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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30458 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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Last week there was a discussion on the motte about Trump’s cabinet picks, in particular about Rubio who is something of a hawk. This goes against what many of Trump’s isolationist supporters want. It’s almost certain that Trump is making these picks extremely haphazardly, deciding on names after a bare modicum of thought and prioritizing vibes, “loyalty”, and Fox news appearances over any other concerns. The NYT has documented this extensively, and it’s entirely in keeping with the chaotic nature of his first term.

One of the goofier explanations given by those on the right was that nominating Rubio was actually a 5D chess move to get Rubio out of the Senate, which is apparently extremely necessary for some unexplained reason…? As opposed to Trumpian loyalists like Murkowski. It was just a silly idea altogether.

Why do I bring it up again? Well, because it might have actually worked! Just… on the wrong person. Trump nominated Gaetz for Attorney General, and Gaetz almost immediately resigned from the House when the news broke. This is a bit unusual, as most people stay in their seats until their confirmation is done. There was the looming release of an ethics report on Gaetz which will likely damage his reputation somewhat, so there’s a chance that Gaetz was always planning to resign, although I somewhat doubt it. In any case, Trump yanked the nomination when it was clear that there was bad press coming from it, and now Gaetz has said he won’t come back to Congress even though he probably technically could.

One might ask why Trump would want to get rid of Gaetz from the House. Well, Gaetz was instrumental in paralyzing Congress over the last term, so perhaps Trump wanted to avoid that. The issue with that explanation is that Gaetz is a fiercely pro-Trump, so it seems weird that Trump would promise something to an ally, and then leave them high and dry. The word “backfired” might be a more accurate description in such a case.

My guess is that Gaetz will probably come back to the Trump White House in some form that doesn’t require a Senate confirmation, after the news dies down.

I looked up the scandal on Wikipedia. He allegedly had sex with a 17 year old (who he claims he thought was 19)? That's what's made him radioactive? Is there anything else I'm missing? The wiki section for this says "UNDERAGE SEX TRAFFICKING" so I was expecting he was ordering 9-year Ukrainian war orphans to his house or something, but this really underwhelming. Technically a crime, yes, blah blah blah, but reminds me of the pearl clutching over Lewinsky.

It gets more interesting: it's likely these 17 year olds were recruited off sugar baby websites by the former Seminole County Tax Collector by the name of Joel Greenberg who gave them fraudulent real Florida driver's licenses which listed their ages as over 18. Joel Greenberg was arrested for a scheme of sending letters claiming to be young teenagers in order to accuse his middle school teacher primary opponent of sexually assaulting them, and they found treasure trove of crimes on his cell phone and computers. Greenberg then attempted to get a deal from the feds by floating to the Barr DOJ that he had evidence a sitting member of Congress had sex with women under the age of 18. Despite the DOJ being filled with frothing-at-the-mouth partisans, they opened a secret investigation into Matt Gaetz (and likely a grand jury), and then former DOJ officials likely attempted to blackmail Matt Gaetz's father for $25m in exchange for a Biden admin presidential pardon for Gaetz's "looming" sex trafficking charges (which spurred one of the most bizarre, and true, interviews of a sitting Congressmen on National TV), but after the blackmail thing was burned the sex trafficking investigation was leaked to the NYT, Joel Greenberg plead guilty was finally sentenced to 11 years in prison (only 1 year more than the mandatory minimum for his specific sex trafficking conviction), and the DOJ dropped the investigation over a year later.

It's unverified if it's specifically true the women Greenberg admitted to giving fraudulent real Florida IDs were the 17 year olds Gaetz is rumored to have sex with, but given the behavior of the DOJ, I think that's a good guess as to why no charges were brought.

I think it’s likely Gaetz knew about the fake IDs rather than it being a deliberate attempt to gain kompromat by Greenberg, who was a consummate failson in many ways. Him and Gaetz were both from rich families and became friends over a mutual interest in crypto and guns, apparently. Gaetz also hasn’t really thrown Greenberg under the bus (even though coming out publicly and saying “the woman had an ID saying she was 19, I later found out my friend had set this up as part of a blackmail scheme”) would indeed be a fair defense not only legally as you say but also, at least to a major extent, in the court of public opinion.

