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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   23532 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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And when his wife who was barely mentioned in the files and barely discussed suddenly makes a big public announcement begging everyone to STOP TALKING about her and Epstein, well.

You honestly can't think of an innocuous reason a woman might want people to stop linking her name with Epstein? "Oh but she was barely mentioned at all!" and yet people are passing around these comments as though they were true.

Indeed, and just look at the plethora of "eating babies" stories floating around based on ridiculously blinkered interpretations of random email fragments. I've even met people irl who believe this! There is a peculiar historical continuity to these stories about elite depravity, as though those in positions of power aren't mundane social actors and actually talk in nasty euphemisms. This is a central theme of most conspiracy theories, a projection of popular imagination riddled with Hollywood tropes about ruthlessly efficient, hyper competent villains who can bring down entire city blocks with one phone call. I think most people cannot grapple with the relative mundanity of real life, which bears little resemblance to how actual human networks operate. Conspiracy theories covert a messy, contingent, uneven and random world into something legible, which is probably more psychologically satisfying.

I can't think of a reason why a grown woman from upper class circles (although that's always debated w.r.t. Trump) would think that begging people to stop talking about something embarrassing could ever work.

There's a lot of behavior that seems mysterious if "believing that it could ever work for accomplishing the ostensible and stated goals" were a prerequisite for engaging in it. Not just by women from upper class circles, but basically everyone in every context, even the most powerful and influential among us, like some politician or executive blaming others when they fail to get the votes or buyers. I think that people, by and large, don't care about the consequences of their actions and just follow their inner impulses in the moment.

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