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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I don't think Putin would face much repercussions at all. How would that compare to an American president? Hard to say, and it probably depends on the president. Trump would probably be hung from a lamp-post, but Obama or Bush? There was already a case where Obama sentenced an American citizen to death, with no due process, and the execution killing his underage son, and there was zero repercussions for him. Or take MKULTRA, where we had incontrovertible evidence that the CIA was conducting experiments on unwilling American citizens, no one faced any charges for that either.
Yeah, the reason why I took Prigozhin as an example is because it's so obvious and glaring, but the point I was making was different. If you had to convince a Putin supporter invested in believing it was an accident, that it was, in fact an assassination, you'd be having a hell of a time. He'd be doing essentially what you are, and characterizing any skepticism of Russian institutions as a "fever swamp". Any frustration or futility you'd be feeling trying to convince such a person is essentially how I feel about any attempts at making me take western "Liberal Democracies" seriously.
Keep in mind that the person that "added them to the mix" was Alexander Acosta. This is the entire rub of the story, and much stronger evidence than anything you bring up.
The most reasonable explanation for what Epstein was doing, if it wasn't a honeypot, is that he was a whoremonger, USA's very own Petyr Baelish (although that might be an unfortunate comparison as he was a bit of a glowie himself), and as long he was providing company and entertainment without drawing attention, everyone involved was content not to ask too many questions, and just enjoy things. The problem is that he did draw attention to himself. His little prostitution ponzi-scheme came as no surprise to anyone who knows anything about the inner-working of that industry, outside, maybe, of just how much throughput Epstein has managed to achieve single-handedly. Which, I suppose, was his downfall, as the sheer scale of it exposed him. The police ended up with enough evidence to lock him for life, and possibly to chemically castrate him on top of that, if they wanted to. An open and shut case, if there ever was one, and if that's how the story ended, I wouldn't even raise an eyebrow.
But, of course, this is not what happened. Somehow he got away with a slap on the wrist, and the seven zillion clerks that had to process all the paperwork didn't find it appropriate to mention anything to anyone (which is where "it would have to involve practically everyone in the Department of Justice!" argument so bizarre). This alone is one of the biggest corruption scandals I have ever heard of, and even now, for some reason, we're talking about everything else about the case, but not it.
Anyway, a few years pass, someone digs out the papers, and it turns out there's more than enough there to hang him with all along, so the authorities go for another try, which is when he dies in suspicious circumstances, exactly as pre-predicted by the fever-swamp conspiracy theorists. Acosta gets asked why did he let him off the hook so easily, and he says "I was told the guy belonged to intelligence".
So let's say it was a suicide, what would I expect to happen with Acosta if this was all completely innocent happenstance? Oh, I dunno, something like his ass being set on fire in a way that would put Russiagate, J6, and all the Trump scandals to shame. What did we get? "The government has investigated the government, and has found the government free of any wrongdoing (other than Alex being a bit of a silly goose)". "Uh... did you follow up on that intelligence thing?"... "oh yeah, we asked him but he can't remember anything specific, nothing to see there!".
Absolute banana republic clownshow.
Please, the man was operating for years and years. Even if it was a run-of-the-mill whorehouse, it certainly served more than the handful of people that were named.
The Obama thing wasn't exactly a secret assassination. He held a press conference about it right after it happened. It later became controversial, but in the context of the legalities and official policy of the United States. And while you can point to MKULTRA and any number of other secret Cold War-era government programs as evidence that liberal democracy doesn't preclude shady government dealings, it's worth considering the context during which these things came to light. The Watergate scandal and everything surrounding it almost completely eroded the public's trust in government and brought down a sitting president who had been elected in a landslide less than two years earlier. It sowed a cynicism that hasn't abated since, and which the Epstein conspiracies are a direct consequence of. It's also worth pointing out that the project was going on at a time before informed consent guidelines really existed, and running those kinds of experiments on convicts and mental patients wouldn't shock the conscience the way they would today. During the same time period, Jonas Salk was testing his polio vaccine by going into orphanages and administering it to all the children there. There was no large-scale public discussion on the ethics of medical experimentation until the mid-1970s (largely a response to the 1972 revelation of the Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiments), and the FDA did not have published guidelines for drug testing until 1981. I'm not saying that the general public would have necessarily been okay with MKULTRA had they known about it at the time, just that the ethical issues involved aren't as unambiguous as murdering a US citizen on US soil and framing it up as a suicide. Anyway, while that's been a nice discussion, I'm not sure how relevant it is to your argument. As far as I understood, you were arguing that some outside actor had bribed one or two prison employees to murder Epstein, not that his death was sanctioned by high-ranking members of the government.
Acosta didn't say this publicly. No one who heard Acosta say this reported this publicly. The quote is based on a 2019 opinion column in The Daily Beast where journalist Vicky Ward attributed it to an anonymous former Trump Administration official, who allegedly told her that Acosta said it during his Secretary of Labor interview in response to concerns that the Epstein deal would become an issue during his confirmation hearings. We don't have any additional context, most importantly whether the person Ward talked to even claimed to have heard this directly from Acosta, or if this was just a rumor they picked up. Acosta, for his part, has denied any knowledge of an intelligence operation, and so has everyone else who has gone on the record. But beyond that, the story doesn't make sense. Why would there be concern that a decade-old plea deal involving a guy nobody had heard of from a case that didn't get any press would be at issue during confirmation hearings? More importantly, how would his answer have mollified the interviewers? Supposing Epstein actually was an intelligence asset, and Acosta was asked about the deal during his confirmation, was he supposed to have made this public? Did the interviewers ask him more questions about it, or just leave it at that? Nothing can really be gleaned from this.
