site banner
PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   29261 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I want to revisit the comparison of AI slop with human slop, and whether AI is currently capable of writing.

I recently came across the most mind numbing and soulless writing in this series of articles: https://www.greenmatters.com/a/andrew-krosofsky . It has all the hallmarks of slop, hundreds of low effort articles, no clear theme, bored and soulless writing, etc. But guess what, it's written by a human! He was also really doing the grind, writing multiple articles per day. I also have receipts because the wayback machine shows his writing years before chatgpt existed: https://web.archive.org/web/20201015131543/https://www.greenmatters.com/a/andrew-krosofsky .

But I noticed something immediately. The writing was obviously human. It didn't have any of that uncanny valley feeling. There are no obvious falsehoods spoken like truth. No hallucinations. And even his worst articles are 1000x better than the typical AI fake news. This just reinforces my understanding:

Even the lowest dregs of the journalistic world write at a higher level than the best cutting edge AI models today.

Now I'm sure the AI bulls here will disagree. So I have 2 challenges for you all:

  1. Find a single hallucination in an article written by this author between 2021 and today. There are quite a few, so this should be easy if human writing is unreliable. For the purposes of this, a hallucination is a statement that is both provably false at the time of writing and not supported by a linked source.

  2. Demonstrate a technique for an AI model of your choice to reliably copywrite articles of a similar quality, over any arbitrary topic that has reputable sources available. Those articles must not have obvious AI tells, pass AI detection, and have a hallucination rate of less than 1 in 1000.

To put my money where my mouth is, I'll offer a wager of $50 for the first person to complete either of these challenges. But I think the fact that a human who is at the bottom of the journalistic world can handily do this but an AI can't should demonstrate the big gulf between human and AI that still exists.

One idea is to detect slop, by looking at how surprising and compressible an essay is. Einsteins theory of relativity would have been surprising for an LLM

Well, to shift the frame a bit, does it matter? Of the people who read an article titled "Will an Egg a Day Keep the Doctor Away, or Will It Simply Raise Your Cholesterol?", how many do care about whether its contents are factual and well-sourced*, and how many just want the qualia of reading an article about something to while away their time on the mortal coil? Depending on what the product of human writers that the market actually demands is, yours might just be yet another case of writing off cars for being inadequate horses.

*and does it even make a difference if the source chain just bottoms out in some garbage p-hacked nutrition paper that will be forgotten in five years when some slop research lab decides to p-hack up a new paper on the topic? What fraction of writing anywhere is about something more than the qualia of writing and reading something like the thing it pretends to be? Perhaps straight up making up citations is just cutting out some layers of indirection in the con.

tl;dr: Rather than being more bullish on AI, I think you ought to be more bearish on humanity.

In my imo it matters whether or not people are reading fake slop articles in fake hallucination la-la-land rather than real human slop. If the reader really needs the sensation of reading something with no truth value, there are plenty of mlp fanfics out there to help satisfy the qualia.

Yes every clickbait article about a p-hacked paper about how a glass of wine a day is good/bad is bad. But at least if it goes viral it's a sort of shared experience. Something that can be debunked. And something that can be talked about. If someone tells you he just read that a glass of wine a day is good you can roll your eyes and start talking about p-hacking or experimental methodology.

If AI slop makes it up, it can't be debunked. It's harder to disprove something nakedly asserted than something eventually attributed to an unreliable source. And there's a literal infinite supply of AI slop, so there's no point.

Tangent: you're writing about AI slop so I was reminded of this Conversations with Tyler: Any Austin, on the "Hermeneutics of Video Games". Any is some kind of famous YouTube celebrity that I'd never heard of. Anyway, Tyler asked him about AI slop w.r.t. video games, and Any made this point that people shouldn't feel too outraged about encountering AI slop on authenticity grounds, because practically everyone's favorite art is inauthentic.

No one will because we can’t even tell now. The amount of times that you have conversations with people and they go, “This was . . .” Mozart’s a great example of this. I can’t get into that conversation because I don’t actually know that much, but my dad — he knows all the classical music and has all those books and reads all the things, but he was largely motivated by money. Yes, that was a big part of his motivation.

People say this when you talk about video games that get made — or music, actually, is probably the best example — “Oh, I know that was an authentic thing. That band, when they put out that album, that was an authentic piece of art,” or whatever.

Then you go and you read about the history, and it turns out that they made it under duress, and they didn’t really want to. They didn’t care about it. All of it is made up, whatever. To me, that makes it very obvious that we can’t even tell the difference between what we perceive as authentic human art versus inauthentic, so it’s very unlikely that we’re going to be very good at being able to tell the difference between AI generated art.

That's a fairly salient point. They weren't conveying some sacred part of the human spirit. They were serving up shit that sells. This isn't the definition of slop, but inauthenticity is the cousin of slop, sure.

It kind of aligns with a different semi-trolly comment I have where people whine that they wanted computers to automate housework, so they could be free to do art. Not automate art so they could spend more time on housework. It shouldn't be surprising that art is easier to automate: popular art is formulaic! Of course it's easy for robots to copy!

  1. I realize calling Mozart slop is odd, but plenty of classical musicians complain about how poppy his music was.

I think the question of authenticity is very simple to answer. The media I was exposed to in my formative teen years was obviously very authentic and deep. Anything produced since I have turned into a cynical adult is shallow consumerist drivel.

For real, I think that there are differences in authenticity. Take video games. On the one end of the spectrum you have games like nethack or dwarf fortress, where the motivation to build the game was clearly not not get rich. On the other hand of the spectrum, you have EA ${sport_franchise} ${current_year}. Perhaps there are devs in the world whose dream job is it to publish the same soccer game every year for a decade, each time with slightly better graphics and the current (licensed) roster, and they would totally do it as a hobby (if it was not for the license fees). But it seems more likely that EA has found that enough people will spend 50 Euros (or whatever) on the latest soccer game every year and are determined to milk that cash cow for the rest of time, and the devs of FIFA are only slightly more enthusiastic about their products than the devs of SAP.

Most games fall somewhere in the middle, with the devs seeing it as a dayjob which (hopefully) pays the bills while also being more fun than writing enterprise Java.

Likewise, there is value in originality. Stardew Valley is a competently written game of its genre, but that is not its claim to fame. It's claim to fame is that it basically invented the genre.

These two measures of authenticity are of course correlated. Large gaming studios are mostly risk-averse, and the bigger the title the less risk people are willing to take. If Stardew Valley had flopped in beta, ConcernedApe would have had to find a different way to make a living. If an AAA title tanks, quite a few people (some of them with decent paychecks) might lose their job. So of course the big studios imitate the indie devs who made it big, better a 80% chance at making a decent game than a 20% chance at making a groundbreaking game.

Stardew Valley did not invent a genre. Most of its mechanics are from the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons series, which started in 1996.

And even if you want to distinguish Stardew Valley from Harvest Moon by SV's combat in the mines, Rune Factory had added it into the series by 2007.

It's actually kinda interesting to think about why it worked so well. It's an improvement in nearly every way from the A-gamer productions, even the ones that avoided handheld hell, but I dunno which one I'd point to as to what actually mattered in sales.

Your semi-trolly comment is based on the shared cultural assumptions that housework = drudgery and art = purpose. We can automate processes, but not purpose, so on the path to eliminating the drudgery of housework, we eliminate the drudgery of soulless art. But people want to do art - not corporate memphis prints of mixed families at a picnic, they want to express themselves. So even while corporations all converge on an art style specifically designed to be 'inoffensive' and mass produced, even as ai makes it trivial to 'bring your imagination to life' and ghiblify your photos, people wistfully dream of the day they can stop working and make art. IGOR beat Father of Asahd in every conceivable metric. We might not notice authenticity, but our brains do.

On a similar note, if you pick a career as an artist to make money, you should get the paint in your house tested for lead. You pick a career as an artist because you want to express yourself more than you want to make money - stupid maybe, but it's true. Sometimes you have to make money anyway though. Does that make your expression inauthentic? No, because it's still driven by purpose. And necessity is the mother of invention. Simply by choosing a life of squalor so you don't have to work 9 to 5 (what a way to make a livin! (fuck that's what I'm singing for the rest of the day now)) positions you to make authentic art. Does that mean you will make authentic art? No, you can still make slop for a paycheck, and that slop might even be popular if you put your soul into it. I don't think anyone would disagree that The Boondock Saints was slop, an attempt to cash in on the Tarantino bubble of 90s movies about hitmen. It is also earnest as fuck and people love it for that.

Artistry is at all times a battle between those who wish to express themselves and those who wish to turn that expression into money. Sometimes and in some places it leans one way, while in other times and places it leans the other. Hair metal and bands like Poison look soulless in comparison to Nirvana and Hair Metal dies, then grunge gets coopted by corporate and refined and streamlined until we get Creed, who look soulless in comparison to The Strokes, and so on, same as it ever was (in case you don't like Dolly).

grunge gets coopted by corporate and refined and streamlined until we get Creed, who look soulless in comparison to The Strokes

What a weird description of Creed, of all the bands you could have picked. Their lyrics are very sincere (if not especially subtle) expressions of Scott Stapp’s Christian faith. They’re far more “soulful”, in terms of heartfelt expression of their true beliefs and emotions, than nearly any other band within their same broad genre. There are plenty of reasons not to like Creed (although I’m certainly a Creed fan), but lack of soulfulness is an inapt one.

Poison, believe it or not, also projected authenticity - they really were into that glam rock party lifestyle - which is why Bret Michaels remained a celebrity despite gradually turning into Janice from the Muppets. But when you get sucked up into the music machine you look soulless in comparison to 'authentic' acts like Nirvana and The Strokes (which in a way is just the same machine in the bust part of the cycle.)

All of them are artists. Blackpink are artists. The Monkees were artists. They will look soulless anyway when coopted by the machine. And while I'll admit I don't know a lot about Creed, I'm pretty sure they were thoroughly coopted by the machine, just based on the radio play they got back then and how much everyone complained about it.

It is 100% true that Mozart wrote a song entitled "Lick me in the arse" (Leck mich im Arsch).

I like to bring that up in discussions of high culture. I no longer get invited to classy parties.

I feel like this is a far too strict definition of "authentic". Most popular art is commercial to some degree or another, artists gotta eat, even if they accrue other less tangible benefits like street cred or pussy.

What does that leave? Mostly amateur art. I don't see how why it's not possible for something to simultaneously be both a work of passion and yet selected to make at least some money.

That isn't to say that the concept of authenticity is an entirely useless concept! I think Nickelback is far less authentic than say, Tame Impala or the Arctic Monkeys. The latter, even after finding a hit formula, ended up making multiple albums that are better suited to jazz lounges and only really loved by the most diehard fans.

And then you have people who make mixtapes and distribute them for free, play in a garage band or upload to SoundCloud. Maximally authentic, most of it trash. Authenticity isn't a reliable proxy for quality, and probably anti-correlates once you account for confounders.

The idea of “authentic art isn’t made for money” comes from the early days of art when the artist had patrons. If you made art for money, you either didn’t appeal to elites enough to have a patron, or worse, were a dirty poor person. Only aristocrats and people they hired could afford to not think about money, ergo, thinking about money was a mark of poverty and poor quality.

Mozart’s a great example of this. I can’t get into that conversation because I don’t actually know that much, but my dad — he knows all the classical music and has all those books and reads all the things, but he was largely motivated by money. Yes, that was a big part of his motivation.

This is an absolutely idiotic example - Mozart constantly needed money because he lived lavishly beyond his means and spent so much time in aristocratic circles as a commoner that he was desperate to emulate them and would bankrupt himself for expensive clothes and horse carriages. His type of financial troubles are a well documented trope of the era, induced partly by more permissive social climbing between gentry and aristocracy. Since he was undoubtedly a musical genius, obviously he used his talents to make good money fast - it doesn't mean he put no artistic or musical considerations into what he composed!

Any Austin (or rather, his father) doesn't seem to understand that a court musician in the 18th Century was not receiving a pop-star salary, but would need other sources to income his expand his fortune to the point where it could even somewhat compete with an average city-dwelling aristocrat. Mozart wanted this badly - perhaps also because he saw how financially dependent his father had been on his patron, the Archbishop of Salzburg, to the point where his freedom of movement was strictly dictated to him, and wanted to avoid the same fate. The best, fastest, most respectable and well paying manner for someone with Mozarts caché and skills to make money was to take musical commissions.

And guess what? Those "non-money motivated" symphonies and operas we love and cherish Mozart for - those were commissions too! Il Seraglio, the Magic Flute, Don Giovanni were all commissions, since that was how large-scale musical arrangements were made and paid for before the rise of radio and television. The musician didn't just sit around strumming his harpsichord waiting for a hit to happen - they were subjects of courtly and church patronage and composed music in return for goods and services.

So I disagree that "Mozart was largely motivated by money" - Mozart was using his incredible talents and social reputation to leverage the best possible sources of income to finance his extravagant lifestyle. It doesn't make his melodies any less charming, nor does it dilute any kind of authentic artistic process if he received payment for having written them.

My favorite example of this is from the band Queen. I've often heard people say "Freddie wrote Who Wants to Live Forever after he found out he was diagnosed with AIDS" when the actual story is far more pedestrian: Brian May wrote it after viewing an early cut of the movie Highlander.

Wait, doesn't everyone know that Who Wants To Live Forever was written specifically for Highlander? It and Princes of the Universe are movie themes.

It's like hearing that somebody thought that Flash was written independently of Flash Gordon - of course it wasn't! Queen just scored some films, for commercial reasons! The songs became popular because Queen were/are damn good musicians, and sometimes that's enough. Good art doesn't need a sob story.

People online also say that Bohemian Rhapsody is about AIDS. There are just a lot of people really into analysis of lyrics who don't do a lot of research.

Dave Grohl had a great quote about people overanalyzing Nirvana lyrics that went something like "Sometimes Kurt just made up lyrics on the spot to fit the music. I watched him do it."

There's so much nonsense in analyzing fiction / lyrics / poetry, but people are having fun. It just gets annoying when they start lecturing you about media literacy.

@DradisPing @OliveTapenade @ChickenOverlord

They are confusing those songs with The Show Must Go On which the band really did write while Freddie Mercury was dying and is very much about that.

Yeah, I've come to realize that most of the art that we judge to have the deepest meaning and most heartfelt creation is just people working for a paycheck, under a deadline, and with no particular intent on making a masterpiece, indeed no way of knowing if anyone would even care about it after they released it.

Then, when one of these works of arts hits mainstream success, the narrative of its creation is amended to make it seem as though the sole motivation for its creation was the artists' outpouring of their soul and they dug deep into their well of angst and it was a work of pure creative oubrust.

Take for example the Song "Sweet Child O' Mine," by Guns N' Roses, which is undoubtedly a GREAT song on almost every level. Evocative, intensely emotional but energetic. Skill was involved in its creation, no doubt.

But how'd they compose the song and come up with such appropriate lyrics, especially the breakdown?

Almost pure fuckin' chance

During a jam session at the band's house in Sunset Strip, drummer Steven Adler and Slash were warming up and Slash began to play a "circus" melody while making faces at Adler.

LITERALLY just goofing around with each other and came up with an neat-sounding riff.

Then:

When the band recorded demos with producer Spencer Proffer, he suggested adding a breakdown at the song's end. The musicians agreed, but were not sure what to do. Listening to the demo in a loop, Rose started saying to himself, "Where do we go? Where do we go now?" and Proffer suggested that he sing that.

The iconic breakdown of the song wasn't so much the process of talented genius... it was an expression of uncertainty and some third party said "run with that."

(Side note, knowing this story makes me find this portion of the song hilarious if you pretend the band is literally asking the audience "hey guys we don't know how to end this song, any thoughts?" like a genuine question.)

How many songs are out there that have similar creation stories... but never got any popularity so nobody knows the story or would care anyway.

So much of life is just that. A confluence of random factors which we then create a retroactive narrative about to seem more meaningful ("authentic") than it really is.

That's musicians at work. Their work involves play, must involve play, because they are trying to tap into emotions through novel sound and poetry. The particular riff happened by chance, and Guns N' Roses maximized the situations where such a chance can occur, and trained to recognize such chances.

It's like Dorothea Lange's famous "Migrant Mother" photo. Lange finding that particular woman with such an expressive and sympathetic face while surrounded by young children is pure chance. But it's not like it could've happened to anyone. Lange maximized her ability to recognize the opportunity for such a photo, take it, and get it published.

Yes, I think most of success really is Talent, but dependent heavily on Motivation and Luck.

And that motivation, well, it can come from many places, both banal and esoteric or exotic. "I will go broke if I don't get this done" works.

Likewise, the 2015 song Renegades was originally written for a commercial advertising the Jeep Renegade. After I learned that, every time I heard the song on the radio, I felt I was listening to a glorified advertisement.

In fairness, I believe artists "pour their soul" into their art, to some extent, even when it's made with strict guidelines for a paycheck. Even non-art professional software, as evidenced by Easter eggs and the occasional feature that is unreasonably clever and well-implemented for no apparent reason. Ideas that come from "goofing around" aren't much different from those that come from insight, both arise from spontaneous thought. The opposite side of "people create a retroactive narrative to explain their actions", is that people's actions are influenced by their past experiences and suppressed desires, sometimes in ways they don't consciously realize.

Ha, I would have guessed it was for Apple, given all the effort Apple went to casting themselves as the brand for misunderstood geniuses and creative weirdos.

Literally using the name of the product in the song is a little on the nose.

I'm not complaining about slop because it's inauthentic. I'm complaining about it because it's bad. I'm talking about how AI is worse at writing and also more prone to falsehoods than the most lazy, and uninspired human writing out there.

More on topic of your comment, I personally like mainstream art more than the avant garde stuff. I'm pretty sure that some popular anime is going to be remembered more 100 years from now than banksy or some other crazy artist like that.

OK, this is a bit of a hack... My method is to use Kimi K2 to write a not-obviously-AI article. However, it didn't provide good sources, for some reason it just hallucinated them so they 404 out. I fully believe the original Kimi was totally correct, Basil is not complicated! But Claude or Grok or just about anything can add good sources and check them. But they re-AI it. So it's back to Kimi to humanize it again. I really should've just started with another AI and finished with Kimi. ZeroGPT gives me 21% AIGPT, most likely human. And it passes my sniff-test of 'not sounding AI'. The prompting was very simple, I just gave it the verbatim of your challenge, told it to write an article of its choice to beat it and gave some pretty simple, perhaps pointless guidelines. These could surely be greatly improved by someone who knew what he was doing.

I need you to write a normal, authentically human sounding article about some topic of your choice. Don't try too hard to sound normal and human, you should be like a secret agent being discreet and boring rather than wearing a trenchcoat and dark glasses obviously. Imagine you're just an ordinary journalist at some run of the mill website, nothing exceptional about this at all.

Never use any em-dashes, this is critical!

So here's the article itself. Naturally it ignored the em-dashes instruction.

How to Keep a Basil Plant Alive for More Than a Week

By [Staff Writer] | July 14, 2025

I murdered my first three basil plants in ten days flat. The fourth one is still alive six months later because I finally quit treating it like a bouquet and started treating it like a sun-worshipping roommate who hates wet socks.

Pick the Right Pot

Use a container with real drainage holes. A coffee mug lined with pebbles doesn’t count; the roots will rot faster than last week’s guac. A mature basil needs at least an 8-inch-wide pot and 8 inches of depth so the roots can stretch out.

