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Welp, turns out more Epstein files are finally getting released!
Apparently there will be a vote coming out to release even more, but the docs released so far have been negative for Trump's claims to be innocent of the whole matter.
This, combined with the ruckus over Trump arguing we need foreign talent, has caused a massive cratering amongst online confidence in MAGA. From my perspective, confidence in MAGA at least online is the lowest it has ever been. Many feel betrayed by Trump when it comes to his America First promises.
Add in the storm over Fuentes and Israel, and I feel I'm seeing the conservative coalition fall apart in real time, extremely quickly.
Is this inevitable, the narcissism of small differences? Or is it just Trump not being a very principled man?
Do you have some example in mind, here? Everything I've seen from this latest release appears to simply confirm what has long been known: that Trump and Epstein were substantially birds of a feather, but Trump kicked Epstein to the curb for stealing his girls. Since that time, Epstein has occasionally ranted about having some kind of dirt on Trump, which for some reason he never actually used and of which there is (still!) apparently no plausible evidence.
I would stop well short of describing Trump as "innocent" of anything and yet the plainly intended implication of all these reports--Trump had sex with underage girls on Epstein island or at least with Epstein's knowledge or assistance--appears to still remain purely in the realm of the undemonstrated, indeed, in most contexts the unstated. Nobody wants to get sued for defamation, and they all know Trump will happily sue them for defamation, so they are just continuing to parrot vague claims while winking and nodding in the direction of Prince Andrew, producing many guns but none smoking, nor even bearing fingerprints.
Trump has spent his adult life a man of wealth and fame, albeit also the butt of many jokes. I would honestly be surprised to learn he hadn't had more than a little bit of illicit sexual contact in his life; I would in that case need to revise my priors on the nature of rich, powerful men. But it seems like there are a lot of people out there who are utterly convinced of the details on this, who keep telling me that some bombshell or other is going to drop (including Pam Bondi!), only for those bombshells to never actually manifest. It was the same with the whole "Russian watersports" thing ten years ago. If Trump were guilty of 1% of the weird, crazy, illegal things he's accused of doing, I would expect at some point for someone to be able to produce hard, non-circumstantial evidence of something. Instead we get lawfare on novel legal theories and this recurrent "this time, we've got him!" nonsense from breathless (and brainless) journalists.
I'm open to evidence! I would not be at all surprised to see it! But again, it seems, no such thing is on offer.
Is there any clarification on "by underage we mean 17" or "we mean 13"? Because I've seen plenty of online 'it's true he's a pedo he raped 13 year old sex slaves' stuff but nothing concrete (the Katie Johnson case seems to be smoke and I have no idea what exactly Virginia Giuffre was claiming happened. If I go by Wikipedia, she was allegedly 17 when Maxwell and Epstein approached her, which is not at all the same as 13 year old).
In one way, I think the very murkiness of the term "underage girls" works for those who want to get Trump; it's easier to convey an impression that this means "13 or 14" and not "17 or just under 18 or even that legally a minor is under 21 in some states". See The Onion; yes this is satire, but they're making it satire on "fucking a 13 year old" and not "fucking a 16 year old":
"Children" to the modal mind is prepubescent innocents who elicit protective instincts. Definitionally it also includes adolescents that are protoadults. Conflating the two is necessary to get the moral value immediately realized, and any attempt at deeper examination is met with hysterical screeches of "ARE YOU A BIGOT". Refugees are always stated to be "women and children" but you never get a picture of these huddled masses because people don't process bearded males as "children". The assumption that Epsteins sex island was a San Francisco Armory dungeon filled with crying prepubescents being abused by leering rapists is as rampant as the assumption that Rittenhouse killed 3 unarmed black men, and of course equally as fictional.
Ironically in this context, there's a current murder investigation about asylum seekers as "unaccompanied children" who were put in emergency accommodation meant for minors, and it now turns out one of the "minors" may in fact have been a legal adult.
Gaming the asylum system, you say? Surely not!
When Kabul fell to the Taliban, there was a widely shared picture of an overcrowded C130 filled with refugees. I love that picture because it is FULL of men, with barely any women or children. I contrast that with the fall of hanoi where evacuees had women and prepubescents. My liberal friends actually had to stop for a second to wonder what "women and children" really meant, and anytime refugees got raised in any conversation subsequently they all bit the bullet immediately before I could play the photo card.
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