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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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New epstein files stash released - search here: https://www.justice.gov/epstein

Trump is mentioned lots of times though some of the more lurid accusations (I was gangbanged by Trump and a bunch of other rich dudes) seem to be non credible. Epstein emailed himself about how he was annoyed that Bill Gates needed medicine from banging underage russian girls - probably fake blackmail. He also got banned from Xbox Live, shared coomer FNAF 4chan threads, talked with Chomsky about racial intelligence differences, getting advice on silencing a girl trying to expose his friends. For our global-intelligence-conspiracy friends, there are some connections to intelligence agencies.

Mods, remove this if it's a crappy post. It's hard to come up with a through line for this, other than "WOW he knew a lot of people".

Unless this breaks some obvious threshold where I need to notice I am likely going to ignore anything on Trump. I 100% believe he banged Stormy Daniels for money but none of his ex-wives fit the pedophilia bro type. I do not think there is a huge overlap in guys who bang Daniel’s (big breast) and into underage girls.

For the reason perhaps I should give other people with accusations the benefit of the doubt. Bill Gates though does have pedophile vibes. Even DiCaprio vibes like a guy who would probably go younger if he was allowed to. Trump just seems to have always gone for a different body type.

ā€œHe knows a lot of peopleā€ It’s weird how a quote from a movie will stick with, but in the movie never been kissed the one baseball player friend of hers who also went back to High School said something like, ā€œIf one person says your cool then everyone will go with itā€. My view is if you have one famous person vouche for you and then you meet 5 more and handle it well then it’s easy to know 500 famous rich people. You are in the club. It’s much harder to find the first famous friend than number 100.

It's not about Trump actually having sex with 16 or 17 year olds, it's about spreading the message of guilt by association. He and Epstein were best buds. Epstein arranged underage sex slaves for his rich friends and contacts. Lurid claims of "I was raped by both of them when I was thirteen" just help that along. Nobody (except the dwindling number of people who do care about distinctions like "underage means under 18, not 12 years old" and "did this really happen?") cares if it's true or not, it's just convenient mud to throw.

He's a racist. He's a transphobe. He's a sexist. He's a rapist. He's a paedophile. He's a Nazi. He's a convicted felon (36 FELONIES!!!)

"Knew Epstein was a pedophile and still palled around with him" is pretty bad in and of itself, making him an accessory through inaction. Conversely, "somehow missed all the red flags about Epstein being a pedophile despite palling around with him" would be pretty damning for Trump's intelligence even if it's ethically exculpatory. So if you establish a sufficient degree of regular association between the two that it has to be one of the two, you have a pretty tight case for Trump either being complicit, or incredibly dumb. Your only way out is to argue that Epstein was so good at covering up his sins that an intelligent man could genuinely hang out with him repeatedly without ever suspecting a thing; and does anyone seriously believe that?

I hate to nitpick but "paedophile" is doing a lot of work blurring things here. If we're talking "under 18 but around 16 at the lowest", then properly it's ephebeophilia and technically it's attraction to young but sexually mature individuals. Paedophilia proper is pre-pubescent children.

But since "minor child" can refer to "this girl was 17" as well as "this girl was 12", then charges about minor children can be weaponised to mean "Trump etc. were raping twelve year olds" and not "Trump and Prince Andrew etc. were having sex with 17 year olds whom they thought were willing or at least paid-for escorts doing a job".

And it's the Trump was raping thirteen year olds version which is the one being used in online spaces, because Orange Man not alone Bad, he is Most Evil of All Evils and MAGA is most evil and we're fighting Nazi fascism and if only this time we scream loud enough, the normies will finally turn on him.

I don't know what age of girl Epstein himself was personally attracted to, he does seem to have liked them very young. But that does not mean that everyone who went to his parties and his island liked them that young. If you know Jeff from his parties where hot nubile young girls hang out and pay attention to the rich men, you don't necessarily know he likes to fuck fourteen year olds, you think he's like you and every other guy who likes hot nubile seventeen to eighteen to twenty year olds. Maybe some of his "special close friends" also share Jeff's interest in fourteen year olds, but that is not going to be common knowledge for the circles he moves in. Only those who need to know will know and will be invited to the island stays where the fourteen year olds are.