Soil Matters

Skip the cheap bag labeled “garden soil.” Basil wants something light. A simple mix is two parts regular potting soil, one part perlite or coarse sand. If you’re feeling fancy, swap the sand for finished compost. The goal is airy soil that drains fast.

Light: Six Hours or Bust

A bright south-facing window in July is perfect. In January, probably not. If the stems get leggy and the leaves look washed out, the plant is begging for more light. A small LED grow light—about twenty dollars online—fixes that for the cost of a latte per month.

Watering Without Drowning

Stick your finger an inch into the soil. Dry? Water until it runs out the bottom, then dump the saucer so the pot isn’t sitting in soup. Still damp? Walk away. Yellow leaves usually mean you’re being too generous with the watering can.

Harvest Like a Barber, Not a Lumberjack

Pinch the top two sets of leaves just above a leaf node. The plant will branch out instead of growing one tall, spindly stalk. Never take more than a third of the plant at once; it still needs leaves to feed itself. Once the plant hits six to eight inches tall, cut the main stem back by half to force it to bush out.

Watch for Flower Buds

Tiny flower spikes are cute but signal the end of tender leaves. Snip them off as soon as you see them so the plant keeps pushing out foliage instead of seeds. Miss a few and the plant starts tasting bitter anyway.

Skip the Fridge

Basil turns black and floppy in the fridge faster than lettuce. Instead, trim the stem ends and stand the cuttings in a glass of water on the counter, like flowers. Change the water daily and the leaves stay crisp for almost a week.

TL;DR

Drainage holes, gritty soil, bright light, and water only when the top inch is dry. Nail those four and you can quit buying those tiny supermarket clamshells every time a recipe calls for two leaves.

Sources (Claude went completely over the top here but I really can't be bothered to redo anything more, so behold the best sourced basil exposition in inhuman history):

The Spruce. "Learn 5 Tips for How to Grow Beautiful Basil in Pots" - https://www.thespruce.com/growing-basil-in-containers-848215 Fiskars. "Growing Basil Plants: How to Plant, Care for & Harvest Basil" - https://www.fiskars.com/en-us/gardening-and-yard-care/ideas-and-how-tos/planting-and-prep/growing-basil-planting-and-harvesting University of Minnesota Extension. "Growing basil in home gardens" - https://extension.umn.edu/vegetables/growing-basil HowStuffWorks. "Perlite: It's Like Popcorn for Your Potting Soil!" - https://home.howstuffworks.com/perlite.htm University of Florida Extension. "Homemade Potting Mix" - https://sfyl.ifas.ufl.edu/lawn-and-garden/homemade-potting-mix/ Cultivated Earth. "Best Soil Mix for Healthy Basil Growth" - https://cultivatedearth.com/en/herbs/best-soil-for-basil/ Greg App. "Ultimate Guide to Light Requirements for Basil" - https://greg.app/basil-light-requirements/ Swan Hose. "Know the Watering Needs of Your Basil Plants" - https://swanhose.com/blogs/watering-herbs/a-comprehensive-guide-to-outdoor-indoor-basil-watering EarthBox. "Planter Boxes – Growing Basil in Containers" - https://earthbox.com/blog/planter-boxes-growing-basil-in-containers Utah State University Extension. "How to Grow Basil in Your Garden" - https://extension.usu.edu/yardandgarden/research/basil-in-the-garden Savvy Gardening. "How to Trim Basil for Big, Bushy Plants and Larger Yields" - https://savvygardening.com/how-to-trim-basil/ Gardening Know How. "Basil Flowers: To Pinch Or Not To Pinch?" - https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/herbs/basil/blooms-on-basil.htm Renee's Garden. "Pinching Basil to Promote Long Harvests" - https://www.reneesgarden.com/blogs/gardening-resources/86126145-basil-how-to-promote-growth The Spruce. "Here's How to Harvest Basil and Pick the Very Best Leaves" - https://www.thespruce.com/how-to-harvest-basil-7629152 Allrecipes. "How to Store and Preserve Fresh Basil" - https://www.allrecipes.com/article/how-to-store-and-preserve-fresh-basil/ Martha Stewart. "How to Store Basil So You Can Use This Fragrant Herb for Longer" - https://www.marthastewart.com/how-to-store-basil-7563482 The Kitchn. "I Finally Found the Best Way to Store Basil So It Stays Unbelievably Fresh for Almost Two Weeks" - https://www.thekitchn.com/skills-showdown-best-way-store-basil-23673293

https://cultivatedearth.com/en/herbs/best-soil-for-basil/

This is an AI slop fake article. Citing a fake source is a FAIL. And even though above human is does shitty link soup, it's not to this level. A bag of links at the end isn't proper attribution, so I would say this FAILs on the quality front. The human cited all sources inline.

https://greg.app/basil-light-requirements/

This is a machine generated source, and not reputable. This is not a human written article and the data sources that it uses are not attributed. I don't believe this is AI, I believe it is just a template that swaps out "basil" for whatever else. Maaaaybe a human journalist would accidentally cite something like this but I don't expect it to happen often.

A mature basil needs at least an 8-inch-wide pot and 8 inches of depth so the roots can stretch out.

The sources suggest an 8 inch plant spacing, but that's not the same as the appropriate container size. I don't see any of the sources suggest that 8 inches is the minimum suggested size for growing basil. Depending on your gardening objective a smaller container may be suitable. So I'm calling this a hallucination. I've seen youtubers and other articles suggest growing basil in smaller containers so I don't agree with this.

Skip the cheap bag labeled “garden soil.” Basil wants something light.

This is kind of right for the wrong reasons. What is sold as "garden soil" in the US is usually a soil amendment, which is not suitable for growing plants on its own but only when mixed in with native soil. I won't take off points for this but I don't like it.

A simple mix is two parts regular potting soil, one part perlite or coarse sand. If you’re feeling fancy, swap the sand for finished compost. The goal is airy soil that drains fast.

Swapping perlite/sand for compost is absolutely not something that makes sense, as the sand/perlite serves a completely different purpose than compost. Anyways bagged potting soil is already a mixture of components, usually peat with chemical fertilizers and compost and perlite all together ready to use. Adding more perlite, sand, and/or compost to premade potting soil is generally not a good idea unless you know what's in that potting soil and you have a reason to change it. None of the sources suggest this mixture as far as I can tell, so it's a FAIL.

A small LED grow light—about twenty dollars online—fixes that for the cost of a latte per month.

I'm going to nitpick and say this is not really correct. I watched this video where he found bargain basement grow lights to be ineffective: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_0EFGE9ZljY . The AI slop does not cite any source that suggests using cheap grow lights, or any source that estimates the cost of using one.

Regarding quality, I know it's subjective, but I would say that it doesn't pass. The tone of the article is incredibly informal and grok-like, which is very unprofessional and not generally suitable for publication. Maybe it could pass for something on vice or some other clickbait site.

Regarding AI detection, I would say it fails. Even though it scores ~"80%" "human" on AI detectors, I think scoring that low is already a red flag. Most human works score over 98% on all detectors - try scanning some of the human's works and you will see that. We could argue this point if the article was otherwise good, but I consider it quite a resounding FAIL, so I can give you this point and it doesn't really make a difference.

I put in the eggs article from that guy, the first one I saw, and it gave me '57% GPT': https://www.greenmatters.com/p/eat-boiled-eggs-every-day

Your standards are too high for the AI scores. There are countless people getting hauled in for AI-written essays by the detectors even though they're innocent. Plus I had it adopt a more human tone to get around the GPT detectors.

Here's Claude's explanation for the mix:

Why this mixture makes sense for basil:

Basil needs nutrients (compost provides this) Basil hates waterlogged roots (perlite prevents this) Regular potting soil alone might not drain fast enough for basil's preferences

From the Utah source, broadly matching up with this:

Basil loves warm weather, lots of sun and plenty of moisture. It prefers nutrient-rich and well-drained soils. Before planting, amend the soil with compost and fertilizer and plant after the last frost.

Basil needs lots of light. So if you wanted to grow it indoors and it wasn't getting enough light (this has been known to happen indoors), you would presumably want to supplement it. Your video is a dude talking about underground lighting where it's JUST artificial lights whereas Kimi and Claude naturally assumes the basil is getting at least some sunlight since basil isn't something you need to hide!

Of course that's a bit over the top. It's just basil, the most boring part of a salad. But if you want to do it, may as well go all the way. That's probably part of the '8-inch rule' too. Claude wants to go all the way, cut no corners on safety and best practices. If it needs space, give it space. You're nitpicking excessively.

I don't think either of us know a damn thing about basil independent of sources of varying veracity and relevance, which is a mistake of letting the AI just do it's own thing. I should've had it write a wiki article about 40K lore or something, then I could confidently assess whether it fits.

I have several pots of basil growing right now, so I'm not clueless on the matter.

I'm not nitpicking excessively, the explanation for the soil is plain and straight up wrong. After autistically going down a soil rabbit hole for days once in my life, I can say this with confidence.

Regarding the grow lights, I could be convinced that it's not provably false, but of your plants aren't getting enough light, the absolute cheapest shittiest chinesium grow light off of amazon is not going to solve your problem.

It prefers nutrient-rich and well-drained soils. Before planting, amend the soil with compost and fertilizer and plant after the last frost.

Relevant for in ground growing not pots or containers.

I put in the eggs article from that guy, the first one I saw, and it gave me '57% GPT': https://www.greenmatters.com/p/eat-boiled-eggs-every-day

Zerogpt is dogshit. Barely better than a coinflip. Use gpt zero or some other detector that actually works.

I should've had it write a wiki article about 40K lore or something, then I could confidently assess whether it fits.

LOL I had a phase of watching hours of 40k lore videos, so it would be fun to see this.

Well gpt zero gives my AI output 38% AI, 62% human or 'uncertain but thinks it's human'. I wouldn't say any AI detector actually works reliably.

Here's my faux Lexicanum article. Now technically it's a hallucination since none of this happened in lore (I decided to make it invent a battle that fits in a real 40K campaign). However it seems internally consistent and wholly believable to me. The tau do field fusion blasters, the Imperium did withdraw from Dal'yth prime, the Longshanks exist, the Protector-class cruisers exist, the Scions of Dorn aren't real but there are plenty of unknown chapters and their heritage is pretty obvious. The tactics make sense, Terminators using teleporter deep strikes only to be countered by the Tau equivalent of melta-weapons. The post-war status quo of cautious diplomatic co-existance while dealing with other threats fits...

I think the story is interesting enough, there's a certain level of non-obviousness with the petrification elements. And GPTzero gives this 100% human, it's totally confident! It looks like it does better when my amateurish 'make this look human' instructions aren't even there. The prompting was quite simple, though I had it do a second pass for logic and consistency, I find that it's not quite a one-shot at this kind of task.

BATTLE OF KAL’SHARA’S GRAVE, 996.M41 Engagement Code: DGC-17-KSG-π

OVERVIEW

The Battle of Kal’Shara’s Grave (Imperial dating 996.741.M41) was an unplanned but fiercely-fought seven-day void–surface operation that erupted when the Crusade fleet of Battle Group Scion intercepted a T’au Kor’vattra expeditionary flotilla attempting to evacuate the abandoned Sept World of Ka’shas’erra. Although not listed in the original Operation Righteous Fury order of battle, both sides subsequently treated the engagement as an independent sub-campaign whose outcome materially affected the final dispositions in the Damocles Gulf.

STRATEGIC CONTEXT

Following the Imperial withdrawal from Dal’yth Prime (see Damocles Crusade, Phase II), the T’au High Command activated “Protocol Shas’kaara”: the systematic stripping of every frontier Sept of personnel, matériel and cultural assets. Ka’shas’erra—renamed Kal’Shara by the Imperium after its first human settlers—had been deemed indefensible once the Crusade broke the T’au outer picket line. The evacuation flotilla, designated Kor’vattra Mission 9-Alpha, consisted of nine merchant-menials and two Protector-class cruisers escorted by the experimental drone-carrier Or’es El’leath “Silent Moon”. Its mission was to extract the remaining 14,200 Fire Caste garrison, eight entire Ethereal caste relic vaults and the prototype Earth-caste “terraforming engine” known as the Worldseed.

Unbeknownst to the T’au, Battle Group Scion—comprising the Dictator-class cruiser Righteous Fury, two Lunar-class cruisers, six Sword frigates and the Astra Militarum 19th Brontian “Longknives”—had been ordered to conduct a final punitive sweep of the Ka’shas’erra system before retiring to Imperial space. The two forces translated within 0.7 AU of one another on 741.996.M41.

ORDER OF BATTLE

Imperium

Task-Force Scion, Battlefleet Ultima 19th Brontian Longknives (3 infantry, 1 mechanised, 1 artillery regiment) Adeptus Astartes, 3rd Company, Scions of Dorn (detached) Skitarii Maniple 117-Δ “Ironveins” (Tech-priest Dominus Varik Hax)

T’au Empire

Kor’vattra Mission 9-Alpha – Merchant-menial vessels × 9 – Protector-class cruisers Fire’s Wisdom, Hope’s Horizon – Experimental drone-carrier Or’es El’leath “Silent Moon” Fire Contingent Shas’Kaara (elements Sa’cea 7th Hunter Cadre + local Sept auxiliaries) Kroot Warsphere “Pale Moon” and allied Kindred packs Vespid Strain “Cloud-Nine” Flight

PHASE I: VOID CLASH (Day 1–2)

Admiral Katerina Voss ordered an immediate torpedo bombardment. The Protector-class cruiser Fire’s Wisdom executed a textbook Kauyon feint; Hope’s Horizon provided overlapping drone-mine cover. The Silent Moon launched fighter drones to screen the merchant line. By the end of the second day, Silent Moon’s port grav-sail was ruptured by Righteous Fury’s lance volley; the carrier began uncontrolled atmospheric entry.

PHASE II: PLANETSIDE ENGAGEMENT (Day 3–6)

The Silent Moon crashed 44 km north-east of the abandoned capital, Proteus Hive. Surviving Earth-caste teams barricaded the wreck and activated the Worldseed; its terraforming pulse instantly crystallised a 3 km radius of topsoil into diamond-hard “plasmacrete”. This unplanned fortification became the T’au centre of gravity.

Imperial landings began at dawn on Day 3. Brontian drop-troops seized the derelict starport but were stalled by overlapping Fire Warrior fire lanes that exploited the newly-formed plasmacrete ridges. Scions of Dorn Terminators teleported directly into the Silent Moon’s engineering decks but were repelled by Crisis-bodyguard teams led by Shas’O Ka’ra Mont’ka. Dornite Captain Thale Rho lost three veterans to fusion-blaster point fire and withdrew to orbit after planting locator beacons.

Meanwhile, Skitarii Maniple 117-Δ attempted to penetrate the Worldseed site through subsurface maintenance shafts. Tech-priest Hax reported contact with “an adaptive geologic AI” before vox traffic ceased. Subsequent orbital augury shows the entire Maniple entombed in rapidly expanding quartzite strata—casualties listed as “unknown; presumed integrated”.

PHASE III: FINAL EXFILTRATION (Day 7)

Recognising that prolonged defence risked total loss, Ethereal Aun’Shi authorized “Shas’Kaara Last-Light”: a staged evacuation using remaining Mantas and the Kroot Warsphere as improvised dropships. The Imperium, exhausted and under orders to disengage, contented itself with saturation bombardment of the Worldseed site. Orbital pict-capture shows a single Manta—call-sign “Silent Blade”—escaping into low orbit carrying Shas’O Ka’ra and the last intact relic vault.

AFTERMATH

Imperial records claim strategic victory; all organised T’au forces were ejected from Ka’shas’erra and the planet was declared Perdita Grade II. However, T’au sources record Mission 9-Alpha as 81 % successful: 11,300 Fire Caste personnel, seven relic vaults and the Worldseed AI core were recovered. The Worldseed itself was presumed destroyed, but long-range Mechanicus auspex has since detected anomalous tectonic remodelling on Kal’Shara consistent with phased terraforming pulses.

Of note: the crystalline battlefield, now known as the Grave of Kal’Shara, remains a pilgrimage site for both Brontian veterans and T’au remembrance acolytes. Occasional quartzine “statues” bearing Skitarii heraldry have been reported by both Imperial surveyors and T’au water caste observers, though neither side has yet mounted a recovery mission.

SEE ALSO

Damocles Crusade, Phase II Logistics Ka’shas’erra (Planetary File) Or’es El’leath-class Drone Carriers Worldseed Terraforming Engine (Speculative Entry)

It's an interesting exercise, and also seems to be a blind spot in the capabilities of AI detectors.

I'm not happy with the article itself though:

“Protocol Shas’kaara”: the systematic stripping of every frontier Sept of personnel, matériel and cultural assets

This seems like if it exists, it would be used often enough to be documented in existing lore. It's a hallucination.

relic vaults

Same as above

prototype Earth-caste “terraforming engine” known as the Worldseed.

AI always insists on coming up with some sort of special snowflake greatest weapon in the game to throw into every battle. While part of the atmosphere of 40k is the feeling of mundanity and futility of its battles. Low quality.

consisted of nine merchant-menials and

"merchant-menians" isn't correct terminology.

two Protector-class cruisers escorted by the experimental drone-carrier Or’es El’leath “Silent Moon”.

The cruisers are the escort, not escorted. Also there's no record of drone carriers as capital ships. Again AI insisting on some special snowflake units.

Silent Moon’s port grav-sail was ruptured by Righteous Fury’s lance volley; the carrier began uncontrolled atmospheric entry.

Grav-sail is not real. And if it was it's not something needed to keep the ship in orbit.

This unplanned fortification became the T’au centre of gravity.

AI tell, nonsensical.

fire lanes

Not a real thing.

Recognising that prolonged defence risked total loss, Ethereal Aun’Shi authorized “Shas’Kaara Last-Light”: a staged evacuation using remaining Mantas and the Kroot Warsphere as improvised dropships.

But the entire operation was an evacuation from the start. Nonsensical.

planet was declared Perdita Grade II.

Hallucination

Perdita-grade's meaning is obvious, it could be an ornate high gothic term for Forbidden World.

centre of gravity

Military terminology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_of_gravity_(military)

This seems like if it exists, it would be used often enough to be documented in existing lore. It's a hallucination.

It could exist. It's within the latitude given to an author to come up with some gambit for their book. It's a plot device to allow for a conflict.

The cruisers are the escort, not escorted

The drone carrier was to provide cover with drones, as described.

But the entire operation was an evacuation from the start. Nonsensical.

Well they lost the drone carrier and the terraforming device they wanted to keep. No use throwing good tau after bad.

AI always insists on coming up with some sort of special snowflake greatest weapon in the game to throw into every battle. While part of the atmosphere of 40k is the feeling of mundanity and futility of its battles. Low quality.

Did you miss the whole Cadia, Blackstone fortresses, big Marvel team up to fight the bigger bad in Chaos? Primarchs reviving? DAOT superweapons, the Speranza? Primaris Marines are the ultimate special snowflakes. Take it up with Games Workshop, they've been advancing the story in this direction. Relic vaults are definitely something the Tau Ethereals might have too, they have a sneaky vibe to them with their control over the Tau, possibly some kind of external technology base or heritage. The Ethereals definitely have Relics, so they may well have Relic Vaults. Drones are part of the general Tau vibe, they could easily have a drone-carrier.

You could just as easily criticize parts of the real lore as being hallucinations or not fitting the atmosphere. How come Kaldor Draigo was able to carve his name onto Mortarion's heart, that clearly goes against the lore of Demon Primarchs >>> random Marines? How come the power of an alpha-class psyker ranges from 'planetary-scale disaster' to 'low-tier psyker inquisitor can take them in a fight'?

