was nothing prosecutors could or would offer him that offered a realistic prospect of release given the strength of public and political pressure for his conviction on extremely serious charges.

At that point, the only motivation to spill would be revenge at no benefit to himself. If that was what Epstein wanted he could have set up a dead man’s switch, have sent an email to Wikileaks, whatever. But why? There is every chance Epstein considered many of these people his friends, and there is a great deal of evidence that he enjoyed their company, especially of people like Dershowitz, Minsky and Prince Andrew. Why would he screw them over in an act of impotent revenge to shave 10 years off a 50 year prison sentence (aged 66). Again, public sentiment and media attention was such that a real sweetheart deal was impossible (unlike in the early 2000s); he wasn’t going to be going to Club Fed or getting out in 5 years.

It was clear at that point on the strength of the reporting and with the number of victims that had come forward that he wasn’t getting out of jail alive even if he lived a long life.

The guy who ratted out John Gotti received a suspended sentence and probation for nineteen murders, including the murder of a police officer. I’m pretty sure a pimp could get a suspended sentence for ratting out a massive conspiracy to blackmail half the United States government.

I mean, the guy who turns on his buddies for not coming in clutch the way he expected is very much a thing.

Three possibilities stand out:

  1. Actually, there are no Epstein files. We already know everything that there is to know (or at least everything that it is possible at this point to know). This is the null hypothesis.

  2. Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset, and thus releasing the files would damage US-Israeli relations (I’m sure some of our less-plilosemitic users will gladly explain how exactly this translates into leverage over the Trump Administration).

  3. The contents of the Epstein files personally implicate Donald Trump.

I mean, it's obviously (3) right? Trump is in the Epstein flight logs and address book. In 2002 in a New York Magazine profile of Epstein, Trump described him:

“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump booms from a speakerphone. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

There's also the Fox and Friends clip from last year, where Trump is gung ho about declassifying the JFK files but very cagey about releasing the Epstein files, insisting there's some "phony" stuff in there. Add to that Trump's own history with younger women. Of course, Epstein's "suicide" was also in federal custody in 2019. Who was President in 2019?

Since when has the FBI, or any intelligence agency, been able to contain anti-Trump leaks? They are so bad at infosec WRT Trump that they leak fake stories about him, invent their own fake stories about him, etc.

This by itself doesn't seem insane to me but the corollary to this theory seems to be that Team Obama/Biden are just insanely incompetent not to release it or are themselves implicated. If it's the latter, then Epstein's network was insanely effective and (based on US policy fluctuations over the past five terms) there's only one or maybe a few things they really care about (because US policy in many areas has widely varied in ways you would not expect if a Secret Group had turbo-blackmail over literally every single President).

And frankly I'm not sure Biden or Trump treated Israel with the deference one would expect if they knew Israeli intelligence services had turbo-blackmail on them. Definitely not the Obama administration, unless Israel is engaging in a lot of kayfabe over the Iran deal and such.

They wouldn't have to be on the list themselves, they'd just need to have enough friends and supporters on the list that it wasn't worth throwing them all under a bus to maybe get a solid hit in on Trump.

How hard would it be to leak the relevant documents to press and leave out the parts you don't like?

I feel like dirty political hits are not exactly rocket science, here.

I don't know, you'd think if there was Trump implicating stuff in there they would have used it by now. Even if you have to redact everything that touches anybody else out of it, it'd be a powerful political weapon.

I think it's a lot more likely that it's because spooks are involved and they don't want a light shone on their operation. No idea if that's American, Israeli or any other type of unscrupulous operator, but mass kompromat production on influential people of all sorts doesn't just happen.

It'd be very embarrassing if the US benefited from or deliberately setup a child sex slave ring, which very likely happened in some form or another.

Acosta supposedly said that Epstein "belonged to intelligence" - why the assumption that it's Israeli intelligence?

I think the reason is because of some of Maxwell's connections, but it seems plausible that Epstein was a U.S. intelligence asset. Not mutually exclusive with working for Israeli intelligence!

I think the Maxwell connection makes Israeli Intelligence unavoidable. The only open question is whether it was a collaboration among several agencies, or they kept him all to himself. Wouldn't be unprecedented. I recall a cyber attack (Stuxnet?) on Iran's nuclear weapons program that had the fingerprints of US, Israeli and German intelligence agencies.

Yeah, great example. I would not be shocked if there was something similar here.

Fourth possibility:

The files implicate one or more politically powerful figures who are not Trump or member of his administration, and negotiations (aka blackmail) are currently underway to see how much mileage can be wrung out of the files.

Even more boring: the files implicate intelligence collection methods that would be embarrassing to admit existing. "We know he's not an Israeli asset because we've wiretapped the entire country of Israel and nobody ever mentioned him as an asset" is probably overstating the US power level, but is an example of something that isn't directly germane but would cause international relations trouble if it got out. IIRC there was that incident involving Merkel I think a decade or so ago.

Sigh, thats probably the correct explanation, given the universe so often defaults to maximize boredom.

The files implicate one or more politically powerful figures who are not Trump or member of his administration

I know this isn't anything provable, or even probable, but I think it's interesting to see just how accommodating Chuck Schumer has become lately.

Maybe Trump calling him a Palestinian just gets under his skin that much.

I think this seems most likely. The entire Epstein thing sounds like a blackmail operation with the goal of getting very highly placed people in a situation where you can easily threaten them by simply having their names on the list. This is a list of people who flew to an alleged pedophile island. And if there’s on thing that’s still career and basically life ending it’s being a pedophile. How much would a person be willing to pay or do to not have their life ruined forever? I wouLd imagine it would be a lot. As to who Epstein is doing this for, no idea. Could be Jews, Mafia, Russia, just about anyone.