It's hard to know since all of this stuff is leaked/rumored as we don't have the full report. My understanding is the rumor is Gaetz was with Greenberg when he was making some fraudulent IDs with the implication being Gaetz knew what was going on, but the specific period we're talking about is in 2017 when the girl was still 17 and I believe this rumored instance was after that. I believe I've heard Gaetz refer to someone going to prison for 11 years (which would refer to Greenberg), but I don't think he's ever said a name.

Given the frothing-at-the-mouth behavior of the DOJ going after anyone connected to Trump, I suspect Gaetz has pretty iron-clad defenses in the court of public opinion and real court, especially when the case would have to be brought in Florida instead of Washington DC or the SDNY.

As a former client told me: if you're going to do shady shit, never in writing and always in cash.

The daily podcast yesterday laid out what they expected would have happened. Senate democrats would have asked Gaetz if he had ever paid women for sex (illegal in Florida and most of the US), whereupon he could have:

  1. Deny ever having done it. The leaked documents combined with the alleged testimony of the women already show that the vast majority of people would see that as perjury.
  2. Admit it, in which case you have a candidate for AG admitting to committing a crime just prior to being sworn in.
  3. Plead the fifth, which would also be remarkable and apparently a bridge too far even for Trump.

Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but I'm surprised democrats wouldn't hold onto this until Gaetz had been confirmed so they could use it as a cudgel against the Trump administration. Maybe they genuinely think he'll wreck the DoJ in a way that his substitute may not.

Sitting on kompromat against Trump to use when it's needed didn't work the last ten times they tried it, and it may well have cost them the election (Trump was able to stall his criminal cases for 18 months, but I doubt he would have been able to stall them for 40 months, especially if he couldn't point to ongoing elections as political cover).

I got the sense from some Democrat lawmakers that they were personally afraid of a Gaetz DOJ. This interview is a masterclass. People in the comments say it's sarcasm, but it's deeper than that. Everything the congressman says is literally true. Even the subtext is straightforward. It is only the emotional valence assigned to the facts laid out that differs between Republicans and Democrats.

I get that mores change and republicans have abandoned even the pretense of moral majority, but like 17 year old prostitution is not suprisingly scandalous. It’s not some made up woke shit. It’s what the whole Epstein island implication was… yesterday.

If one personally doesn’t find this scandalous, ok. But the performative surprise that others might is disingenuous

But the performative surprise that others might is disingenuous.

Uncharitable and frankly surprising since your posts are usually pretty high quality. I'm not performing anything. "Performative " describes people who act outraged when a 42 year old bangs a 17 year old but don't care when a 43 year old bangs an 18 year old.

It’s not some made up woke shit.

Conservatives were performatively butthurt about this stuff way before the Woke. "Won't someone think of the children!" is an ancient meme. I never said it was "made up woke shit." Conservatives have a way longer history of disingenuous pearl clutching, that's why I brought up Lewinsky. I'm saying that I think both wokies and self-righteous moral majority types who express offense at this are inconsistent and ridiculous.

No see this is the issue. If conservatives have been ‘pearl clutching’ about sexual morality for this long maybe it’s not performative… and further why are you surprised?

Your entire reaction (if not performative) thus rests on the conclusion that conservatives don’t earnestly find anything wrong with soliciting teenage prostitutes.

If you don’t find anything wrong with it, again- ok. But to assume anyone who does is pearl clutching is an extremely warped worldview

If conservatives have been ‘pearl clutching’ about sexual morality for this long maybe it’s not performative

Because the majority of pearl clutchers get divorces, use contraception, get abortions, let their sons and daughters fornicate in high school and college, consume internet porn, watch gratuitously violent and sexual movies/tv series, etc etc.