Grav-sail is not real. And if it was it's not something needed to keep the ship in orbit.

There are some issues here, grav-sails aren't a thing but it's not beyond the freedom given to an author to make stuff up. Grav-chutes certainly are a thing as are gravitic drives. Kimi could give a perfectly adequate explanation - more experimental technology trying to fuse some captured Eldar tech into the Tau tech-base. These grav-sails were stealthy, agile, logistically efficient but it turns out they were fragile too and so didn't go into production. This fits the Tau, they're the only one actively advancing in technology in the setting. They have to be introducing experimental tech all the time and some of it won't work out. One could easily see distorted gravity effects from the damaged equipment causing the cruiser to fall out of orbit.

Now I'm not prepared to defend 'fire lanes'. I don't see how it's that bad though. As a whole, the wiki entry wouldn't have any value if it weren't creative and didn't add new things to the lore, albeit in a respectful and measured way. If a 40K book was perfectly lore-abiding then it would surely be sterile. It's not a cliched 'and then the Marines boltered through the hordes of aliens, xenos and mutants with Courage and Fury, enduring great sacrifice before the Biggicus Baddimus taunts them and exposes some weakness, whereupon he is banished back to the foul abyss' story. You'd just say that was slop even if it were fully lore-adherent and rightly so IMO. Better a creative work than some by the numbers piece, like Warhammer 50,000 and 60,000 - great fanfics albeit unfinished.

Any single one of these things could potentially be something that can work. But to bring 5+ new special snowflakes out in a single article is out there. It defeats the purpose of lore if less than half of the stuff in a given battle has been seen before.

let's count the special snowflakes that are present in this otherwise mundane-ish battle:

  1. Experimental drone carrier
  2. Terraforming engine
  3. Grav sails
  4. Relic vaults
  5. Protocol Shas’kaara
  6. plasmacrete
  7. Perdita Grade
  8. etc.

Perdita-grade's meaning is obvious, it could be an ornate high gothic term for Forbidden World.

But it's out of character for this article, which logically should just call it a forbidden world. Anyways it's inconsistent with the lore because in the multitude of times forbidden worlds have been described in the lore they have never once used the term Perdita-grade

The drone carrier was to provide cover with drones, as described.

It's still incorrect to say that the cruisers are escorted by the carrier.

Find a single hallucination in an article written by this author between 2021 and today. There are quite a few, so this should be easy if human writing is unreliable. For the purposes of this, a hallucination is a statement that is both provably false at the time of writing and not supported by a linked source.

First article I checked (first published March 2021, updated Jan 2023): Sodium acetate crystallization is not a chemical reaction, phase changes are physical. The linked source does not make that claim.

Ouch you're right. I could try to argue that "chemical reaction" coliquially encompasses crystalization, but that's a stretch. This is a clear mistake in the article and probably due to the fact that humanities people know no chemistry

Pm me with PP deets or whatever for prize.

Edit:

Wait no the linked source calls it a reaction:

  1. As the crystals spread, the stored heat energy of the solution is released, heating the hand warmer up to 54°C – an exothermic reaction.

The source has a clear error, but this guy just repeated it.

I'll direct the prize money to https://deltawaterfowl.org/join-us/donate/ instead. Thanks.

Re: Edit:

"Exothermic reactions" can also apply to physical processes like phase changes, but now I'm the one that's nitpicking and asking for a nonstandard definition. I don't think his statements about nucleation sites are clear enough to be "wrong", so I'll withdraw my claim.

I'll send a donation anyways as a thanks for playing.

Thanks for being lenient.

I checked a couple more of his hard science articles, and they have a similar level of rigor. Solar Flares confuses cause and effect with mere association, and has a couple other oddities:

According to NASA, solar flares are defined as intense bursts of radiation that occur as a result of the magnetic energy found in sunspots. Solar flares can also happen when particles like electrons and protons unexpectedly accelerate.

The electrons and protons accelerate because of the magnetic field. That causes a release of radiation, which is the solar flare.

No matter what the composition, solar flares release large amounts of solar, gamma, and electromagnetic radiation into space. They can last anywhere from several minutes to several hours.

Very strange phrasing. Rephrasing it, it is: electromagnetic or particle radiation from the sun, electromagnetic radiation below 10 picometers, and electromagnetic radiation in general.

They can last anywhere from several minutes to several hours.

What do solar flares look like?

Despite the fact that some of them can last for a rather long time, solar flares generally happen too quickly to be seen by the naked eye.

It's not the speed that's the problem ("several minutes to several hours", from the previous paragraph, or minimum four minutes due to the measurement criteria here), but the brightness in the visible spectrum. This might actually be a hallucination, and could've come from the mismatch between human and astronomical time (where a million years can be "fast" and ten minutes can be described as "a flash").

Those circumstances emit X-rays and magnetic fields that travel across the cosmos, bombarding the Earth with geomagnetic storms that can interrupt long-range communication and the like.

The field itself isn't reaching the Earth (any more than normal, at least), but charged particles are, and they can affect us.

Solar flares do ramp up into something called a solar maximum every 11-year solar cycle, but even at their maximum strength, no recorded flares have ever been large enough to reach the planet.

A bit of a nitpick, but the solar flares are the light. All(?) recorded solar flares have reached the Earth, because that's how we recorded them. Solar prominences and flare sprays have never been large enough to reach Earth.

According to NASA, CMEs are similar to solar flares in that they are bursts of solar material that result in the release of particles and radiation.

CMEs and solar flares are somewhat like thunder and lightning. They happen at the same time from the same event, but they are distinct phenomena.

This was a good challenge, and kudos for putting your money where your mouth is. I saw the generation attempt upthread, but I'm still wondering if o3, Opus 4, or another model could outperform him, if given a good bit of scaffolding. The bar is higher than I thought.

Hm I didn't know what solar fares are either, but the author definitely didn't take the time to learn. Good find, hard science is definitely a weak point of human writers that I underestimated greatly.

Trump on his assassination attempt:

"They briefed me and I'm satisfied with it," Trump said. "They should have had someone in the building, that was a mistake, they should have had communications with the local police—they weren't tied in—and they should have been tied in. So there were mistakes made. And that shouldn't have happened."

"But I was satisfied in terms of the bigger plot, the larger plot," he continued, "I have great confidence in these people. They're very talented and very capable—they had a bad day, I think they'll admit that." "This is a very dangerous job being president,"

Trump’s claims of stolen election have led to much recriminations that he is no mere crook or liar, but damaging to democracy. His supporters otoh, have ramped up the anti-elite conspiracy to include this assassination attempt, in order to show loyalty/outbid themselves, even here on the motte. This rejection by the principal actor/TV star sends a clear signal where the truth lies in this matter, whether you agree with Trump’s politics or not. Test is over, results are in, you can calibrate. If you bought the assassination conspiracy, consider that your brain may have been fried by the culture war.

Just today I took note of this article in n case people are still on the conspiracy train: WaPo: The lingering mystery of the Trump shooting: Why did this young man do it?

After Trump took office again in January, his new picks to lead the FBI — Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino — asked to be briefed on the investigative steps that had been taken before they arrived, they said in a televised interview. They personally visited the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, to view the evidence, including laboratory and ballistics evidence, and examined Crooks’s rifle.

Bongino, who in August had complained on his podcast that he didn’t entirely trust the FBI’s claim that Crooks had no political ideology, had a professional reason to be obsessive as he poked and prodded his briefers with questions.

He had served as a Secret Service agent for 12 years, including on threat investigations and on the protective details for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bongino had a deep knowledge of the Secret Service’s landmark Exceptional Case Study Project, which documented striking similarities among people who had tried to kill presidents and prominent political figures.

In studying and interviewing 83 people known to have attempted or plotted such an assassination from 1949 to 1996, the research found they were overwhelmingly White males who were relatively well educated. They were also deeply isolated, often friendless and suffering from a mental health disorder. Often, after a personal crisis or break, they began to fixate on assassinating a high-profile figure as a route to fame or affirmation.

After reviewing the evidence, Bongino firmly agreed with the conclusion of his FBI predecessors. Crooks was just “a lost soul” akin to the many would-be assassins interviewed for the Exceptional Case Study Project, he told colleagues. There was “no there there” to the conspiracy theories about an inside job or Iran.

In a Fox News interview on May 18, Maria Bartiromo asked Patel and Bongino why the public had almost no information about what led to the shooting in Butler as well as an apparent attempted assassination of Trump on a golf course in Florida. Bongino stressed that there was no “big explosive” evidence tying Crooks to an international conspiracy or any larger plot.

“I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m going to tell you the truth. And whether you like it or not is up to you,” Bongino told Bartiromo. “The there you are looking for is not there. … It’s not there. If it was there, we would have told you.”

Basically you have a total expert, Trump supporter, and skeptic get full access and found nothing. Can’t ask for much more than that. Shockingly, the article claims that a lot of people were working on it:

It consumed FBI agents and analysts from half of the bureau’s field offices, nearly every headquarters division and some international offices.

Trump is not a reliable source of truthful information. He can tell us what he believes or wants us to believe, that's it. It's like Procopius, interesting and relevant but not necessarily reliable. From that very article:

Trump was asked when people can expect to see the benefits promised in the One Big Beautiful Bill, which was passed earlier this month, when the House voted 218 to 214 to pass the bill after Vice President JD Vance broke a tie with his vote.

"They're already seeing them," Trump said. "Because of that bill, we're having investment in this country that nobody's ever seen."

"We're up to close to £15 trillion," he said. "Other administrations—they wouldn't do that in four years."

15 Trillion? Really? Or with Epstein, Trump says 'oh no there's nothing to see here, he killed himself somehow (we just lost the footage), now have some footage of a corridor somewhere and stop talking about it.'

Ever since the assassination attempt happened, I've felt that the most likely explanation is the lone wolf theory. The reason is, I figure that if it was a conspiracy by shady powerful groups, they would have made sure to find a gunman who wouldn't miss from that range. That said, I don't know much about guns, so this might be poor thinking on my part. Not sure.

He didn't miss the shot though - Trump moved his head by happenstance at the exact same microsecond that the trigger was pulled, which I doubt even a veteran marksman can account for. But the shot itself very much did not miss its target - hence the blood on his face and all that.

It is not poor thinking on your part. The AR15 is a perfectly good weapon for head-sized targets at ~150 yards, but IIRC the optic he used was an unmagnified red-dot, rather than something with magnification and a precise reticle.

If it were glowies, I would expect it to be better thought out and to serve multiple purposes and add much more value for the risk they're taking. Maybe attacking him with a Russian/Iranian drone which would have a higher success rate I expect and also instigate further conflict with these "deep state" favorite enemies.

Missing that shot was definitely happenstance, I wouldn't read too much into it. But if some competent planning group tried that wouldn't they have a backup plan?

Yeah acting like a false flag is going to aim to clip Trump on the ear instead of either 'deliberately missing' or 'intending to actually kill him' is pretty galaxy brain.

Why'd you assume 'competent groups' ?

Competence is rare. It's going to be even rarer when you have to have clandestine groups doing insane things. You need to have loyal, competent people willing to do crazy things that could get them killed or imprisoned for life.

Maybe attacking him with a Russian/Iranian drone

Where would they get an Iranian drone? And Russian drones, right now, are stuff anyone can 3d print and assemble from parts from China.

The problem is that a backup plan means multiple shooters which successful or not is a giant red flag for a conspiracy. Also there was a second attempted shooter just a few weeks later that also almost succeeded.

For anyone else wondering, this is not about a new assassination attempt. This is about last year's, which was one year ago today (where his ear got clipped).

I'm curious what you think the counterfactual world looks like, where Trump comes out instead and claims "There were malicious people at work, and it was all orchestrated by [specific actors]."

What would happen next?

And if you're going off the assumption that Trump is being truthful and fully transparent, then why'd you bring up the election issues?

Are YOU saying that his claims of the election being stolen are credible, since you're here saying that he's honest about such serious matters?

His supporters otoh, have ramped up the anti-elite conspiracy to include this assassination attempt, in order to show loyalty/outbid themselves, even here on the motte.

Neat.

Now do the people who don't think Trump was shot at all.

So long as we're addressing conspiracy theories.

The counterfactual would look like Trump introducing his own praetorian guard. But he's Marius, not Sulla. He's not gonna do that. He's gonna say 'the secret service is great- the best. They had a bad day'.

It’s not necessarily smart to do that even if you have evidence of internal plots, because the same usual external plots / random crazies also still exist and people outside the secret service have much less experience identifying or defending against them.

Trump is not necessarily going to do the smart thing.

If memory serves, Marius went off the rocker in his old age, and was rather tyrannical, if not quite as bad as Sulla.

Yes. History rhymes. Which of his associates will March on Rome?

Are YOU saying that his claims of the election being stolen are credible, since you're here saying that he's honest about such serious matters?

Well Bondi hasn't investigated those yet.

/s

The overall problem is that Trump is not a reliable narrator. For this assassination attempt, he came out looking very good, by a centimeter or two. (Can you imagine what would have happened if like the side of his face was blown off, but he survived?)

That led to competing conspiracy theories:

  • BlueAnon types thinking it was staged.
  • QAnon types thinking it was a plot or at least allowed to happen by the Deep State, to actually kill him.

Since Trump came out against the theory favored by (some of) his supporters, that takes all the steam out of it. No reason to expect he would lie on this.

For elections, Trump says basically every one he's in is rigged. If he loses, it's rigged against him. If he wins, it's rigged against him (or they tried to, apparently, in 2024, per his Epstein tweet).

If he loses, it's rigged against him. If he wins, it's rigged against him

If you're considering the possibility of rigged elections at all, there's nothing inherently goofy about this. "Rigged" doesn't mean "they can fake absolutely any outcome they want"--if they could fake X percent of votes and he wins by more than X percent, it might be rigged against him and he could win anyway.

This is one of those "worst arguments in the world" where "rigged" can now apparently mean "any level whatsoever of voter fraud" instead of what it's commonly expected to mean--major, material effects on or at least attempted changes to an election outcome.

You're just sanewashing Trump's unjustifiable statements for which no actual evidence has ever backed all the myriad theories (and there are accounts where he does admit he actually lost in 2020, by the way.)

Major material effects can still be insufficient to change the outcome.

Sure, and that's why I specified "attempt" in there, but there ought to be evidence of it.

Not mere allegational delusions.

No reason to expect he would lie on this.

SOME reason to think he might, because if he straight up named conspirators, then now he's got to prosecute it and most likely try to have them executed.

There are scenarios where that is less than ideal, and the preferred method is letting them know he knows but otherwise dismissing it.

Oh sure, it's definitely not something that could be totally ruled out.

The 180 is hilarious to witness after all that build up.

To me, the “he faked it” argument doesn’t really pass the laugh test. No one sane is going to hatch a plan in which a guy climbs a roof and shoots a real bullet at his head. No sharpshooter is going to attempt that shot especially outdoors where wind and glares can be a factor. It’s not a reasonable theory because the shot probably 99% of the time ends with the target hit rather than grazed.

The SS wanting a failure I could be convinced of. The reports by rally attendees over at least an hour that went completely unchecked is a pretty big failure. As in any sane person trying to protect a famous person would have at least checked it out sometime between the rally goers reporting the unknown guy on the roof and the actual shooting. I’m completely at a loss for an explanation that isn’t either “these guys are incompetent” or “they set him up.”

I said at the time and look to have been validated, that people have this idea of the USSS as a super competent organization. But at the end of the day they are still an organization, and are thus not immune to the common failure modes of organizations. As I understand the facts that we have, the communication failures (separate radio networks for the main detail and local support), the “good enough” problem (they had someone in the building, just not covering the roof), and “someone else’s problem” (bad or incomplete assignments during the planning phase) are absolutely classic organizational problems that crop up just as easily and pervasively in the USSS as they do in a large for-profit corporation. If anything, there’s less will to shake things up like a CEO might.

I assure you there were serious theories about fake blood capsules. I saw this from both Right and Left people.

Nevermind the real bullets that killed real people.

I mean again, you’re still stuck with having a guy point a real gun at a person’s head with a real bullet in it and really pulling the trigger. It’s a thing you can’t just gloss over. If Trump decided to fake it, he’s either stupid or crazy because if even the slightest thing goes wrong. He moves tge wrong way suddenly, the wind changes, the sun pops out from behind a cloud, tge scope is a few millimeters off, the shooter gets nervous, or he for some reason has to rush tge shot, there’s no way to be sure that this very real bullet fired from a very real gun doesn’t end up in Trump’s very real brain. We know it was a real bullet fired because it hit people in the crowd behind him. And all of this assumes it’s not at 19 year old dietary aide and community college graduate using a rifle he shoots paper targets at in a gun club once a week. A professional sniper wouldn’t dare try it, an amateur would undoubtedly kill his client trying something like this even at close range, let alone off the top of a building several hundred yards away. If you had a top sniper at gun range distance try to graze the ear of a baliastics gel head that’s randomly moving without hitting the rest of the head, I’d be shocked if anyone could do it even 1/20 times.

Oh I completely agree. The theory was something like: "The sniper was shooting around Trump, not at Trump, and Trump had a blood capsule to burst on his ear." People had to die to really sell it.

Nothing here makes sense in terms of risk/reward. And there's objective evidence to disprove it.

And yet.

I'm honestly surprised the shooter was just good enough to narrowly miss a headshot, but then couldn't even get a body shot for his follow ups. He got off at least three controlled shots before Trump ducked down.

(But we do have a number of people on this very forum that apply roughly the same level of credulity to Ghislaine Maxwell having a longstanding poweruser Reddit account, clearly authored by a Malaysian man, for actually not even a coherent motive. People want to believe.)

I'm honestly surprised the shooter was just good enough to narrowly miss a headshot, but then couldn't even get a body shot for his follow ups. He got off at least three controlled shots before Trump ducked down.

Or he was such a poor shot that he was aiming at the body, jerked as he pulled the trigger, and the shot just barely missed the head. Thus the lack of body shot follow ups: he was that bad of a shot.

That is a good point.

Also his scope may not have been zeroed very well.

Epstein's Unanswered Questions

In a recent speech at the Turning Point USA conference, Tucker Carlson criticized the administration's recent closing of the book on the Jeffrey Epstein case. Carlson alleged that there was 'no answer' to his central question, namely how a "high school math teacher at Dalton" became a "billionaire" who owned the largest private residence in Manhattan "by providing accounting advice". Apparently, this is a question for which no answer has ever been provided. According to him, the truth is that Israel provided Epstein with his money.

In this comment, I will suggest

(1) By far the most plausible explanation for the source of Epstein's wealth

(2) Implausibilities in the Mossad agent theory

How Did Jeffrey Epstein Get Rich?

Jeffrey Epstein was born in the early 1950s to a working class family in Coney Island. He was an extremely smart student with a talent for maths and physics, and graduated high school two years early.

"He was just an average boy, very smart in math, slightly overweight, freckles, always smiling"

He pursued a major in math at Cooper Union and then at NYU (for just under three years), which he dropped out from, then took a job as a math teacher at Dalton aged 21. Dalton, which as I noted recently is the most progressive of Manhattan's old prep schools, was undergoing a time of transition. It had become co-ed a decade earlier, and - in the long aftermath of the sexual revolution of the 1960s - liberalized in other ways too. Unlike the city's public schools, subject to the strict demands of NY's extraordinarily powerful teachers' union, private schools can hire who they want.

