There are enough clues about Epstein's involvement in international blackmail-ing that they can be called "evidences". Moreover, there are many names, like "Epstein", "Maxwell's father" and "Mossad".
Moreover, there is Conquest's third law and the Sniffing Cop Argument.
Ghislaine's dad Robert Maxwell was pretty much a real life Bond villain. He probably spied for both the Soviets and the Israelis.
I was assigned to close a fairly trivial business deal with Maxwell's underling in 1989, but after 6 hours on the phone with London, Maxwell intervened to try to rip off my employer for one ... million ... dollars! My boss, the chairman of the firm I worked at said to tell Maxwell's underling to take a hike.
There’s a weird silence from the many victims (who’d hit jackpot by suing their elite rapists) and dearth of evidence. Almost like Epstein just raped the girls himself.
This is a disgusting slander: some victims denounced and were piled by the Police, e.g. the girl that was found by the bobbies while being raped and then accused of soliciting.
Now imagine the same thing, plus the rapist has also six figure payouts and probably some black cover - if the story is believable.
Wrong. Many of the Rotherham victims, and girls in other British towns, tried to report the crimes but quickly learned that both the social workers and the police would not help them and would in some cases accuse them of prejudice, which is a more serious crime in that moral shell of a country. Word got around. Victims gave up. We aren't much better, if we're better at all. Learn minimal facts before posting uninformed remarks, please. If you know nothing, say nothing.
I agree. Victims, especially young girls from already-troubled homes, don't always present as good witnesses in the eyes of DAs, who are usually defence attorneys learning their trade on our dime before switching sides. I've dealt with a lot of these scumbags. I'm lucky to live in a county with a serious sheriff. When my first human neighbor (past the goat farm) was nightly raping his 11-year old daughter by another girlfriend and the child told her teacher, he was so bold as to call the police himself and try to get off with a sob story. He'd had much success doing this in the county next door -- a sanctuary county. They had cut him loose three times for serious traffic infractions that we would go to jail for -- because he was illegal, even tbough his ID was false. Given his age and our inability to even know where he had previously lived, who knows how many children he repeatedly raped. We do know with forensic evidence that he raped and impregnated to birth another 11-year old daughter in that county.
He can now spend the rest of his life behind bars, regretting switching zip codes. I'm happy to spend my tax dollars on that: the trial transcript was the worst I've read, and I have read a lot of them.
There were four or five adults living in that single-wide. They cannot claim that they didn't know.
It all comes down to what the local sheriff or chief of police and DA will choose to do, or, in most cases, shelve and forget. Some rich college girl claiming lack of consent after a drunken night will get her day in court. An 11-year old being predated in her own house by her father with her slut mother and scum uncles looking the other way, as she protected her two younger sisters, is the type of youth who ends up being used by people with more power than she has. Maybe they're not coming forward now because they're strung out druggies -- or dead.
The concern about the "Epstein case" is not about pedophilia, although that is certainly cause for concern. The issue is that if Epstein was gathering information for blackmailers, and we don't know what that information is, then the blackmail was successful, and is almost certainly ongoing.
The primary concern should rightly be the obvious crime of pimping out underaged girls. While the blackmail/intelligence angle is certainly possible, the fact that Epstein was the only person ever arrested for having sex with underage girls ought to be the main concern. You don't jump over obvious crimes to try to figure out more speculative ones.
I disagree. Epstein's crimes were egregious, but worse things happen every day, and anyway, he's dead. But if foreign blackmailers were controlling important members of our government, then they still are.
That'll be over soon. Another couple years and if a "tape" of Bill Clinton shows up with him nailing a sixteen year old, it will be explained away as AI...and they'll probably be right.
This is a good point. The advent of 'Is it really real?' AI photos and video are undermining the 'Show me the photos/video!' standard of 'proof' that's been widely accepted for quite a few years now.
Not sure where this is going to lead, but genuine eyewitness accounts may become more prominent again, as they were before ubiquitous imaging.
There are signs that we'll be retreating into numerous older ways of getting things done as AI floods our day-to-day lives with artificial ick. Bluebook/viva exams, live public speaking (echoing the Agora), F2F meetings to establish authenticity and trust, etc.
I'm trying to do more things in the real world. I recently went to an open mic night on a Monday and it was full. The music was not as good as I can call up on the home system, but real life is still valuable.
There are some possible solutions for the AI fakes thing. Apple for example could add a feature that does a hash of any video you take and timestamps it and uploads it to a public cloud server. People would then be able to demonstrate that they had the original raw footage.
I found a recommendation on Rod Dreher's substack to a tremendous essay by Mary Harrington on the nature of this transformation. Key paragraphs:
"Though many still believe in Whig history, it is already over—a casualty of the post-print counter-Enlightenment. For while believers in Whig history generally recognize the contribution made by the printing press to their story, most assumed the advent of digital culture would continue this trajectory. They were wrong. The digital revolution is profoundly reactionary. The transformations it brings are less revolution, in the laudatory Whig sense, than putsch—one that critically undermines every presupposition underpinning Whig history.
The end of print culture is already upon us. With its end, we are already witnessing the disintegration of modernity’s load-bearing foundations, including the valorization of facts and objectivity, and a conception of the individual subject as a universal model of human personhood. This reality-picture, which crystallized in the seventeenth century, is already well on its way to dissolution in the solvent bath of digital media, a process radically accelerated by the spread of AI."
Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. I'd rather take fingerprints, DNA and time-stamped communications.
Lots of true witnesses are nervous, and lots of false accusers are pathological liars who don't bat an eyelid when they give evidence. And corroboration doesn't get you far if people talk to each other.
Let's say you are 4 days away from sweet 18 when it happened. Let's further say you were from a good background, promiscuous, no drugs, and may have received money before for other similar things, and then were recommended for the event. Unlike the Sean Combs story, there was no violence involved, and the person on the other side would deny physical contact or knowing your age was 4 days short of 18.
BTW, you talk about blackmail, but until you can actually prove those powerful/wealthy people participated in the rape of underage girls, what do you have to blackmail them with? Nothing.
So you're still left with having to at least allege the crime of rape against these powerful/wealthy men, if not prove those allegations, before you can proceed to other allegations.
The primary reason for skepticism about the serial blackmail theory is that "elites" talk to each other. Word would quickly get out to "avoid Epstein island," if nothing else, so the idea that this was going on for years and all these powerful people were just tumbling obliviously into the same honeypot stretches credulity.