It could very well be that... Epstein was doing this for himself. Charisma and balls to the wall risk taking will take you far if you have no morals and run in the right circles- both of which are true. Of course it could also blow up in your face and it eventually did.

Blackmailing rich people, especially societal elites, is just so so much easier than making an honest living. And his entire life appears to be doubling down on balls to the wall risk taking to blackmail societal elites, with himself as a major beneficiary. Living on a private island in the Caribbean with a harem and palling around with the richest and most popular people in the world while being immune from tons of laws is an appealing life for many.

I agree. If you look at Epstein’s life he was a gambler. He followed the Sam Bankman-Fried philosophy of taking every single bet that he thought had a chance of not-failing, except he was both more intelligent and (crucially) attractive and charming.

Actually, there are no Epstein files. We already know everything that there is to know (or at least everything that it is possible at this point to know). This is the null hypothesis.

What do we know so far? I mean do we even have the list of people who went to the island?

Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset, and thus releasing the files would damage US-Israeli relations (I’m sure some of our less-plilosemitic users will gladly explain how exactly this translates into leverage over the Trump Administration).

Yeah this is plausible I suppose... but dude if the intelligence agencies are covering up for huge pedophilia rings like... what the hell?!

The contents of the Epstein files personally implicate Donald Trump.

mmf good point. Didn't think of this one, but you know it does make sense. Sigh. I wish Trump wasn't so morally degenerate.

if the intelligence agencies are covering up for huge pedophilia rings

I mean, they generally don't have to; they had a few running in Afghanistan and that was relatively public knowledge at the time.

Of course, because in that case they were foreign brown boys, and in this case they're domestic white women at peak female insecurity age, so the difference in the public's level of care is trivially predictable- one is routine/character-building, the other is a sacrilege/high blasphemy.

My null hypothesis is that the intelligence agencies aren't covering for huge pedophilia rings (and by that I mean "actual little kids", not physically mature teenagers) because there aren't enough sufficiently powerful [male] pedophiles for them to be viable in the first place. The traits that predict 'obligate' pedophilia are likely statistically underrepresented in that group anyway given the most prominent examples are researchers and other academic-types.

I think people’s priors for this are higher because of high profile cases like the Catholic Church where a huge bureaucracy was indeed subverted to protect the interests of paedophiles.

I think that, much as with homosexuality, you err in assuming that a propensity for child abuse is primarily an aberrant genetic mutation that affects desire, as opposed to a willful choice to perform a transgressive evil for the sake of it. I think that the people running American society won't allow anyone into their club - they won't allow anyone else to have any of their power - until they've proven that they really are completely soulless, empty, and evil. Anything we'd recognize as sexual - the whole limited hangout archetype everyone's rambling about here, with an entrapment sex party featuring jailbait - is essentially incidental. You have to be on the record participating in the sadistic torture and execution of a few innocent people before they let you into the big leagues, and you need to seem to enjoy it, too. They're Satanists, and they only want to share the halls of power with fellow Satanists. Those are the people who made America. Freemasons. Those fuckers.

What the hell?

I guess I should tap the evidence, specific groups and maybe speak plainly signs. Somehow, I don't feel like that's sufficient. This is not a place to vent about how much you hate "those fuckers."

Fair; I felt the need to emotionally underline my point, but it felt un-The-Motte-ish as I did it, a feeling I should have paid more attention to.

I think you're onto something, but there is an element of reeling people in with these sorts of evil initiations. I think the jailbait entrapment is the first step. Then they either get girls that are progressively younger, or they encourage the mark to act progressively rougher, or both. There's probably some level of drug use to facilitate this. Something like cocaine or amphetamine would decrease inhibitions, increase aggression and sexual desire, and numb feelings of empathy.

I agree with you that there's a cabal of ghouls operating high up in the realms of power. But I think this cabal is better modeled as a self perpetuating group of evil elites actively seeking out other elites to corrupt and blackmail into joining. I don't think it makes sense as a "you must be this evil to join" club.

Regarding taste... I think there are a lot of evil appetites that increase as they feast. Many of the people strung along or blackmailed into extreme sadism or pedophilia may come to like it over time. Then they go on to perpetuate the cabal.

Freemasons.

Ah, so that's why they call government agents G-Men!

you err in assuming that a propensity for child abuse is primarily an aberrant genetic mutation that affects desire, as opposed to a willful choice to perform a transgressive evil for the sake of it.

I don't actually think [the former], and as such should have chosen my words more carefully; this is all molestation, not pedophilia, since the details are (as you mentioned) completely incidental and [from the supplemental videos linked in other comments] it's all about who presents the easiest target of opportunity. Though, I will point out that of all the things you could get up to, "fucking a willing 16 year old of the opposite sex" is probably the least actually destructive one (and the stupidest "transgression", since the social opprobrium over it is fake and gay anyway) you could ask for in a shadowy elite.

You have to be on the record participating in the sadistic torture and execution of a few innocent people before they let you into the big leagues, and you need to seem to enjoy it, too.

They generally have established patterns of that behavior beforehand so I'm not sure "being willing to do that, except with a slightly cuter human being" is really helping them. It wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility, but these are already bad dudes.

much as with homosexuality

lol

Yeah this is plausible I suppose... but dude if the intelligence agencies are covering up for huge pedophilia rings like... what the hell?!

I keep meaning to read Chaos about how the CIA "created" the Manson Cult. Supposedly it's very well researched, and if it's somehow all smoke and no fire, I'd be amazed.

I just re-listened to that book on audible. It's very good, but it's very convincing in like seven different directions so it's at least mostly smoke.

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