In the 1970s, with the city in slow-motion financial crisis, tuition at elite private schools was also much lower than today, in inflation-adjusted terms about a quarter of the price. As youth became prioritized above all else and the peak of the baby boom in education led to increased demand for teachers (the boom itself had peaked in the late 1950s, meaning the mid-70s were peak demand for high schools) hiring a 21 year old NYU math dropout as a math and physics teacher was less unusual than it might seem to us. At Dalton, Epstein quickly made an impression and a name for himself as an intelligent, charming and handsome man.

Epstein was at Dalton for around two years. At parent-teacher conferences, a parent who knew Ace Greenberg of Bear Stearns (whose own children also studied at the school, but weren't taught by Epstein) was repeatedly impressed by him, thinking he was a smart and capable young man. When Epstein was fired by the school as enrollment numbers dropped, the city-wide spillover from the financial crisis continued to dent confidence in NYC and drive the UES wealthy out to the suburbs, he begged that parent for an introduction.

“This parent was so wowed by the conversation he told my father, ‘You’ve got to hire this guy,’ ” recalled Lynne Koeppel, daughter of the late Alan “Ace” Greenberg...Greenberg, son of an Oklahoma City women’s clothing store owner, rose from Bear Stearns clerk to CEO and had an affinity for employees he called “PSDs” — poor, smart and desperate to be rich.

As Bloomberg found, Greenberg offered Epstein a job - not as a trader, as has repeatedly been falsely alleged - but as a trading floor assistant, essentially a clerk to a trader. This was a clerical job that required no particular education, certainly not a degree (which wasn't necessary even for traders until the mid-1990s).

Epstein arrived on Wall Street in 1976 at an auspicious time, even though the decade was poor for equities. Options on securities had existed for centuries, but had always suffered from a fundamental problem with liquidity because they were largely specific bets made between individual buyers and sellers, with no standardized pricing, each arrangement a custom contract, traded over the counter if at all, with price discovery difficult. From 1973, the CBOE allowed the easy trading of options as a hedging tool which, coupled with the slow emergence of computerized valuation and ledger tools, allowed investment banks and brokerages to offer a much larger and ever more complex array of tools to their corporate clients. This tied into growing financialization that made intermediaries like Bear more important than ever after the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the oil crisis and growing globalization of American firms who wanted to hedge huge swings in fuel prices, FX rates and so on.

Epstein made partner at Bear in four years. This was not unheard of at the time for an exceptionally talented young man. Even today, while progression is much slower in most of finance, it can still be that fast in booming sub-fields for very smart people. I know of someone at a leading quant firm who made partner at 28, in his first job, after four years, in the early 2020s. In 1981, Epstein was asked to leave Bear for a violation of securities law, possibly for failing to register products with the CFTC. Avoiding an expensive revenge-driven regulatory case would have been the firm's overriding interest, meaning that even for Epstein's brief partnership and overall tenure he would likely have received a decent payout.

In the early 1980s, Epstein floundered as an 'independent' financial consultant. A huge amount of drivel has been written about his activity between 1981 and 1986/1987. He used his looks to embark on brief relationships with a couple of heiresses he ripped off, most notably Ana Obregon. Her father had been caught up in the collapse of a short-lived firm playing games in the reverse repo business; Epstein merely facilitated her family's addition to an already-extant lawsuit with Chase, who were caught up in the affair, and who eventually repaid most of those involved. Epstein took a modest cut for pretty much no work. At around this time, Epstein socialized with some moderately influential people in New York. This was hardly surprising; he had met many advising corporate executives at Bear Stearns. They were also usually new money or outsiders to NYC; not UES generational New Yorkers.

Epstein told some of these people that he was a secret agent for the CIA, and perhaps Mossad. He told others he was deeply involved with Adnan Khashoggi, the world's richest man at that time, who had made his fortune taking a cut of arms deals between the UK, US and Saudi Arabia. Epstein had a fake gimmick Austrian passport, likely of a low quality and kind you could order in gray-area magazines at that time, and carried around a fake handgun sometimes, to impress party guests. He claimed he was an arms dealer, and lated claimed he was involved in facilitating Iran-Contra. There is no evidence of any of these claims, which are regularly repeated by the credulous. Khashoggi was famous at the time and Epstein was a compulsive liar; Khashoggi was one of the most photographed men in the world, his parties and debauchery attracted the world's press, he loved the media and was happy to appear on TV shows about the rich and famous. Epstein does not appear to have been part of his circle, just a liar who pretended he knew him.

My guess is that the occasional cut of a deal with the poorly informed, his payout from Bear and his winnings from Obregon tided Epstein over through to the mid 1980s. According to Vanity Fair, he lived in a small one-bedroom apartment; other sources suggest that he had no office at this time other than a temporary space he occasionally rented. Not exactly the lifestyle of an ultra-rich international arms dealer man of mystery.

The true source of Epstein's fortune dates to 1986, and his meeting with Les Wexner. Wexner had taken over his parents' clothing store in Ohio and built it into a chain of discount stores, which he then leveraged to buy and found a number of other store chains, including Victoria's Secret and Bath and Body Works. Wexner didn't need to move to New York (he could easily have run the conglomerate from Columbus, as he now does), but he chose to, and chose to buy a series of ever more extravagant homes in Manhattan as his fortune grew. In 1986, Wexner was an almost-50-year-old billionaire who had never been associated with any woman, was unmarried, and was widely considered a 'confirmed bachelor'. He was on magazine covers as 'the bachelor billionaire', with all the implicit subtext. There was rumor in both Columbus and Manhattan.

That year, Epstein met an insurance executive named Robert Meister on a flight from New York to Palm Beach. The insurance executive was taken in by Epstein's charm and bluster (no doubt full of stories about Khashoggi, international deals, arms, scandal) and invited him to an event also attended by Wexner after Epstein repeatedly showed up to his racquetball games and begged to meet Wexner. Epstein charmed Wexner, and within a year they were 'business partners', with Epstein increasingly directing Wexner's investments. It is impossible to do more than speculate here, but Wexner's business partner's thoughts, followed by some other anecdotes from the Vanity Fair piece:

Robert Morosky, who had been the vice chairman of The Limited [Wexner's holding company], was surprised Mr. Wexner took to Mr. Epstein so readily. “Everyone was mystified as to what his appeal was,” Mr. Morosky said.

Jeffrey said, ‘See all this stuff? I don’t need any of it. I could live in a tent. But Les gave this to me for a dollar. Les would do anything for me.’ ”

“Les would defer to him in any meeting…. Les would put his hand on Epstein’s shoulder.”

Wexner's own friends, according to several sources, believed that Wexner and Epstein were in a romantic relationship, and referred to him as "the boyfriend". Epstein denied he and Wexner had a sexual relationship in a filmed deposition.

Wexner and Epstein soon became virtually inseparable. They were an odd pair. Wexner was in his late 40s, with a round face and big ears. Epstein was in his early 30s and dashing—from the right angle he looked like Richard Gere. Wexner’s public image continued to grow after hiring Epstein. A 1989 Boston Globe profile that detailed Wexner’s rise reported that his September 1 diary entry that year read: “I finally like myself". Wexner’s physical appearance changed. A former Victoria’s Secret executive recalled Wexner dyed his hair. He hired a live-in personal trainer and adopted a new wardrobe. “Les would wear the tightest jeans you saw. I don’t know how he didn’t cut off blood supply to his private parts,” the former executive said.

In the early 1990s, well into his fifties, and at the urging of his elderly mother (who abused him in company meetings and was his unspoken co-CEO) Wexner married a London-based corporate lawyer in her early 30s. Epstein wrote the prenuptial agreement. The couple moved back to Ohio and had four children. Wexner stayed close with Epstein, and gave him control over his finances and investments. Even very rich people regularly make terrible financial decisions, especially when love is involved. Anyone who has been in the presence of that rare, 99.9th percentile charisma knows that very few people are immune to it, no matter their usual sobriety.

Merritt recalled once asking Wexner why Epstein was so well compensated. “Les just said, ‘Because I got more money than I can ever spend,’ ” said Merritt. “Les gave him free rein over his checkbook.” In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported Epstein earned $200 million from Wexner. Merritt puts the number at $400 million.

The bond between an older and younger man, protege and elder, can be particularly strong in cases. Unlike some thieves, Epstein didn't even take all the money, because as will become clear, he didn't need to.

Behind the BS, Wexner was Epstein's only ever client. Which brings us, at long last, to the money. Epstein 'stole' $46m from Wexner according to Wexner, and made at least tens of millions more in asset management fees in which he was paid (as is common practice) a percentage of the money he made his client. Wexner’s business was already turning over $3bn a year by the early 80s, with exceptionally high margins for the already lucrative clothing retail business. Of course, Epstein didn't invest the money himself. Instead, he just handed it (as was made clear in the recent Jes Staley case) to JP Morgan and a handful of other banks and firms, who did the work for him. Fortunately for him, Epstein was again lucky. The bull market of the age mean that even an index fund for the S&P 500 would have returned almost 500%, meaning that Epstein's loot, plus his share of Wexner's own gains, could easily have amounted to over a billion dollars by the early 2000s in a 2-and-20 arrangement, without Epstein doing anything more than acting as a middleman between private wealth teams at a few big Wall Street banks and his dear friend Les.

Was Jeffrey Epstein an Agent for Israeli Intelligence?

It is important to be clear about the specific nature of this allegation. By the late 1990s, many of the social connections Epstein had fantasized and lied about the in the 1980s were real. He really did know Bill and Hillary Clinton, Oprah, and various other important and famous people. He was not the most well-connected man in the country, and there were social scenes in which he was less widely known, but the combination of his relationship with Maxwell, who had been raised into the British elite and had connections he didn't, in addition to Wexner's money, had been good for him. Now well-connected in Washington and internationally, in part because Wexner had introduced Epstein to his social club of Zionist activist billionaires (the Lauder family etc) who Epstein had tried and failed to pitch his 'financial advisory' services to, Epstein made friends with Ehud Barak, the Labor Prime Minister of Israel. Barak's influence in the Israeli state was already declining; he would be the final left-wing Israeli leader.

It is to me entirely plausible that Epstein trafficked gossip to Mossad, and likely also American intelligence agencies. It is possible, although unlikely, he was paid for it, and I suspect anyone who did pay would have found out, as so many of Epstein's associates did over the course of his life, that he was full of shit, but it may have happened. This is different, however, from the Israeli state being the source of his wealth and power. I will summarise some reasons here:

  1. The substantial majority of those alleged to have been victims of Epstein's supposed blackmail scheme were Zionist Jews. Consider this logically. You do not need to blackmail rich Jewish-American billionaires to support Israel. They will do it for free. The idea of Israeli intelligence spending a huge percentage of their budget on destroying the goodwill of their number one supporters who already spend billions lobbying for Israel is absurd. Step One: Gather prominent people who already support Israel, often fervently. Step Two: Film them having sex with underage prostitutes. Step Three: Tell them to keep supporting Israel Or Else... Anyone who approves that operation likes burning money.

  2. Even the gentiles allegedly involved in the scheme had no natural hostility toward Israel. Most were old-school WASPs uninvested in either the socialist or Islamic angles of Palestinian liberation. Almost no Muslims were involved. If you were Mossad and wanted to blackmail people ambivalent or hostile toward Israel into supporting it, you'd target rich Chinese, Indians, gentile Russians, and above all rich Sunni Muslims, particularly in the Gulf. You would not target Alan Dershowitz. The blackmail argument betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the basic purpose of blackmail. It also betrays an understanding of diaspora Jewish politics and Mossad's influence over it. Most critically, those rich Americans who were more skeptical of Israel do not appear to have associated much with Epstein (likely because that isn't really their crowd). Epstein bragged about working for intelligence agencies; that is the one thing you don't want your agent of blackmail to be doing.

  3. Epstein had no ingrained loyalty to Israel beyond that he was ethnically Jewish (like 7 million other Americans), and so there is no good reason for Mossad to trust him with one of the most expensive intelligence operations in history. There were and are plenty of charismatic Israeli-American businessmen, who have served in the army and who in some cases have connections to intelligence, that Mossad could would have prioritized for an overseas influence operation. Many were - unlike Epstein - actually successful on Wall Street or in other industries. A random conman and compulsive liar who had been fired from every real job he ever had isn't a good target for this kind of operation. It is telling that while "Mossad wanted to blackmail Americans into doing Israel's bidding" sounds like a clever plan, nobody can even present a compelling case for why Jeffrey Epstein's inviting of various influential pre-existing zionists into his social circle would actually serve the goals of that plan. Was there some great mass of principled Anti-Israel (largely Jewish, presumably) Americans just waiting to go full BDS if Mossad didn't have the sex tapes? A poor argument at best.

  4. Much of the argument for Epstein's supposed connections to Israel involves either Ehud Barak (whose influence in the country was again on the decline, who was PM for a very brief period, and who was 'collected' by Epstein as just another famous political or media figure to show off at events like the Clintons, Prince Andrew etc) or an alleged connection to Robert Maxwell. There is no evidence that Epstein ever met Robert Maxwell beyond hearsay by anonymous callers into a popular Epstein grifter podcast that they 'supposedly' met in London in the late 1980s. Again, no photographs exist, no record of them being at the same social event or party exists (interesting given that there are tens of thousands of pictures of Epstein at big social events over the last thirty years; he didn't shy away from a camera, and neither did Maxwell). Maxwell was considered a hero by Israeli intelligence because he facilitated weapon and plane part shipments, illicitly, from the Soviet Union, France and elsewhere in the early years of Israel's existence. He was badly connected in America, such that his takeover of the New York Post was a desperate attempt to try to lobby for a bailout for his failing media empire, which collapsed upon his death.

You do not need to blackmail rich Jewish-American billionaires to support Israel

Well-connected Jews have attempted to blackmail Jewish billionaires before. Rabbi Balkany tried to blackmail Steve Cohen into funding yeshivas. Balkany was famous for being a DC “fixer”, so this may have been par for the course for Balkany. There are some billionaire Jews who are unaligned with Zionism. I recall reading the Wikipedia of a Hollywood talent management owner who had no confirmed philanthropy whatsoever, but for the life of me I can’t remember his name, and there’s also Zuckerberg whose donations to Jewish causes are a pittance relative to his philanthropy.

The substantial majority of those alleged to have been victims of Epstein's supposed blackmail scheme were Zionist Jews

Source? If Epstein is meeting with Zionist Jews in private, this is not evidence that he is blackmailing them. Do you think he used a separate private jet to do this or a separate island? Even if they were raping the girls, do you think Mossad would prefer this to happen under the auspices of a Mossad handler, or do you think they’d prefer that they try it elsewhere? You have no evidence that the majority of blackmail victims were Zionists. The only confirmed blackmail case is Bill Gates.

He’s a liar

This is like saying James Bond is a liar. Epstein lying to his clients about why he’s loaded and what connections he has is exactly what he would do if he were Mossad. This cannot be used as evidence that he was unprofessional or untrustworthy, or that he wasn’t Mossad.

You are also ignoring very important evidence:

  1. Despite having connections to Israel, none of Epstein’s victims were Jewish. Even Jerry Seinfeld was dating a 17yo Jewish girl at this time. I imagine this will be excused away on account of Jewish girls not being as drawn to wealthy men, but Instagram attests to this not being the case.

  2. According to Maria Farmer, a victim, there was a theme of Jewish supremacism that pervaded Epstein’s circle, among Epstein / Ghislaine Maxwell / Eileen Guggenheim. “You’re nothing because you’re not Jewish”, “useless white girl”, “anyone who was not Jewish, the way they spoke about them was really horrifying”, “it was every one of them, the way they spoke”. If Epstein’s circle was Jewish supremacist, this would explain his link to Mossad.

  3. You are forgetting that Wexner was linked to Mossad by way of the Mega Group, and Epstein’s connections were throughout the Mega Group.

The spy said he was tasked by the Israeli ambassador to get a copy of a secret letter given to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat by then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher for a source identified only as “MEGA.” “The ambassador wants me to go to MEGA to get a copy of this letter,” the Israeli spy said, to which the superior replied, “This is not something we use MEGA for.”

The counterintelligence report was an embarrassment for the NSA and Israel sought to deflect the identification of MEGA by claiming it referred not to an individual but to the CIA. The leak set off a major hunt for MEGA, believed to be an Israeli mole in the State Department and other agencies.

Then, in 1998, The Wall Street Journal solved the mystery. The newspaper published a story on U.S. titans of industry working for Jewish philanthropy that called themselves the “Mega Group.” It included 20 of America’s wealthiest and most influential Jewish businessmen who met twice a year.

Among the members of the group were Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, Seagram Chairman Edgar Bronfman Sr. and former hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt. The group was founded in 1991 by two billionaires: Charles Bronfman, Edgar’s brother and Seagram co-chairman, and Mr. Wexner.

Also, 4. the attorney handling Epstein’s 2008 case was told that Epstein belonged to intelligence: In 2017, "a former senior White House official" reported that Alexander Acosta, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida who had handled Epstein's criminal case in 2008, had stated to interviewers of President Donald Trump's first transition team: "I was told Epstein 'belonged to intelligence' and to 'leave it alone'", and that Epstein was "above his pay grade".

There are some billionaire Jews who are unaligned with Zionism. I recall reading the Wikipedia of a Hollywood talent management owner who had no confirmed philanthropy whatsoever, but for the life of me I can’t remember his name, and there’s also Zuckerberg whose donations to Jewish causes are a pittance relative to his philanthropy.

Certainly, but Wexner’s social circle that Epstein adopted and embraced was comprised primarily of Zionists, not apolitical tech billionaires or those Hollywood types (obviously not all) who didn’t really care about the whole Israel thing.

The only confirmed blackmail case is Bill Gates.

I’m not sure that Gates is the only ‘confirmed’ victim, given that unlike the Dubins or Leon Black (the latter being what I would consider the only truly likely implicit victim of a blackmail scheme given that he directly paid Epstein a huge amount of money for nothing, something even Les Wexner didn’t knowingly do) he didn’t give him a fortune.

This is actually further evidence against the agent theory, since in this one case (where I think blackmail was quite probably involved), the money all went to Epstein directly, not to his supposed paymasters.

Despite having connections to Israel, none of Epstein’s victims were Jewish.

There’s no evidence of this. Only a handful of victims have come forward publicly out of high hundreds or thousands of teenagers. Epstein didn’t spend much time in Israel, he mainly procured girls where he lived most of the time (NYC and Palm Beach).

If Epstein’s circle was Jewish supremacist, this would explain his link to Mossad.

Ghislaine Maxwell isn’t Jewish by the standards of any hardcore Jewish chauvinist, her mother is a French Christian and she never converted. Farmer bought into a lot of dumb things - and was pursued by a lot of open WNs online, over Facebook etc - and unfortunately in grief over a lost life has made numerous flawed claims (most unrelating to Judaism, to be clear) that rendered her a notoriously unreliable witness.

You are forgetting that Wexner was linked to Mossad by way of the Mega Group, and Epstein’s connections were throughout the Mega Group.

On the contrary, I discuss this in my comment when I make direct reference to Lauder etc. Israel’s billionaire supporters supporting Israel is a completely opposite direction of travel to Israel funding Epstein‘s activities in the United States (which mainly included spending huge amounts of money). In addition, the presence of ‘they do it for free’ groups like Mega further casts doubts on the Mossad agent theory. Consider that if Israeli intelligence wants access to the elite of American politics, Hollywood, finance and so on, they don’t and didn’t need Jeffrey Epstein to facilitate it, blackmail or not.