So Musk may well have been one of those deemed "don't need to know" and even "not important enough to cultivate, not in the circles I want" which seem to have been established finance and old money, as well as Big Names in science and the arts. Musk may simply not have been a big enough name or the right kind of big name for Epstein. Maybe it was simply personal dislike. Who knows?

Your only way out is to argue that Epstein was so good at covering up his sins that an intelligent man could genuinely hang out with him repeatedly without ever suspecting a thing; and does anyone seriously believe that?

That depends, do you think Noam Chomsky is intelligent or not? 😁

I think you've misunderstood me. I never argued that Trump was himself attracted to underage girls. What I view as pretty likely is that Trump knew that Epstein was in that business, and yet did nothing to report and expose him; not because he was himself interested, but because he didn't care/couldn't be bothered/preferred enjoying the other perks of being pals with Epstein to doing the right thing and getting on Epstein's bad side in the process.

I'm not sure why you went off on the tangent about Musk and what he knew, as I never brought him up. I agree that Musk probably didn't know, but then it's not clear that he ever even got as far as the island. I feel like it would be considerably more difficult to have actually attended one of the "wildest parties", and still not realize that there were sketchy things going on. Wouldn't there be an interaction somewhere along the way of Epstein making it clear what range of girls he had on offer, to let the guest have his pick? And judging by all the leaked material and reports, does Epstein sound like he would couch such an offer in such carefully-guarded terms that an uninformed, intelligent man genuinely couldn't pick up on the scandalous age of some of the options? Maybe I'm picturing this all wrong, but that's where I'm coming from.

And no, I don't especially expect that this will have real consequences for Trump. It's just that it should. If your buddy is an unrepentant rapist then you have to turn him in, it's not enough to politely say "not for me, Jeff, thanks" and keep sleeping with the adult prostitutes he fetches for you. "The President knew about a serial statutory rapist and did fuck-all about it" should be a scandal to rock the nation all on its own, never mind whether he personally partook, and it's very depressing that it isn't (though yes, certainly the muted response is downstream of the boy-crying-wolf dynamics from the Left lobbing spurious accusations at Trump every Tuesday such that when a genuinely outrageous one arises it barely registers).

That depends, do you think Noam Chomsky is intelligent or not? 😁

I think he might very well be morally complicit, in the sense described above ("knew Epstein had unsavory hobbies but couldn't be bothered to do anything about it").

What I view as pretty likely is that Trump knew that Epstein was in that business, and yet did nothing to report and expose him; not because he was himself interested, but because he didn't care/couldn't be bothered/preferred enjoying the other perks of being pals with Epstein to doing the right thing and getting on Epstein's bad side in the process.

That's the entire point of the whole "Trump and Epstein" publicity, and thanks for putting it so succinctly. It doesn't matter if Trump was himself fucking underage girls, what matters is his morality. He knew and did nothing, hence he is a bad person.

The question of course is, did he know? Did he know about the fifteen year old masseuses? Did he know they were doing more than giving regular massages?

Side A says of course he knew, because Orange Man Bad. Side B says there's room to doubt he knew.

This is what, in the end, it comes down to: not a question of paedophilia or the rest of it, but political mud-slinging. And it all depends on how we gauge the honesty of those involved: is Lawrence Kraus telling the truth or lying here? Should he have known about the fifteen year olds?

Professor Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and author of Quantum Man, has planned scientific conferences with Epstein in St. Thomas and remained close with him throughout his incarceration. "If anything, the unfortunate period he suffered has caused him to really think about what he wants to do with his money and his time, and support knowledge," says Krauss. "Jeffrey has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women but they're not as young as the ones that were claimed. As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I've never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people."

As to why I included Musk, because he's been in the comments as well as to "did he know or not?" Ditto with Chomsky, where the more interesting question is "Okay, attempting to hob-nob with the likes of Chomsky was all part of the rehabilitation effort after the Florida court case, but what was Chomsky getting out of it?"