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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   31128 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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The WSJ has a new article (archive link) out detailing a certain incident where Trump was composing fanfic of himself and Jeffrey Epstein bonding over their shared secret interest in the same kinds of women, and then signing his name to it. This was sent as a gift for Epstein's 50th birthday.

“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything,” the note began.

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

Trump: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.

The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.

I personally don't think it's that bad, but I've been heavily radicalized against conspiracy theories over the past few years. I highly doubt Epstein was blackmailing huge swathes of wealthy/influential people with pedophilia. However, if I was given towards conspiratorial thinking this probably wouldn't be a great look for Trump.

EDIT: Trump has responded, and he's furious. It appears he desperately tried to have Rupert Murdoch crush the story, but that Murdoch apparently wasn't able to do so. Now he's promising to sue. Also, Hillary.

The Wall Street Journal, and Rupert Murdoch, personally, were warned directly by President Donald J. Trump that the supposed letter they printed by President Trump to Epstein was a FAKE and, if they print it, they will be sued. Mr. Murdoch stated that he would take care of it but, obviously, did not have the power to do so. The Editor of The Wall Street Journal, Emma Tucker, was told directly by Karoline Leavitt, and by President Trump, that the letter was a FAKE, but Emma Tucker didn’t want to hear that. Instead, they are going with a false, malicious, and defamatory story anyway. President Trump will be suing The Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp, and Mr. Murdoch, shortly. The Press has to learn to be truthful, and not rely on sources that probably don’t even exist. President Trump has already beaten George Stephanopoulos/ABC, 60 Minutes/CBS, and others, and looks forward to suing and holding accountable the once great Wall Street Journal. It has truly turned out to be a “Disgusting and Filthy Rag” and, writing defamatory lies like this, shows their desperation to remain relevant. If there were any truth at all on the Epstein Hoax, as it pertains to President Trump, this information would have been revealed by Comey, Brennan, Crooked Hillary, and other Radical Left Lunatics years ago. It certainly would not have sat in a file waiting for “TRUMP” to have won three Elections. This is yet another example of FAKE NEWS!

It also looks like he might cave and actually publicize it? I don't know if the grand jury stuff is all that people are interested in or what:

Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval. This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!

Dear Jeffrey,

Happy 50th you old dog!

Just want to say

I’ve committed many crimes with you! There’s a list people will be talking about in 20 years- I’m on it!

It’s me, Donald Trump, writing this letter

/images/17528648808721187.webp (nsfw)

To be serious for a moment (and because I don’t want to get banned again for making a joke)

I’m of two minds with this - on the one hand I can totally believe that Trump was a client of Epstein. he is a history of using prostitutes, cheated on his wife, had leaks about grabbing women by the pussy, probably groped some women before, dropped in on a teen beauty pageant while they were changing (?), and other scummy things. He was friends with Epstein, talked about having a fondness for young women, etc

On the other hand, the letter is way too on the nose, and it comes up JUST WHEN HEAVY SUSPICION IS COMING DOWN ON TRUMP FOR BEIG A CLIENT OF EPSTEIN?

Seems way too convenient. Why hasn’t this been dug up before? Why now? And it doesn’t read like something Trump would ever write and it’s basically a confession.

dropped in on a teen beauty pageant while they were changing

This always struck me as one of those accusations that's either complete BS or lacking context. I have no doubt that pre-politics trump would drop in back-stage constantly at his own events or other peoples events, even when doing it would be rude. Dropping in to be the boss, to gladhand with people, to make connections. This story is presented like he's some pervert trying to sneak a peak at naked teenagers to get his rocks off. It seems far more likely that if the story is true, he does this as a power move to show that he's the in charge. Or a more charitable version would be that he's sincerely interested making the contestants and the event successful and wishing them well or telling them to break a leg.

I suspect most people agree since this particular accusation doesn't seem to even make the top 50 of his greatest hits. But its just another shot in a long litany of things to make him look bad.

This always struck me as one of those accusations

It was a brag, not an accusation. After he boasted on TV about hanging out in the dressing rooms at Miss Teen USA, a bunch of Miss Teen USA contestants came forward to say that he had indeed ogled them in the dressing rooms, and Trump changed tack and said that he had been joking and they were all lying.

I assume that a man who brags about hanging out in teen girls' dressing rooms thinks that that kind of behaviour is socially acceptable. And I think most men who thought it was socially acceptable would do it. So I find it more likely than not that Trump did hang out in the dressing rooms at Miss Teen USA.

It’s funny to me that in real life, many a man will cop to being friends with various kinds of scumbags with the “yeah, I wouldn’t want him to marry my sister, but he never did anything to me” reasoning, but somehow when it comes to celebrity I’m expected to be scandalized that people stayed friends with Epstein even though he had a thing for 16 year old girls (whom they may well have believed were 18 anyway).

Even a thousand Epsteins wouldn’t be as bad as, say, the Rotherham scandal where 12 year olds were being sexually tortured and pimped to hundreds or thousands of strangers, sometimes dozens a day. Yes, what Epstein did (paying 16 year olds for sex and having them recruit their school friends for the same purpose) was cruel and wrong - and he deserved jail for it - but in the grand scheme of all sexual crimes it was far, far from the worst.