We don’t know all the clients of Epstein because the client list wasn’t released. You’re confusing his social circle with the client list. His social circle was filled with Wexner’s influential Jewish friends — Wexner ran the Mega Group, a consortium of Jewish billionaires who pooled their money toward Jewish / Israeli influence.

Wexner led the group with Bronfman, and it inspired several philanthropic initiatives such as the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, Birthright Israel, and support for the renewal of Hillel International

Epstein’s friends and funders being the most influential group of Jews in the world, organized in secrecy to promote Jewish interests and Israel, is very strong evidence that Epstein was tied to Israeli interests. Certainly, those who flew on the Lolita Express were not all Jews: Jean Luc Brunel, a top modeling scout; Bill Clinton, whose wife of course was highly influential in politics, and who Mossad had previously soft-blackmailed with the Monica Lewinsky tapes they had wiretapped; Prince Andrew; Bill Gates. But I don’t think we know what percent of blackmail was done on the plane vs in the wiretapped properties.

not to his supposed paymasters.

The billionaire Jews who got together in secret to allocate their funds toward the influence of Jews did not employ Epstein to make money. So the paymaster, if anything, would be the abstract concept of “Jewish influence”, or “Israel influence”.

Ghislaine Maxwell isn’t Jewish by the standards of any hardcore Jewish chauvinist

Her father was an important Mossad asset, which makes her the exception. .

and unfortunately in grief over a lost life has made numerous flawed claims

She was considered reliable by the media and investigators. I think you and the lawyers of Eileen Guggenheim are the only ones saying she is unreliable. It’s convenient to pretend that she is lying here.

notoriously unreliable witness.

I can’t understand your motivations here. The testimony of Maria Farmer was published without any doubtfulness by every major news organization who wrote long pieces on Epstein. Her testimony appears in documentaries and books, without skepticism. She was the first to report Epstein for crimes and the first to go to journalists. In no stretch of the imagination is she a “notoriously unreliable witness”. She is maybe the most reliable witness we have about Epstein.

Israel’s billionaire supporters supporting Israel is a completely opposite direction of travel to Israel funding Epstein‘s activities in the United States

Why would you think that? “Recording high-profile people in kompromat” goes against Israel’s interests? If Hillary had won, they might have had blackmail on her husband!

the presence of ‘they do it for free’ groups like Mega further casts doubts on the Mossad agent theory. Consider that if Israeli intelligence wants access to the elite of American politics, Hollywood, finance and so on, they don’t and didn’t need Jeffrey Epstein to facilitate it, blackmail or not.

Kompromat is always valuable. And having the suave Epstein ingratiate themselves to influential Americans is also valuable. Consider what Mossad is known for:

  • They will “appeal to Jewish racial or religious proclivities” to recruit agents. Note Maria Farmer’s testimony that the Epstein crew had racial supremacist tendencies.

  • “Blackmail is also used”

  • “The Israeli intelligence service depends heavily on the various Jewish communities and organizations abroad for recruiting agents and eliciting general information”

We don’t know all the clients of Epstein because the client list wasn’t released.

Why would there even be a "client list"? Epstein wasn't a straight-up pimp brokering fee-per-throw or fee-per-hour transactions; he would have parties where the guests could make use of underaged prostitutes he provided. If there's a list of exactly which guests used exactly which underaged prostitutes (or video of the same), the FBI probably doesn't have it.

Well-connected Jews have attempted to blackmail Jewish billionaires before. Rabbi Balkany tried to blackmail Steve Cohen into funding yeshivas.

Er, the only blackmail case I see from this link and a cursory google involving both Balkany and Steve Cohen is this, which doesn't involve blackmailing Cohen into supporting Israel more generally, or even specific yeshivot in Israel. Balkany apparently tried to shake down Cohen for donations to Balkany's own girl's school, which Balkany previously admitted to have been misappropriating money from. Doesn't seem to be at all useful as a counterexample to /u/2rafa's assessment.

It is a useful for assessing priors, because it’s an example of a Jewish billionaire being blackmailed by a Jewish fixer for the funding of a Jewish cause. We don’t have the luxury of knowing who Mossad blackmails in America, so it is not in the realm of possibility to provide a one-to-one counterfactual.

No, it's a Jewish billionaire being blackmailed by a Jewish fixer for the fixer's own personal benefit. There's no evidence whatsoever that you've supplied or that I've been able to find that the motive for the blackmail was to "support jewish causes" or ideological in any way shape or form. I don't know how you're overcoming the Occam's Razor presumption that this was bog-standard personal corruption and greed, rather than anything ideological.

Rabbi Balkany, the leading lobbyist for Haredi Jewry in DC, married into one of most important Haredi dynasties, did not blackmail billionaire Steve Cohen in order to reap a meager 180k salary from his school. However, as you note, this is my fault, for not providing the abundant evidence necessary to persuade an unfamiliar and perhaps somewhat naive reader who cannot make the natural extrapolation that a highly influential DC fixer for decades is not blackmailing Steve fucking Cohen just to receive a tiny salary from his Jewish day school.

  • His salary was 180k, while his revenue stream from his small business Rite Care was 450k

  • One of the two requested subjects of donation was a different Haredi school that he was not involved in, which he had no way of financially benefitting from

  • He was involved in “expediting” Jewish school funding through DC connections as early as 1987

  • “In 1994, Milton Balkany, a conservative Republican active in political fundraising,[22] tried to have Luchins excommunicated by a Jewish religious court,[13] blaming him for having "caused yeshivas in the land of Israel to lose money",[23] after Luchins had complained about Balkany's efforts to compel Israeli government officials to use U.S. aid money for projects Balkany favored in Israel.[24]”. This is not someone who is in it for greed! He is more like the sacrificing commander of a foreign army. He is in it for his tribe, giving them money and funds. Trying to have another Jew excommunicated because he didn’t want American aid going for Yeshiva funding. This is a very loyal lieutenant of the Jewish cause.

  • He helped Jewish funding as far away as Russia

  • He worked to ensure orthodox Jews got half of NYC’s school vouchers

This is not a guy who does things for personal benefit. In typical fashion, I imagine he would have pocketed some of Cohen’s money, or sent some of it to another Jewish endeavor. But the overarching real reason behind doing this was to fund the Jewish schools. Haredi corruption is like this. The Cars4Kids, the 1bil in nyc public funds, etc.

I don’t think my claim was that Jews don’t blackmail Jews (which would be rather disproven by the Israeli criminal underworld and countless other examples), but that specifically blackmailing Zionist Jews who contribute large amounts of money to that cause into supporting Israel would be pointless at best and counterintuitive at worst.

Balkany was just trying to extort Steve Cohen for money (funneled via his school, as he noted), the most mundane and commonplace motive for blackmail.

But Epstein didn’t target Zionist Jews who contributed large sums of money, right? Leon Black isn’t really a big Zionist contributor, and his moderate donations to Jewish causes occur post-Epstein. Large Zionist donors do not appear to be targeted by Epstein. They were among his social network because Wexner was Epstein’s patron.

Balkany using blackmail to fund Yeshivas isn’t commonplace or mundane. Yeshivas are the heart of Jewish identity and an essential way that Orthodox Jews buffer against the prospect of assimilation. Chabad was very upset when Sweden forbid homeschooling, because in the absence of indoctrination the kids will have a less extreme Jewish identity. This falls under “blackmail for increased jewish power”, not “blackmail for personal gain” (his salary is not a proportion of the total yeshiva endowment).

none of Epstein’s victims were Jewish

Didn't he target fatherless white girls living in poor, hispanic-majority neighborhoods? This is not a very Jewish demographic. It's also exactly the demographic you'd expect 'just wants to sleep with teens' types to target.

Maria Farmer was a graduate art student who was pressured to sell her work to Epstein at a discount by her school's dean, Eileen Guggenheim. Giuffre was a spa attendant at the Mar-a-Lago. Jennifer Araoz was recruited outside of her high school.

If you read the original documents and reporting from the Palm Beach case it was almost all poor, often Hispanic girls from deprived areas of West Palm Beach.

The only confirmed blackmail case is Bill Gates.

O rly? Confirmed you say?

This is like saying James Bond is a liar. Epstein lying to his clients about why he’s loaded and what connections he has is exactly what he would do if he were Mossad.

He was bragging about being a Mossad agent, though, is the thing. Very bad OPSEC. Kinda the opposite of what you want to do.

You are also ignoring very important evidence

I don't see any "very important evidence" about whether there was a black intel op involved here, no.

In 2017, "a former senior White House official" reported that Alexander Acosta, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida who had handled Epstein's criminal case in 2008, had stated to interviewers of President Donald Trump's first transition team: "I was told Epstein 'belonged to intelligence' and to 'leave it alone'", and that Epstein was "above his pay grade".

So, if true, why did it end up this way? (And if were true, why is this Acosta guy blabbering about that in public? Who is "intelligence"? There are protocols for handling sensitive asset issues and this ain't it.)

Jane Doe #200 was told (or given hints) that Epstein was Mossad, but she was dating him. This was not something casually mentioned to a victim.

Hoffenberger was told that Epstein was in “intelligence” and engaged in “blackmail”, but this is when Hoffenberger was a fellow Jew engaged in Epstein-level fraud. He went to jail and converted to Christianity and I suppose had a road to Damascus moment and told the truth:

Hoffenberg told me that Epstein had said he’d worked on several projects with Robert Maxwell, including solving Maxwell’s “debt” issues. (Maxwell died in 1991, under vey strange circumstances, apparently having fallen off his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, in the middle of the night and it was discovered in the aftermath that he’d stolen 100s of millions of dollars from the pensions of his employees.) Epstein had also told Hoffenberg that via Maxwell and Leese he was involved in something that Hoffenberg described as “national security issues,” which he says involved “blackmail, influence trading, trading information at a level that is very serious and dangerous.”

Four separate sources told me — on the record — that Epstein’s dealings in the arms world in the 1980s had led him to work for multiple governments, including the Israelis. Some of these sources are more reliable than others. But the gist of the claims that you will be able to hear, and ultimately watch in a three-hour documentary series, is that Maxwell, who was himself a conduit between the Israelis and other governments during his life time, introduced Epstein to Israeli leaders, who then allegedly used Epstein as the equivalent of an old-fashioned Russian “sleeper,” someone who could be useful in an “influence campaign.” The sources, who range from former arms dealers to former spies — and also Hoffenberg — suggest that Epstein, who lacked any sort of moral compass, decided to go one step further and compromise influential people by recording them doing things they wouldn’t want made public.

Ari Ben Menashe, himself a former Mossad spy, recounts that he was told directly by Maxwell that Epstein was Mossad (or military intelligence): [2]

What happened was Maxwell introduced [Epstein] to us, and he wanted us to accept him as part of our group. [He said] ‘and your Israeli bosses have already approved.’

I’m not sure of anyone else that Epstein told was Mossad. In fact, this itself is telling if true. If he is hanging around a Jewish network, he’s involved in Mega even, and he’s going around telling everyone that he’s X and Y, but he selectively omits the very lie that he would naturally tell, which is that he’s Mossad…. If he’s just lying all the time, surely he would tell the victims and the gentiles that he is Mossad. Why only tell the well-connected Jews? Would he really risk lying to two Mossad agents about being Mossad (Maxwell and Menashe)? If I’m Epstein and I’m a random American guy who loves to lie, and I love my Jewish identity, I would be telling everyone that I have deals with Israel — I wouldn’t tell them every lie but this one.

As I already said, Hoffenberg was a gullible fool who believed every word that Epstein said and later got got for astounding idiocy in his Ponzi scheme.

Four separate sources told me — on the record — that Epstein’s dealings in the arms world in the 1980s

Yes, exactly. Epstein’s dealings in the arms world of the 1980s, in which nobody in the booming arms industry of the age ever remembered him, no record of him exists, and during which he was living in a 1-bed in Manhattan begging people to give him money to invest after being fired from Bear Stearns. Those dealings.

It is astounding the extent to which claims of Epstein’s work ‘in intelligence’ ultimately trace back to Epstein himself and his own bullshit to make himself seem more interesting, influential and important than he was at that time.

Frankly I hold Mossad in too high of regard to believe any of this shit on incompetence grounds.

The Israelis are less risk-averse than their US counterparts as a general rule, but they aren't bumbling fools orchestrating haphazard sex-based coercion like this.

Also, to correct the record on Acosta claiming Epstein was told to go easy because Epstein "belongs to intelligence":

The OPR report also looked into allegations that have surfaced in press reports over the years that Epstein may have gotten special treatment because he was some sort of “asset” to U.S. intelligence agencies.

“Acosta stated to OPR that ‘the answer is no,’” the report said.

Rich Jewish guy hanging out with rich Jewish guys, some of whom have ties with the Israeli government, is not exactly enough evidence to show anything. Is anything about Epstein's alleged ties to the "arms world" actually proven?

If any of this was true one would think Ari Ben-Menashe would be dead already for spilling state secrets.

That’s not correcting the record. Acosta, a career politician in office, is going to tell one thing to a confidant and another thing to the OPE.

Wow, who can we really trust here?

Certainly not, as you say "career politicians" or "confirmed criminals."

And there's just not really any hard evidence.

So why believe any of the rumors if you won't believe people trying to deny the rumors?

Frankly I hold Mossad in too high of regard

I don't, using children as sexual blackmail to squeeze the balls of the west is exactly what I expect them to do. The mfs even managed to get English royalty by the balls. And the media tried its hardest to keep Prince Andrew's involvement out of the news cycle.

You're confusing "moral regard" and "competency regard."

Even if I accept Mossad is totally evil, I expect them to be good at it. Unlike this.

There are protocols for handling sensitive asset issues and this ain't it.)

I suspect there are also protocols for disposing of one. Telling him that he's run out of luck and no one will come to save him and hence he ought to kill himself with some dignity instead of facing even worse seems within that protocol.

Doing it anyway like what has happened seems like a pretty bad idea, no?

Whole point is to keep things quiet.

Great post. Can you finish the story through the present day? It feels like the story ended right when it was taking off ( I understand you’re not writing a biography of Epsteins life, but it would be a compelling read if you did).

If there was a blackmail info collection operation, I don't think the purpose would be directly "making Zionist billionaires turbo-Zionist" or something like that but more like "This info might come useful at some point. How? Who knows? Black swan events and all that" style.

I agree that Epstein was a fabulist so we can't trust any claims he might have made. I think if there was any 'intelligence gathering' it was more akin to him trying to shop gossip around to anyone who would pay for it ("hey I have all these connections with rich and important people, you might be interested in what I can find out") because he was that sort of untrustworthy little toad, and that the best/only connections he had as contacts were Mossad or somebody who knew somebody who was connected to Mossad, and they might have bought bits'n'scraps because hey, why not? this guy might turn out to be useful sometime if he ever does stumble across anything important or we can finally find a use for him (I have no doubt, for instance, that they'd be happy to gather blackmail material on the Royal Family via 'Randy Andy' just because).

If he was just a compulsive liar, how was he squashing federal investigations and getting sweetheart plea deals where he doesn’t have to serve any time?

He was personal friends with Bill Clinton and close to a number of top Bush donors.

Well, money and rich friends.

Like say the President of the United States.

There is no evidence that Epstein ever met Robert Maxwell beyond hearsay by anonymous callers into a popular Epstein grifter podcast that they 'supposedly' met in London in the late 1980s.

From https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/before-president-trump-wished-ghislaine-maxwell-well-they-had-mingled-for-years-in-the-same-gilded-circles/2020/07/31/f8d3f56a-d02f-11ea-8c55-61e7fa5e82ab_story.html

"According to Hoffenberg, it was Robert Maxwell who first introduced his daughter to Epstein in the late 1980s."

It's hard to establish exact dates for things this far out, but at a minimum we know that Epstein was dating Robert Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine around the time of his death. It's more likely than not that they knew each other.

It's also notable that the headmaster at the Dalton School while Epstein worked there was Donald Barr. Barr worked for the OSS (CIA precursor) during WWII and was also former AG Bill Barr's father.

Regarding Maxwell, I think that was two con men trying to exploit one another. As mentioned in the original post, Maxwell had few connections in the USA and his media empire was built on sand (see the pensions fund scandal) and he wanted to use Epstein's contacts to get a foothold in the US, and Epstein of course wanted to use another rich guy for whatever he could extract out of him.

It's also notable that the headmaster at the Dalton School while Epstein worked there was Donald Barr. Barr worked for the OSS (CIA precursor) during WWII and was also former AG Bill Barr's father.

This is incorrect, Epstein joined Dalton 3-4 months after Barr left (which I believe may even have been before Epstein dropped out of NYU) and there’s no evidence Barr would have had anything to do with his hiring.

"According to Hoffenberg, it was Robert Maxwell who first introduced his daughter to Epstein in the late 1980s."

Hoffenberg was quoting Epstein, whom he knew since this would have been in late 1992 / early 1993 before the Towers Financial collapse. Your friend asks who how you’re dating an infamous tycoon and press baron’s daughter, saying that her father told you to look after her before his mysterious death is peak Epstein, peak drama, peak bullshit, just like telling them you were personally centrally involved in Iran Contra which he was also known to do.

Ghislaine’s friends at the time, not to mention her brothers (who were very close to her and to their father, and to whom he had actually entrusted her care) first heard of Jeffrey after she moved to NYC full-time and introduced him as her new man. Epstein’s narrative that Maxwell senior introduced him (a sleazy New York conman less rich, less influential, less powerful and less well connected than countless other rich and influential friends he had) to her as her ‘protector’ doesn’t make sense.

I think a point you stake a claim on doesn't necessarily withstand scrutiny.

Epstein wasn't a pathological liar. He was a sociopath who lied when it suited him, that's not the same as compulsive lying. For your examples, he was lying to ingratiate himself with higher social circles. He also maintained his fortune, and as you said, he left it in the hands of professionals. That's proof that he had an honest assessment of himself, not one overblown as we would expect from other sorts of behavioral pathologies. It might be easy for a "boy toy" to get himself in a good position, staying there isn't easy, and you've described a competent man.

You then stake on the idea of intelligence agencies not working with liars and conmen, that's exactly what they do. Treachery, betrayal, is considered the gravest sin. The lowest circle of the Inferno, the ice is full of traitors. What has the US done, time and again? Turned spies against their country of origin. If the US government can find a reason to trust someone who commits the gravest sin below treachery to God, no doubt with as little slack as they're given, they can find a reason to trust a guy who lied at parties and fumbled around early in his career. It's an idea from how the world should be, or an idea from how the world operates in fiction about spies. None of what you describe of his background is specifically disqualifying for his use as an asset. The question is the link, whether his connections make sense, or the impact, whether blackmail makes sense.

Israel, as a state, knows history isn't over, and they act like it. They're operating from a timeline looking to the end of the century and the next. Having the US as an enduring ally is an existential requirement, just as is keeping every country around them unstable until they have enough of a technological edge to assert permanent regional supremacy. They have reason to run a perpetual blackmail machine, including targeted those who appear to be on their side. Appearing like it isn't enough when the game is whether your country keeps existing. It could be, as @Quantumfreakonomics wonders, that for some it was a carrot, and others a stick. It could be that the stick becomes a carrot. Once they've got you on tape fucking one 17 year old, what's ten more? And on that note, you think the sorts of guys hearing about Sex Monster Island aren't aware of the power of the jews in America? They'd notice if they never saw any other jew. I'm reaching here, but you've also reached in looking for benign explanations. Like with Epstein's death, you start with the frame of suicide, so you make the explanation for why. I would ask, given what we know about his life and how often men like him skirt justice, is it probable that rather than torching literally any VIP he could draw from the list of flights, he instead just killed himself? It's not.