You think that "locker room talk" among buddies goes away once the number of zeros in your bank account hits a certain number?
It doesn't even have to be explicit. Epstein was hanging out with lots of these dudes in group settings, and there was media coverage of his associations in the early 2000s. All it takes is for a blackmailee to take their friend aside and say "hey, watch out for that guy -- trust me."
Epstein tried to blackmail Bill Gates over a relationship Gates had with a woman he met through Epstein. Gates blew him off and Epstein walked away empty handed, so he’s clearly not the mastermind people claim.
You have to look at the perversions of the society he moved in. The description of his house tells a lot. His seat on the Board of the elite Robin Hood Foundation with powerful news anchors (and Weinstein) reveals their abject disinterest in his prior criminal record. Bis,choice to work with programs for adolescent schoolkids didn't raise any red flags with our nation's "finest journalists" didn't raise eyebrows?
I don't believe in cabals as such, but I do think that those drawn to power seek it for its own sake. They get off on it in a way that normal people don't understand. And as with any other vice, they need to keep upping the dose. Their drug of choice is domination.
So individual elites, not acting in unity (necessarily), find themselves seeking out someone like Epstein as they continue to push the envelope and chase the dragon. They may not even be pedophiles in the sense of finding pre-pubescent kids as the most attractive; it's just that domination over a younger victim is more total, and their terror more impotent. And perhaps most key is the sense of untouchability if they think they can get away with it.
It feels like parsimonious explanation that follows logically. It doesn't require some grand conspiracy of total participation. Just the most out of control freaks (which may in fact be a lot of them, but I digress). In the midst of this you just need some intelligence agencies (cough) willing to compromise the freaks, and bam. You have an Epstein.
Even your explanation is too complicated. Invite a middle aged guy to a mixer, get a couple drinks in him and have a decent looking sixteen year old girl come onto him. Prehistoric instincts take over. No need to complex thinking about domination is required. That's just to help us assume we'd resist.
Scott Greer is a good writer. CPT does have some credence when you see the left has terms like Minor Attracted Person. Also leftists are just consumed by sentimentalism, they have to justify everything by explaining how it is either natural, some people are born attracted to children, or they experienced some trauma in early life that made them this way - so therefore we should be accepting of it to some degree.
But they tried and are trying to make it catch on. That’s the point. They think being sexually attached to children and minors is OK and society shouldn’t stigmatize this attraction so long as they don’t act on it. A step towards normalization and they will keep trying.
Coulter just asserts that we know that Epstein’s network had sex with his victims. In fact there’s no evidence of any of it, and an odd silence from hundreds of victims who can sue for a fortune. Almost like it didn’t happen.
It's much, much simpler. For months, Trump's campaign (maybe not the man himself, but the campaign) and MAGA influencers have been whipping people up into a frenzy about this issue. Dan Bongino and Kash Patel built whole streaming careers about them. Pam Bondi said the files were on her desk and even held an "Epstien Files Phase One" event where LibsOfTikTok and a few other loyal influencers got binders full of info. These things have been dangled in front of the right for a year or more. And then, all of a sudden, Trump says they don't exist, or don't matter, or are a Democrat plot.
You may think MAGA are stupid. And sure, some are. But not all. Some have memories slightly longer than a goldfish and the whiplash - and absolute arrogance of the admin to change so quickly in a week, some soviet Pravda level stuff - angers them.
Personally, I accept that intelligence agencies (probably Mossad, but could have been CIA) will gather blackmail info on people. And I'm not going to be some extreme prude who thinks a rich guy having sex with a 16-year-old girl who was well-compensated to be at a private party is the end of the world; obviously these things happen. My issue is the chutzpuh of the administration to think everyone would forget about these things overnight because overlord Trump said so.
I didn't follow it closely so sincerely asking--is it possible they didn't release the files (BTW was it file about Epstein compiled by investigators or files created by Epstein like videos?) because after all the hype a boring report would seem like a coverup anyway? If the report said that Epstein killed himself and did all this by himself because he was a smart gregarious guy who liked talking to smart people and found parties full of underage girls was a good way to set that up...wouldn't everyone scream coverup?
If the report didn't indicate that Epstein was working for Mossad to blackmail American politicians, then the right would STILL call it a cover-up. The left has a fantasy about Trump and other prominent Republicans being perp-walked into a prison for pedophilic crimes. The right has a similar fantasy about prominent democrats, but they also fantasize about exposing the "fact" that both sides are being blackmailed, and hence controlled, by Israeli intel.
The right is willing to drop EVERYTHING - from the border invasion, to antifa attacking ICE agents, to the transing of our kids - just to "prove" that our government is "controlled" by Israel.
It seems like Trump is right again, while the online left AND right are DESPERATE for the Epstein story to be the main issue we discuss. It's a fantasy without much evidence. Epstein was rich. He knew other rich and powerful people as a result. Some probably participated in his crimes, but as of now, we have no evidence.
Maybe in that sense CPT is the rightwing version of CRT/Woke-- so few political discussions these days involve policy and almost never policy alternatives for agreed upon problems. It's all identity groups repeatedly convincing themselves that the others are the bad guys.
A friend of mine posted to social media how embarrassing it is for him traveling as an American these days. The implication is because Trump but he never states a specific complaint about Trump policy. It took the waiter in Brazil saying he didn't like Trump because Trump just imposed tariffs on Brazil. Now that makes sense to me.
Sure, but unless you are extremely paranoid, this is just kind of annoying and badly handled. Being outraged about it is kind of weird to me but I’m more of an occam’s razor person than a conspiracy theorist.
If they wanted to cover up for pedos or mossad, they wouldn’t have bungled it in this way, they would have not mentioned it from the get go.
My guess is that there are a lot of people named, but not enough info to know which ones were involved in the pedophilia, and so releasing vague information will just hurt innocent people and cause a chaotic witch hunt.
Given Israel's current unpopularity among prominent demographics, I'd expect information about Epstein's ties to Mossad to be leaked in the near future.
If said information isn't leaked, that would suggest those ties have been overstated.
Didn't that come from one of the early investigators saying he was called off Epstein because "he belongs to intelligence"? If true, it suggests at very least he belonged to US intelligence. They might have been protecting him on behalf of Mossad but if he was just Mossad, that's not how it would have been stated.
No, the daily beast reported that an unnamed source told them that Alexander Acosta had told them that Epstein was an intel asset. Acosta was asked about it and came as close as he could to denying it without violating guidelines.
Yes, if this was a second hand report by an anonymous source, absolutely. I read a little more about it and more likely explanations are 1) Epstein had excellent lawyers and the federal prosecutors ran into the same problems as the state 2) Powerful people took an interest in putting the kibosh on it because they would be exposed. This would have happened whether or not intelligence was involved.
Pretty obvious to me that the whole story is a nothingburger. Where are the lawsuits targeting hundreds of elites? Why are the victims forgoing the chance to make eight figures?
If the entirety of the midwit and below internet is certain there is fire, and the iSteve commentariat is unimpressed, I'd lay my bet on nothing deeper to be found.
You don't seem to have much contact with ordinary people on the right. A handful are obsessed. The others have more pressing issues. You're acting like the MSM, exaggerating and demeaning ordinary people. It's not attractive.
No, I just think you, as you have reported, limit your political interactions to rather well-connected people, and thus you have an elitist tendency to draw jaundiced views of the rest. Dean Martin and Goldie Hawn had something to say about that, if you recall. It's enjoyable watching in any case.
There are a lot commenters on this page and a lot of comments. If you remember stuff about me from prior discussions, and are responding to them, I recommend you mention those in your responses. Otherwise I'm just going to assume you are responding to the text of the comment above. I'm completely baffled by who these well connected people are that you think I'm having "political interactions" with. These days political discussions are limited to the Steve comments section, two friends and two family members.
Few people, left or right, seem to know what pedophilia really is. By definition, it is sexual attraction to prepubescent children. People mistakenly use the term without even knowing what it means, which is common in today's world. Epstein WAS NOT a pedo by any definition. ALL of the girls and young women he was involved with were adolescents and adults. NONE were prepubescent children. Yes, I know people have the mistaken idea that adolescents are still children but they're not. Adolescents are capable of reproducing, which means they are no longer children. Epstein was a weirdo but a pedo he was not.
Age of consent varies by state. It might have changed, but the Federal age of consent was 16. Epstein had a fetish for massages from teenage girls. He was paying them $300 per session and having them recruit other girls.
Thet's age of consent were no money changed hands. If money changes hands, it goes up to 18. And then, there is an additional statute, if someone crosses state lines, even after 18.
Doesn’t it vary by location? The age of consent is 16 in many places. Didn’t even know there was an age floor for prostitutes, as it was illegal for most of my life. I’m pretty sure it’s still illegal in many places.
The age of consent for the oldest profession is 18, not 14. So if someone had a long history, but she's 4 days before 18, that would not count as legal consent. On the other hand, a rational jury might be seeing it differently.
Teenage prostitution is bad and should be illegal and prevented, but it’s not the same as a child being molested or raped by her step father or family member. I actually think it’s disgusting to ppl who genuinely experienced that as kids to pretend it’s the same.
The former (and stripping) is often preceded by the latter (or physical abuse) for females, according to Dr. Drew Pinsky on Loveline. Single motherhood and easy divorce are at the heart of the problem. Would fewer fathers leave if they knew they were needed and wanted?
Fathers who leave their children deserve no consideration. Nobody forced them to procreate and leave children in distress and us on the hook to pay for their offspring.
Pedophilia is a documented personality disorder. The definition has never changed. The problem is that people who should know better make their own definitions. What, exactly, is a "minor"? The term is used for different things. For instance, 18-year-olds can vote and the military will take 17-year-olds with parental consent and 18-year-olds without it but most states don't allow consumption of alcoholic beverages until age 21. In short, it's whatever you want to make it to suit your personal ideas.
The biggest mistake by the administration was the overhype about the information before actionable evidence was obtained. Years ago, in my youth I watched the McCarthy hearings on Communist infiltration of every part of government and culture. I remember Joe waving sheets of paper claiming to be a list of known communists in every walk of life. Yes, the list contained some real communists but it also included the names of socialists, communist sympathizers, supposed communists and others who were on the list for reasons unknown.
Epstein’s list could well meet that same criticism of unproven accusations which would be made public without a scrap of evidence of proving sex with minors. No matter, those names, if released would be considered guilty by social media, forever.
To paraphrase a witness from the McCarthy hearings, how do I ever get my reputation back.
Also most of the "missing" children were actually "abducted" by the their own parent: the parent who lost the brutal legal tournament known as American Family Law, but which should actually be called Anti-Family Law.
I know one such child, who is an adult now. She is healthy and well adjusted. She is eternally grateful that her father "abducted" her from her legally victorious but personally incompetent mother.
She was born in the 1970s. Had she been born more recently, when the surveillance grid is tighter and the laws more vicious and punitive, she and her father would have been hunted down, she to be returned to her incompetent mother, he to be banged up indefinitely as a felon and perpetual debtor. Both their lives would have been ruined. We call this Progress.
That may be true, especially adjusting for race, but
1) the veracity of my comments doesn't depend on the sex of the 'abductor',
2) even if I had made a claim in favor of one sex over the other inside the court system, that is irrelevant to whether one sex is more prone to abandonment outside the court system.
But you did make it about the sex of the abductor. There was a dreadful story in the NYT last week, I believe, about women who abducted their children from their husbands and took them into hiding in a lesbian camp where the women went about naked and, I'm sure, boy children and girls as well suffered greatly. The mothers claimed they had to do it because no court would give custody to a lesbian. Be that as it may (and history of sexuality books frequently outright lie about the slings and arrows directed at such glorious lesbian adventurers), it was quite gratify to see the pushback in the comment thread, where even most Times readers were horrified at the thought of doing that to a child.
Oh well. At least we aren't living in the grim and tedious days of Kramer Versus Kramer anymore, for many reasons.
That NYT story is dreadful. It's not novel, though. I've heard similar stories since ... the '90s I think?
Courts give lesbians custody all the time. Lots of family court judges, lawyers, and court-appointed social workers are lesbians. Heck, 11%-22% of the Supreme Court are lesbians. They don't need defensive "camps". That's just an excuse for their systematic grooming project.
Methodical exploitation of insecure mothers and their children has been an ongoing lesbian grooming model for a while, I'd say.
