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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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I don’t think the full truth of Wexner and Epstein’s relationship will come out for a while, if ever. My understanding is that Wexner was always zionist (as zionism generally becomes more fervent the smaller a jewish community is outside of israel, growing up in ohio probably made him moreso than most), but that Epstein pushed him to become more involved in galas, events, the MEGA group in part as way to expand Epstein’s own social circle. He did this with plenty of secular / non-Jewish civic events too, hence the endless pictures of Epstein at everything, but that was part of it.

But the money isn’t particularly interesting. Israel in the late 80s and early 90s was poor, much poorer than most other developed countries. GDP per capita was half that of the UK for example, which Israel has now overtaken. The Mossad did not have hundreds of millions of dollars to spare to channel through Wexner or anybody, if they had the money by whatever means, they had other things to spend it on instead of a vague 40 year influence operation with as yet completely unclear outcomes led by a compulsive liar with no real loyalty to Israel beyond his ethnicity (and given even Israeli Jews have been arrested for spying for Iran in the most recent war, that’s hardly a guarantee).

A real diversified retail conglomerate type billionaire with (unlike say a lot of tech billionaires) a lot of relatively liquid assets is a whale fall event for anyone who has any proximity to the money, especially in a decade when equities returned like 500%. 2 and 20 was more than enough, even with Epstein making relatively poor financial decisions (and he mostly seems to have just handed Wexner’s money to a few big Wall Street banks, which would have made him one of their largest and most lucrative wealth management clients ever - since other people with that net worth would have more competent family offices unwilling to hand $20m a year to JP Morgan to do nothing) he could siphon several hundred million dollars.

His net worth actually seems to have peaked in 2008, but he lost a lot of money in the crash having invested in some CLO funds.