There is also maxwellhill. Ghislaine Maxwell had a prominent hand in the general psy-opping of the giant psy-op that is Reddit. She was, maybe still is, an intelligence asset. What was Epstein, then?

The lowest circle of the Inferno, the ice is full of traitors. What has the US done, time and again? Turned spies against their country of origin. If the US government can find a reason to trust someone who commits the gravest sin below treachery to God, no doubt with as little slack as they're given, they can find a reason to trust a guy who lied at parties and fumbled around early in his career.

This is not how HUMINT agencies evaluate potential assets, no.

Most spies don't "need" to be "turned" against their country; they just need to be found.

Being a "traitor" is also very much an eye-of-the-beholder situation. Nathan Hale, patriot or traitor?

Personally, I'm very grateful to e.g. the "traitors" to communism in the USSR.

None of what you describe of his background is specifically disqualifying for his use as an asset.

Reliability and discretion matter quite a lot, in fact, for the value of an operational asset conducting sensitive missions.

They have reason to run a perpetual blackmail machine, including targeted those who appear to be on their side.

They also have reason to avoid ops that, if exposed, would cause major problems. Risk, reward.

I would ask, given what we know about his life and how often men like him skirt justice, is it probable that rather than torching literally any VIP he could draw from the list of flights, he instead just killed himself? It's not.

Well, he wasn't able to skirt justice, right?

There is also maxwellhill. Ghislaine Maxwell had a prominent hand in the general psy-opping of the giant psy-op that is Reddit. She was, maybe still is, an intelligence asset. What was Epstein, then?

You're just asserting that as proven fact? Somebody with her profile, especially if she was ever an actual intel asset, puts their fucking real name as their handle?

Come on. Be serious now.

Most spies don't "need" to be "turned" against their country; they just need to be found.

This is only two sorts, and there are conventionally four. Those who do it for the money, those who do it for the ideology, those who are coerced into it, and those who do it for ego. You can find those who do it for ideology or ego; those who do it for money or (especially) because they are coerced have to be made.

Oh there are a lot more than four kinds.

MICE is super old, plus there's typically more than one motivation in the mix.

And I assure you that those who do it for the money pretty often just need to be found, or want to be found. Money is nice. People like it.

But, usually, people willing to put their life on the line as a covert operative are doing it for more than just money. Money as a primary motivator is typically not the best kind of asset.

Somebody with her profile, especially if she was ever an actual intel asset, puts their fucking real name as their handle?

Ross Ulbricht was arrested for a similar OPSEC failure, so I don't think it's completely implausible. Per Wikipedia, "[t]he connection was made by linking the username 'altoid', used during Silk Road's early days to announce the website, and a forum post in which Ulbricht, posting under the nickname 'altoid', asked for programming help and gave his email address, which contained his full name." I won't discount parallel construction here, but I think there is a certain point in an effort like this when you realize "this is for real", but you can't easily scrub the account history: a new account would itself look pretty suspicious and probably point right back to the original -- "DM'd all the other mods and asked for a new account to be blessed" is itself suspicious if you don't trust all those mods, and it's visible to users that a brand new account was given mod access. Satoshi seems like an exception here, but I think it's hard to leave no trace in these sorts of situations generally.

Early Reddit also strikes me as a place where a power-user could steer the conversation more broadly in ways that would be useful to more than just intelligence agencies, or could just be a personal power fantasy. Bots weren't believable conversation partners a decade ago. Observably, various political activists have gotten a lot of mileage out of moderating default Reddit subs, so even if maybe the impact of that is fading today, I think "digital conversation influencer" might have been a playable role that would get one into real conversations in the halls of (non-digital) power.

Ross Ulbricht was not a Mossad asset, was he? Typically, one gives one's operatives some OPSEC training.

But also you just literally described where he didn't use his name as a handle. He disclosed his name while using the handle.

That's a very different kind of error.

It's fucking funny to even consider that a super sex coercion operative would also be used as a Reddit influencer using her real name. Was that really her competitive advantage for an intelligence agency in terms of effort or exposure risk?

Come the fuck on. Mossad is not retarded. Risk mitigation is a thing.

You then stake on the idea of intelligence agencies not working with liars and conmen, that's exactly what they do. Treachery, betrayal, is considered the gravest sin. The lowest circle of the Inferno, the ice is full of traitors. What has the US done, time and again?

I think this is ideosyncratic chain of thought and mostly irrelevant as a consideration to intelligence agencies.

Important part is not that Esptein was a liar, it's the narcissim and bragging. It is a more profile of source of leaks than than someone who would be responsible for running anything. Putting this guy in charge of any operation would have been a miscalculation, exactly because he was sort of guy who would be caught. And look, he was caught and convicted, twice.

I could be as well as that Epstein had some connections but also overinflated ego which lead to running a blackmail operation on his own initiative. Perhaps he offered services to whatever genuine CIA/Mossad connections. Perhaps he put up airs of intelligence connections in order to appear more serious and invulnerable, and the rest of the weirdness surrounding his circumstances was because of regular interpersonal corruption and blackmail.

Side question, have there ever been any people who said Epstein tried to get them to the island but they refused? Anyone whose kink turned out to be adult women? Anyone who was blackmailed but it call came out in a divorce or some other legal trouble?

Part of what confuses me about this is that if I'm going to a private island escortfest I don't think most people have a practical way of distinguishing between a 16 year old escort and a 18 year old escort in that context.

Which proves a point that these brackets were always intended as a 'gotcha' more than anything else.

I should add, it is possible that someone made a miscalculation of recruiting Epstein to run an op, it is not literally impossible, miscalculations happen. It is reason to downweight it as an explanation.

It might be easy for a "boy toy" to get himself in a good position, staying there isn't easy, and you've described a competent man.

I think Epstein was competent (he managed to get and hold that job at Bear Stearns) but he was also greedy and couldn't stop himself from ruining a good thing by trying to profit even more out of it. His fundamental untrustworthiness meant he couldn't hold down anything honest, and he got himself entangled in his whole web of fake stories, deceit, and trying to find shortcuts to easy money.

Did he really commit suicide or was he killed? Suicide is odd. He might indeed have done so, because even if he survived all the scandal, he was looking at years in prison and once he got out, he would have nothing left. No money, no contacts, no chance of rebuilding his fortune and status. This was not a man who would be content to live a poor, obscure life. Momentary despair and seeing no other way out? That's plausible.

(Also plausible: he didn't intend for it to be successful but rather a 'cry for help' suicide, banked on the guards finding him in time and then he'd maybe be moved to better conditions or his lawyer could argue for clemency from the court due to his mental distress, but it didn't work out for him that way).

(Also plausible: he didn't intend for it to be successful but rather a 'cry for help' suicide, banked on the guards finding him in time and then he'd maybe be moved to better conditions or his lawyer could argue for clemency from the court due to his mental distress, but it didn't work out for him that way).

This is the (darkly) funniest possible explanation. Yeah, I can believe that completely. Will share.

Had experience a couple of years back with a family member who tried suicide, and despite their protestations, it was one of the "cry for help" types rather than genuine "will kill myself for sure". They certainly intended to die, but the method they picked wasn't 100% fatal (indeed, looking it up, it wouldn't have been fatal at all but they didn't know that).

So yeah, people can try and kill themselves and even be serious about it, but not so serious as to pick a really working method. I think Epstein was the kind of guy who would try and use a suicide attempt to bargain his way out of things, he just mis-timed it and it turned out it worked.

There is also maxwellhill. Ghislaine Maxwell had a prominent hand in the general psy-opping of the giant psy-op that is Reddit. She was, maybe still is, an intelligence asset. What was Epstein, then?

This part of the theory was always baffling. Why would a known socialite working to pull off a psyop use her real name?

I know at least two people in real life who (were they to use that handle) it would be kind of an “obviously it was them.”

It only seems obvious in retrospect. If true, that is (I’m inclined to believe it’s at least plausible).

If it wasn't for her getting arrested, would anyone have ever made the connection? Rich powerful people are known for having massive egos and dangling random loose threads for no reason other than their own egotistical enjoyment.

We're dealing with an account that in a very short time period slightly before public knowledge of the arrest decided to go from posting all the time to not posting at all. Why?

And it's not death, the Worldnews moderation team insisted that maxwellhill is still alive and just not posting for ... unexplained reasons.

The mods posted a DM claiming he is active, but why a DM which is super easy to fake and not an actual public post which wouldn't be faked? If maxwellhill doesn't want people to know the account is still active then why do the DM and let fellow mods reveal it, if they don't mind providing proof they're not in prison then why not just post a comment?

They say he's just a random Mayalasian man who lives there too, but he seems to treat Maylasia as a country he just visits normally

Have you ever once talked about the country you live in as something you're "visiting"?

And they have a birthday right around the same time

Maxwell is Dec 25, MaxwellHill is past Dec 21.

So we have an account with a similar name, many similar interests, that just happens to be really busy and stop posting for years right before Maxwell got publically arrested who shares a similar birthday, refers to his home country as a place he visits, doesn't prove his existence for vague and completely irrational reasons.

If it's not Ghislaine Maxwell, it's a person (a long with the rest of the mods) trying really really hard to be as suspicious as possible and likely has insider information about what is happening to her in order to coordinate stopping posts right then. Because again they could just post a comment if the account was actually still active and not have to share easily faked DMs.

If it was Maxwell and the lynchpin of so many online conspiracy theories, why can’t the powers that be (which surely have access to Reddit or - at worst - Ghislaine’s recovery email) just log in as her and post something?

And besides, you again ignore the entire point. In one of the most expensive intelligence operations in modern history, the most banal, easiest, entry level bulk reposting of links (which would have been botted even back then) was supposedly manually done by a middle aged ultra-rich heiress who knew many of the most powerful people in the world and who was moonlighting as a Reddit powermod and farming karma by reposting (in 99.9% of cases) uncontroversial news stories, the kind of thing any third world teen on a gig work site would have done for $3 an hour and which, in the most sensitive cases, would have been done by 22 year old junior intelligence analysts on their first job.

“Sorry, Your Royal Highness, I’m going to have to interrupt our drinks so I can repost an article about an avalanche in Spain on Reddit for 500 karma because the huge intelligence operation I work for values me not for my contacts and charisma but because I can press submit on m.reddit.com several dozen times a day, a skill nobody else you have access to can do”?

The richest man in the world posts constantly. He liked it so much he bought the company so he could post more to his liking! Rich people do like posting. I don't think in a world where Elon and Ackman and Kevin Durant exist we can say "why would anyone shitpost if they had an otherwise busy life?"

Moreover, I've gone into this in more detail in the past, but Ghislaine could have used a powerful Reddit account to recruit teenage girls. In this case having her identity tied directly to the account (Maxwellhill) would have helped her credibility when she reached out.

Which would also explain why Reddit wants to bury the story rather than try to keep the account alive.

If it was Maxwell and the lynchpin of so many online conspiracy theories, why can’t the powers that be (which surely have access to Reddit or - at worst - Ghislaine’s recovery email) just log in as her and post something?

Why'd they care?

kind of thing any third world teen on a gig work site would have done for $3 an hour and which, in the most sensitive cases, would have been done by 22 year old junior intelligence analysts on their first job.

Maybe she had an intern do that stuff, but used the account herself too for more important stuff, like influencing stuff as a powermod, no ?

That's only evidence against her doing it mostly as part of an intelligence operation scheme, not evidence against her owning the account.

If some random Maylasian man is apparently capable of spending all day posting random articles for years and years, why couldn't Maxwell also be the type of person to do that? Rich and famous people are not immune to having normal idiosyncrasies like that.

It could have just been a normal account of hers just like it supposedly is a normal account of random Maylasian guy visiting his own country.

There's a shit ton of weird coincidences and connections, including the major evidence of "they suddenly stopped posting very shortly before public knowledge of Maxwell being arrested even came out" that all fall together to point to it being her account, and is disproven in an incredibly simple way that they refuse to do for no good reason, only resorting to an easy to fake roundabout method that doesn't make any good sense to do unless it's for the purpose of faking, and their official explanation contradicts prior comments by the very account in question.

https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-secret-reddit-account/

Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.

Even most of the time.

This article makes some really terrible arguments

“Maxwell” is not a rare name; howmanyofme.com suggests there are 81,736 Maxwells in the United States. The number worldwide might run into the hundreds of thousands. My father’s middle name is Maxwell.

Not relevant, he's supposed to be Malaysian. How many Malaysian men have the name Maxwell? That they're even trying to use American names and not Malaysian names as an argument is silly, does the author themselves not even believe the "actually they're just a random Maylasian guy!" defense?

It’s hard to see why attending a party would mean you can’t post on Reddit for 24 hours.

Yep the posting correlating with "party times" was actually bad evidence, in part because anyone with a brain knows that scrolling social media on their phone is something plenty do at parties and public events anyway.

So one good actual point that doesn't disprove anything, just dismantles a not particularly strong claim.

But you can’t focus on this similarity and ignore the ways their interests differ. /u/maxwellhill mostly posted about US politics, from the vapid center-left “Orange Man Bad!” perspective that constitutes Reddit’s background radation. (click to enlarge).

The Malaysian man never cared about Malaysia, just US politics. Odd.

Ghislaine Maxwell is on record – literally – as claiming to be Donald Trump’s friend.

Donald Trump didn't even enter politics that much until 2015-2016. He was mostly just a rich celebrity business mogul. And if you know anything about elites, even the literal politicians, they tend to get along surprisingly well anyway. Maybe the writer has no concept of being friends with people of different political beliefs, but it's a common thing.

I’m sorry to tell you this, but /u/maxwellhill did post after the 2nd of July. Just not in public. He continued to perform moderator duties, interact with staff members, and answer private messages. Here’s a conversation between /u/hasharin and /u/maxwellhill that happened on the 9th.

This is exactly the sort of nonsense I'm talking about! If they're perfectly willing to say "Oh my god the account is still active, just look at this private message" then why are they so unwilling to just make a real post?

What kind of person when providing evidence prefers the super easily faked one of a screenshot of an easily edited webpage over hard proof that the account is still active of just making a single post.

You literally have to believe that the moderators are too stupid to realize how ridiculous that is, and trust that none of them would ever lie to cover up their connections to a sex trafficker. It just doesn't make any sense, the entire thing is made even fishier by the hilariously terrible attempt to disprove it.

Here’s a question for believers: do you think Ghislaine cared what the age of consent was?

Yes, pedophiles would prefer to live in a world where they don't have to hide their pedophilia, even if they're rich and powerful and currently getting away with it.

If she is, then large numbers of people (the /r/worldnews mod team, for a start) are lying and/or forging evidence in the most incompetent way possible. It would also require Ghislaine to be both insanely cautious and stupid at the same time, the equivalent of someone locking their front door with three deadbolts and leaving the house keys on the doormat.

"Large numbers of people" but can only name a single group, the Worldnews moderation team who is directly incentivized to lie, is making suspicious and contradictory claims already (like come on again, who "visits" a place they supposedly live?) and refuses to provide hard evidence that should be extremely easy to do if their claims were true and the account was still active, instead preferring easily faked and completely unable to be verified screenshots.

The Malaysian man never cared about Malaysia, just US politics. Odd.

Ahahahaha, are you not on Twitter at all? There's a notorious guy with this exact gig, and tons of non-Americans are obsessed with our politics.

But he was pretty interested in global politics, not just American. /r/worldnews was his jam.

https://x.com/stillgray?lang=en

But at the end of the day you're approaching this backwards. Coincidences happen all the time. There's no substantial evidence it's her, and even if it were her, it doesn't even matter, right?

The Malaysia placename does check out btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukit_Larut

Donald Trump didn't even enter politics that much until 2015-2016. He was mostly just a rich celebrity business mogul. And if you know anything about elites, even the literal politicians, they tend to get along surprisingly well anyway. Maybe the writer has no concept of being friends with people of different political beliefs, but it's a common thing.

I don't think you understand the argument here. If this were Ghislaine, what is she doing here saying derogatory stuff about Trump, her friend? About COVID? To what end? Also the posting went on until 2020, so I really do not understand what point you think you're making about Trump's political timeline.

This is exactly the sort of nonsense I'm talking about! If they're perfectly willing to say "Oh my god the account is still active, just look at this private message" then why are they so unwilling to just make a real post?

The cited PM says the guy thinks this is all pretty funny. I would too, were I him. Or her.

"Large numbers of people" but can only name a single group, the Worldnews moderation team who is directly incentivized to lie, is making suspicious and contradictory claims already

Uh, you're asserting "can only name" but that's not actually true just because the author didn't provide an exhaustive list.

I trust the market: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7082/ghislaine-maxwell-confirmed-reddit-accout/

Man just skimming https://old.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/comments/ shows it's very unlikely to be an elite socialite woman doing psyops on the internet. It definitely reads as someone who speaks pretty good Bri'ish Engrish as a 2nd language too, with slight verb, definite/indefinite article, and plural errors.

Examples:

Given the coronavirus situation in UK a couple of weeks ago, shouldn't the heir to the British throne canceled all those engagements? He is 71 years old.

Trump is a vindictive SOB and it’s scary to think that this unhinged US President is sitting on a pile of nuclear arsenals with the key code to unleash hell on earth.

Trump's behaviours such as this no longer tolerated by some European head of states.

WTF?! - how did a pedophile get a job in a children's detention centre in the first place? As this is one of several cases brought to light in recent weeks. So what's being done to prevent such incidents from recurring?

What do you think of the President Xi’s indefinite rule following the removal of presidential term limit? Is a good thing for China?

How would this change China’s foreign polices overal and in particular with the US now that Xi can focus on long term issues over a 10-20 years ahead. Knowing this how do you think Trump will manuever himself in order to cope Xi’s rising influence on the world stage?

So was Ghislaine trying extremely hard to consistently mimic the British English usage of a nonnative speaker spewing out median Reddit libtard views? Why?

I'm sorry if you read the comments from this account and think it's actually Ghislaine Maxwell instead of some Asian dude you have an incurable case of brain weasels. There's nothing but coincidences, tons of counterevidence, and it wouldn't even matter if true.

More comments

Yes, pedophiles would prefer to live in a world where they don't have to hide their pedophilia, even if they're rich and powerful and currently getting away with it.

Is there any indication that the reddit account was trying to bring about such a world?

the Worldnews moderation team who is directly incentivized to lie, is making suspicious and contradictory claims already (like come on again, who "visits" a place they supposedly live?) and refuses to provide hard evidence that should be extremely easy to do if their claims were true and the account was still active, instead preferring easily faked and completely unable to be verified screenshots.

  • Why are they incentivized to lie? If maxwellhill were really Ghislaine, they probably wouldn't know this. So what would have happened to the mods if they had not produced the evidence they have produced so far?

  • it would be impossible for them to produce evidence that the account is still active without making public posts

More comments

Maxwell hill is a location in Malaysia. The posters habits interests and grammar indicate either a British ex pat with connections to Malaysia, or a British educated Malaysian. That could be faked but the name is a Malaysian connection on its own.

More comments

She made the account in 2006. It has her last name but connecting that would be tenuous without knowing a lot about her. Her name also isn't the meat of the allegations. It's that a weird, politically active and well-connected account had repeated lapses in activity that could be tagged to events in the life of a similarly weird, well-connected woman, the activity halting completely when that woman was arrested.