I don't doubt that principled conservative exist when it comes to sexual mores -- I think I (and you?) would probably count, but we're now a very small minority. My conservative religious family members are all okay with gays now, 20 years ago they absolutely were not.

So my point (perhaps poorly expressed) was that the media is engaging in a sort of cargo-cult appeal to Christian morality ("Can you BELIEVE he cheated on his wife/had sex with a student/posted raunchy comments on a forum/etc.??") to the ever-dwindling number of people who can muster anything more than lukewarm outrage to that stuff. There's a "smoke and mirrors" effect of the same type as a woke Twitter outrage mob. Some outlets repeat the story, Twitter addicts tweet incessantly and spam memes and shit up the victim's Twitter threads, and risk averse corporate/political consultants label the victim "high risk" and endorsements get withdrawn. The Kamala campaign astroturfed the heck out of the internet for weeks, we just saw a very pure example of this phenomenon.

More to the original point, they tried the same stuff with Trump. He's a philanderer, he has sex with expensive prostitutes, grab em by the pussy, pee tapes, etc. I'm pretty sure that (most) conservatives in the 90s would have been genuinely affronted by Trump's behavior, but (most) conservatives in the 2010s, while unhappy with his antics, apparently didn't find them disqualifying.

both wokies and self-righteous moral majority types

In case you were wondering what the difference between wokies and temporally-embarrassed wokies self-righteous moral majority types is:

Traditionalists (popularly, "conservatives") are butthurt that a 42 year old man fucked a 17 year old woman, without having to pay with his life for the sex.

Progressives (popularly, "wokes") are butthurt that a 17 year old woman fucked a 42 year old man, without demanding he first pay with his life for the sex.

By contrast, liberals are the men and women who don't think sex is worth that much.

That's not really comparable. 17 is well past the sexual majority in most countries. The Epstein scheme recruited girls as young as 11.

Not to mention there's a world of difference between paying for sex and setting up an underage brothel.

There is a difference in both nature and degree between these moral transgressions.

All the famous Epstein victims were 16/17. There was some dark hinting about younger ones but the evidence is extremely thin on the ground.

I seem to remember testimony from 14 year olds (at the time). The evidence in general in this case isn't particularly forthcoming, for obvious reasons.

I think the criteria is that if it’s not bad enough for your own side to care (I mean a large number of people genuinely caring, en masse, rather than just some senators thinking “I’m gonna have to burn some political credit to confirm this guy”), then it’s not a genuine moral infraction, and it can be assumed that the alleged outrage on the opposing side is largely performative.

Epstein involved girls younger than that, in greater quantity, with elements of coercion, going unpunished, and potentially for the purpose of blackmail on behalf of a foreign nation. These are not comparable events.

an upcoming guy from a rich family gets elected as Seminole County Tax Collector who then gets women off of Sugar Baby websites paying them >$70,000, prints them fraudulent Florida driver's licenses listing them as >18, and then pays them to have sex with him and others, including perhaps a sitting Congressmen

looks like this could potentially be a blackmail operation also (although perhaps not on behalf of a foreign nation), but the guy doing it also engaged in a bunch of other ridiculous criminal behavior which landed with him being arrested for something else which is when the above was uncovered

I think there was a blackmail element no?

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/leaked-texts-from-israeli-consular-official-show-more-details-in-gaetz-levinson-funding-scheme/

https://archive.is/5jZtH

Admittedly I never looked into this deeply. I also distinctly recall some other politician coming forward when the Gaetz drama dropped, saying that something similar happened to him: he met someone, they had girls in the back of the car who were overly friendly, and he left because of the strange vibe. But I don’t remember who that was.

As far as I know, there was no blackmail element from Joel Greenberg himself.

There was other nonconnected blackmailers, though: a former prosecutor for the northern district of Florida by the name of David McGee and a former Intelligence officer for the military named Bob Kent got together and likely attempted to blackmail Gaetz's father. The scheme was Don Gaetz would give $25,000,000 to McGee and who would allegedly use this money to attempt a rescue operation on a long-lost CIA contractor named Bob Levinson and in exchange the two would use their contacts in the Biden admin to get a presidential pardon for Matt Gaetz's "looming" federal sex trafficking charges (which up to that point were secret). Don Gaetz immediately went to the local FBI and they got him to wear a wire to meet with David McGee. Luckily for the Gaetz family, Don refused to do anything without a written letter from the FBI detailing the purpose of the meeting, their agreement, and their cooperation.

Once the Gaetz family had that letter and went to the meeting with David McGee, shortly afterwards someone leaked the entire sex trafficking investigation to the NYT which led to Matt Gaetz giving one of the most bizarre television interviews ever. I also remember this causing a bit of a fallout with other politicians commenting, but I also don't remember who that was.

It looks like your links don't list Bob Levinson as a CIA contractor, but I believe his ties to the CIA (and maybe others) were leaked to the press in ~2013 in an attempt to pressure the Obama admin to get him back.

The main Epstein scandal involved girls who were 16-17, most famously Giuffre. Maxwell was recruiting high school girls. There were allegations about girls who were younger than 15 but much less evidence behind them, which is not, of course, to say it didn’t happen.

I think it was the paying for sex part.

I'm still amazed that someone would be not only so stupid as to not use cash for an illegal transaction, but would actively document it using transparent innuendo.

If anything, being this sloppy should be disqualifying. If you can't even get consorting with whores right as a politician, how are you going to do anything more sophisticated with the whole bureaucracy against you?

Who cares? This is up there with stealing a balloon on free balloon day. Sloppy? It doesn't matter how careful you are, they will make scandals up. See Kavanaugh

I like my political operators to understand basic operational security because I want them to succeed in enacting the goals of my coalition.

That the enemy uses diverse tactics that make this only relevant sometimes doesn't invalidate that preference.

This translates to something like: "I like my political operators to not get lied about. If they were smart their enemies wouldn't be lying about them." E Carrol Jean. Tulsi Gabbard. Kavanaugh.

But this isn't a lie -- Gaetz really did pay for sex on Venmo & PayPal. There are receipts.

"My opponent is going to lie so therefore the black-letter truth doesn't matter" is a take.

Where did Kavanaugh leave written receipts of any wrongdoing exactly? Afaik there is no evidence for him doing anything untoward, only hearsay.

Our man would still be AG in waiting if all there was was hearsay.

I understand closing the ranks is a sound tactic, but if you can't recognize picking competent leaders is too I can't do anything for you.

Nah it’s cringe to hire 17 year old prostitutes as a 40 year old man, people are entirely within their rights to consider that sleazy behavior.

I can only hope to be so cringe but free at 40.

You planning a move to Thailand?

Excuse me, I'm racist, not gay.

What does age gap discourse have to do with hiring a prostitute?

I think it's much less cringe than hiring 37-year-old prostitutes. And at 400-500 dollars per session she was a real bargain, to boot.

In your view, what are the most and least cringe age of prostitutes to hire, and for what prices?

It's not just age. It's the answer to "how likely would the person be able to have the same experience by asking his wife/GF or hooking up" that determines the cringeworthiness. So it can be age, kink, difference in attractiveness, etc.

More comments

the girl was allegedly 17 years old in 2017 when Gaetz was 35 and the girl likely had a fraudulent real Florida driver's license saying she was 19

middle-aged women are "within their rights" to think any opinion and it's certainly not surprising they disapprove of rich congressmen their age sleeping with 17 year olds, paying them or otherwise

I'm not middle aged or a woman and I think carrying on a purely sexual relationship with a high schooler while a man in his thirties is pretty cringe.

why?

More comments

What’s the threshold for ‘middle aged’ in your opinion?

over 30-35

for the record, this wasn't meant to be a personal dig at you because I didn't know you fit this description (or even if you do, but given the mod response I suspect it's at least close); it was meant to be a dig at the middle-aged+ women commentariat who regularly make such comments on the internet

Make your point without the snide personal digs.

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