A surprising number of people just literally don't know that Eptstein's victims were adult-presenting teens who were mainly 16-17 and performed escort work. They think it's Rotherham, where elementary and middle school aged girls were used as brothel prostitutes.

Every society has distinguished between hetairia and porne. People are fine with the former as a vice other people engage in but furious at the latter involving citizen women.

You’re wrong. Epsteins schtick was to find young troubled girls as young as 11 or 12. He would even get them to find more girls for him:

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/16/797011139/u-s-virgin-islands-officials-epstein-trafficked-girls-on-private-island-until-20

No, he's not wrong. They were generally older. The youngest girl ever mentioned was 12, and seeing how they were generally older, she probably looked older than she actually was.

Girls start puberty, on average, around 11 in late 20th century America. So, odds are, while this was obviously very wrong that she was not, biologically, a child.

A surprising number of people just literally don't know that Eptstein's victims were adult-presenting teens who were mainly 16-17 and performed escort work.

Western society has been on a media diet of near-constant agitprop over at least the last 100 years equating 17 year olds with 7 year olds, and most people unironically believe it, including said 17 year olds.

Why on Earth would we start drawing the distinction now, especially when the delightful moral treat of getting to call public figures pedophiles presents itself (or at least, presents itself to a media who knows its audience has been sufficiently mindkilled to parrot it uncritically)?

These people mostly have nuanced-if-not positive views on grown men dating sixteen year olds. They are simply mistaken as to the actual ages of Epstein's victims.

I think that most people who care about the Epstein matter, me included, care mainly because of the political implications, not out of empathy for the girls. I abstractly empathize with the girls, but I don't know them, so their woes don't really emotionally affect me any more than it emotionally affects me if I hear that, say, 3000 people died in a flood in Bangladesh. Which is to say, very little. Same with the Rotherham scandal. I abstractly care about the victims, but I don't really feel much emotion about it.

The point of the Epstein business is that I want to see rich, powerful people who seem like predators brought down from their high places, thrown into the mud, and trampled on. That's why I care more about the Epstein matter than about the Rotherham scandal. Because it seems to afford more opportunity to damage rich, powerful scumbags. Now that's something I do feel emotion about. Glee and a zestful desire to see mighty amoral people brought low. It's a very primal, atavistic, selfish emotion, to be clear, not some clean moral imperative that looks pretty on paper. No, it's like the glee that a villager feels when he sees that a lion that has been prowling around the outside of the village for days get shot through the heart with an arrow. I don't feel the glee because yesterday the lion ate some guy on the other side of the village whom I didn't know. I didn't know that guy so I felt little emotion when I heard that he got eaten. But that lion felt like a looming threat to me, prowling out there, powerful, enjoying his lion life in a very annoying way, enjoying it so much, sitting around licking his fangs out there with not a care in the world while I spend the day working, that lion clearly not giving a single shit about my desire to not get eaten or the fact that I have to work for a living. So when the lion went down, I celebrated in the same sort of ecstasy that communists might feel when they see that the rich people are fleeing the city. Will the rich people fleeing the city actually make my life better in the long run? Probably not, intellectually one understands that if the populists come to power they'll probably just make things much worse. But in the moment, one feels an atavistic glee.

...Wut?

This is pushing whataboutism in new and interesting ways.

I stand by it. Epstein’s victims are victims - like Harvey Weinstein’s , to some extent - of the sexual revolution and the very negative consequences it had on many young women. My mother tells stories about half her friends at 14 years old (in the late 1970s) having 25-30 year old boyfriends who picked them up outside school. That is the way it was.

Few more than me have stood up more here to say this whole thing was a bad idea and a way for largely higher status men to maximize access to pussy (especially from previously respectable kinds of girls) without consideration for their wellbeing or that of society, but this specific case is just an illustration. Much of the most salacious theory (including Trump’s involvement) is implausible for a number of reasons. The rest is just a richer version of a sad, mundane story that occurs in countless places at countless times.

Is Donald Trump an inner city kid who got into trouble, the way you're blaming society for his crimes?

Seriously, bro, what are you doing here? You could have just ignored this thread if it didn't interest you, if you think the whole Epstein obsession is tinfoil-hat stuff. Instead you've jumped in to say "It doesn't matter that Donald Trump is lying about a bunch of stuff because, you know, there was this one thing that happened in a different country on the other side of the ocean, and as a result you're not allowed to care about anything else until I say you can" followed up with "actually Donald Trump didn't do anything wrong because it was society that was set up the wrong way or all this never would have happened."

I’m at most an ambivalent Trump supporter, it’s disingenuous to imply I haven’t criticized him and his more naive fans countless times on this board over the last decade.

This person was always a liar and a scumbag. I remember writing about what he did to the priceless Bonwit Teller sculptures, rare examples of good art deco (along with the rest of the building), his treatment of his business partners, lenders, investors and so on. His treatment of his wives, cheating on pregnant Melania with prostitutes etc.