Also sounds more like a stalker who followed her during periods of activity and went inactive when she was inactive? There's a lot of crazy people out there, someone obsessed with Ghislaine Maxwell who persuaded themselves into a fantasy life version of her (see the movie Single White Female for a fictional version of this) isn't the most implausible thing.

We are talking about an immensely wealthy and connected woman, who according to this allegation was personally spending hours each day manually reposting links across Reddit to farm karma. This while being a socialite and running an ocean conservation foundation and falling in love (twice) with younger men and staying close to her family and doing various other things - including hanging out with Epstein.

Yes, it is implausible. If it was a Mossad or other intelligence operation she (a socialite who knew many powerful people, the ‘face’) wouldn’t be anywhere near the online cyber-ops people running online influence operations. Many people knew her during the relevant period, has anybody remarked that she was on Reddit every 5 minutes? Would Mossad have her set up her account under her real last name? It’s not tenuous at all, even if it’s so stupid as to be so ridiculous that it wouldn’t arouse suspicion (which of course it did anyway) there would be no reason to do it.

All of which is to say that if she was behind the account (which I consider extremely unlikely but not impossible) it was not an intelligence operation but a weird hobby for a middle aged woman. The linked post discussing the sharing of links about case-related things is also extremely disingenuous given how prolific a poster the account was.

manually reposting links across Reddit to farm karma

To continue her work in the giant psy-op that is reddit. This isn't a trivial affair. Reddit a bastion of progressivism and a key component in their narrative machine.

For my money, I don't view Epstein as a Mossad op. I view it as a joint operation between multiple countries' intelligence services where they each found benefit.

You continue holding the idea of these people behaving in predefined ways. They don't. You think they wouldn't use an account with their own last name. Yeah, they would. I wouldn't even say it for the tin foil "Triple bluff." No, they just don't actually think about these things. Opsec is often comically bad, it just sort of works out anyway because nobody gives a shit and people are actually really good at keeping their mouths shut. Though for what it's worth, what you are describing is in fact perfect opsec, because you've convinced yourself it couldn't possibly be her.

It was. Your priors are wrong, probability has her dead to rights.

You continue holding the idea of these people behaving in predefined ways. They don't. You think they wouldn't use an account with their own last name. Yeah, they would. I wouldn't even say it for the tin foil "Triple bluff." No, they just don't actually think about these things. Opsec is often comically bad, it just sort of works out anyway because nobody gives a shit and people are actually really good at keeping their mouths shut. Though for what it's worth, what you are describing is in fact perfect opsec, because you've convinced yourself it couldn't possibly be her.

So. The patterns suggestive to internet sleuths that account was hers is due to "comically bad" opsec, which enable the sleuths to make the connection. Whereas simultaneously, all the other contradictory patterns (rest of accounts post history) suggestive of coincidence is "perfect opsec", and can be dismissed.

Eh, if that post is the meat of the allegations, I would quite strongly lean towards it being a coincidence.

The evidence seems to boil down to:

  • Alignment of gaps in posting with two big events in Ghislaine Maxwell's life. Just two events? Surely a person this public and active will have had more than two known events during which they could not have been on Reddit. Did the internet sleuths check for that? Why no mention? Seems like the potential for cherry-picking is great.

  • The reddit user posted pro-pedophilia dogwhistles. Pedophilia absolutely mindkills normies, so it's not surprising they overindex on this (and preferring world models in which your enemies are a small number of individuals with many aliases is a curiously universal tendency: see the standard 4chan argument where all the disagreeing posts in a thread are insinuated to be by the same person, or more recently organised as a raid by some discord), but this in isolation is actually a fairy weak Bayesian signal considering that Reddit powermods are a famously degenerate bunch. Also, wasn't the narrative about Ghislaine Maxwell that she looked more like a case of someone who would (for whatever reason) do anything for Epstein, than like a proactive pedophile?

  • The username.

  • The reddit user stopped posting after Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest. From what I understand, this happened well after the Reddit user started being dogpiled on the suspicion of being Ghislaine Maxwell; it is plausible enough that the Reddit user abandoned their account from the pressure (I imagine they were getting smothered in loads of hatemail, and there were probably some e-bloodhounds on the case who would have gotten to their personal email, phone number, address etc.).

Against this, we have:

  • The low base probability.

  • The extra low base probability that an active, put-together socialite would have the time and motivation to be a Reddit powermod. Again, Reddit mods are a famously low-human-capital bunch; is the amount of energy the job takes even compatible with normal functioning?

  • The Reddit user, per the screenshots in your post, seems to have primarily posted tech and privacy activism news. This alone codes so heavily male that, if I saw it on some aggregator blog being linked from HN with a female name attached, I would pull the "I bet this person is a transwoman" card. (Fun game to play with tech blogs.) Am I supposed to believe that, on top of being a rich socialite, Ghislaine Maxwell also was a one-in-a-million unicorn nerd girl with male self-actualization patterns who is into privacy and free speech rights?

  • All the other evidence that one would expect to be found under such a level of scrutiny but is conspicuously absent. Did the Reddit user ever insinuate insider knowledge of finance or high society, which Maxwell would have had? Reddit's status economy places a high value on "I have this uncle who has real insider information so let me explain to you plebs". Would the powermod have foregone this opportunity? What about the absolute standard things OSINTers do such as trying to infer time zones from posting patterns? Are we to believe that Maxwell had perfect opsec about this while being so conspicuously trash about other things?

In the end, "Epstein's manic pixie also secretly controlled Reddit and used it to spread hypnotic pedo propaganda" seems too much like the sort of appealing but unrealistic narrative that people with main character syndrome would fall for (like, "everyone's political archenemy once slighted me by deleting my edgy post on /r/offmychest; this is personal"), plus the QAnon tendency of yearning for the legible tropes of cartoon villains, and then confirmation bias would do the rest.

The reddit user stopped posting after Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest. From what I understand, this happened well after

It did not. maxwellhill's last post was June 30, 2020. Maxwell was arrested July 2, 2020. I would wonder if claims of harassment preceding maxwellhill's disappearance were propagated from the mods who claimed they were still active in modmail when, obviously, they weren't.

"Coincidence" has no explanatory power. "Reddit-type" is just wrong. If the account were made in 2014 it might, the account was made in 2006. This indicates a different category of person. It indicates someone very savvy in tech, which Maxwell is. The probability also isn't low. Bayes favors Ghislaine. The name is one bit of information, her lapses in activity is two, or four. It's true these examples could be cherry-picked, but the question isn't only how much the stopping coinciding with her arrest increases her probability, but how much it decreases the probability of it being someone else.

For Ghislaine herself, assuming the number of all users on reddit in 2020, which best I can tell was 600 million, the probability difference ranges from being >5 million times more likely to >150 million times more likely. The lack of probability for the others says enough. But we're not looking at everybody, we're looking at a specific subset of all people who stopped using reddit. For the definition of the power-user, the most probable explanation is an involuntary stop. That means death or incarceration. If it's incarceration, it's Ghislaine. If it's death, then we consider the probable causes for death for a user who posted every single day then abruptly and completely stopped. That's an instant death. Heart attack, blood clot, accident, manslaughter, homicide, suicide. That would narrow it to deaths on June 30 and July 1, but let's say we expand it out to a week, just because. That's 5500 people.

The probability of one person in a selection of 5500 deaths being skilled enough to be a Top 10 redditor is zero. We can round way up and say it's exactly one person. Ghislaine, or Rando, and with two options, their probability sums to 1. What's the probability Rando would be savvy enough to register an account in 2006? Probably high, given their acumen. What's the probability vs Ghislaine they would name themselves "maxwellhill?" Let's say indeterminate. What's the probability they would show similar interests? Again, probably high. What's the probability they would also have prior lapses in activity that could be tied to specific outings? Very low.

It's not 50/50, but even if it were, it's Ghislaine. It's 90/10 her favor. We rounded up so realistically it's 99/1. Super-realistically it's 100/0, which I know you can't actually say under Bayes. Fortunately in this little area of reality, we can say. It was her.

What's the probability vs Ghislaine they would name themselves "maxwellhill?" Let's say indeterminate.

Ahahahahahahahahahaha.

Bayes doesn't work if you don't accurately evaluate the evidence.

Would mark as "bad."

Everything following "The probability of one person in a selection of 5500 deaths being skilled enough to be a Top 10 redditor is zero" is charity extended to my interlocutor. With sub-1% chance of death and sub-1% chance of a voluntary stop, the probability of it being Ghislaine Maxwell is already over 90%.What's the probability alone of someone incorporating a bit of personal information into their reddit username? 5%? How's it change when our options for maxwellhill are Ghislaine Maxwell and person who probably doesn't exist?

This is not how evaluating coincidences should work.

https://www.econlib.org/just-a-coincidence

What are the chances that out of 8 billion plus people in the world, it's you and me right now debating this? Astronomical really.

Someone with a massive public profile doing shady shit would have -10000% probability to put their last name as their Reddit handle where they were a power user and top mod.

It's far more plausible it's just a coincidence, unless there is strong evidence to even consider this hypothesis at all. (There isn't, which is why your merely privileging the hypothesis.)

See also: https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-secret-reddit-account/

But he married Robert Maxwell's daughter? That's a pretty big connection. It's not hard to imagine that Mossad reaches out to an influential American billionaire closely connected to one of their top people. Influencing American elites is one of their priorities. Epstein has all these connections and he's Jewish, Mossad relies on local Jews a lot in its intelligence work just like how Chinese espionage relies on Chinese people overseas. They're called sayanim, helpers, and usually do passive information gathering, safehouses, logistics, access, bureaucratic processes, introducing contacts - the boring but necessary stuff. But that's when they're low-ranking, low-profile people, rather than billionaires.

And Epstein seems like the kind of guy who'd love to be working with them, make himself more of an exciting international man of mystery, make more friends in high places who could give him stock tips or useful information.

I suggest that Mossad wasn't giving him huge amounts of money, they were exchanging information and providing some level of protection from the law, perhaps passively. The FBI investigated him once and he got off easy, somebody got him a get out of jail free card. Maybe that was Mossad, maybe it was somebody Mossad knew or introduced him to, maybe there was just a certain vibe floating around. Connections can enable the acquisition of wealth like you say, being connected with a billionaire is a lucrative opportunity if you have the skill to grasp it. Connections with intelligence can surely be just as lucrative and advantageous, if you don't bite off more than you can chew. Mossad or being connected to Mossad helped enable his weird sex parties with other elites.

But it seems he only got one get out of jail free card, there's a certain level of media attention that can't be squelched and a critical point where one's friends in high places turn their backs.

The thing is, I think your argument is completely plausible and I allow for it in (2). Epstein exploited Wexner, but Wexner was and is a committed Zionist and was long close to the WJC and Lauder, who in turn were and are clearly very well connected in Israel, particularly the center and center left. If someone in Wexner, Lauder or Barak’s orbit (including Israeli intelligence) asked for a favor, an introduction, or information Epstein had acquired, there is every chance Epstein would have done it as you say on an ad-hoc basis, probably not for money but for influence and favor trading (useful given his sexual proclivities had put him under investigation from the mid-1990s).

It’s also obviously, clearly true that Epstein had powerful friends who ensured he was given a sweetheart deal in the early 2000s. They may have been ‘intelligence’, they may just have been very well connected Wall Street people who were close to the Bush administration for whom ‘belongs to intelligence’ was a convenient smoke screen for more naked corruption and favor trading (I think this is more likely; telling Acosta Epstein is intelligence is more likely to stop an investigation than telling him a top donor is friends with him). You don’t need Mossad to frustrate an investigation if you’re friends with a former president and very close to leading GOP donors, which Epstein was.

But crucially, this is all very different to the allegation, made explicitly by Tucker, that Israel and Mossad were behind his immense wealth and also behind a sex-trafficking elite kompromat operation. It is more likely that Epstein was a pervert who preyed on teenage girls (often from poorer backgrounds, in NYC, West Palm Beach, and via modelling world connections he had made through Wexner and the 1980s New York fashion scene from Eastern Europe, and before that his former and before that current students) his whole adult life. As he grew in wealth and power, he sometimes offered girls he was seeing to business associates, not as kompromat but as sweeteners for deals and friendship (Meister, Wexner’s ex-insurance man who introduced Epstein to him and regrets it, explicitly says that Epstein showed up to his house once with models and offered them to him).

Eventually, he used his seduction (likely romantic) of Wexner to catapult himself into the top echelon of NYC wealth, met Maxwell, fresh into exile after the scandal around the collapse of her father’s business, and joined the global elite. At this point he began to attract the attention of people for whom knowing what that elite is doing and thinking was and is important, and as he became aware of his victims reporting him more as the 1990s went on (before then, between ~1965 and 1990 or so no cops would have taken it seriously at all, but the early 90s saw the emergence of third-wave consent based feminism, modern workplace harassment guidance and law) he may have played those connections to try to stay clear of jail.

But no, I don’t think Mossad got a failed high school teacher a job at Bear Stearns. I don’t think they gave a billion dollars to a washed up, fired trader who was unhireable by any legitimate Wall Street firm because he violated securities law in the hope that he would Gatsby his way into the world’s elite and set up a sex trafficking blackmail operation.

If Epstein is a con man who seduced and stole from Wexner and seduced a bunch of girls, why wouldn't the government release all their records? No one needs to protect a conman. Why was the prosecutor leaned on to go easy on him because "he's intel"? What if Wexner's funding is the means by which an Intelligence agency (or more likely agencies) were keeping an asset.

Personally, I think he was probably running a honeypot for multiple agencies including the CIA and Mossad (and possibly other 5 eyes) and that's why he's so well protected. Because the CIA participating in running hundreds of US children into sexual blackmail ops might actually bring down the government.

why wouldn't the government release all their records

Because the records don't exist- either due to having been destroyed or due to never having been compiled.

Because the CIA participating in running hundreds of US children into sexual blackmail ops might actually bring down the government.

After the covid reaction, I don't believe this. Nothing will cause the revolution. Americans are too docile.

Gatsby his way into the world’s elite

I do think that a reasonable intelligence agency might want to get into the social circles of a Gatsby character just for networking purposes, even if they weren't involved in the "mysteriously acquired fortune" part. And if they were open about the affiliation, it's not impossible to imagine Epstein a Gatsby character bragging about the contacts as a mark of social status (possibly to the consternation of agents trying to act quietly). Or that the "I have friends in the CIA" was quite grossly exaggerated from the truth: it's even possible someone else lied to him about such an affiliation and he ran with it.

That said, I don't have a strong idea on what actually went down in the Epstein affair, I just think it's important to consider all plausible avenues before jumping to conclusions.

You do not need to blackmail rich Jewish-American billionaires to support Israel.

Sure, they "support" Israel, but do they love Israel with all their heart and all their soul and all their might?

The one thing that sticks out about English-language media coming out of Israel is that approximately all of it is aimed at Americans. Some of it is aimed at the general population with, "look how cool and based Israel is amirite?" but dig a little deeper and you discover a massive operation aimed at getting American Jews to support Israel even more.

You're right that the Little St. James project doesn't quite fit with being a blackmail operation. Perhaps it was the proverbial carrot rather than the stick?

The one thing that sticks out about English-language media coming out of Israel is that approximately all of it is aimed at Americans.

Well who else would it be aimed at? Israel has plenty of people who know English but the most common native languages are Hebrew, Arabic, and then Russian. No doubt Hebrew and Russian language media coming out of Israel is aimed at actual Israelis.

I think the primary beneficiary of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation was himself and maybe a small handful of actual friends, who he probably didn’t care to blackmail but may or may not have kept kompromat on. Separate to that was his love of the game and of impressing successful and powerful people, which he enjoyed doing his whole life, regardless of whether or not they shared his sexual proclivities. In the course of the latter he may have traded in secrets, although it was never close to being his main line of work.

We need to get to the bottom of this. Were there any pedophiles in the pedophile cabal, or was it wholly infiltrated by blackmailers with no authentic dedication to pedophilia at all?

Is there any gold in Fort Knox?

Paedophilia is the term that needs definition. There have been some extreme claims of 12-14 year olds being raped, but it seems in the main to be more "underage by American law" which is "not 18 yet" (in other countries, age of consent is 16, for example).

So he was operating off "all men are attracted to hot young things" and throwing parties where there would always be a supply of attractive young women to pay attention to the guests and to act as arm candy. Pimping them out? Yeah, that's the big question here. If you're at one of these parties and the attractive young woman expresses interest in being your one night stand, do you take that as "this is a sex worker operated by my host" or the general "yeah attractive young women do throw themselves at me because I'm rich/important"?

Epstein was a creep, and he was recruiting vulnerable young women to exploit, and he probably wasn't adverse to gathering intelligence/kompromat on the people he invited to those parties as blackmail material and insurance. Epstein himself probably liked them young, and the younger the better (see the rumours about him as a teacher at that private school). But was he deliberately pimping out underage girls to people who knew they weren't 18/17/16? That is the entire rationale for the scandal and the conspiracy theories and the "he didn't really commit suicide" allegations, and that is what remains to be proven.

Similar cases of accusations of child sex abuse against high profile people in the UK have been tainted by fraudsters such as Carl Beech and by an atmosphere of over-correction, where police forces swung from dismissing accusations against celebrities to taking prosecutions on the basis of flimsy accusations which later collapsed.

Things such as the following - how credible are they? Could they have happened? Were they just people trying to jump on the bandwagon like Beech did in the UK?

Julie Brown's 2018 exposés in the Miami Herald identified eighty victims and located about sixty of them. She quotes the then police chief Reiter as saying "This was 50-something 'shes' and one 'he'—and the 'shes' all basically told the same story." Details from the investigation included allegations that 12-year-old triplets were flown in from France for Epstein's birthday, and flown back the following day after being sexually abused by the financier.

They should be able to find out if 12 year old French triplets flew in and flew out of Florida, but did anyone do so?

Paedophilia is the term that needs definition. There have been some extreme claims of 12-14 year olds being raped, but it seems in the main to be more "underage by American law" which is "not 18 yet" (in other countries, age of consent is 16, for example).

Actually, the age of consent in America varies by state, from 16 to 18. The myth that it's a flat 18 across the country is due to the fact that virtually all television and movies are made in California, where it is indeed 18.

That's another odd thing about this case, the operation regularly too great pains to hold their events in places where the age of concent was 18 (Florida and the USVI). It's odd that potentially two people from states where they are above the age of consent were brought together in a state or territory where the age of concent is 18 specifically to have carnal relations.

Not odd at all? If the whole point is blackmail, the of course you move the operation to where it is illegal.

Exactly! It's odd if we accept OPs framing that Epstein is a simple conman.

My understanding (perhaps wrong) is that there was no actual pedophilia on Epstein’s island of the form that give people nightmares.

Forgive me for being lurid but I would have thought that if Epstein were deliberately luring in pedos there would be more 13-year-olds and 8-year-olds and fewer ‘haha she’s 17 years and 11 months old, pay up or I tell the police’ girls.

I can absolutely believe that Epstein found such entrapment to be a useful extra string in his bow but I doubt he was specifically advertising it as pedo paradise.

On a cursory reading, it seems to be more that it was Epstein who liked them very young, and the other girls were recruited around ages 14-16 or so by other girls or by Maxwell and then groomed into being the party favours by promises of modelling careers and the like, with threats then if they tried leaving.