Movie critic Sailer, Don't tell them about the 11x Oscar winning movie Gigi which was a pretty good description of upper class France and was made in Hollywood, starring collaborater M Chevalier, and wasn't considered controversial at the time
Similarly, Nabokov's distasteful "Lolita" came out in 1958 in America and sold 15 million copies around the world. The second adaptation lost so much money 30 years ago that there will never be a third.
"Popular conspiracy theories tend to assume that shadowy elite individuals are pulling the strings, although they can’t be bothered to figure out their names." In the case of the last administration, some names of those pulling Biden's strings are only recently coming out; for example, I don't think our host was aware of Anthony Bernal. Of those "long-time advisors" whose names had been mentioned earlier, not one American in a thousand would have heard of them. The descriptor "shadowy elite individuals" seems apt in that case, but Steve will continue to call it a conspiracy theory.
You posted that after Bernal had been written about in the news. But were you aware of him on 11/06/2023, when you wrote, "And who are these shadowy figures pulling Biden’s strings?" That's my point--we didn't know.
BTW aren't the same people who are so concerned about pedophiles the same people who believe an old French man is married to a much younger French president
I don’t think it’s really a controversial thing to say the left is pretty invested in remaking norms around sexuality, including under age kids. The entire ‘queer’ movement insists that children have a sexual identity, and as the meme goes I don’t see any drag performances at nursing homes under the guise of tolerance although they do seem to want to allow kids to attend. It might be a minority of the left, but it’s pretty powerful in that no Democrat seems willing to say that illustrated books about kinky sex in libraries and adults acting out a kink in front of minors simply is not acceptable.
Did you hear the one about that cockamamie lab-leak theory for the Wuflu? Or that wild-eyed tale about Joe Biden being at Stage 4/5 dementia and practically non-agentic beyond what was for breakfast? Or (get this), that whopper about the Clinton campaign conspiring with elements of British intelligence to fabricate a dossier on Trump and disseminate it to national media. Or the one about 50 former national security officials with active clearances solemnly lying through their teeth that Hunter's laptop was a Russian plant. As if!
Next you'll tell me the NY Times won a Pulitzer for cooking up Russiagate with the assistance of senior members of the Executive branch. Who also bugged Trump Tower hoping to dig up dirt and influence the election of who would be their next Boss. Like Nixon wasn't nailed to the wall for Watergate?
Do I look like I just fell off the turnip truck?!!!!!
Seriously Steve, a multimillionaire pederast tossing around way more money than his investment footprint would indicate, a private island complete with synagogue, unperson Robert Maxwell's daughter as his madam, a harem of teenaged girls, a jet with flight manifests, Manhattan townhome with surveillance everywhere, a wrist slap after he's caught dead to rights in Miami, and ... NOTHING. Just him and good ol' Ghis arranging dates for Prince Andrew with teenaged females. Well la di da. And then, the most anticipated suicide in human history happens under the watchful eye of Warden Mo'esha. Whattaya whattaya?
It could certainly be nothing. Or it could be something. What's the harm in letting Matt Taibbi loose on it and see what we can find out? Speaking of Matt, remember when he determined through old fashioned, plodding document review that the "Biden" administration conspired with social media companies to suppress certain viewpoints, and he got defamed and summoned to a hearing and raked across the coals for it? Just kidding I made that one up.
There are enough clues about Epstein's involvement in international blackmail-ing that they can be called "evidences". Moreover, there are many names, like "Epstein", "Maxwell's father" and "Mossad".
Moreover, there is Conquest's third law and the Sniffing Cop Argument.
Yeah, "can’t be bothered to figure out their names" doesn't really apply here.
Oh I wish a was a little Scott Weiner
That is who I'd really like to beeeee
Cause if I were a little Scott Weiner
All the kids would be in love with me
All speculation (except for Epstein himself). And Ghislaine Maxwell.
You know the difference between speculation and truth? 6 to 12 month.
This case considerably more than a year old and it remains murky and full of unanswered questions.
Too bad official investigations are total bollock, innit?
Yes it is. That’s why people are angry.
Is all speculation true? I hereby speculate that you sir are a pedophile!
Go use some strawman to Banania blog, since it is clear beyond speculation you are in bad faith.
Ghislaine's dad Robert Maxwell was pretty much a real life Bond villain. He probably spied for both the Soviets and the Israelis.
I was assigned to close a fairly trivial business deal with Maxwell's underling in 1989, but after 6 hours on the phone with London, Maxwell intervened to try to rip off my employer for one ... million ... dollars! My boss, the chairman of the firm I worked at said to tell Maxwell's underling to take a hike.
Doesn't sound like much of a super villain if all he could do was threaten people without any results.
There’s a weird silence from the many victims (who’d hit jackpot by suing their elite rapists) and dearth of evidence. Almost like Epstein just raped the girls himself.
Try this argument with Rotherham victims, if you are devoid of decency enough.
Unlike this case, the rotherham victims did in fact accuse their rapists.
And in that case the rapists weren’t even people who could afford eight figure payouts.
This is a disgusting slander: some victims denounced and were piled by the Police, e.g. the girl that was found by the bobbies while being raped and then accused of soliciting.
Now imagine the same thing, plus the rapist has also six figure payouts and probably some black cover - if the story is believable.
Then you would die of shame, if you had honor.
Wrong. Many of the Rotherham victims, and girls in other British towns, tried to report the crimes but quickly learned that both the social workers and the police would not help them and would in some cases accuse them of prejudice, which is a more serious crime in that moral shell of a country. Word got around. Victims gave up. We aren't much better, if we're better at all. Learn minimal facts before posting uninformed remarks, please. If you know nothing, say nothing.
“Devoid of decency” if you’re going to counterargue by appealing to how awful I am you might as well be a leftist
I counterargue with logic, then spit on your face for your lack of decency.
You are disgustingly in bad faith (for the DEI commentators, the counterargument is: you are in bad faith).
Better block you.
I agree. Victims, especially young girls from already-troubled homes, don't always present as good witnesses in the eyes of DAs, who are usually defence attorneys learning their trade on our dime before switching sides. I've dealt with a lot of these scumbags. I'm lucky to live in a county with a serious sheriff. When my first human neighbor (past the goat farm) was nightly raping his 11-year old daughter by another girlfriend and the child told her teacher, he was so bold as to call the police himself and try to get off with a sob story. He'd had much success doing this in the county next door -- a sanctuary county. They had cut him loose three times for serious traffic infractions that we would go to jail for -- because he was illegal, even tbough his ID was false. Given his age and our inability to even know where he had previously lived, who knows how many children he repeatedly raped. We do know with forensic evidence that he raped and impregnated to birth another 11-year old daughter in that county.
