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Epstein was a millionaire, not a billionaire.
Secondly, There is a very large, very ordinary gray zone of questionable to even illegal wealth portfolio that does not require a "global child sex trafficking" conspiracy to explain.
His connections begin to make sense when you treat "the elites" in his orbit as ordinary human beings capable of stupidity, vanity, and bad judgment than as a cold, coordinated hivemind operating from the top floor of Evil Inc.
Both "victims" and "connections" tell us he was an ambitious smooth talker who was super duper good at attaching himself to powerful people and making them feel like they were getting something valuable. His knowledge about the architecture of modern finance was impressive, we're told. Combine his knack for sociability with above average intelligence and it's easy to see why men like Chomsky would be charmed by him.
Charisma is the ability to get someone to do what they would not otherwise do. That is a higher-base-rate explanation for things like the Wexner relationship than a sophisticated, government tolerated and Mossad-led blackmail enterprise that somehow left almost no operational footprint. At least nothing to actually.... convict any of his friends.
And this is an age where such large scale, systematic trafficking and blackmail of the kind imagined would generate multipple records, witnesses, communications, financial trails, opportunistic leaks and competing incentives among so-called participants. To me, that's a much harder sell than a disordered, opportunistic socialite who climbed socially, engaged in some illegal sexual activity with underage girls (personally), and left behind a mess that looks more chaotic than engineered.
Gotta be specific when there's 3 orders of magnitude of space there.
He was alleged at $600 million at the time of his death, although that surely fluctuated a lot, although much of that wasn't liquid. He worked hard to keep it from public disclosure throughout his legal process.
That's a HUGE amount to reach if you start from the bottom. I reserve some probability for a series of 'lucky' trades. A dude in New York in the '90's and early 2000s could stumble around and turn 10 million into 200 if he had some pure luck and a little bit of finagling the system.
But I find some form of massive insider trading to be the most likely way to bootstrap whatever seed money he obtained into the secretive empire he actually did create.
And yet, if he was really insider trading for decades you'd expect him to probably get even richer than he apparently was. So the part where I go out on a limb for real is the assumption that much of his wealth did not actually belong to him and was occasionally siphoned off for other purposes.
Plausible, but also what one might expect people to say to slough off some blame and avoid further investigation. It is 'proven' that plenty of important people he associated with stayed quiet about whatever activity they observed, for a long time, so he sure used some method to keep things under wraps.
Its not proof that "EVERYONE WAS IN ON IT!" but it suggests some unifying factor keeping people from commenting. Similar to the Diddy situation. One guy was the nexus of a whole ton of bad behavior, and virtually nobody of import was willing to be the one to break omerta for years and years (except 50 Cent that glorious bastard). And Diddy is like an inverse Epstein in that he was CONSTANTLY seeking public attention.
The thing is IT DID generate such records, there were various leaks and both victims and staffers occasionally coming forward to add details, although it was mostly about the sex trafficking stuff.
The problem being that the financial trails are the ones that we've gotten very little insight to, and have been kept particularly secret... which is where I think the meat of the actual conspiracy would be found.
And being clear, I don't believe that blackmail was the primary goal of anything he did. If intelligence agencies want Kompromat on someone, they have a bajillion other ways to get it.
My theory is that he ended up as the nexus/fall guy of some kind of slush fund for, at a guess, one or multiple state intelligence agencies. Maybe Mossad, CIA, or whatever. A 'good' way to launder and multiply such a fund would be aggressive but secretive insider trading or similar 'inside' deals. His initial appearance/rise happened right around The Iran-Contra affair. No I am not alleging a connection there, just illustrating that we have an existence proof of this sort of conspiracy. A good way to keep such deals and talks 'off the books' it to have them in person. ESPECIALLY on a plane or island you control to minimize surveillance and eavesdropping risk. If you want to convince a VIP with insider knowledge to make an in-person appearance, a good inducement is promising sexually available young women. That some of them are underage by a couple years helps to align the incentives against mentioning the meeting. Basically, get people with specialized knowledge on your plane and on your island, show them a good time, and insinuate they ought not disclose anything that was done or discussed. Pump out insider information that you can then trade on to keep the piggy bank topped off.
I agree he was indulging his own personal proclivities, but I also think that was his recruitment pipeline so as to have such girls available on short notice.
I am not convinced that he was doing everything with primary motivation of maintaining his own lifestyle at that level indefinitely. At some point, it would be easier to 'retire' to Eastern Europe or Thailand or something if you just want to molest teenage girls constantly with minimal risk.
I do not go all the way down the "satanic child sacrifice rites and adrenochrome harvesting" rabbit hole. I'm trying to avoid too large a complexity penalty.
I point as another piece of evidence to this:
Ghislaine Maxwell's ability to remain hidden for a relatively long time. It makes very little sense that she would be able to orchestrate the creation of various shell companies, buy a huge property, hire and maintain armed security, and otherwise maintain her cover without the assistance of competent third parties to act on her behalf. Suffice it to say I entirely DISBELIEVE she's enough of a mastermind to pull if off through only her own volition.
The fact that she's still alive is, to me, conditional proof (conditional on such a conspiracy existing) that things have 'moved on' and there's very little she can do to disrupt their current activities.
So in short, I think his 'secret sauce' was insider trading, funded by Gov't agencies that needed off-books ways to make and clean money, and he was a reliable and controllable asset, with proven ability to ingratiate to otherwise hard targets to extract information they used for rapid financial gains, and maintaining an image of elusive megarich eccentric playboy was in fact good cover for moving large sums of money around without raising eyebrows. Indulging his proclivities was both part of his tactics, and a good way to keep him in line, and thus 'they' stuck a thumb on the scale when lesser government agencies tried to snag him for the sex stuff.
That last part really is the most compelling for me. It remains unclear why else he'd have gotten such a sweetheart deal when he was pretty well dead to rights on various serious charges, and other wealthy dudes in the area were sent to prison despite aggressive efforts to avoid it.
But if he really just a charismatic manipulator who did it all for the love of the game, by and large, I'd still want to know that truth because holy cow that's some dedication, the psychology of such a person has to be fascinating.
My take is that he was just stupid. Norms were different. The girls consistently say they claimed to be 18. He was reckless and didn't check IDs well. Often they brought fake IDs. I think he thought he wasn't going to get caught. Then when he did he correctly predicted he would get a reasonable, survivable sentence, since it was 2008 and nobody was woke yet. He then failed to predict the government would betray him after radical feminism leveled up over the next 10 years. Ghislaine Maxwell failed to predict she would be the next target. As a French citizen, all she had to do was fly to France when Epstein was arrested and move several million to a French account and be content to hang out with Polanski for the rest of her life. Nope. She thought the media was the only thing to fear so she hid out in New Hampshire with some security guards. She must have been surprised when she found out the United States is no longer the «free country» she grew up in through the harsh reality of the cuffs going on and never coming off. My only conclusion is they were boomers that thought they had freedom and still lived in 1976. At this point Europe may be poorer but it is substantially freer.
Only on this one axis (of dubious value IMO). They don't have free speech, guns, or a Fourth/Fifth Amendment.
I believe this is a big part of the axis we are discussing, and they have better privacy and due process in most countries than the US now. Many European countries have guns (as if that's important), and they have almost as much free speech as the US. I will say the US wins on free speech due to only the topic of HBD and no other topic, although that can be done remotely so doesn't matter. Just do your free speech in English from US servers while living in Europe if talking about race is really that important (That's the only topic they lose on in free speech). Fun fact is most of the HBD intellectual sphere is based in Europe and, there are no hate speech arrests, in part because they do this.
Which countries are you thinking of? The big ones the US hears about are UK/Germany, and they both seem harsher on natives committing speechcrime, such as liking a meme or calling a violent criminal a mean name, than immigrants committing gang rape. Is it the Netherlands that keeps convicting that right-wing politician for saying unpleasant but true things about Islam?
UK is way worse than the US. I'm talking about continental Europe (I think Anglos are the problem -- the rest of the Anglosphere is mostly worse than the US). I think it is Belgium which persecutes Dries Van Langenhove (he is from Flanders). He is getting plenty of due process and the sentence is relatively light. When these laws come to the United States it will be ten years for the «very serious crime».
As far as I know they've been after him for 5 years and thanks to due process he might do 1 year in a decent quality of life European prison. If it were the United States after him for posting the wrong bytes on the internet he'd already be in prison and he'd have 10 years left, and good 'ol Americans would joke how much he is probably getting raped by black men inside.
Why do you think this case helps your argument? As far as I can tell, his "crime" is purely political speech. If he did it in the US, we have the First Amendment, so he would never even be charged, much less investigated for it. He would definitely not get 10 years in prison for it as you falsely suggest. If he got even a 1 year sentence, we would consider it an abhorrent affront to the constitution and to the ideals of liberty and justice that the country was founded upon. Yet you think this not only looks good for Belgium, but Belgium is better than the US, because "[h]e is getting plenty of due process and the sentence is relatively light" as you say (which seems like missing the point entirely).
Am I missing something? I'm struggling to understand your reasoning here.
No, you wouldn't. When hate speech laws come to America, it'll be because, thanks to demographic shifts, people will now consider the speech to be out of bounds, like all of the currently illegal speech that is harshly punished in the United States right now.
Example: this man sentenced for obscene speech acts to 40 years of prison in 2021. Somebody involved in his defense posted on Bluesky about how he wasn't allowed to mount a defense at all; he couldn't call experts to argue that his speech-acts had artistic merit. So, he got no fair trial. His 8th amendment appeal produced one of the worst opinions I have ever seen, amounting to the violation of his right to appeal, another massive violation of due process:
Fallacious reasoning. Rummel did not deserve a life sentence. Given he got life for about $800 of fraud, and that conspiracy to violate rights is a type of fraud (if this was done on purpose), or getting to a judge seat one is not intelligent enough to hold is also a type of fraud against society (if they truly believe this pablum), and a life sentence costs far more than $800, you could just as easily argue that producing such a wrong opinion as this ought to constitute a crime which warrants a life sentence (and frankly, this speech is obscene § to me). So, it is incredibly hypocritical of these judges to write this stuff.
The law is unconstitutional. Laws can violate not only the 1st amendment, 14th amendment, but also the 8th amendment by making good behavior a felony and so on. There was even a case on the unconstitutionality of guidelines themselves. US v. Booker in 2005. Given this opinion was written by a federal court in 2024, how are these judges even still on the bar?
The law is unconstitutional, but so is the United States judiciary. The constitution is dead-letter. When the US government starts prosecuting racist hate speech in 10 years, expect this.
Another one of my favorite violations to the 1st amendment is the law against threatening the President.
It obviously violates the 1st amendment unless there is evidence of actual action related to the alleged threat. Nonetheless, here's a recent example where someone Said the Line:
This guy went to jail for 4 years for going on a substance-less rant. Clearly way too much prison time. It violates the 1st amendment, nobody cares, even has hate speech elements because it was racist. This is a sign of how hate speech laws will work in the United States.
§ And I mean literally that I find it obscene. American Heritage Dictionary defines obscene:
Obviously the court's writing is massively offensive to at least some serious and worthy accepted standard of decency. That is, the only outline in the US constitution, although maybe not the one around the court today. I would argue seriously that the writing is morally repulsive and disgusting. It certainly makes me feel that way inside. I cannot imagine the writers to be good people and I do think they should be recalled from the bench over this decision (which is impossible, but would be possible in a superior country). And obviously the opinion is so extreme that it is outrageous and objectionable. I think maybe I have strong visualization powers so something that would help would be to make a very realistic life in Texas prison movie that spares no details. Including the details many Texans hope happen off the books to the defendant. We could show that up close and see if it's obscene or not. To me when they write that opinion, they make that film, just as how the defendant was convicted for both writings and drawings.
My point is I see in this system almost no shame. I think Europeans have shame. Shameless is when you never think for a second your own reasoning could be turned around on you, because you think you are a god among men, because you sit in the high seat right now. Shameless is when you're so proud of yourself and your «justice» that you don't see why the hell every sentence shouldn't be life. Clearly, you are a god and this guy who stole $800 before you is just some peasant and will never be good. Life in prison. The petty self-worshiping god in the seat fails to see how this is an innately depraved and violent act, which calls into question his own character just as he so severely goes beyond the letter of the law to judge the character of the man who stands before him, even if he only bangs a hammer on a table and says some words as he gets guards to do the physical part for him. They commit obscenity in my eyes while persecuting someone for being obscene in a slightly different way, although a way that is significantly less harmful to civil society. Which sounds objectionable to these people, but eroding civil liberties from the pulpit is far far worse than some creepy pedo writing disgusting stories on his own seedy website. I think a main problem with Americans is that they have no conception of that fact any more which is why they are always throwing away civil liberties to persecute hated classes of people whose actual measured damage potential is quite low. Nothing was ever so harmful as a tyranny.
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