Some of it, it’s fine but relies on a lot of the hearsay (quite a bit of it traced back to Epstein’s own bullshitting laundered through people he spoke to and then others who heard it second or third hand) I discuss in my comment. Especially discussions of when Epstein originally met Ghislaine Maxwell, speculation about what he was doing in the 1980s and so on is a weakpoint with little critical analysis. For example, every suggestion that Epstein ever met Robert Maxwell (and this isn’t concrete evidence that he didn’t by the way, it’s just interesting) can be traced back to Epstein personally, who used to tell people in New York that Robert had personally asked him to look after his daughter, which was ludicrous and ridiculed as such by his sons, whom he had actually groomed to takeover his business and look after their sister and who, unlike Ghislaine, actually knew about his various business and personal affairs, including connections in Israel. That’s before we get to Khashoggi and the many, many people (almost everyone) he knew, none of whom heard of Epstein before the mid-late 1990s post-Wexner fortune grab.

Epstein was unemployed, living off savings and scrounged money in a 1 bed apartment in NYC (much cheaper back then than it is today, of course) before he met Wexner. The suggestion that he was a well connected shady international businessman with close and profitable Khashoggi ties doesn’t track.

I am not convinced that Epstein was part of some deeply shady business that the public is not yet privy to. I try to be reasonable and keep an open mind about what might have happened. I appreciate your nuanced analysis. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to discuss Trump's recent reaction, because I find it fascinating:

What’s going on with my “boys” and, in some cases, “gals?” They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and “selfish people” are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again. Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 “Intelligence” Agents, “THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,” and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands. Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it? They haven’t even given up on the John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. Files. No matter how much success we have had, securing the Border, deporting Criminals, fixing the Economy, Energy Dominance, a Safer World where Iran will not have Nuclear Weapons, it’s never enough for some people. We are about to achieve more in 6 months than any other Administration has achieved in over 100 years, and we have so much more to do. We are saving our Country and, MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, which will continue to be our complete PRIORITY. The Left is imploding! Kash Patel, and the FBI, must be focused on investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein. LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT! The 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen, and they tried to do the same thing in 2024 — That’s what she is looking into as AG, and much more. One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the “HOTTEST” Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

My attempts to objectively evaluate the probabilities of what might have happened are being altered in real-time by watching Trump act like a dog who just snatched a piece of meat off the table and is then sitting in the corner of the room with guilty eyes.

This is kind of hilarious to me. Trump is openly doing the complete opposite of what someone would do if he actually wanted to get over the whole Epstein business, and if he didn't actually know more than he lets on.

The funniest possible explaination is that Trump had no idea that the whole thing was about fucking 16-year-old girls. Trump thought everyone was angry about some other thing, and now he has to do damage control because he was totally fucking teenage girls on Epstein Island.

No, that can't be it, because there's one alleged victim who has been trawling the story around for years (and failing in all the law suits) that Trump and Epstein raped her when she was 12/13:

A federal lawsuit filed in California in April 2016 against Epstein and Donald Trump by a California woman alleged that the two men sexually assaulted her at a series of parties at Epstein's Manhattan residence in 1994, when she was 13 years old.

It may well be that there is no convenient little list or black book of clients that can be produced, and any records available are tangled up in "yeah but if you go ahead and say X was an Epstein client they will immediately drag you into court" so that the promised Big Reveal can't be made after all.

The trouble with high-profile cases like these is that there are then a lot of people happy to come forward with claims from "back in the day" which can't be substantiated (but they can peddle them to the media for nice sums of money):

On October 25, 2016, allegations were made by two men stating that Trump had attended and partaken in sex parties filled with underage minor females as young as 15 years old who were induced with promises of career advancement. Illegal drugs were also alleged to have been provided to the minors.

One man was identified as model and actor Andy Lucchesi, while the other was identified as a fashion photographer who spoke on condition of anonymity. Both men claim to have been acquaintances of Trump during that decade, which one described as his "Trump days".

Lucchesi, for his part, claimed that he saw Trump engage in sexual activity with the girls but did not witness him taking illicit drugs. Regarding the age of the girls, Lucchesi said he himself never specifically asked about their ages, only remarking of the attendees "a lot of girls, [aged] 14, look 24."

That part seems like careful legal advice about skating past any direct accusations and then counter-accusations of libel - after all, you never said X knowingly fucked a 14 year old when she could convincingly pass for 20, now did you? But it's sufficiently juicy a claim for the paper to run with the story.

That's quite funny, but if you can remember his specific quotes about Bill Clinton, Trump knew what the deal was and what people were objecting to pretty specifically.

That's what makes this 180 so conspicuous. It makes no sense: if you know you're compromised, you wouldn't have campaigned on lifting the veil, if you know you're not, what could possibly convince you to hesitate at the last second?

So far the only theory I've heard that makes sense is that important US interests are presently depending on the kompromat and none of this can see the light of day for reasons Trump wasn't privy to when campaigning or when he was president.

And yet still, why not just bury the story and say nothing? Or endlessly delay? This performative display of guilt is so stupid I'm almost willing to believe some insane cope about it being 4D chess.

That's what makes this 180 so conspicuous. It makes no sense: if you know you're compromised, you wouldn't have campaigned on lifting the veil, if you know you're not, what could possibly convince you to hesitate at the last second?

Not that I take any position on Epstein or Trump's relationship to him, but as far as Trump's campaign actions go, Trump will say anything and then abandon it. Whatever happened with Obama's birth certificate? Does anyone care? Was Hillary ever locked up?

Whatever happened with Obama's birth certificate?

On September 16, 2016, Trump announced that Obama was born in the United States.

if you know you're not, what could possibly convince you to hesitate at the last second?

The Epstein data has been released. There is no intact 'list'; it was destroyed at the same time as Epstein died, or shortly thereafter. Trump thinks bullshitting about how it's no big deal is a better move than coming clean that they don't actually have much data.

I'm equally baffled by Trump's 180, and for the same reason. The best answer I can come up with is that Trump isn't on the list, but someone who is on the list has something on him.

So far the only theory I've heard that makes sense is that important US interests are presently depending on the kompromat and none of this can see the light of day for reasons Trump wasn't privy to when campaigning or when he was president.

I'm leaning towards "any relevant evidence was destroyed by someone years ago". If there was damning evidence about Trump, I'm 99.999% certain it would have been "leaked". And if there still existed any damning evidence, I don't think Team Trump has the unified discipline to not have any actual leaks.

That's what makes this 180 so conspicuous. It makes no sense: if you know you're compromised, you wouldn't have campaigned on lifting the veil, if you know you're not, what could possibly convince you to hesitate at the last second?

I think it is at least moderately possible that we live in such a degraded political and media environment, that Donald Trump can rise to the Presidency by just continuously doing the thing that seems like the best idea at the time. So, compromised or not, run on nailing Epstein johns to the wall, because that incrementally improves your electoral chances. Then, once in power, if it turns out there are reasons to not release that information, just do a 180 with no explanation and brazen out the short term consequences because they don’t matter in the long run.

Donald Trump walks the Shortest Path.

Then, once in power, if it turns out there are reasons to not release that information, just do a 180 with no explanation and brazen out the short term consequences because they don’t matter in the long run.

He's not even doing this, though. A few days ago, he got really testy with a reporter who asked him about Epstein, and earlier today he went online and wrote a whole paragraph rant about Epstein totally unprompted. He could just lay low and let the whole thing blow over, but for some reason he keeps getting openly emotional about it.

Could just be a narcissism flare up.

I have a hard time believing there's any actually damning evidence against Trump or really anyone, or else someone would have leaked something by now. It's been a big issue for years, multiple administrations.

I have a hard time believing there's any actually damning evidence against Trump or really anyone, or else someone would have leaked something by now. It's been a big issue for years, multiple administrations.

The common retort is that there’s stuff on Bill Clinton as well as Trump so they can’t. But this is a bad argument because

  1. They could just have published the Trump stuff and conveniently redacted the Bill Clinton stuff if they had wanted to.

  2. I really don’t think Bill’s grip on the party is so strong that they wouldn’t throw him under the bus to attack Trump if necessary.

I also don't think anyone would care if Bill was partying too hard with 16 year old girls. He's, uh, not exactly a current figure these days and nobody sane was going to trust him with their daughter anyway. Probably most of this stuff is beyond the statute of limitations or otherwise not prosecutable too.

Well besides any formal revelation of the documentation, I'd expect at least partial leaks of any juicy bits. Or at least semi-credible rumors.

For instance, there are allegations that there are never-released tapes of Trump saying very politically correct things on The Apprentice.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/alleged-trump-apprentice-tapes/story?id=57192712

For the Epstein stuff, I'm not aware of any specifics like that. Obviously, the typical person highly interested in Epstein is also pretty dang MAGA, and this tension has now been built in since Trump I. But it's not like the Epistemically Unsound Left hasn't tried to believe anything possible about Trump being a rapist. Or a Russian asset.* I loved BlueAnon believing the assassination attempt was faked.

So the simplest explanation is there's "no there, there." Can't leak what doesn't exist. The MAGA [REDACTED] Nation has just been spewing BS and is now the dog that caught the car while also driving the car.

The whole "intel black op theory" at least theoretically explains why no one is revealing any further details (if they even exist). Of course, if Epstein was supporting highly controversial totally black ops, one would hope the relevant intel agencies would have spirited him away, or conducted some kind of much cleaner cover up much earlier.

*For the record, RussiaGate did in fact find a lot of pretty bad shit that would have been unthinkable. But claims and expectations exceeded evidence; so some can pretend Trump was totally vindicated and it was all a hoax.

You know what sucks about these discussions everywhere else on the Internet? That you can't go more than two or three posts without seeing "Looney Left" and "MAGAtard Nation."

We discourage this for a reason.

My apologies.

I was trying to specify the particularly looney part of the Left, not the whole Left.

Harder to make that distinction for the MAGA community, sadly.

I understand that argument, and I think that there is a lot of sense to it. I would have said something very similar yesterday, probably. But I'm just bewildered at Trump repeatedly getting emotionally heated about this issue, out of left field, with nothing really compelling him to do it. It seems like a deep emotional reaction. It's starting to seem to me that something really bugs Trump about the Epstein matter on a personal level, beyond just journalists annoying him about it. I don't necessarily think that where there's smoke, there's always fire. But I am seeing a weird amount of smoke coming out of Trump about this lately. He's acting defensive about it beyond his usual level of getting annoyed when attacked. He's bringing it up un-prompted. Those are very common behaviors that people engage in when they are trying to hide that they did something.

Well, Epstein was his friend.

It's totally plausible Trump participated in Epstein parties with those young girls Trump said Epstein liked so much. At this point, it's not very plausible that concrete evidence for such activities exists.

The Epstein Story is now an albatross around the Trump Admin's neck from their own supporter base.

It's not an unprompted reaction--there's a lot of strife in MAGA World right now over it. As I said in another comment:

"The MAGAtard Nation has just been spewing BS and is now the dog that caught the car while also driving the car." Including, of course, his present FBI director and deputy director.

Or he's just really fed-up with people winking and nudging that he was fucking 14 and 15 year olds. I can see him being defensive about "so I hung out with him, so what? So did a lot of people back then, there were a lot of people in those social circles" and "yeah there were girls at those parties, there's always girls at those parties, attractive young women like rich and powerful men, why are you making such a big deal out of this?".

Trump is not somebody to sit back coolly and take a rational approach to this kind of constant dripping of irritation and reporters and others harassing him about Epstein. Particularly after the E. Jean Carroll case where he wasn't convicted of rape but the judge then came out and said "yeah you can say it was rape". People really are out to get him, even if he is being paranoid.

Why do you think Epstein killed himself if he was hardly guilty of a crime and not wrapped up in any broader intelligence operation?

The good times were over. There was no way he was rebuilding from this. And he was a guy who had spent his entire adult life re-inventing himself so he could clamber up to the circles of the rich and powerful. Now he had a future of jail time, then going back to being poor and obscure. Just being depressed and despairing for a short time, suicide in that time could have seemed the best option. Yeah, if he had lived till the next day, he might well have changed his mind about trying to kill himself - but he didn't live.

Because there certainly was enough evidence to convict him of interstate trafficking of a minor for sex (with himself), which is the killer charge in all of these cases and which Epstein’s lawyers would have told him guaranteed he was going to die in jail given the salacious public attention to the case, the fact that federal sentences don’t have more than a small reduction for good behavior / parole, and grandstanding by the prosecutors on the case.

He had lived like a billionaire for 30 years, private jets, satisfying his sex addiction with teenage models, doing whatever he wanted, and now faced not merely the prospect but the certainty of spending the rest of his life in jail - and not only in jail but in jail as a chomo, the worst of the worst, where (like Derek Chauvin) it was inevitable at some point that the guards would turn a blind eye and he’d get beaten, stabbed and so on (maybe even sexually violated) by other inmates.

Many people would kill themselves in that circumstance. It’s one of the least suspicious cases of suicidal tendency imaginable. If someone in that circumstance told me they were thinking of killing themselves I would literally think “yeah, that’s unsurprising”. It’s common for people facing charges like this who are out on bail to kill themselves. As for how he did it, he may have had his attorneys bribe the security team at the jail so they didn’t stop him.

He got off the hook in 2008 and pled not guilty here. I don't see why he wouldn't at least fight the charges. It's not like he committed suicide out of embarrassment since he was already a convicted and registered sex offender.

IMO Trump's public attempt to sweep Epstein under the rug provides evidence for why Israel would collect Kompromat even on strategic allies. The Israelis are already among the top 3, if not higher, countries in the world that target the United States most aggressively for spying operations. So the "why would they collect blackmail on allies" would be "for the same reason they do all their other spying operations on their allies."

There's also the possibility that the operation was tied to a non-Mossad Israeli intelligence operation that pertained to internal divisions in Israeli politics. Ultimately there's too much handwaving - "he really charmed his way into getting a job at Bear Sterns, and he was joking when he told people he belonged to Intelligence." Of course it was also claimed Epstein was from intelligence in his 2008 legal troubles which is what got him off those chargers. Apparently Epstein was able to set up a meeting between some JP Morgan execs and Netenyahu? That sounds like deeper connections than you described:

Epstein may have facilitated a get-together with JPMorgan bosses and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, too. In March 2011, one JPMorgan employee wrote to Staley and another high-level executive, “Against all odds, we have been granted a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu.” Staley forwarded the message to Epstein and wrote, “Thanks,” to which the convicted sex offender replied, “surprisee suprise.”

He got off the hook in 2008 and pled not guilty here. I don't see why he wouldn't at least fight the charges.

He got off once. He'd used up all his favours. It was likely the truth was going to come out about how he'd been lying all along, and the entire house of cards had collapsed.

Assuming Epstein didn't kill himself, why does it have to be Mossad or another intelligence agency that did it? All kinds of powerful people used his jet and were possibly involved in paedophilia through him, there are hundreds of people with motive and means. One of his more high profile connections was the 4th in line for the British crown, is it hard to imagine such people wouldn't be able to arrange a death?

The real reason is that blaming the Jews is always popular, but Mossad in this case makes it easy by being an intelligence agency with plausible motive, means, opportunity, and most of all enough competence that it wouldn't leak.

Having someone killed in prison and leaving the motives undiscoverable is child's play. 80 IQ hood gangs do it all the time. This seems more than within the competency of the Clinton's or Royal Family's fixer.

JP Morgan has facilities in Israel and is one of the most important banks in the world. The idea that they needed a mossed connection to have some of their executives meet with the prime minister of Israel is just kind of silly. Jaime himself could have easily facilitated the connection. If it was with some lower level executive then you really shouldn't invoke the JPM name because lower level execs are just normal people with limited influence. I've met a number of executives of this level and if they were interested in this type of connection it'd just be mundane "can we cut the red tape on the construction of this thing we are underwriting the loan on" type of stuff, not insidious geopolitical shenanigans.

Apparently Epstein was able to set up a meeting between some JP Morgan execs and Netenyahu? That sounds like deeper connections than you described:

Not at all, in fact it’s explained if you read my piece. Staley and Dimon were not particularly well connected in Israel. Epstein was close to Lauder and Wexner and could easily have asked either of them to raise the request with Netanyahu, for whom in any case it wouldn’t have been unusual to meet with senior figures at the most important Wall Street bank. That is most of what Epstein did in his later years, namely send emails to people in his Rolodex whom he had met in his decade of relentless socializing pestering them to do minor things that he could trade in for other things.

There's also the possibility that the operation was tied to a non-Mossad Israeli intelligence operation that pertained to internal divisions in Israeli politics.

It’s possible, and there is nowhere I disagree that Epstein may have played politics for Barak during the slow emergence of the modern Israeli security state in the early 2000s. But again, that was after he acquired fame and fortune and long after the sex stuff started, during which time he would have been a nobody to anyone in Israel.

He got off the hook in 2008 and pled not guilty here.

He was still convicted in the early 2000s, though, he just got a sweetheart deal. This time there were more witnesses and more credible witnesses, more victims and more medium to high quality testimony from his own former employees. In addition, he was already a convicted criminal, which would affect sentencing and make a second sweetheart deal less likely in any case (regardless of offense or offender). The Florida cases were localized, the New York case had a much greater emphasis on interstate and international movement which meant a much longer sentence in a real prison was inevitable if convicted. As the Ghislaine sentence (and there was much less direct evidence of a lot of her involvement shows), Epstein wasn’t making it out in his lifetime and there is every chance he knew it. It wasn’t embarrassment, it was someone realizing he wasn’t going to get to do any of the things (or people) he wanted ever again.

The Israelis are already among the top 3, if not higher, countries in the world that target the United States most aggressively for spying operations. So the "why would they collected blackmail on allies" would be "for the same reason they do all their other spying operations on their allies."

Spying on the Mormons at the CIA and the hippies at State is very different to blackmailing Alan Dershowitz into becoming a more fervent Zionist. Israeli intelligence in the US is largely about acquiring intelligence Mossad can’t get directly about Israel’s enemies because the US has sources and deals with Qatar, Lebanon, Bahrain, with Iran via Russia and sometimes directly, intercepts intelligence from other countries that might deal with anti-Israel groups like the Houthis and Hezbollah, has some channels with the IRGC. For example, there was a big Israeli effort to get more information about conversations between the Assadist Syrian and Russian governments, and it’s possible that the US might be able to intercept more than Israel, and it has access to shared Five Eyes intelligence that Israel doesn’t. That makes strategic sense and is much cheaper than running a blackmail op on rich Zionist Wall Street tycoons who already attend the friends of the IDF annual fundraiser for free (or indeed, for a significant donation).

“he really charmed his way into getting a job at Bear Sterns”

As I explained, in the Wall Street of the 1970s it really wouldnt have been unusual for a really smart Brooklyn kid to drop out of a math degree at NYU and still end up in finance on the trading floor. At that time, many new traders were working class and didn’t necessarily have college degrees. Everyone who met Epstein said he was insanely charismatic.

@2rafa @SecureSignals @Goodguy It was a joint Mossad/CIA project. That’s why he was able to get the the earlier charges dropped on the basis of being intelligence. The way he got rich was by being a CIA money launderer. Trump can’t reveal the list because the American people would react badly if they found out that electoral politics is basically fake and they’ve been living in a dictatorship of the CIA for the past 60 years.

If electoral politics is fake and we're living in a dictatorship of the CIA, how'd Trump get elected?

he may have had his attorneys bribe the security team at the jail so they didn’t stop him.

It literally seems more implausible that he was able to pay his attorneys to bribe them than that the guards would have turned down this bribe. Prison guards are cheap to bribe and what are the gonna do, admit to committing a felony?

The guards letting it happen is the least implausible part of this story.

Not OP but his reputation was destroyed, and for someone like him what does he have left?


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats