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The mainstream conspiracy narrative is so ridiculous. If the government is under control of foreign blackmail, none of what it releases can be trusted anyway (it's at best selectively-released, if not outright fabricated). If the government is a trustworthy source of information, then it's not under the control of a blackmail cabal in the first place. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Also, this whole redaction thing is such a troll. If you want to release 50 pages and hide 50 pages, you don't release 50 unedited pages and 50 pages of black boxes; you just release the 50 clean pages and don't mention the other pages you left out (and yes, I do deem the government capable of re-numbering a list, especially with the help of ChatGPT).
I find the whole "release the files" thing so funny.
If you really believe that there exists a DoJ employee who is so moral and ethical that he would neither leak an incriminating document during the Biden admin, nor destroy it during the Trump admin, and so powerful that he could not be fired or forced to do so during either; then you probably believe in the Easter Bunny.
If there is anything incriminating in there, it's going to come together weeks from now. It's going to be a reference that correlates to a hint that leads to a receipt that pulls on a thread that leads to an angle. It's going to be some clue so small that they forgot to redact it, and it's only going to make sense as a piece of circumstantial evidence, a piece that completes a puzzle we haven't taken out of the box yet. But probably it won't be that either.
It's not going to be something that MSNBC can broadcast in real time.
It was clear that nothing much would come of it.
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).
Still, Trump campaigned on releasing the Epstein files, which played well with his base but was an unforced error on his part given how much he hung out with this guy. Likely all the photos of him hanging out with Epstein were already leaked, as was his creepy-as-fuck birthday card.
The Democrats forcing the DOJ to release the files was just them cashing in on that. It was clear that either he would have to release the files with him being in them, or redact everything which mentioned him. Both would harm him, somewhat. Unsurprisingly, he did not want the photos of him and Epstein going through the press again, so he redacted everything. But less than 5% of the electorate is going to take that as "this proves that he did not know Epstein".
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.
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.
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.
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