But when in Stephen Miller and to some extent Homan the US has its best in 30 years and probably final chance to do even a small amount (which will have big effects down the line) about large scale illegal migration from Central and South America I can’t countenance the wasting of that singular political moment and energy on the irrelevant sexual proclivities of a disgusting but dead man decades ago.

I want my children to inherit a functioning country inhabited by civilized people with public services that function and with the smallest possible violent and dysfunctional criminal underclass. Until mass immigration is solved, this is the absolute political issue, above anything else, beyond everything else. The same is true about other irrelevancies, like Iran, Ukraine, tariffs.

It's worth noting that Latin American immigration is not universally non-white, has a long history of assimilating pretty well- and generally not to the criminally inclined underclass, the Hispanics and blacks hate each other and the Hispanic underclass is probably not, proportionately, much higher than the white one- and that Hispanic fertility in the US holds up much worse than native white TFR.

There are criticisms of Latin immigration- they're terrible drivers who raise premiums for everyone, they drive down wages for the native lower-working class, etc. But America's underclass is, mostly, black. The non-black underclass has plenty of whites in it, and I wouldn't claim those whites are any better than the blacks. The median Hispanic in the US works as a cook or a mechanic or construction worker, pushes his kids to move up the social ladder but doesn't complain when it's only one rung, and uses no drugs worse than pot. His daughter is likely to marry a white man, give birth to European looking and acting children, and have higher fertility than her peers who marry other Mexicans. His son likely has a better chance of stable and productive employment than his white peers. The developed parts of Latin America with lots of whites are, by the standards of high income inequality middle income countries, the best in the world- much nicer places to live than former soviet countries, South Africa, etc. It's unlikely that Hispanic immigration will raise income inequality or suppress economic growth by enough to reach, say, Chilean levels. Hispanic migration is simply not a crisis to US ability to maintain its functioning civilization.

large scale illegal migration from Central and South America I can’t countenance the wasting of that singular political moment and energy on the irrelevant sexual proclivities of a disgusting but dead man decades ago.

Until mass immigration is solved, this is the absolute political issue, above anything else, beyond everything else. The same is true about other irrelevancies, like Iran, Ukraine, tariffs.

Then don't comment on these threads, or just comment one sentence that you don't care about anything more than you care about Blanqueamiento, and move on.

The motte is for truth seeking, not petty dishonest political persuasion. It probably won't work for the latter anyway, and even if it did the US voting population of the forum might be 50 on a good day, of which I'm not sure you yourself are included.

How am I supposed to trust anything you say about the matter after you tell me that nothing else matters except deporting brown people? Your top level post the other day, do you actually believe that Epstein was just a particularly hot gay hustler, a Gold Digging Hall of Famer, or is that what you determined was the best thing to say to protect Stephen Miller's political project? Is everything you say about all the issues you just told me don't matter to be ignored, just a weather-vane tested method of finding the right piece of whataboutism to get everyone to shut up and give ICE more money?

I just don't understand how one goes on the motte and says "stop talking about X, it doesn't matter compared to Y." Because nothing we talk about on the motte matters; thus the truth is all that matters. And I'm disappointed that you've disavowed it.

I don’t think we should stop talking about it. I find Epstein fascinating enough that I’ve read almost everything (possibly everything) ever written on him. I think he was a real life example of extraordinarily high verbal intelligence, which is rarer even than the spatial equivalent. I’m talking about political attention. Apologies if that wasn’t clear, I don’t think the discussions we have matter politically, obviously.

We discuss a lot of things ere that aren’t the most important thing in the country, we discuss architecture, obesity drugs, video games, history, whatever.

of the sexual revolution and the very negative consequences it had on many young women. My mother tells stories about half her friends at 14 years old (in the late 1970s) having 25-30 year old boyfriends who picked them up outside school. That is the way it was.

Were normal, middle/upper class girls screwed up by stuff like this? All I know is I like my hippy aunts better than the tightasses. And I don‘t really see much regret or complaining from that generation compared to younger ones.

Good point for sure re: far from the worst. At face value, I believe this story is totally overdone, paying 16 year olds for sex is bad, he deserved jail, but they did “consent” and it’s not like they were 10 or even 12. Majorly different classes to that sort of crime IMO.

BUT, I think there’s much deeper undercurrents here. Trumps base absolutely fucking hates that he’s “covering up” and trying to bury this story (or blame it on a dem hoax which just doesn’t make sense). He is the conspiracy candidate and he went hard on this in the campaign trail. It’s more about the fact that “releasing the Epstein tapes” means “exposing and prosecuting the Washington swamp” rather than anything specific to do with child porn/prostitution.

It also seems like Epstein had plausible connections to intelligence and Israeli intelligence specifically. Tucker Carlson is doing a huge expose on this today (yesterday?) and that’s a big deal. Tucker is the #2 pod behind Rogan AND he just spoke at the RNC like a few months ago??

While the actual facts of the story is kinda meh, this is going to be a massive problem for Trump. I wish the first major scandal was something else, like not stopping any of these wars he promised to, but ofc this is what catches on with normies & his base…

Epstein was raping 11 year olds (allegedly): https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/1/15/lawsuit-alleges-epstein-trafficked-girls-as-young-as-11

“Heap more evils upon them O Lord, heap more evils upon those who are glorious upon earth.”

Even a thousand Epsteins wouldn’t be as bad as, say, the Rotherham scandal

Epstein molested a few hundred girls. Rotherham was about 1400 victims, and the total across all known British Pakistani gangs is about 5000. So Rotherham is say 5x worse on scale, or 20x if you treat "Rotherham" as a synecdoche for the whole scandal. I can imagine it being 10x worse on severity, but not 100x worse, so I think 1000x is exaggerated. "It was just men paying underage chavettes for sex, nothing serious" is a pathetic excuse that would cover most (but clearly not all) of the UK grooming gang victims in the same way it does Epstein's.

The fact that nobody who mattered cold-shouldered Epstein before his first conviction, and almost nobody did so even after it, indicates that either Epstein was concealing the more egregious behaviour (i.e. he only pimped out the 17-year-olds) or that elites don't consider sexual exploitation of underage chavettes a big deal (which is worryingly plausible - unlike the sports coach cases, there is no way your daughter could have ended up a Rotherham or Epstein victim if you are a functional normie, let alone an actual elite).

People in general are OK with lower class girls from the same tribe becoming courtesans(which is basically what Epstein's victims were) as a form of social mobility as long as it's quiet. Very few people are OK with ingroup women of any description working as brothel prostitutes/streetwalkers(which is what the Rotherham victims were). It's reasonable to see these as different kinds of sex work and I'm not sure 100x worse is that far off.

Epstein molested a few hundred girls. Rotherham was about 1400 victims, and the total across all known British Pakistani gangs is about 5000.

Pearson’s extrapolation method estimated based on the rates in Rotherham more than 350,000 victims nationwide. Sarah Champion, the Labour MP who blew the whistle on the scandal said there were hundreds of thousands, up to a million victims nationwide (over the 65 year period of mass immigration from Pakistan).

based on the rates in Rotherham

Most of the other gangs that have been busted were an order of magnitude smaller than Rotherham. The coverup ended a decade ago - we have a pretty good handle on the size of the problem, and we now know that Rotherham and Telford were unusually bad. This wasn't known at the time Sarah Champion took up the issue - so she was making a reasonable guess at the time.

(over the 65 year period of mass immigration from Pakistan)

Another dubious extrapolation - the scale of the gangs we know about increased a lot after 1997 when Blair legalised fetching marriage. Apart from a few places with powerful local ethnic-Pakistani political machines (Bradford/Halifax is the only one of the local grooming gangs where this is a plausible factor) the police would not have gone soft on Pakistani sex offenders until well into the 1990's.

Another dubious extrapolation - the scale of the gangs we know about increased a lot after 1997 when Blair legalised fetching marriage.

Do you read j’accuse on substack? While I find him histrionic and extremist much of the time (and wouldn’t endorse his politics), he tracked down an extensive list of old newspaper articles about criminal cases that made very clear this was going on in a major way since the mid-1950s, single-digit years or even months after any non-negligible immigration from Pakistan began. Even I was quite surprised at that. There are quotes in many of them from police and others that suggest this was already a widely-known about issue among local police and councils by the mid-1960s at the latest, when pressure began on the left to take action to reduce the chance of race riots in the wake of Powell’s peak popularity.

I don't think anything in that article is inconsistent with my claim that things got an order of magnitude worse after 1997. J'accuse identifies a lot of cases with single-figure numbers of victims going back to the 1950's, but nothing on the scale of Rotherham or Telford.

I don’t see why 1997 would be the turning point. Mass immigration from Pakistan was relatively unrelated to the Blairwave (which actually began in the last year or two of Major’s premiership), the Mirpuri community was already large, well-settled and very fecund (much moreso than now) at that time and many of the perpetrators were second generation (this is sometimes hard to tell because the press today uses their current ages when discussing historic cases, but many if not most were 18-30 year old, born in Britain at the time of their offenses).

the police would not have gone soft on Pakistani sex offenders until well into the 1990's

I don’t think so. I suppose the prevailing narrative is that the British police may have been ‘institutionally racist’ until at least Stephen Lawrence (which if anything would make 1993 the turning point). I have my doubts about that, but in any case widespread overall racial prejudice among some white cops doesn’t mean that they would have been deliberately tough on Pakistani grooming gangs, whose victims were predominantly the (native) underclass for which most police officers would have had some degree of contempt given that they are the population they most frequently interact with (or would have interacted with, at least at that time).

Some of the articles he links to also feature local police in court saying or implying the issue was already widespread and a well known feature of local life.

This is Sarah Champion's method to arrive at 1 million victims: “I extrapolated that Rotherham is a town [of] 200,000 and had 1,400 known victims of CSE [child sexual exploitation] between 1997-2013 and 15% of women report their rape - so scaled up,”

I really don't want to lessen a large number of very serious crimes, but to say that method is seriously flawed would be an understatement.

Pearson’s method extrapolated from both Rotherham’s population and the rate there and the relatively population and distribution of the Mirpuri/Pakistani community in England.

It’s funny to me that in real life, many a man will cop to being friends with various kinds of scumbags with the “yeah, I wouldn’t want him to marry my sister, but he never did anything to me” reasoning, but somehow when it comes to celebrity I’m expected to be scandalized that people stayed friends with Epstein even though he had a thing for 16 year old girls (whom they may well have believed were 18 anyway)

How many of those scumbag men are accused of being ringleaders of international sex trafficking schemes (allegedly) providing for rich elites from across the world like royalty and party leaders? That seems a lot different to me than just "he had a thing for 16 year olds"

Also not just 16 year olds, one of the lawsuits alleged as young as 12

Even a thousand Epsteins wouldn’t be as bad as, say, the Rotherham scandal where 12 year olds were being sexually tortured and pimped to hundreds or thousands of strangers, sometimes dozens a day.

Yeah the Rotherham scandal is bad but is it hard to understand why people tend to care more about international elites more than they do gang members? People have always been interested in the drama of the powerful upper class and celebrities more than they are of the peasants.

That’s bad. “Me and Epstein share a secret pleasure that only the elites are able to enjoy. This enigmatic thing never ages, wink wink. But you remember that from last time. I AM WRITING THIS WITHIN THE SILHOUETTE OF A NAKED WOMAN IN CASE THERE IS ANY CONFUSION”.

Eric Weinstein wrote on x a few days ago

He was almost certainly a front used for funding edgy science, information gathering, control, etc away from normal channels.

It wasn’t one thing. He wasn’t a creepy front company…he was a mall filled with different business providing different goods and services. It wasn’t all about raping kids. Some collection of people invested something like 9 figures in creating a weird 11-12 figure fairy tale via leverage. And it was used for a lot of things. It was called Jeffrey Epstein.

The funders of Jeffrey Epstein were possibly able to blackmail both Bill Clinton and Trump. In the 2016 election, no matter what, they had leverage.

I quite enjoy Eric Weinstein's commentary on Epstein and how Epstein is a window into similar constructs.

Weinstein can sometimes be insufferable and it was hard to get through his latest appearance on Diary of a CEO podcast. Steven Bartlett was really out of his depth as an interviewer and Weinstein constantly violated The Motte's 'Speak Plainly' rule, but there was a lot there about the 'construct that was Epstein' and non-pedophile related angles like influence over scientists (Hawking, Harvard Grads etc). It was also funny in the video to see Bartlett freak out when Weinstein talked about how certain interests might try to capture and control 'human terrain' (read:influencers).

We're gonna have to see if Trump actually goes through with the lawsuit and what happens over it, but given WSJ and Murdoch decided to go through with the article knowing his plans (they even state in the article that's the comments they got when reaching out to the admin) I'm expecting they might be storing more in the barrel still and baiting.

As a North Carolinian, I saw a similar story play out with Mark Robinson where he claims it's fake, starts a lawsuit and then quietly dropped it after things were no longer relevant. Especially funny cause he kept using the username in question too.

Still whether or not this particular letter is real is mostly a distraction from the Case of the Missing Epstein Files we kept getting promised only to end up not existing and things like the altered video. Probably why this is the first time JD Vance suddenly has some thoughts to share, of course none about the Epstein situation, it's so sad how we just don't talk about it anymore in favor of random drama of the day.

Anyway funniest conclusion will be a real letter but not by Trump or associates, but by Epstein and associates faking it and putting people's signatures on things for some weird fantasy.

I'm not sure they the WSJ cares about the truth of it, presuming they want to help the Democrats right now, anything that keeps Epstein in the news cycle, including a lawsuit from Trump, is productive. That might be very well the trap here; they know Trump's ego wouldn't allow letting this be heard unchallenged, but challenging it is guaranteeing it stays in the news cycle for months.

The WSJ wanting to help the democrats? The party trying to chase them out of NYC?

The paper owned by Rupert Murdoch, a known hive of TurboLibs.

The new editor is a big lib.

Why would Murdoch hire a big lib?

His children did.

The WSJ is not too partisan usually, but I would not be surprised if they felt that the Democrats would be less willing to throw in with socialists if they had better chances in the midterms.

Nah the funniest conclusion would be that 2003 Trump didn't actually know Epstein all that much, had met him in passing, but knew he was rich and connected (he's such good friends with Bill Gates AND Bill Clinton!) so he wrote this note off rumors he heard to appear in the know.

Didn't Epstein get banned from Marlago for sexually harassing a member's teenaged daughter?

That was after 2003, when the letter appears to have been written. I wanna say 2007?

I thought it was after the first conviction in 2008.

Might have been, I just know it wasn't a factor in 2003

There is a woman sitting in the Federal Correctional Institution, Tallahassee right now who could clear up so many of these mysteries. If only she could be convinced to speak, and could be trusted to tell the truth. Alas...

The Warren Commission studiously avoided ever interviewing Jack Ruby because... BECAUSE THEY JUST DIDN’T NEED TO OK??

Huh? They interviewed him for three hours. Three rambling, incoherent hours.

She's appealing to the Supreme Court to throw her conviction out. She may well be innocent, or at least not as guilty as the crime she's been convicted of.

She's in Tallahassee?

Hmm, I can make that drive in a day.

Can she get visitors? Go ask her to her face. It's time the Motte turned into a journalistic outlet.

There are people (all women I believe) on those prisoner letter writing forums who are in touch with her.

Maybe you should give it a try, no? I mean, same tribe, even vaguely similar social circle.

My prior is very high that prisoners giving interviews about their involvement in sensational crimes are just Mehmet Ali Agca-ing various retarded theories in the hopes of getting a book deal, attention, or boredom relief.

Alas, I'd probably have to extend attorney-client privilege in order to get her to talk, so they'd have to offer me a ton of money to breach that with the goods.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Of course Trump is in the Epstein files. It was deniable 2 weeks ago ("two more weeks" guys finally get a win), but there is really only one reason everyone in the administration would suddenly get cold feet and display the same suspicious nothing-to-see-here attitude at exactly the same time. They didn't just want this quietly ignored, they wanted this GONE.

That seems quite possible, I'll admit. But I have wondered if this (and several similar brouhahas) could happen because the government has other reasons to not reveal the files that are known to the higher-ups on both sides of the aisle (classified, for example), but it's politically useful to hammer the party in power because it looks suspicious and there is little they can do about it.

For example, if the public were instead clamoring about child sexual abuse at Area 51, it'd be politically convenient to always blame those in power while neither side wants to "reveal the files" to prove that it's actually aliens whatever they do there, not child abuse.

In this case I don't doubt that Epstein was molesting children, but the supposed intelligence connections could be embarrassing for rather unrelated reasons ("reveals methods").

But the direct involvement of powerful figures sure is a juicy idea. Maybe it's even true.

the government has other reasons to not reveal the files that are known to the higher-ups on both sides of the aisle

I kind of assume that if there is evidence of crimes by wealthy, powerful individuals at the presumed level of Epstein clientele, it won't see a DAs office. Instead, a 3 letter agency will have presented it to said individual with a "welcome to being our bitch" speech.

In this case I don't doubt that Epstein was molesting children, but the supposed intelligence connections could be embarrassing for rather unrelated reasons ("reveals methods").

Sources and methods is a very obvious issue. It would be embarrassing to admit that the NSA had tapped Prince Andrew's phone, and compromising to say how they did it. It would be even more embarrassing to admit that the CIA and Mossad are spying on each other like they are in MAD magazine.

Yes, and?

Along with other high-profile individuals who were associated with Jeffrey Epstein, President Donald Trump's name was mentioned nine times across the hundreds of pages made public earlier this year in the “phase one" release of the declassified Epstein files.

If it's just some token mentions then they've essentially created this problem by being furtive. Just bite the bullet. He was rich, famous and living in NY. Of course people like Epstein ran into him or tried to collect him.

Yes and that's bad/extremely embarrassing/suck it red team

The point is that it's not new. The "revelation" that Trump is knew Epstein and indeed even traveled on Epstein's plane has been out there for a long time. Constantly forgetting and presenting it as a new revelation every time the Epstein story comes up doesn't make it new and shocking information.

Ohhhh, yeah

I find it impossible to believe that if there were some hint of damning evidence about Trump in Epstein's files that it wouldn't have gotten leaked during either of the last two elections. There is just no conceivable value that the Dem establishment would have held high enough to cause them to refrain.

Much more believable that the juicy parts of the relevant hard drives and data were "accidentally" thrown into an incinerator in 2019.

The list consists of Boomer men who either were wealthy New York Jews or hung out with wealthy New York Jews (like Clinton and Trump), so it is going to be 70+% Democrats. While the Democratic Party was led by Boomers, releasing the whole list hurts them more than Republicans. With most of the Clinton-Pelosi generation of Democrats retired, releasing the whole list mostly hurts Trump personally.

This implies adequate compartmentalization of intel, and we know that doesn't happen. Were there something substantive that indicted Trump and also indicted a bunch of boomer dems, one of the dozens of bright-eyed young socialists in all those retinues would have seen it and said "Fuckin' two birds" and dumped it to the press.

Even the righty wet dream scenario where the DNC itself would cease to exist from >90% of its major personnel being indicted still demands an answer to the question of why a radical in the lower ranks doesn't release it. They aren't all ruthless realpolitikers, plenty are true believers in socialism as a winning platform and that the DNC only loses elections because they aren't radical enough. That's means and motive.

The last challenge point was the election. That nothing was released after November 6 is proof nothing substantive exists.

They aren't all ruthless realpolitikers, plenty are true believers in socialism as a winning platform and that the DNC only loses elections because they aren't radical enough. That's means and motive.

Consider an alternative possibility, which we've seen demonstrated in public numerous times: The Democratic party lacks balls, has always lacked balls, lacks balls at every level from top to bottom. The strain of trying to pretend to have balls and be a Democrat eventually gave Fetterman a stroke and now he's a blithering retard.

Okay, come on, this is just pure reddit-tier boo-outgroup.

You are better than this.

I've seen this excuse used approximately a thousand times, and look: what if your priors just are wrong here? What if the Democratic party and its surrounding establishment just aren't the all-powerful, almighty band of operators that this theory presumes that they are? What if genuinely is information that they haven't obtained, at least in usable form, until it comes out?

I've seen this excuse used approximately a thousand times, and look: what if your priors just are wrong here? What if the Democratic party and its surrounding establishment just aren't the all-powerful, almighty band of operators that this theory presumes that they are? What if genuinely is information that they haven't obtained, at least in usable form, until it comes out?

The theory presumes nothing of the sort. But they had control of the executive branch. If Trump has info that he could be hiding for personal reasons, there is no reason to think Biden's people wouldn't have had it too. If anything, the Dems ought to have a much stronger prior for having access because so much of the IC and deep state was supporting them. What possible chain of events could have taken place to make some killshot link between Trump and Epstein available to the Trump admin now, but not to the Biden admin any time in the last four years?

They dont need to be all powerful, they were in power. While in power they used every bullet they could, and even fabricated evidence to use against Trump and invented novel legal theories to try and nail him. All that tilting at windmills could have been avoided if they had a video of him having sex with a 15 year old prostitute.

What about Epstein's links to Mossad? Supporting Israel is a rare example of US bipartisanship, opening this can of worms would have serious consequences for relations with Israel. There would be MAD as Trump and Republicans name all the Democrats they know of with Epstein connections. Very damaging for both parties and govt legitimacy generally, it only strengthens outsiders and populists (see how Musk has been using this issue).

Plus it'd be a funding nightmare given how much Jewish patronage they get. The Republicans are propped up by Adelson money and now Yass, while the Democrats get lots of money from Soros and some of the other liberal Jewish donors. If you go through the biggest donors for each party, about 50% of them are Jews, more on the Democrat side. A bunch of Jewish billionaires (many of them strong Israel supporters) are unlikely to want lots of investigation into the corrupt connections of a Jewish billionaire with Mossad connections. They certainly don't want any more anti-Semitism in America, there's already lots of complaints and nervousness on that front.

From my post about 2020, I'm assuming it hasn't changed that much since then:

Who were the biggest individual political donors to Biden in 2020? Mr Sussman, Mr Simons, Ms Simon make up the top 3. All three are Jewish (Simons is the multi-billionaire founder of Renaissance capital, Sussman founded another finance company and and Simon is a real estate heiress).

Other notable spenders in the election were Bloomberg and Steyer, who ran failed electoral campaigns of their own. Steyer is half-Jewish. Bloomberg is Jewish. On the Republican side we have 'kingmaker' Sheldon Adelson, who was the largest Trump donor in 2016 and probably 2020. Jewish. We've got Uihlein, Griffin, Mellon, Ricketts & Eyechaner non-Jewish. Dustin Moskovitz, Jewish. Paul Singer, Jewish (he supported Republicans but also tried to get them to support LGBT). And then there's Soros whose exact donation figures are hard to discern due to it mostly being dodgy websites that discuss it, though probably very large if not the highest of all. Zuckerberg provided hundreds of millions for election offices, which is vaguely political. I can't believe it doesn't buy influence, especially in conditions where the format and methods used were in a state of flux due to COVID.

I observe a general trend where extremely rich Jews support Democrats and LGBT - their fortunes mostly from finance. There's Adelson who's on the other side of course. In contrast, we have gentiles who usually support Republicans and are fairly right-wing. This is from reading their wikipedia blurbs. Of the twelve 2020 megadonors CNN described as 'white', 7 are Jewish. 6.5 depending on how you class Steyer.

Mildly amusing, fictional, Thick of It video (Malcolm Tucker: NOBODY brings up dodgy donors because it makes EVERYBODY look bad!): https://youtube.com/watch?v=uaydTJqZoIM

The Republicans are propped up by Adelson money and now Yass, while the Democrats get lots of money from Soros and some of the other liberal Jewish donors.

There's a frequently expressed desire by the public to 'get money out of politics', might this money be a good place to start?

At least in the Anglosphere, the public support State funding of political parties (which is the alternative) even less. In the past, you could probably have reduced the cost of politics by restricting the ability of FCC-regulated broadcast media to accept paid political ads (this is how the UK kept the cost of politics down) but that is increasingly irrelevant in the modern media landscape.

Yes. The whole point of democracy and a nation-state generally is that it's supposed to be for the people, not some market product to be bought and sold among scheming elites.

No good having '1 man 1 vote' but having the guy you elect serve some foggy mess of donors, lobbyists and media instead of you.

Obligatory SSC:

Everyone always talks about how much money there is in politics. This is the wrong framing. The right framing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so little money in politics?

Personally, I do not think that Jewish money is any worse than gentile money, and you would require significantly higher levels of antisemitism in the US before "I may be funded by billionaires, but not Jewish billionaires" becomes a selling point in US politics.

Even if billionaire money is a problem in politics (and it can be argued that it is -- look at the maximum marginal income tax and how it has evolved since 1950, not that I expect billionaires to pay even that), this is a coordination problem. Almost all of the present politicians are where they are because they are cozy with rich donors, cutting down on campaign funding would really disadvantage them over competitors. And unilateral rejection of funding would hurt your own side.

It is like going to medieval Europe and saying "if we all coordinated to disallow metal weapons and armor, wars would be a lot less bloody which would be better for everyone". Even if all the nobles could coordinate to accomplish that, no knight wants to be beaten to death by a peasant with a stick, so they would still not do it.

Also, there is this guy whose shtick is that he does not accept big campaign donations, but for some reason I think few of the "Jewish money ruins everything" demographic are going to vote for Bernie.

This is because the public, by and large, doesn't have much money to spend on politics. They're trying to kneecap anybody with a competitive advantage. If it's not money, it's exclusive access. If it's not exclusive access, it'll be something else.

It's bottom-half people complaining they're not winning. And unless you have a strategy to profit off of the long tail, they're not worth listening to.

I think that Trump's involvement is the more peripheral "lot of smoke, no fire" kind of thing. The Democrats wouldn't release it because it would have just been brushed off as such and made it look like they were grasping at straws, just like the various prosecutions. If there was nothing they could prosecute, it would just be another smear that everyone forgot about in a week.

I don't know if they planned it this way, but it was good ammunition to have in the event that Trump won the election. Now that the pressure to release it is coming from his base, and he at least alluded to releasing it, but he has cold feet for some reason, it makes matters worse. It's like with his tax returns; it's unlikely that they would reveal any criminal activity, but there's something personally embarrassing that he doesn't want revealed. Now that he's been intransigent despite the pressure, anything that is in there that's unfavorable is going to have a much bigger impact.

If there's one thing we learned about the Democratic establishment in 2024, its that they love themselves more than they hate Trump. Very possible that those in charge decided that the hit to Trump wasn't worth the risk to themselves or their friends from bringing additional scrutiny upon the Epstein story.

Or the Epstein files have been destroyed and they don't want to admit it.

My Trump-voting mother has been saying "of course Trump's in the Epstein files too" for like, years now? Quite a while at any rate. At least some segment of his base just took it to be common knowledge and wouldn't view it as a big revelation even if it was "confirmed".

FWIW, as a 2/3 Trump voter (albeit in a red state, so I knew my vote didn't matter and just thought it would be funny if he won the popular vote) I'm generally bored with the Epstein stuff and wouldn't be surprised if he was in it or if he was covering for others in his circle.

I mean, he's more Ross Perot and Bill Clinton than he is Pat Buchanan (so the immigration restrictionists should be expect to be betrayed), even if he was clever enough to ape the latter for politics' sake.

I get what you are saying, but I think that a not-insignificant part of the MAGA base is into the QAnon stuff.

In literature (in the widest sense), making a character a rapist or child molester is often done to drive home that they are a baddie. It is a bit crude, but it works. So when create a myth of a smoke-filled room where sinister figures decide the fate of the world, to exclude the possibility of someone saying "but what if this is actually a good thing?", you add "and after business was concluded, they relaxed by injecting adrenochrome harvested from children and also raping a few kids".

Epstein is the closest real-life thing to that trope. Sure, it does not match the trope perfectly, nobody is alleging that the fate of the world was decided on his island, and calling it "pedophile island" seems a bit of a misnomer when most of the victims (from what I heard) were female minors who had already hit puberty, but polite society is really big into age of consent (and for good reasons), so it still generates sufficient moral outrage (and for good reasons, again). I think the underage aspect was probably meant to celebrate that the participants were rich and powerful and beyond the morals and legal restrictions of ordinary people (and also, blackmail obviously, but Epstein could hardly tell his guests that).

Pretty much nobody ever believed that Donald "grab them by the pussy" Trump was into consent very much. I do not think he is into violent rape, but groping someone he has power over (e.g. some beauty pageant contestant) in a way which would upset the HR ladies seems very in character for him.

I can not imagine that his reaction to Epstein was "hanging out with (supposedly) powerful, rich people and illicit, transactional sex with Problematic consent are my two least favorite favorite things in the world, I will pass". I do not think he was really that much into the underage aspect of it (I think that few people really are -- but of course any sexual taboo is a also a kink, if the Aborigine had pornhub I think "Kumbo on Kapota" would be in the top ten categories).

In a way, I think one thing the QAnon crowd is disappointed about is that they saw Trump as an outsider who would clean up the corrupt and immoral DC elites. Who cares how many models he fucked, at least he is not part of the supposed sex and power shadow council which rules DC and the world. Except that they now find that to the very limited degree that their fever dreams were something real, he was in the fucking middle of it, much more than Biden or 'crooked' Hillary ever were.

Again, this should come as a surprise to nobody, Trump was already part of the elite the moment he was born, and his defection from the DC swamp was always kayfabe at least till J6. But it does surprise the QAnon voters.

“I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he said. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”

That's deep. Feels like we're getting a rare look at the man behind the mask.

Never wrote a picture in his life. Does he regret that? Is there an artist in there, struggling to get out?

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

Better writing than most of what's on AO3.

it's definitely not written in the style he uses for twitter. not sure how similar it is in style to other documents he has created in that era

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