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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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"Your conspiracy theory conflicts with these official reports" as if the official reports are some objective source of truth is such a weak argument. Giving a bone to the truth while slipping in falsehoods and lies is a staple of getting away with a cover-up to begin with, we would expect the official documents to conflict.

This is something especially true when it comes to sensitive matters. Half the point of an intelligence agency is spreading lies and misinformation! I don't believe there's much evidence linking him to being an intelligence agent, but it's not so easily dismissed either.

And when we have plenty of bold faced lies happening even now around Epstein, my trust is greatly diminished. Why are they lying about the "raw footage" that was clearly edited? Why did the Trump admin officials continually claim there was a list that they were gonna be releasing beforehand? Trump is claiming his letter to Epstein is fake, but there's tons of evidence that the birthday book is real and hes even had other birthday books done for him! It's a tradition!

Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel, and his wife noted the great diversity of guests. “There is no limit to your curiosity,” they wrote in their message, which was compiled with others in January 2016. “You are like a closed book to many of them but you know everything about everyone.”

The media mogul Mortimer Zuckerman suggested ingredients for a meal that would reflect the culture of the mansion: a simple salad and whatever else “would enhance Jeffrey’s sexual performance."

And the director Woody Allen described how the dinners reminded him of Dracula’s castle, “where Lugosi has three young female vampires who service the place.”

He says he never wrote a picture in his life, meanwhile he would send off an autographed doodle every year for charity.

Why say he was never on Epstein's plane when we know he was on Epstein's plane?

They're lying and lying and lying. It seems like they're either innocent people trying to make themselves suspicious for ??? reasons, liars addicted to lying for the hell of it or there's something deeper going on.

Why say he was never on Epstein's plane when we know he was on Epstein's plane?

Because people lie when you accuse them of something that makes them look bad. It's practically a universal response.

Giving a bone to the truth while slipping in falsehoods and lies is a staple of getting away with a cover-up to begin with, we would expect the official documents to conflict.

Which of the statements I made above do you think are falsehoods?

Why are they lying about the "raw footage" that was clearly edited? Why did the Trump admin officials continually claim there was a list that they were gonna be releasing beforehand?

Because Trump tells his base what he wants to hear and doesn't expect to have his feet held to the fire. He knew damn well all along that there wasn't any evidence that would satisfy whatever wild fantasies his base harbors, so he figured he could make empty promises and then forget about them when it came time to deliver. Except he hired morons like Pam Bondi who might actually be true believers and who like him don't know when to shut up, and all of the sudden people were actually expecting him to release stuff that would blow the case wide open, and the whole thing has turned into quicksand where the more Trump tries to wriggle out the deeper he sinks.

Honestly, I don't really give a shit about Trump's role in the whole thing. Believe me, there's nothing I'd like more than for his entire presidency to be destroyed, but I don't see any actual evidence of malfeasance. I think Trump has a reflex where he tries to automatically put as much distance between himself and anything he thinks will hurt him, to the point where he never stops to consider that there may be definitive contradictory evidence. Then again, maybe he just has a horrible memory. It was the same thing with the Billy Bush pussy tape, where he initially claimed to his staff that he wasn't worried about it because it never happened, and then the tape came out. This is a guy who said that of course he didn't rape E. Jean Carroll because she wasn't hot enough for him to be interested in, only to mistake her for his wife in a photograph. If you're going to ask me for a logical explanation of why Donald Trump or certain people in his administration do things, I don't have an answer for you.

I just don't extend that same level of skepticism to anything that came out before January of this year. Previous administrations, including the first Trump administration, seem to have been run, at least at the "deep state" level, by professionals who largely knew what they were doing. I don't have any reason to believe that the Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility was, in 2019 and 2020, filled with partisan hacks looking to effect a coverup. I have no evidence that such is the case even now. I haven't seen any "official" evidence that contradicts any unofficial evidence of the same caliber. If you want to argue that something is incorrect, then I welcome your argument. But you can't just dismiss everything out of hand because you don't like the people in charge.

I think it’s fair to question the official report, you just need to be clear about what it is you doubt and what evidence points to the conclusion.. If I think the ME is wrong about the hanging, I better be coming with statistics and medical evidence and so on.

Why did the Trump admin officials continually claim there was a list that they were gonna be releasing beforehand?

Because he stoked the flames of this conspiracy while campaigning, and his government is a mixture of incompetent true believers and cynical yes men.

Why say he was never on Epstein's plane when we know he was on Epstein's plane?

Because Trump is a habitual liar and says whatever he thinks will benefit him.

Why are they lying about the "raw footage" that was clearly edited?

The demand for such footage outstripped supply, so they embellished what they had. The "clearly edited" parts I've seen are the missing minute and file metadata indicating editing software involved, both of which could be irrelevant technical details of how the security system works and how the file was produced. Neither are definitive evidence of tampering. Of course, tampering is still possible even in a "Epstein wasn't murdered" world if They are sufficiently worried about the mob.

Just as a linguistic aside, "bold-faced" lie is not incorrect according to some dictionaries but is probably the wrong word; the original is "bald-faced" (or the less common "barefaced") and meaning unconcealed, as opposed to "bold-faced" which meant impudent. It's been mutually confused for long enough that most won't call it wrong, but IMO it properly still is.