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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   32448 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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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.

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