But even worse is that your narrative is incomplete. Epstein was initially investigated by local authorities, but the case stalled when it got to the DA's office. Prosecutors initially wanted to offer him a deal where he'd get five years probation. Then they decided to indict him on a single felony count of solicitation of prostitution. At this point it's worth pausing to look at the accusations as they stood at the time, since they all followed a similar fact pattern. Girls already in his employ would recruit other girls with the promise of quick cash if they were willing to give a rich guy a massage. He'd ask them to strip to their underwear and they'd massage him while he was naked. At some point he'd start jerking off and ask the girls to lower their panties while he fondled them with a vibrator, though this didn't happen with every girl. Then he'd pay them about $200. All the girls claimed to be eighteen (this isn't relevant legally, but it can influence a jury). Some of the girls came back multiple times, and there was no evidence that there was any coercion or forcible abuse.
Was the Palm Beach County DA reluctant to prosecute because they got a call from Washington informing them that Epstein was involved in intelligence? The explanation they gave to the police was that it was actually a difficult case to prosecute, and as a lawyer, I can see where they're coming from. Epstein's attorneys hired investigators to dig up dirt on the accusers, most (or all) of whom came from poor families and had had rough lives. Social media profiles showed drug and alcohol use and contained provocative comments about their bodies and sexual prowess. Some of the girls had minor criminal convictions. The prosecution's case would have rested almost entirely on the testimony of these girls. The reports they gave to police may have been compelling, but how would they react as witnesses? How would they deal with having to recount sexual abuse in open court? Would their stories be consistent with what they told police? How would they hold up under cross examination? Would the jury see them as victims, or as juvenile delinquent prostitutes who lied about their age and kept coming back to get more money? The chief of police was enraged, and turned the case over to the FBI.
This presents an interesting conundrum for someone who thinks Epstein was treated with kid gloves because he was some kind of intelligence asset. If the DA in Florida was willing to offer Epstein an even better deal because of it, then the Powers That Be were obviously tipped off to the investigation, so why bother letting the FBI spend a year on it? Why not just tell them to knock it off and say it's a state matter? After the Feds started investigating, Acosta had the same problems as the Florida DA with one additional one: Jurisdiction. The Feds could only prosecute cases that involved crossing state lines, and most of the Florida victims never left Palm Beach County. The pool was much shallower, and the victims who were left were among the repeat customers who had the biggest credibility problems. Acosta nonetheless hit harder than the DA in Florida had, indicting him on a charge that carried a ten year sentence. But the problems with the case didn't go away, and Dershowitz and Ken Starr made it clear that they intended to take the case to the mat, beginning with a jurisdictional challenge.
It's worth pointing out here that US Attorneys in general don't bring criminal cases unless they're practically guaranteed. Local DAs are often willing to roll the dice, but on the Federal side they expect the case to be airtight. Alexa Acosta was still in his 30s at this point and had previously handled civil rights cases and employment discrimination cases. I'm speculating here, but I don't think he'd want to deal with the humiliation of going after a high-profile target and whiffing. So he dealt Epstein. It was a sweetheart deal, but there was still jail time involved, and he still had to register as a sex offender, and those are usually the two biggest hurdles a prosecutor has when dealing out these kinds of cases. The case hadn't seen much press at this point, so there was no public clamor for him to proceed.
None of the stuff about powerful people potentially being involved came out until years later, when Virginia Giuffre et al. started filing lawsuits. None of the girls questioned in the initial investigation claimed to have serviced anyone other than Epstein; it doesn't look like there were any guests at the house at all, just staff and the girls. Gilsaine Maxwell doesn't even appear. I'm not trying to excuse Alex Acosta or the Florida DA or anyone else involved in slapping Epstein on the wrist here; they had a duty to prosecute these crimes, and they failed at it. But I understand where they were coming from, and I think that explanation makes more sense than that Epstein was a secret intelligence asset who would blow the whole operation if he didn't get what he wanted. It's easy to claim otherwise when what we know now gets conflated with what was known by prosecutors at the time. By 2019, the pubic had learned about what had happened and was appalled, and the US Attorney in New York had the political capital to go out on a limb. The national mood had also changed in the previous decade, and juries would be much more sensitive to a troubled teen taken advantage of by a rich pervert, and more sympathetic to a witness with a troubled past. The victims, too, would be adults now, and in better position to testify.
If Epstein was running a whorehouse, the guy who knows more about this than probably anyone else doesn't seem to think so. Bradley Edwards has represented over 200 alleged victims, and he said that the Epstein was both the pimp and the john. He said that a few of the girls may have serviced a few of Epstein's friends at some point, but for the most part he kept that part of his life hidden from those he interacted with.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link