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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26685 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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If there was solid material evidence that Trump had fucked 13yo's, then the Biden administration would have gone after him. They certainly tried to get him for everything else in the book (some of which was fair, other stuff less so).

I keep seeing this argument from "moderates" on both sides and I have no idea why when there's a very obvious explanation: because the collateral damage would have brought down a bunch of bigshot Democratic politicians and donors too like Bill Clinton. That's why the top congressional bigshots kept their heads down and the release was largely led by gadflies Ro Khanna and Tom Massie.

Same reason Dems never really pressed the Dennis Hastert scandal even though one would think that the opposing party's Speaker being exposed as a serial pedophile would be a great issue to campaign on. Everything falls into place if you operate under the assumption that most high level politicians from both parties are pedophile rapists, or at least pedophile rapist adjacent.

Everything falls into place if you operate under the assumption that most high level politicians from both parties are pedophile rapists, or at least pedophile rapist adjacent.

So all the fierce fighting between Trump and the Democrats is just kayfabe, then? Harris and Trump were laughing about the electorate seeing them as opponents while raping some kids?

And why would a cabal of kid-fuckers end up in charge, anyhow? Unlike being a lizardman (possibly), being a pedophile does not convey an intrinsic advantage at winning primaries. You could perhaps convince me that being a child-rapist is the kind of dirt which will keep a politician firmly in the hands of his blackmailers, who might therefore favor him over less controllable candidates. But such blackmailers would want to compartmentalize their assets, having them all go to Epstein parties seems terrible opsec.

Or it could be that child rapists pursue political careers at higher rates than baseline because they hope that political influence will shield them from law enforcement. But this would be stupid, because being a politician also means that a lot of people will dig for dirt on you, and they do not know if some elite pedo cabal even exists.

Even more if you consider that even Epstein himself was not into 6yo's, but rather girls at puberty. In any country in which you have extreme poverty, you will also likely find underage prostitution. Plenty of these countries are also corrupt as fuck and will likely have little moral outrage over tourists fucking slum girls. Nobody is running for Congress to fuck 12yo's.

Then there is the fact that such a conspiracy would require some way to disincentivize defectors. Probably one in ten politicians would have a late onset of conscience on their deathbed and be willing to spill the beans to make amends.

Or the thing that they did not make a very good job of covering up Epstein. Do you think every last cop who was investigating him was in the pedo cabal? If not, how did they make sure that none of the cops would leak incriminating videos of senior politicians raping kids, especially once they found out that their case would not go anywhere? Whistleblowers have martyred themselves to get much less juicy stuff out to the public.

Normie hetero men aren’t likely to make a real attempt to bone pubescent girls even if they happen to have a strong urge to. But it’s not such normie men who usually rise to the higher levels of political power. It’s in fact something that psychopaths are likely to pursue. Also, the exercise of political power is ultimately a collective act. Nobody can seize and exert power on his own, he’ll need people he can trust. And a group cannot exercise political power unless they all hold one another in check and there is a tangible risk of penalties for betraying that group. Hence politicians are incentivized to work with and recruit other politicians who have dirt on them.

There's plenty of well-placed progressive democrats who would be happy to bring down the old guard.

More to the point, we, uh, know who Trump cheated on his wives with. His type is well known, and it doesn't seem like 'young teens' were his thing.

would have brought down a bunch of bigshot Democratic politicians and donors too like Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton hasn't been a "politician" by that and pretty much nothing short notarially authenticated tape of him committing a felony could "bring him down" in any way. That's the person who fucked interns in White House and lied under oath and got away with it without any "bringing down" happening. Imagining that some words from Trump - which would automatically be dismissed by 100% of the Left as lies no matter what he says - could "bring down" anybody on the left, let alone a figure like Bill Clinton, is complete nonsense.

It wouldn't be "words from Trump" that would bring down Bill Clinton, proof that Bill Clinton is a pedophile rapist would bring down Bill Clinton.

Democratic leadership (and we should distinguish between the leadership and the voters on this, I'm sure your average Dem voter would happily sacrifice Bill and most of Congress to bring down Trump) would rather Trump be in charge than for their top brass and donors to wind up in prison for being pedophile rapists. It's a big club and you ain't in it.

They just wouldn't release this proof, if it ever existed (which it likely does not), but instead destroy it (which they likely did long ago, if it ever existed, which it probably didn't from the start). We know for a fact about many recent cases where evidence of crimes was destroyed (e.g. Clinton records, or IRS records of prosecution of Tea Party NGOs, many such cases) and absolutely nothing happened (except for some noise in the press, but there's always noise in the press). In fact, just recently we learned the videos from Jan 6 about pipe bombs just "disappeared" and... nothing. It is trivial and safe to disappear any evidence if you are in control of the government. Moreover, there had been ample evidence of both Clinton committing perjury, and Clintons having deep - much deeper than Trump ever had - links with Russia (among many other foreign interests, if anything, they are very equal opportunity corruptionist) and exactly nothing happened.

And this is not unique and not specific for Clintons alone. In fact, we just this week learned Fulton county illegally certified 315K votes - something that people were prosecuted for trying to look into - and mark my words, exactly nothing will happen to people who had done it. In Minnesota, billions were stolen under Waltz watch (and likely with his active enablement) - do you think anybody from his team will suffer any serious consequences (like jail and expulsion from politics)? Neither do I. I could add examples here ad nauseam, but I think my point is clear - it's only in movies once you publish something that looks incriminating a top political figure, they are instantly overthrown and the closing credits roll in. In reality, in most cases very little happens, especially when we talk about somebody of Clinton's caliber. There are too many people invested in it.

So summarily we would have some murky indications (because anything else had already been long destroyed) against the massive coverup machine which had already achieved numerous coverups. The premise that they did not release supposed dirt on Trump that they supposedly had, because they feared - while holding absolute control over the government - that this machine will fail to protect somebody as unassailable as Clinton - is completely laughable.

It's a big club and you ain't in it.

And you think this big club can't manage to release dirt on Trump without bringing Clinton down? After all they have done so far?

Agreed. We've already had the Bill Clinton Sex Scandal, and approximately nothing came of it. And Monica Lewinsky wasn't the only case, there were several others as well. The reaction to this is already being demonstrated by a few comments on here to the extent of "so what? nobody cares, Clinton is irrelevant".

If anyone does care, it will be "yeah we knew Bill was a horndog, everyone knew that, so there are photos of him with pretty young women? And?"

Trump in photo with young woman: Aha, we told you he was a paedophile! Bill in photo with young woman: Who cares, that was years and years ago, now let's get back to how these files prove Trump raped 13 year olds on his best buddy Jeff's private sex slave island

There's another very obvious explanation: Democrats don't actually care. The Epstein files are largely a conservative populist fixation, and Dems really only got interested when they realized it might be a wedge between Trump and his base.

Practically speaking, the files are probably more useful unreleased. People hoping for a smoking gun are likely to be disappointed, since all we're likely to get is more confirmation of what we already knew: Trump is a creep, Epstein was friends with a lot of celebrities, etc... There probably isn't a photo of Trump fucking a thirteen year old, but as long as he insists on holding stuff back you can insinuate that there might be. And Trump's narcissism is such that you can expect him to balk at releasing everything even if he can easily weather the resulting storm.

There's a good possibility that releasing a huge batch of files will likely lead to some investigative reporting putting together more circumstantial evidence of something or other.

I still think if they had an honest-to-god killshot on Trump that somebody would have pushed it through even if there was reverberations through senior Democrats. Especially if it was legacy ones rather than current ones.

I legitimately can't even imagine what a killshot on Trump would be. Even if they had 4k video of Trump violently raping a 14-year-old girl Republicans would just become pro-sexual privacy in this specific instance.

  • -12

We've had the "I was 14 13 when Trump and Epstein raped me" case, and it's gone nowhere because the alleged victim never showed up, the lawsuits were mediated through various men so everything was at second and third hand, and even the journalists going in to the story hoping for a juicy scandal piece got so frustrated with the roadblocks that they gave it up.

In April 2016, an anonymous woman using the pseudonym "Katie Johnson" filed a lawsuit in California accusing both Trump and Epstein of forcibly raping her when she was 13 years old at underage sex parties at Epstein's Manhattan residence in 1994. The case was dismissed the following month. A second version of the lawsuit was filed in New York in June by the same woman as "Jane Doe" claiming to have been raped and sexually assaulted by the pair at four 1994 parties when she was 13. The lawsuit was refiled in September, and on November 2, Doe was scheduled to appear at a press conference at the office of Lisa Bloom before abruptly canceling; Bloom said Jane Doe had received multiple threats. The lawsuit was withdrawn two days later.

This is one of those moments where you should probably take honest stock in your model of the world, because it's really far out there. I could imagine some defenses these days along the lines of the video not being real; AI gen has gotten good or whatever. But there is not even a single cultural/theoretical/whathaveyou hook that is remotely likely to take hold as a defense in society if it is widely believed that such a video is real. It's not like Clinton, where the left was already trying to lean hard on "consent of adults is the only thing that matters" in order to help the gays.

I think Quantumfreakonomics' model of the world has been proved accurate so far. If you described the 'grab em by the pussy' video to 1,000 people before it was leaked and asked them what effect it would have on his campaign, most would have surely have guessed it would be terminal. But a whole process of justification and exculpation follows that is not that easy to imagine ahead of the event. Supposing Trump raped a 14 year old on tape, as you say, people would say it's AI ... they'd think it was out of context roleplay ... they'd say she lied about her age ... they'd think it was invasion of privacy or propaganda and refuse to watch ... they'd think Trump has let himself down again, but on a national level he's still a force for good etc. I don't think we can be confident it would bring him down at all, although it's impossible to run this experiment so I suppose we'll never know unless it happens.

I think (hope) there is some degree of social desirability bias in the first and just honest to god repulsion with the second.

There's a pretty huge difference between a tape of someone running their mouth and a tape of someone raping a minor. Again, if your model of the world doesn't account for this sort of massive difference, then you might want to reconsider your model. Different models may have different predictions for a tape of someone running their mouth, and one might evaluate said models on what actually happened, but there is obviously no constraint on the set of models forcing them to produce the same output on such extremely different cases.

people would say it's AI

This is plausible today, which is why I mentioned it.

they'd think it was out of context roleplay ... they'd say she lied about her age ... they'd think it was invasion of privacy or propaganda and refuse to watch ... they'd think Trump has let himself down again, but on a national level he's still a force for good etc

None of these are plausible for the example given of a tape of him "violently raping a 14-year-old girl".

Testing one's model as parameters go to infinity is, indeed, a good sanity check. I do this in my daily work. If your model has truly absurd results as the parameters go to infinity, it's more likely that there's a problem with your model than that the world will actually match the model outputs.

I am just saying I think people would crowd-source every way it mighty possibly be fake or not as bad as it looks, until a response emerges that works well enough for enough of his supporters.

I do acknowledge that if we take this example 'to infinity' and keep stipulating a bunch of extra facts such as:

-the girl is very obviously underage -she comes forward and testifies -other evidence comes out making it highly likely Trump is guilty -he cannot make a refutation stick

Then yeah, he would lose support, and this could snowball to the point where the original video qualifies as a 'kill shot'. I don't think he is literally bullet proof (any more than a bullet proof vest is, when tested to infinity).

Sure, some people will want to think that it's fake in some way. I mean, I guess something like that could be fake? If you asked me a prior probability for a video coming out of any prominent politician committing a violent rape of a 14-year-old, especially in the AI age, I'd have a pretty non-zero chance of it being fake. And these days, normies have had their probability estimates for foreign government disinformation along lines like these jacked up, too.

...but that's basically the only thing that could plausibly have any play for the example given. People might think it's fake, but if there is enough other evidence to support that it's not a total fabrication, nothing else would save him.

I legitimately can't even imagine what a killshot on Trump would be.

It's easy for me. The bullet would have had to go just an inch to the left.

I find this comment to be in especially bad taste.

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