He can now spend the rest of his life behind bars, regretting switching zip codes. I'm happy to spend my tax dollars on that: the trial transcript was the worst I've read, and I have read a lot of them.
There were four or five adults living in that single-wide. They cannot claim that they didn't know.
It all comes down to what the local sheriff or chief of police and DA will choose to do, or, in most cases, shelve and forget. Some rich college girl claiming lack of consent after a drunken night will get her day in court. An 11-year old being predated in her own house by her father with her slut mother and scum uncles looking the other way, as she protected her two younger sisters, is the type of youth who ends up being used by people with more power than she has. Maybe they're not coming forward now because they're strung out druggies -- or dead.
Having a Girl-Sniffer-in-Chief for 4 years didn't help matters.
The concern about the "Epstein case" is not about pedophilia, although that is certainly cause for concern. The issue is that if Epstein was gathering information for blackmailers, and we don't know what that information is, then the blackmail was successful, and is almost certainly ongoing.
The primary concern should rightly be the obvious crime of pimping out underaged girls. While the blackmail/intelligence angle is certainly possible, the fact that Epstein was the only person ever arrested for having sex with underage girls ought to be the main concern. You don't jump over obvious crimes to try to figure out more speculative ones.
I disagree. Epstein's crimes were egregious, but worse things happen every day, and anyway, he's dead. But if foreign blackmailers were controlling important members of our government, then they still are.
That'll be over soon. Another couple years and if a "tape" of Bill Clinton shows up with him nailing a sixteen year old, it will be explained away as AI...and they'll probably be right.
This is a good point. The advent of 'Is it really real?' AI photos and video are undermining the 'Show me the photos/video!' standard of 'proof' that's been widely accepted for quite a few years now.
Not sure where this is going to lead, but genuine eyewitness accounts may become more prominent again, as they were before ubiquitous imaging.
There are signs that we'll be retreating into numerous older ways of getting things done as AI floods our day-to-day lives with artificial ick. Bluebook/viva exams, live public speaking (echoing the Agora), F2F meetings to establish authenticity and trust, etc.
I'm trying to do more things in the real world. I recently went to an open mic night on a Monday and it was full. The music was not as good as I can call up on the home system, but real life is still valuable.
There are some possible solutions for the AI fakes thing. Apple for example could add a feature that does a hash of any video you take and timestamps it and uploads it to a public cloud server. People would then be able to demonstrate that they had the original raw footage.
The transformation that's underway runs deep.
I found a recommendation on Rod Dreher's substack to a tremendous essay by Mary Harrington on the nature of this transformation. Key paragraphs:
"Though many still believe in Whig history, it is already over—a casualty of the post-print counter-Enlightenment. For while believers in Whig history generally recognize the contribution made by the printing press to their story, most assumed the advent of digital culture would continue this trajectory. They were wrong. The digital revolution is profoundly reactionary. The transformations it brings are less revolution, in the laudatory Whig sense, than putsch—one that critically undermines every presupposition underpinning Whig history.
The end of print culture is already upon us. With its end, we are already witnessing the disintegration of modernity’s load-bearing foundations, including the valorization of facts and objectivity, and a conception of the individual subject as a universal model of human personhood. This reality-picture, which crystallized in the seventeenth century, is already well on its way to dissolution in the solvent bath of digital media, a process radically accelerated by the spread of AI."
Here's the URL: https://firstthings.com/the-king-and-the-swarm/
Plus there's DNA. We have no AI for DNA, alas for the DEIs among us.
Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. I'd rather take fingerprints, DNA and time-stamped communications.
Lots of true witnesses are nervous, and lots of false accusers are pathological liars who don't bat an eyelid when they give evidence. And corroboration doesn't get you far if people talk to each other.
There is a lot of evidence beyond eyewitness testimony. Videotapes, flight logs, etc.
We already know quite a bit about his preferred form of carpentry.
But this isn't just about Epstein. It's also about the many other powerful men who traveled to his island to participate in the fun he provided them.
Not one of them have been charged. Damn few have even been named.
Almost like it didn’t happened. Hundreds of victims raped by the richest people on earth and no one’s suing?
Let's say you are 4 days away from sweet 18 when it happened. Let's further say you were from a good background, promiscuous, no drugs, and may have received money before for other similar things, and then were recommended for the event. Unlike the Sean Combs story, there was no violence involved, and the person on the other side would deny physical contact or knowing your age was 4 days short of 18.
Except that isn't what happened.
Why would it be hundreds?
BTW, you talk about blackmail, but until you can actually prove those powerful/wealthy people participated in the rape of underage girls, what do you have to blackmail them with? Nothing.
So you're still left with having to at least allege the crime of rape against these powerful/wealthy men, if not prove those allegations, before you can proceed to other allegations.
The primary reason for skepticism about the serial blackmail theory is that "elites" talk to each other. Word would quickly get out to "avoid Epstein island," if nothing else, so the idea that this was going on for years and all these powerful people were just tumbling obliviously into the same honeypot stretches credulity.
You think billionaires talk to others billionaires about being under the threat of blackmail after having sex with underage women?
You think that "locker room talk" among buddies goes away once the number of zeros in your bank account hits a certain number?
It doesn't even have to be explicit. Epstein was hanging out with lots of these dudes in group settings, and there was media coverage of his associations in the early 2000s. All it takes is for a blackmailee to take their friend aside and say "hey, watch out for that guy -- trust me."
Possibly. But the opposite appears to have happened. The old boys’ network worked in his favor and not against him.
There’s also the dearth of evidence. Hundreds of victims are passing on the chance to take revenge and win eight figure jackpots in lawsuits?
Why hundreds?
Epstein tried to blackmail Bill Gates over a relationship Gates had with a woman he met through Epstein. Gates blew him off and Epstein walked away empty handed, so he’s clearly not the mastermind people claim.
It’s a tempest in a teapot. If Epstein’s many victims were raped by many elite men, why aren’t they suing them?
There’s no sign that they were raped by anyone other than Epstein.
You have to look at the perversions of the society he moved in. The description of his house tells a lot. His seat on the Board of the elite Robin Hood Foundation with powerful news anchors (and Weinstein) reveals their abject disinterest in his prior criminal record. Bis,choice to work with programs for adolescent schoolkids didn't raise any red flags with our nation's "finest journalists" didn't raise eyebrows?
I don't believe in cabals as such, but I do think that those drawn to power seek it for its own sake. They get off on it in a way that normal people don't understand. And as with any other vice, they need to keep upping the dose. Their drug of choice is domination.
So individual elites, not acting in unity (necessarily), find themselves seeking out someone like Epstein as they continue to push the envelope and chase the dragon. They may not even be pedophiles in the sense of finding pre-pubescent kids as the most attractive; it's just that domination over a younger victim is more total, and their terror more impotent. And perhaps most key is the sense of untouchability if they think they can get away with it.
It feels like parsimonious explanation that follows logically. It doesn't require some grand conspiracy of total participation. Just the most out of control freaks (which may in fact be a lot of them, but I digress). In the midst of this you just need some intelligence agencies (cough) willing to compromise the freaks, and bam. You have an Epstein.
Even your explanation is too complicated. Invite a middle aged guy to a mixer, get a couple drinks in him and have a decent looking sixteen year old girl come onto him. Prehistoric instincts take over. No need to complex thinking about domination is required. That's just to help us assume we'd resist.
Then you also need the many victims to shut up and not sue their elite rapists for eight figures.
The explanation that follows logically is that they were only molested by Epstein himself.
Scott Greer is a good writer. CPT does have some credence when you see the left has terms like Minor Attracted Person. Also leftists are just consumed by sentimentalism, they have to justify everything by explaining how it is either natural, some people are born attracted to children, or they experienced some trauma in early life that made them this way - so therefore we should be accepting of it to some degree.
“Minor Attracted Person” never caught on. No one likes pedos (except other pedos). This is not partisan.
But they tried and are trying to make it catch on. That’s the point. They think being sexually attached to children and minors is OK and society shouldn’t stigmatize this attraction so long as they don’t act on it. A step towards normalization and they will keep trying.
Who’s “they”? AFAIK it’s a tiny number of weirdos.
I find the Ann Coulter and Hank Oslo takes plausible:
https://anncoulter.substack.com/p/bondis-absurd-epstein-excuses
https://theamericansun.substack.com/p/epstein-was-a-money-guy
See also from Tina Brown, editor of The Daily Beast when they broke the Epstein story:
https://tinabrown.substack.com/p/why-maga-is-right-about-jeffrey-epstein
Coulter just asserts that we know that Epstein’s network had sex with his victims. In fact there’s no evidence of any of it, and an odd silence from hundreds of victims who can sue for a fortune. Almost like it didn’t happen.
It's much, much simpler. For months, Trump's campaign (maybe not the man himself, but the campaign) and MAGA influencers have been whipping people up into a frenzy about this issue. Dan Bongino and Kash Patel built whole streaming careers about them. Pam Bondi said the files were on her desk and even held an "Epstien Files Phase One" event where LibsOfTikTok and a few other loyal influencers got binders full of info. These things have been dangled in front of the right for a year or more. And then, all of a sudden, Trump says they don't exist, or don't matter, or are a Democrat plot.
You may think MAGA are stupid. And sure, some are. But not all. Some have memories slightly longer than a goldfish and the whiplash - and absolute arrogance of the admin to change so quickly in a week, some soviet Pravda level stuff - angers them.
Personally, I accept that intelligence agencies (probably Mossad, but could have been CIA) will gather blackmail info on people. And I'm not going to be some extreme prude who thinks a rich guy having sex with a 16-year-old girl who was well-compensated to be at a private party is the end of the world; obviously these things happen. My issue is the chutzpuh of the administration to think everyone would forget about these things overnight because overlord Trump said so.
I didn't follow it closely so sincerely asking--is it possible they didn't release the files (BTW was it file about Epstein compiled by investigators or files created by Epstein like videos?) because after all the hype a boring report would seem like a coverup anyway? If the report said that Epstein killed himself and did all this by himself because he was a smart gregarious guy who liked talking to smart people and found parties full of underage girls was a good way to set that up...wouldn't everyone scream coverup?
If the report didn't indicate that Epstein was working for Mossad to blackmail American politicians, then the right would STILL call it a cover-up. The left has a fantasy about Trump and other prominent Republicans being perp-walked into a prison for pedophilic crimes. The right has a similar fantasy about prominent democrats, but they also fantasize about exposing the "fact" that both sides are being blackmailed, and hence controlled, by Israeli intel.
The right is willing to drop EVERYTHING - from the border invasion, to antifa attacking ICE agents, to the transing of our kids - just to "prove" that our government is "controlled" by Israel.
It seems like Trump is right again, while the online left AND right are DESPERATE for the Epstein story to be the main issue we discuss. It's a fantasy without much evidence. Epstein was rich. He knew other rich and powerful people as a result. Some probably participated in his crimes, but as of now, we have no evidence.
Maybe in that sense CPT is the rightwing version of CRT/Woke-- so few political discussions these days involve policy and almost never policy alternatives for agreed upon problems. It's all identity groups repeatedly convincing themselves that the others are the bad guys.
A friend of mine posted to social media how embarrassing it is for him traveling as an American these days. The implication is because Trump but he never states a specific complaint about Trump policy. It took the waiter in Brazil saying he didn't like Trump because Trump just imposed tariffs on Brazil. Now that makes sense to me.
This seems to be a case of methinking thou doth protest too much
Sure, but unless you are extremely paranoid, this is just kind of annoying and badly handled. Being outraged about it is kind of weird to me but I’m more of an occam’s razor person than a conspiracy theorist.
If they wanted to cover up for pedos or mossad, they wouldn’t have bungled it in this way, they would have not mentioned it from the get go.
My guess is that there are a lot of people named, but not enough info to know which ones were involved in the pedophilia, and so releasing vague information will just hurt innocent people and cause a chaotic witch hunt.
Given Israel's current unpopularity among prominent demographics, I'd expect information about Epstein's ties to Mossad to be leaked in the near future.
If said information isn't leaked, that would suggest those ties have been overstated.
Didn't that come from one of the early investigators saying he was called off Epstein because "he belongs to intelligence"? If true, it suggests at very least he belonged to US intelligence. They might have been protecting him on behalf of Mossad but if he was just Mossad, that's not how it would have been stated.
No, the daily beast reported that an unnamed source told them that Alexander Acosta had told them that Epstein was an intel asset. Acosta was asked about it and came as close as he could to denying it without violating guidelines.
Or it could simply mean Bill Clinton was involved in it and needed an excuse to call off the investigation.
Yes, if this was a second hand report by an anonymous source, absolutely. I read a little more about it and more likely explanations are 1) Epstein had excellent lawyers and the federal prosecutors ran into the same problems as the state 2) Powerful people took an interest in putting the kibosh on it because they would be exposed. This would have happened whether or not intelligence was involved.
Pretty obvious to me that the whole story is a nothingburger. Where are the lawsuits targeting hundreds of elites? Why are the victims forgoing the chance to make eight figures?
Yes.
Silence is required to get and keep the money.
If the entirety of the midwit and below internet is certain there is fire, and the iSteve commentariat is unimpressed, I'd lay my bet on nothing deeper to be found.
You don't seem to have much contact with ordinary people on the right. A handful are obsessed. The others have more pressing issues. You're acting like the MSM, exaggerating and demeaning ordinary people. It's not attractive.
You have difficulty with reading comprehension.
No, I just think you, as you have reported, limit your political interactions to rather well-connected people, and thus you have an elitist tendency to draw jaundiced views of the rest. Dean Martin and Goldie Hawn had something to say about that, if you recall. It's enjoyable watching in any case.
There are a lot commenters on this page and a lot of comments. If you remember stuff about me from prior discussions, and are responding to them, I recommend you mention those in your responses. Otherwise I'm just going to assume you are responding to the text of the comment above. I'm completely baffled by who these well connected people are that you think I'm having "political interactions" with. These days political discussions are limited to the Steve comments section, two friends and two family members.
You have asked three times. You have been answered.
Few people, left or right, seem to know what pedophilia really is. By definition, it is sexual attraction to prepubescent children. People mistakenly use the term without even knowing what it means, which is common in today's world. Epstein WAS NOT a pedo by any definition. ALL of the girls and young women he was involved with were adolescents and adults. NONE were prepubescent children. Yes, I know people have the mistaken idea that adolescents are still children but they're not. Adolescents are capable of reproducing, which means they are no longer children. Epstein was a weirdo but a pedo he was not.
True but they were below the age of consent. Why would a man want a 14 year old girl when 17 year old ones are available?
It’s a good question though. Why didn’t Epstein just hire adult women?
Age of consent varies by state. It might have changed, but the Federal age of consent was 16. Epstein had a fetish for massages from teenage girls. He was paying them $300 per session and having them recruit other girls.
So he used young teens because he liked them himself. Good point.
Thet's age of consent were no money changed hands. If money changes hands, it goes up to 18. And then, there is an additional statute, if someone crosses state lines, even after 18.
Doesn’t it vary by location? The age of consent is 16 in many places. Didn’t even know there was an age floor for prostitutes, as it was illegal for most of my life. I’m pretty sure it’s still illegal in many places.
The consent laws are very tricky things. They change if someone is in position of authority or if money changes hands.
No one is saying you can't be an ephebophile.
You know who denies that men who want 14 year old girls are pedophiles? Pedophiles!
Kafka's Pedo Trap.
PS- I just learned about Kafka Trap from comments a couple Steve column's ago so I had to :)
The age of consent for the oldest profession is 18, not 14. So if someone had a long history, but she's 4 days before 18, that would not count as legal consent. On the other hand, a rational jury might be seeing it differently.
See my other comment.
Teenage prostitution is bad and should be illegal and prevented, but it’s not the same as a child being molested or raped by her step father or family member. I actually think it’s disgusting to ppl who genuinely experienced that as kids to pretend it’s the same.
The former (and stripping) is often preceded by the latter (or physical abuse) for females, according to Dr. Drew Pinsky on Loveline. Single motherhood and easy divorce are at the heart of the problem. Would fewer fathers leave if they knew they were needed and wanted?
Fathers who leave their children deserve no consideration. Nobody forced them to procreate and leave children in distress and us on the hook to pay for their offspring.
Maybe pedophilia once meant, or should mean, attraction to children, but nowadays it just means attraction to minors.
Pedophilia is a documented personality disorder. The definition has never changed. The problem is that people who should know better make their own definitions. What, exactly, is a "minor"? The term is used for different things. For instance, 18-year-olds can vote and the military will take 17-year-olds with parental consent and 18-year-olds without it but most states don't allow consumption of alcoholic beverages until age 21. In short, it's whatever you want to make it to suit your personal ideas.
The biggest mistake by the administration was the overhype about the information before actionable evidence was obtained. Years ago, in my youth I watched the McCarthy hearings on Communist infiltration of every part of government and culture. I remember Joe waving sheets of paper claiming to be a list of known communists in every walk of life. Yes, the list contained some real communists but it also included the names of socialists, communist sympathizers, supposed communists and others who were on the list for reasons unknown.
Epstein’s list could well meet that same criticism of unproven accusations which would be made public without a scrap of evidence of proving sex with minors. No matter, those names, if released would be considered guilty by social media, forever.
To paraphrase a witness from the McCarthy hearings, how do I ever get my reputation back.
McCarthy was right.
It’s worth noting that one source for the pedo panic is the constant repetition of the extremely misleading statistic that an American child goes missing every 38 seconds (https://childfindofamerica.org/resources/facts-and-stats-missing-children/). Feel free to check my arithmetic.
But the vast, vast majority are found within hours or days.
Also most of the "missing" children were actually "abducted" by the their own parent: the parent who lost the brutal legal tournament known as American Family Law, but which should actually be called Anti-Family Law.
I know one such child, who is an adult now. She is healthy and well adjusted. She is eternally grateful that her father "abducted" her from her legally victorious but personally incompetent mother.
She was born in the 1970s. Had she been born more recently, when the surveillance grid is tighter and the laws more vicious and punitive, she and her father would have been hunted down, she to be returned to her incompetent mother, he to be banged up indefinitely as a felon and perpetual debtor. Both their lives would have been ruined. We call this Progress.
Statistically, fathers are far, far more likely to disappear without the kids.
Facts trump anecdotes.
That may be true, especially adjusting for race, but
1) the veracity of my comments doesn't depend on the sex of the 'abductor',
2) even if I had made a claim in favor of one sex over the other inside the court system, that is irrelevant to whether one sex is more prone to abandonment outside the court system.
But you did make it about the sex of the abductor. There was a dreadful story in the NYT last week, I believe, about women who abducted their children from their husbands and took them into hiding in a lesbian camp where the women went about naked and, I'm sure, boy children and girls as well suffered greatly. The mothers claimed they had to do it because no court would give custody to a lesbian. Be that as it may (and history of sexuality books frequently outright lie about the slings and arrows directed at such glorious lesbian adventurers), it was quite gratify to see the pushback in the comment thread, where even most Times readers were horrified at the thought of doing that to a child.
Oh well. At least we aren't living in the grim and tedious days of Kramer Versus Kramer anymore, for many reasons.
How did I make it about the sex of the abductor?
That NYT story is dreadful. It's not novel, though. I've heard similar stories since ... the '90s I think?
Courts give lesbians custody all the time. Lots of family court judges, lawyers, and court-appointed social workers are lesbians. Heck, 11%-22% of the Supreme Court are lesbians. They don't need defensive "camps". That's just an excuse for their systematic grooming project.
Methodical exploitation of insecure mothers and their children has been an ongoing lesbian grooming model for a while, I'd say.
It’s obvious from the amber alerts. Usually something like John Smith, abducted by Carson Smith.
The ones I typically see are more like "Maria Jimenez abducted by Juan Jimenez".
Most whites nowadays know they can't escape the grid, but the Jimenezes can get to a different jurisdiction and blend in.
We who work in the field know that. Pin that tail on the donkey, not the experts.
Movie critic Sailer, Don't tell them about the 11x Oscar winning movie Gigi which was a pretty good description of upper class France and was made in Hollywood, starring collaborater M Chevalier, and wasn't considered controversial at the time
Similarly, Nabokov's distasteful "Lolita" came out in 1958 in America and sold 15 million copies around the world. The second adaptation lost so much money 30 years ago that there will never be a third.
I attribute that far more to changes in reading fiction, or even trying.
"Popular conspiracy theories tend to assume that shadowy elite individuals are pulling the strings, although they can’t be bothered to figure out their names." In the case of the last administration, some names of those pulling Biden's strings are only recently coming out; for example, I don't think our host was aware of Anthony Bernal. Of those "long-time advisors" whose names had been mentioned earlier, not one American in a thousand would have heard of them. The descriptor "shadowy elite individuals" seems apt in that case, but Steve will continue to call it a conspiracy theory.
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/deep-state-revealed-the-gay-caballero?utm_source=publication-search
You posted that after Bernal had been written about in the news. But were you aware of him on 11/06/2023, when you wrote, "And who are these shadowy figures pulling Biden’s strings?" That's my point--we didn't know.
Don’t think Sailer would call that a conspiracy theory considering that he wrote about it at the time.
BTW aren't the same people who are so concerned about pedophiles the same people who believe an old French man is married to a much younger French president
Enquiring minds want to know. It's certainly a peculiar marriage.
They’re french
I don’t think it’s really a controversial thing to say the left is pretty invested in remaking norms around sexuality, including under age kids. The entire ‘queer’ movement insists that children have a sexual identity, and as the meme goes I don’t see any drag performances at nursing homes under the guise of tolerance although they do seem to want to allow kids to attend. It might be a minority of the left, but it’s pretty powerful in that no Democrat seems willing to say that illustrated books about kinky sex in libraries and adults acting out a kink in front of minors simply is not acceptable.
Democrats can’t admit that Republicans are accurately describing the LGBT movement’s creepy children’s literature.
Very well-put.
Critical Pedo Theory! MAGATS suRe R StUpiD!#*@!
Did you hear the one about that cockamamie lab-leak theory for the Wuflu? Or that wild-eyed tale about Joe Biden being at Stage 4/5 dementia and practically non-agentic beyond what was for breakfast? Or (get this), that whopper about the Clinton campaign conspiring with elements of British intelligence to fabricate a dossier on Trump and disseminate it to national media. Or the one about 50 former national security officials with active clearances solemnly lying through their teeth that Hunter's laptop was a Russian plant. As if!
Next you'll tell me the NY Times won a Pulitzer for cooking up Russiagate with the assistance of senior members of the Executive branch. Who also bugged Trump Tower hoping to dig up dirt and influence the election of who would be their next Boss. Like Nixon wasn't nailed to the wall for Watergate?
Do I look like I just fell off the turnip truck?!!!!!
Seriously Steve, a multimillionaire pederast tossing around way more money than his investment footprint would indicate, a private island complete with synagogue, unperson Robert Maxwell's daughter as his madam, a harem of teenaged girls, a jet with flight manifests, Manhattan townhome with surveillance everywhere, a wrist slap after he's caught dead to rights in Miami, and ... NOTHING. Just him and good ol' Ghis arranging dates for Prince Andrew with teenaged females. Well la di da. And then, the most anticipated suicide in human history happens under the watchful eye of Warden Mo'esha. Whattaya whattaya?
It could certainly be nothing. Or it could be something. What's the harm in letting Matt Taibbi loose on it and see what we can find out? Speaking of Matt, remember when he determined through old fashioned, plodding document review that the "Biden" administration conspired with social media companies to suppress certain viewpoints, and he got defamed and summoned to a hearing and raked across the coals for it? Just kidding I made that one up.
Great comment. I plan to quote.
Thank you, Anti-Gnostic, for articulating this for me. My frustration with Sailer here has happened before, but thankfully not often: Boomer Credulity
Do I look like I just fell off the turnip truck?!!
Yes, obviously. Gish galloping hard.
Gish, call me.
Whattaya whattaya?
Meanwhile the victims aren’t suing the elites who raped them for eight figures each. What gives?
There’s a weird absense of evidence that anyone but Epstein molested anyone.
Who knows? Court orders, threats, hush money? Here's Roman Polanski and Samantha Geimer.
https://s2-oglobo.glbimg.com/_JHWrZ7cNvr2y4ah4xCeArHgViI=/0x0:655x435/888x0/smart/filters:strip_icc()/i.s3.glbimg.com/v1/AUTH_da025474c0c44edd99332dddb09cabe8/internal_photos/bs/2023/l/G/mcva8sQn2PU0yHeUPLtA/roman.jpg
Just Jeff and Ghis, rattling around in the mansions with dozens of teenagers? Maybe. Like I say, let's have some folks go through the document dump.
How many times are you going to ask this yet not reply to answers?